Brooklyn Row House

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Well, isn't this special?
2008-05-29 03:02:00
New York Magazine's cover story this week is The Brooklyn Wars. Is this ominously titled article about drug gang violence at the projects or the racial tensions in Crown Heights? Or maybe something really volatile, like another pizza shoot-out between Grimaldi's and Tontonno? Nope. It's a five thousand word feature about The What, an anonymous misanthrope who posts on a Brooklyn real estate blog, Brownstoner. Sheesh, I can't even get this blog mentioned as a footnote in a local shopping paper and New York Mag writes a cover article about a troll on another Brooklyn blog? It ain't fair. I guess I should be happy that the Manhattan media is taking such an interest in Brooklyn blogs at all. So congrats to... well, I'm not sure who to congratulate. The What sounds like a chronic malcontent who's pissed that he missed the gentrification boat and his detractors seem to be the same upwardly slithering, relocated latte sippers I moved to Brooklyn to escape from Soho. Folks, ...
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Brooklyn's "Blue Thunder"
2008-05-28 02:53:00
While this is generally a quiet neighborhood, we get quite a bit of helicopter noise here. Traffic choppers hover overhead during the morning news to monitor the "Belt-BQE split" a few blocks away. I always know when Bush or Cheney is in town because Marine One and its small convoy of support aircraft are uniquely audible, even in my basement. Mainly, we're three blocks away from NYPD Aviation, where the police choppers refuel. So it's not uncommon to have the chirping birdies obliterated by the hellish thunder of a Bell 412 on approach, flying about 150 feet above my house. Fortunately, this only happens two or three times around mid-day. After the sun goes down they make their approaches over New York Harbor. Lately though, people have been upset by non-NYPD helicopters using that heliport, one of them a silver 412 with no markings. Rumors were flying (pun unintended) that celebs we're being allowed to use the secure police heliport to avoid the paparazzi. This morni...
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"Starter house" for sale
2008-04-29 22:03:00
Got a pampered dog or a very small relative? This is believed to be Brooklyn's smallest house. Located near the intersection of Ave T and Van Sicklen in Gravesend, it occupies what used to be a driveway. It's a 1BR, 1 bath home sitting on a lot just 7.25 feet wide and 113 feet long. The interior area is just under 300 square feet. This is a shot of the living room looking towards the entryway. The window on the right looks a bit superfluous, doesn't it? ... and here's a shot from the opposite side. The kitchen actually looks fairly normal sized, at least by Brooklyn row house standards. There's even a washer/dryer. The sole bedroom is behind the kitchen, like any classic NYC railroad flat. Obviously, it would be a problem entertaining guests in the back yard with a double bed in the way so... Murphy bed to the rescue! I can't think an application more suited to it than this house. Speaking of the backyard, it's actually pretty cute. You won't be throwi...
More About: House , For Sale , Sale , Starter

Got a shop? You need this stuff!
2008-02-25 04:52:00
Last weekend, my boss and I made the trek to the annual NJ Woodworking Show. Jeb has a pretty nice woodworking shop but his passion is car and motorcycle restoration. He's done several old bikes -- Velocettes and Moto Guzzis -- but his current project is a 1955 Land Rover. The Rover looked like it had been parked at the bottom of a river for the last fifty years but after two years he's nearing paint and finish, which means he needed supplies, which means we both needed to hit the show. I've been looking for a decent steel tool deck cleaner for a couple of years. Nothing I've tried worked much better than WD40, #00 steel wool and carnuba wax. Jeb told me that he'd had good results with Boeshield and, sure enough, we found it at the show. It's expensive but it was worth a try. Boeshield was developed by Boeing for cleaning metal airplane shells. It's actually a family of specialized products but the T9 aerosol is the centerpiece. It's like a super deluxe WD40 with an...
More About: Stuff , Shop

