We've Moved the Blog!!

Howdy friends and neighbors. We've moved the blog over to Wordpress.

http://unprotectedwrecks.wordpress.com/

Wordpress offers a bunch of gadgets that Blogger doesn't, and we've heard from a few people that they have had trouble commenting. So we're going to try out Wordpress-land. Let us know what you think.

The Landlord Store

A friend of ours, Mary Ellen, came over to our house not long after we bought it to check out our disaster area. She pointed to some especially cheap, ugly tile the previous owners had chosen, and said, "that's from the landlord store." She explained that somewhere in Gowanus or South Williamsburg or somewhere, there's a big warehouse full of piles of crappy stuff: ugly light fixtures, MDF cabinetry, those leaky fake chrome faucets with the clear plastic knobs, laminate flooring...you get the idea. And that's where all the landlords go to get cheap, ugly, crappy stuff to put in their tenants' apartments.

(Turns out the landlord store is actually south of Red Hook, and it's called Home Depot. Who knew.)

"Landlord Store" has become our shorthand for anything that looks cheap and badly made. When we set out to find a vanity to put in the garden level half-bath, we were hoping to find something that wasn't landlord store. We tried Green Demolitions, where we found our master bath vanity (we posted about that HERE), but had less luck this time around (though we did get to spend three really enjoyable hours in NJ traffic). We tried finding salvaged countertop to put together with a salvaged sink basin we knew we could get. Turns out the industry term for a piece of salvaged counter large enough to cut a vanity top out of is "full price." We priced out new materials. We veered briefly into pedestal sink territory, which turned out not to work because the plumbing had been installed for a vanity. Nothing we tried got us a bathroom sink for less than $500. So it was off to the landlord store this morning.



This is what we came up with. It cost $125, and is 100% landlord store. We have a fiendish plot though. The panels are shaker. Our brilliant idea is to fill the panel depressions in with something beautiful - maybe laminate some handmade paper in there and cover it with thick poly? Maybe tile it? (We learned when we were in Mexico for my sister's wedding that there is virtually no surface that can't be tiled. And we're good at tiling, so we're going to keep doing it.) Anyway, we have high hopes that with a little bit of artsy-fartsy-ness, we can de-landlord-store this vanity and stay on budget, both at the same time.

Let Us Now Praise Famous Jen

This photo is of the first finished-ish space in our garden level -- the walk-in closet in the master bedroom. It has walls and a ceiling, its joints are taped, its corners compounded, and it has [sound of gong] a floor. That floor was salvaged from the demolished part of the front room and laid, this afternoon, by Jen.

This is momentous for many reasons. First, we have a semi-finished space, which we were beginning to believe would never actually happen. Admittedly it's a closet, but still. Second, Jen laid a salvaged hardwood floor. That means we now have (OK, she now has) the skills necessary to lay more salvaged hardwood floor, which will save us many hundreds of dollars.

We have 300 square feet of reclaimed chestnut waiting to become our bedroom and upstairs bathroom floors. Its gorgeousness and the story behind it will be another post on another day, but its advent, and the possibility that we will someday live like grownups in a finished house, is seeming like a reality for the first time in quite a while.

NB from Jen: Due credit must go to my brother, Micah, who was the second man on this two-man job (I was the first, in case that wasn't clear). He actually kind of knew what he was doing, which was useful. So he steadfastly held the nail gun in place while I whacked it with a mallet. Which is harder than it sounds.

Stubborn As Hell

I spent two days this week banging nails out of hardwood flooring. What kind of nails, you ask? SCREW NAILS. Really, I'm just not going to say anything else about that. Here they are:


I wanted to see them all together, the way you might want to see your appendix after it's been removed. With a rusty spoon.

Below is some of the flooring I salvaged by removing said nails:


We ripped this flooring out of the area that is becoming, with excruciating slowness, our bathrooms. In the interests of keeping material out of landfills, and saving a little money, we decided to try to salvage it for use in the new closet and maybe the downstairs hallway. I posted on Brownstoner asking for advice on how to do such a thing. The response I got: er, why would you do that? The answer: I'm stubborn as hell. You remember the Passover seder we had with 24 people on good china with no kitchen three days after we bought the house? Right. So salvaging a floor should really be no problem.