The Greenville Horror
2008-01-07 00:04:00
A Google search shows that the house at #6 Whitten Street in Greenville, SC was sold to George C. Leventis on July 8, 2003 for $88,000. Flash forward four years. The home's new owners are the Browns, who purchased the Whitten Street house for $75,000. Cited text is courtesy of WYFF. Jason and Kerri Brown of Greenville found a secret room in their home behind a bookcase, and what was inside was a nightmare beyond their wildest dreams. "This can't be happening. This can't be true. It terrified me," Kerri Brown told News 4's Tim Waller. A secret room! Who hasn't had fantasies of finding a secret room in their old house? But for Kerri Brown, it was about the worst nightmare a home owner could face. The secret room in the old mill home on Whitten Street in Greenville's Dunean section contained a handwritten letter from the previous owner titled, "You Found It!" "Hello. If you're reading this, then you found the secret room. I owned this house for a short while and it was ...
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Vincent Gentile's War on Illegal Curb Cuts
2007-12-22 06:02:00
Quality of life issues are the low-hanging fruit for low-rated pols looking for Page Two time. Like Rudy's crackdowns du jour, they rarely accomplish anything other than some wasted news print and an overnight ticket blitz. But Vincent Gent ile, city councilperson for District 43, seems to be a determined pit bull with one of these issues: the illegal driveways, curb cuts and careless parking in his district of Bay Ridge and Dyker Heights. Every month or so it seems there is another article about another initiative he's gotten behind to put a stop to the growing problem of antisocial parking. I like this guy. Today's Bay Ridge Eagle reports that Gentile will be introducing two bills to the City Council to put some teeth back into the curb cut laws. One will require homeowners with illegal curb cuts to restore the curbs back to DOT compliance. The other bill addresses a more serious problem that has been at the bottom of many of these illegal driveways, not to mention a lot su...
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Designing Stained Glass
2007-12-17 07:59:00
I suck at drawing. I can visualize things pretty well but there's a bridge out somewhere between my left and right brain. With woodworking, I usually wind up head jamming the fabrication. It works 90% of the time. The other 10% is handled by my hard-won skills in making dumb mistakes look like I meant to do that. But this ad hoc process doesn't work for stained glass construction, where you need to have a completed design and pieces cut before you start soldering things together. My stained glass work to date has been pretty simple, angular and, yes, left brained. But for the new projects here I wanted something a bit more artistic. So I began the hunt for stained glass design software and settled on Glass Eye 2000 from Dragonfly. It's ain't cheap but it's not like stained glass people are a huge market. Nevertheless, it's a high quality product and the best design software I could find. This is a window panel I designed in GE2k in about three hours. GE2k is pri...
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New Stained Glass Projects
2007-12-12 04:09:00
I have several stained glass tasks in the queue here. Some, like the upper cabinet doors in the living room media cabinet, have been on hold since 2003. Others, like the funky stairway skylight, I've wanted to replace since the day I first saw the place. While stained glass construction is fairly mechanical and basically just woodworking joinery using glass and lead came, the design, templating and piecing out can be very time consuming. Most of the glass I've done here is fairly simple and angular to match the existing stained glass. But I wanted something a bit more ornamental for these new projects. The delay is mostly because I suck at drawing. I can muddle my way through Photoshop if I have to and I've even built a few nice web page banners using "creative appropriation" of assets conceived by others. Change a few lines, overlay a mask or two, morph a few elements and, poof, it's mine. Derivative art. While a Photoshop geek might be able to design stained glass us...
More About: Projects , Glass

My Odorific Old House
2007-12-04 04:50:00
I'll be posting a new series of articles on stained glass construction in a few weeks. I purchased some new ($$!) stained glass design software from Dragonfly, Glass 2000 Professional, to help me complete the half-dozen stained glass projects I've got on my plate. So I'll post a review of that as well. I'm gonna change gears and show a bit of my feminine side. I like fragrant houses. I spent my early years living in a small town in Japan, where my mother became a passionate connoisseur of oriental incense. She often had a subtle fragrance burning in the house long after we moved back to the States. For me, a fragrant house smells like home. Since I moved out on my own, I've usually had a cone of incense burning, mostly temple fragrances. It beats smelling the dogs' microwaved breakfast all day. After moving to Brooklyn I found myself estranged from my Manhattan oriental incense supplier. I tried buying it online but the stuff I was getting smelled more like a broth...
More About: House , Old House

Bay Ridge Hum
2007-11-07 03:52:00
Out-worlders would probably expect Brooklyn to sound like inner-city traffic, police sirens and "Yo! Vinnie! T'row me down some money fa a' egg cream!" Actually, it's pretty quiet down here by the harbor, except for the low-flying NYPD helicopters. Nevertheless, I have two "bizarre noise" stories. I'll talk about the most public one first and, if I can keep it short, I'll tell the other one. In late 2005, I was at the dog run when an obviously exhausted woman told me that she was kept awake all night by a loud hum outside. She lives only three blocks from me so she asked if I'd heard it too. I told her I was sorry but I hadn't heard a thing. She bore on, telling me that it sounded like a low engine rumble, almost like a fog horn, except it was non-stop. I thought there might be a simple explanation: she was nuts. A few months later, I read an article in our local paper, the Bay Ridge Courier. It was a brief interview with a resident on Colonial Rd complaining about ...

My Product Review
2007-10-23 19:05:00
The last product I was asked to review was an in-floor Kryptonite locking system for motorcycles for Motorcyclist mag. I injured my knee tripping on that #*$% lock in the dark. Let's see if I have more luck with the EZ Clean paint brush that Jeannie from Houseblogs.netasked me to check out. My project was painting my kitchen extension, which still had seven year-old primer on the walls. It's one of those Deferred Completion Syndrome items I was happy to check off the list for this product test. I didn't have a clue what I would be testing other than it would be a "new painting tool". When UPS delivered the box and I saw what it was I have to admit I was a little disappointed. I guess I was expecting something dramatic like a high tech masking tape product or an ultrasonic paint stirrer. Those are jobs I hate doing. Cleaning paint brushes doesn't really bother me. In fact, I find it strangely cathartic. I also have to say that I was skeptical when I saw the name. I'v...
More About: Product Review , Review , Product

Stripping a Door: Part 1
2007-10-21 05:41:00
I brought in an amateur stripper, Doc Karen, to serve as my photo model for this two part pictorial. Even anesthesiologists have to moonlight to make ends meet these days <grin>. I was gratified that she took our tutorial seriously enough to wear her surgical scrubs (mismatched as they were). I guess that makes me "House". Karen's own house is full of painted architectural woodwork so she wanted to learn how the paint stripping process worked. Since it's her door now I was only too happy to hand her the tools and take my position behind the camera, tucking an occasional dollar bill in her rubber glove and yelling, "Take it all off, baby!" until she threatened to beat me stupid. The first thing she did was get the door in a comfortable working position on a pair of sawhorses. Whenever possible, try to remove the woodwork and get it horizontal. This applies to baseboards and casings too. If you don't, you'll know why this is a good idea about twenty minutes into ...
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Saving The World: Black Pixels and Termite Farts
2007-10-14 20:23:00
Tomorrow, Oct 15, is Blog Action Day and tens of thousands of bloggers like me have each committed to writing an article about the environment. BrooklynRowHouse is about old home renovation and improvement so this topic is a low, slow ball over the plate for people like me. (Do you like how I worked in a baseball metaphor during playoff season? I actually couldn't care less about baseball but this will be a long article and I need to use whatever cheap literary devices I can to hold your interest because there are thousands of bloggers out there who write better than me and we're all writing about the same thing.) I think a lot of us old house shut-ins are going to contribute something along the lines of this: If you're thinking about downsizing from the SUV parked in your garage, consider what's possibly parked in your utility room: a 30 year-old, low-efficiency heating system and a 20-year old water heater. Unlike your gas guzzler, your heating system is cranking 24/7 ...
More About: World , Black , The World , Saving , Term

Cheap digs
2007-10-05 05:33:00
Jeannie from Houseblogs.net challenged us blogger monkeys to write a show-and-tell post. Considering the probably millions of bucks that we housebloggers collectively squander annually on new roofs, new additions, central air and glass door knobs, if there was a ever a low, slow ball over the plate for this group, this was it! Bragging about my tool collection was the first thing that popped into my head. but I just got off a nine-month drunk bedroom reno project where I blabbed relentlessly about them. What about my central vac? Nah, I did that one recently too. My dogs, Jack and Auggie? Furry pets are always a safe fallback post when you've got nothing else to talk about. I wish I could boast about my auction and flea market finds but I've been pretty disappointed by them the past year or two. All I bought at the last one was a bag of kettle corn. Home automation? Not again. Instead, I want to talk about something I've had since I was 11 years old: a book that my da...
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A Prodigal Door Returns
2007-09-29 04:21:00
Okay, it's a lightweight job and it's not even for my house. But after several months of heads-down work on a software task for my client, The Children's Health Fund, I've got another DIY project. Maybe it will kick me back into gear to finish the cabinet doors and stained glass projects that have been dogging me all summmer. Well, some of it for a lot longer than that. The job is stripping an old interior door and replacing its center panel with some sort of a screen. Karen is a licensed wildlife rescuer and needs this door so her animal room has adequate ventilation. She wanted to install an aluminum screen door but my relentless bleating about what a hideous scar that would leave on her old house succeeded. I suggested that she instead do some dumpster diving for a 30" door and we'd modify it so it would at least have some architectural integrity with her old federal style house. She agreed. More importantly, I figured that would keep her busy until sometime next ye...
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Tin Roof Expert visiting: Anyone want to learn?
2007-09-10 17:59:00
October : Lady Liberty?s Tin Man ?Ternes? toward Howard Hall Farm Our House at Howard Hall Farm has a Terne Tin roof, so over the years, Reggie has done a lot of research on it. He?s been looking for an expert for quite some time now, so when he read an article in the New York Post about THE TIN MAN who is the fourth generation of a line of tinsmiths (dating back to 1892), and Lady Liberty?s personal assistant, he couldn?t resist getting in touch with him. Incredible as it seems, Dennis Heaphy has agreed to come work on Howard Hall Farm?s tin roof! He?ll be working here for a week in mid-October. During his stay, Dennis will be conducting a presentation for children (on October 20th) about the making of the statue of Liberty. In an interview for ?The Tin Man:Metalsmith puts best face on Lady Liberty?, by C.J. Sullivan(New York Post) , Mr. Heaphy said, ?This truly is my dream job. It?s an evolution of everything I?ve ever done. It?s an opportunity to use an esoteric knowledge, combin...
More About: Roof , Learn , Expert , Pert