We're a little stalled, because we can't hang the rest of the sheetrock until we have a plumbing inspection. And nothing else can happen until the sheetrock is hung. The plumbing inspection will happen on Tuesday afternoon. In the meantime, I AM GOING TO LOSE MY MIND IF WE DON'T FINISH SOMETHING. So I have set my sights on the walk-in closet. There is no plumbing in the walk-in closet. The sheetrock is hung. I have taped and plastered it. And today, I'm going to install the goddamn floor that I pounded the goddamn nails out of for two days, and then I am going to get down on my knees with an orbital sander, refinish it, and slap a coat of goddamn poly down. And the closet will be FINISHED. Thereby preventing my head from exploding. I will sit down in my finished closet with a nice shot of whiskey, and I will drink a hearty toast to my patron saint, Sisyphus.

Practice for Having a Child

We've got guys in the house again. By which I mean, for the past few days Carlos' crew has been back to do some drywalling and other wall- and door-making activities which we could do ourselves, but half as well and much, much more slowly.

The thing is, when there are guys in the house, our lives are a string of ramifying interruptions. We start out on a task innocently enough, which gets interrupted by a second task of higher priority. The second task gets interrupted by a full-on emergency, which we follow through until we find out it's not an emergency and not even time-sensitive. Right about that moment we get interrupted by a fourth task, which IS time-sensitive, and requires a trip to Lowe's. Which seems great, because we needed to go to Lowe's for task #1 anyway, except we only dimly remember what task #1 was. At Lowe's we find what we need for task #1, but the thing we need for task #4 requires us to find a specialty vendor because they don't have it at Lowe's. Of course, midway through task #4, we are interrupted by task #5. Which requires us to go back to Lowe's. It is 5pm before we complete anything at all, and that only partially.

I figure this is good practice for having a child.

Back to Life, Back to Reality

Poor us. We spent eight days last week at the southern tip of Baja, in 85-degree weather, looking out with astonishment at the view above from our hammock. Yes, there are really places in the world that don't need to be Photoshopped to look like that.

Jen's sister Rebekah got married, and so did Jason, and even to each other. It was freakin' gorgeous, the whole thing. It could hardly not be when it happened on this beach. I mean, really.

Here is the chuppah blowing in the wind before the ceremony. (I don't have photos of the ceremony, because I was videotaping it. Just trust me that it made your eyes hurt. The dresses were this amazing plum color, and yellow flowers, and...yeah.)

The water, in case you're wondering, is clear and relatively warm, and twenty yards off the beach you look down and see schools of beautiful tropical fish.

And now we're home. Um, hooray? Our house is still only semi-livable and maddeningly disorganized. We do have a bathtub--not installed, but we have one. We don't have walls per se, but we're getting there. It is not gorgeous and tropical. I did laundry yesterday in our filthy chaotic basement and washed the lingering perfume of sunscreen and salt water out of our clothes. Still, I'm strangely, perversely glad to be back.

Grant Hell, and My Sister Is Getting Married

My sister is getting married! To a really nice guy! Who we like a lot! And who is kind of a geek!

Mazel tov to Rebekah and Jason. They're getting married in Mexico next week, and we're all trucking down there to sit on the beach, drink things with umbrellas in them, fish (or in our case, watch people fish), and smile happily at a relationship that, as far as we can tell, works pretty darn well. It's a messed-up world, and yet we still do this crazy thing where we fall in love with each other and do the hard work we need to do to stay together. It's an incredible act of faith. So cheers to you, Rebekah and Jason. Right on.

If you haven't heard from me recently, it's because I've spent every waking minute of the last two weeks writing a grant. In case you don't know, I've co-founded a non-profit organization. Because it seemed like a practical thing to do and a reliable source of income. The organization is called OurGoods. It's an online barter network for artists. To the left are two of the images Louise Ma, one of the other co-founders, created to demonstrate the site. She is brilliant. So are Caroline, Rich and Carl, the other co-founders. But I don't have pictures they drew.

The site is being alpha tested now, so you can't really see it, but you can peek in at ourgoods.org.

We were invited to apply for a very, very large grant, which is a big deal - they got 415 submissions, and only 75 organizations were invited to apply for the 12-15 grants they will actually give. The application is ginormous, and that's pretty much all I've been doing.

In the meantime, the plumbers and electricians have completed this phase of their work, and it's now time for us to start sheetrocking, wonderboarding, tiling, trimming, and a lot of other things. It appears I am going to learn to install ductwork. But not until this grant is done and my sister is safely married to this really great guy.