The Flamingo Kid Rides Again
2007-08-28 05:49:00
This weekend I was invited again to my neighbor's annual court party at her cabana at the Breezy Point Surf Club in the Rockaways. Breezy, a/k/a the Irish Riviera, is as definitively "boro" as it gets and as timelessly shabby as a summer camp. Anyone who's seen Garry Marshall's 1984 movie, "The Flamingo Kid", with Matt Dillon might be able to imagine the place. In fact, that movie was filmed on location only a mile down the beach from Breezy at a similar, although higher-end, beach club. My buy-in for the annual invite is my sangria, which I immodestly admit has few peers. It's loaded with good wine, brandy, Triple Sec, at least six fresh fruits and a few secret ingredients. (I'll cop to one of them: cinnamon sticks). I come laden with six gallons of the stuff, both red and white. It's too easy to take cheap shots at Breezy. After passing through the gates, it looks less like a beach club than a refugee camp with tiny, cluttered wooden cabanas abutting the parking lot...
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Pet peeves
2007-08-13 05:53:00
"Pet peeve" is a terrible metaphor. Pets are warm and drooly and something you like. Peeves are something which irritates the hell out of you, sometimes to an unnatural extreme. What annoys me to an unnatural extreme? Tonight it's pinheads who have garages but instead park their cars on the sidewalk because they think they have a right to do so by virtue of having a legally protected curb cut. More often than not, they've converted their garages into attic extensions, packed full with boxes of Christmas decorations and forgotten bicycles. They have no intention of using those garages for their vehicles, which was mandatory for city approval of their curb cuts. Then there are those black belt twits who not only park on the sidewalk but park their second cars at the curb cut so pedestrians have to walk into the middle of the street to pass by. Or, worse, rent out their curb cuts as parking spaces. You just know they're the first to cry foul when someone crowds their driveway...
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A Tree Blows Down in Brooklyn
2007-08-09 03:04:00
About 5:30am this morning I was suddenly awake. I'm not sure if it was the threatening thunder approaching from the northwest or my shivering, hundred-pound Newfoundland desperately trying to crawl under the covers with me. Outside, it was like War of the Worlds... real Wrath of God stuff. Lightning was flashing like a paparazzi frenzy and the thunder was getting progressively angrier. I heard the rain starting. Within minutes it was coming down in buckets. Seriously, that's what it sounded like: someone dropping buckets on my roof. By now, most of you have probably heard that Brooklyn experienced its first tornado since the 19th century (and that one was barely a dust devil). Because modern Brooklyn doesn't like to do things small, this one was an EF2, as classified by the National Weather Service this afternoon. My immediate neighborhood was its landfall before it worked its way north-northeast and into Sunset Park, Boro Park and Kensington. At 5:45am I crawled out o...
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Test, test... is this mic on?
2007-08-05 06:29:00
It's been a month since my last blog post. I'm touched that people have emailed to see if I'm okay or if I fell under a lumber truck or something. I'd like to say that I'm on an extended vacation, motorcycling in the Andes or taking an expert seminar on timber frame construction at Howard Hall Farm but, no, this is my typical mid-summer geek fest. It's when I put down the tools and immerse myself in overdue computer projects, a/k/a working for a living. For anyone who's interested, I'm building my first "Web 2.0" project for The Childrens Health Fund and it's seventeen affiliates. It's a referral and transportation management system (TRMS) to track patients, mostly kids from medically under-served communities, through their encounters with our byzantine health care system. And get them to and from their appointments. Another "first" is that I'm a one-man band on this project -- the organ grinder and the monkey. Usually, I'm spoiled with having a designer or two, ...
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Robot, robot
2007-07-05 19:31:00
There was a song by a Chicago band called The Flock that I used to love during my trippy teen days: Robo t , robot arms and legs Teeth, bones, hair, its all there Robot, robot arms and legs Battery's dead, head's dead. (Mechanical man, mechanical man!) Whenever I muck with my home automation hardware this song plays over and over again in my head. It's pretty maddening. Sitting on my dining room table since last Thanksgiving was a small pile of boxes containing Insteon controllers, in-wall dimmers, relays and the like that have been waiting patiently for me to complete the master bedroom renovation. I was intending to do client work over the Fourth but after sixteen consecutive days of building database stored procedures I needed a break! So I assembled my tools and got busy making that pile smaller. Anyone who has read the X10 primer I posted here knows that I'm a nut for home automation gear. And anyone who has read my blog knows that I've been very faithful with renov...

A Case of the Mightaswells
2007-06-25 19:55:00
If you own home in progress, whether you're a DIYer or someone who calls a contractor to change the lightbulbs, you know the syndrome. "As long as I'm updating the kitchen, I might as well make it larger." "As long as I'm pouring a new basement floor, I might as well replace all the old plumbing underneath. And then I might as well rough out for another full bath. Then I might as well build it." "As long as I'm opening up the wall, I might as well add a central vacuum system, split-unit air conditioning and a new 50a riser to the second floor. And a whole house beer tap!" You think I'm making this stuff up? That's me, folks! Well , except for the beer tap but, believe me, I came very close to doing it. And compressor outlets on every floor too. Anyway, the mightaswells struck this weekend when I decided I needed to sand and add another coat of Danish oil to the ipe table I made for the living room deck a couple of years ago. Karen found the wrought iron base in one ...
More About: Case , Wells , Swell

More and more sawdust
2007-06-20 03:28:00
With the top floor reno winding down and my tools reunited with their friends in the basement, it was time to turn my attention to the crime scene that used to be my shop. I don't mind working in a messy environment but I can't start a new project unless everything is neat and tidy, with every tool in its proper place, the table saw waxed, stationary tools aligned, blades sharpened, etc. This is my operating room, after all, and you don't cut out new patient's gall bladder with the last one's blood still on the walls. Today was the marathon cleanup of the past nine months of mayhem. It actually began last night because I needed to catch this morning's garbage pickup. Did I say how much the Sanitation guys love me? They even autographed one of my garbage cans a few years ago, scrawling "Balls!" on it with black magic marker. Out went four large garbage cans of wood scraps, some of it legacy leftovers from earlier renovation projects -- a lot of it short pieces of crow...
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Time to buy a bed
2007-06-04 04:15:00
I can't freakin' believe it. All my tools are back in the shop where they belong, the paint's up, the room is clean, the nine-month saga of the master bedroom renovation.... so OVER! Okay, there are still a few things left to do: the cabinet drawers and doors, the hallway stained glass windows, the doorknobs. I'll get around to it. Over the last few weeks I've been finishing up the hallway, the two closets and my outside plantings. There's always a sense of closure when I lay that second coat of paint, especially after a nine month project. I used a wedgewood blue matte finish. It was down to that, salmon or a pale yellow. I couldn't decide so I just closed my eyes and picked one. I like it. It's sorta weird in these shots because the camera makes it look lighter than it really is. It's time to reflect back on the lessons I learned. At the top of the list is, don't use engineered floors if you have big, energetic dogs. The floors already look like they...
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I actually do have house stuff to blog about
2007-05-19 05:53:00
After all, it's been almost two weeks since my last blog post. However, I like to accompany my renovation articles with photos and the bedroom is currently an eyesore while I reorganize closets and get rid of clothes I've had since my disco show band days. No way am I posting photos of it now. A fair question would be why I'm reorganizing closets when I haven't finished the bedroom reno yet. I have a long closet that connects the two bedrooms. That's where I stuffed everything when I began this project. Now I have to lay a new floor in there. Being the well-prepared guy that I am, I didn't cover the clothes when I started the reno so they're buried under plaster and saw dust. I've been washing clothes for the last three days and hanging them in the new cedar closet. I can almost see the floor now. Even if disco comes roaring back, I don't think my 28" waistline will. Maybe St Theresa's church can find something useful to do with my purple and green palm tree motif...
More About: House , Blog , Stuff , Have , Ouse

At last, that curved baseboard!
2007-05-03 18:02:00
I've been pushing off this little project for a couple of months. The bedroom renovation began with construction of the closet and the curved plaster corner I absolutely had to have (if for no other reason than I'd never done one before). I knew that was going to create problems with the trim later but, hey, later is later. Six months later, later became today. There are basically four ways to build a curve using solid lumber. One is to steam it and bend it in a jig. Bending 1" nominal hardwood stock to as shallow a radius as I need is probably impossible, at least with my skills, and since I don't have a wood steamer anyway, it's moot. So let's move on. The second method also involves a jig but instead of bending solid lumber you build up thin veneer layers like plywood. You can construct a very small radius this way and lots of glue ensures a stable curve. The third way is to saw lots of narrow vertical kerfs in the back of the stock, leaving a thin facing layer t...
More About: Curve , That , Base

Engineered Flooring HOWTO v2.0
2007-04-15 07:04:00
I don't like drywall. I like plaster. I don't like composite mouldings. I like hardwood. Heck, I don't even like prefab mouldings. I like to cut my own. So why would I like something as new-fangled and artificial as engineered flooring? Actually, I don't. Even though I went through bloody hell to lay those herringbone floors in the living room, solid hardwood is still my first choice. But there were reasons why engineered flooring was the better option for the second floor in my house. One is that I didn't want to add an extra 1.25" to the height of the top stair. That's what would have been required if I'd gone with 3/4" hardwood. I can't count the number of times I've tripped because of uneven stair heights, on one occasion fracturing a shoulder. Also, an engineered floor has a finish at least twice as hard as that of any job-site applied finish. With two big dogs tearing up my hardwood floors downstairs that's not a small selling point for me. Just to be...
More About: Flooring , Ring , Engine , Howto , Engineer

Con Ed resolution
2007-04-13 16:16:00
Catching up on the recent fun at BrooklynRowHouse, I've finally got my electrical back. My electrician strapped the panel so I didn't have a half-dark house but I couldn't run any 220v appliances, including my Delta table saw. That brought the woodworking in the bedroom reno to a dead stop. The stories about the fried feeder line are here and here. I was very concerned that my saw and clothes dryer could be out of commission for months. My neighbor had the same problem and it took Con Ed four months to fix it. That's why I was surprised that Con Ed made an appointment for t'weaks. Of course, they failed to show up for it. After spending that day talking with Con Ed droids who played three card monte with my calls, transferring me to voice mail boxes all over Brooklyn, I guess I must have left a message with the right person because later that afternoon I got a callback from a woman profusely apologizing for their "computer screwup". Someone had flagged my job as being ...
More About: Solution , Resolution

Mea Culpa.
2007-04-10 05:09:00
Forgive me, blog, for I have sinned. It's been a month since my last confession. I've been so busy that I haven't found the time to sit down and write about what I was up to. I should break this update into a few posts. Lemme talk about the bedroom reno first. After I got derailed by Con Ed's feeder line burning out and putting my 220v Delta table saw temporarily out of commission, I regrouped and decided to start on the finish work. The remaining trim work is mostly shop stuff so I can do it later. Three days! Three miserable frikkin days! That's how long it took to fill all the nail holes and sand the 500+ square feet of woodwork in the bedroom and hallway renovation down to 220 grit. After that, I vacuumed and ran tack cloths over every square inch of it. Then I applied an oil wood conditioner. This usually isn't critical with hardwood or hardwood plywood but sometimes the veneer blades can leave cutting marks that you won't see until you apply the stain. S...

T'weaks
2007-03-19 17:33:00
Wow. I was surprised at 8:45am this morning when a big Con Ed truck pulled up just as I was walking out the door with the pooches. If you read my last post, I lost one leg of power to my house yesterday. The extorti...er, electrician I summoned pronounced one of the feed cables from the street DOA and called Con Ed to report it. He left me with a number to call if I didn't hear from Con Ed soon, which he translated to mean "in the next two or three weeks". In other words, it's the classic unit of flex-time I call t'weaks. Yes, I know it sounds like "two weeks" but that's where you're wrong. That only leads to false expectations (see: contractorus interruptus). It's really more of a Klingon word. T'weaks lives in a different temporal dimension from terrestrial time, immune even to General Relativity. Let's use it in a sentence. "When will that part arrive?" "T'weaks." "When can your guys get started?" "T'weaks." T'weaks is based on quantum theory. It's sorta like...