Movin' on Out (To the Yard)

Today I'm on a deadline, so I feel the need to post. I am looking at some pictures that I took in the garden-to-be the other day and thinking about what kinds of transformations I'm going to make, so here they go.

In this photo, we're standing close to the middle of the yard and looking back. It doesn't translate so well onto the two-dimensional image, but the ground slopes up pretty sharply, especially once you get to the big maple on the right. The plan here is to put a low wall around the base of that tree and across the yard, and terrace behind it. (Black thing on left is the composter, which will probably move.) We'll also add lots of dirt in front of the wall, starting about where the green starts in the photo, to create a more or less level surface for grass, flowerbeds, and cavorting.


Here we're standing about at the first tree on the right in the photo above, looking the other direction. You can see the hideous concrete rectangle (yellow arrows) that someone thought was an elegant Versailles-type symmetrical walk. I'm bashing it up with a sledgehammer and pulling it out. That is where a lot of the new dirt will need to go. We will also be taking down the mulberry tree (red arrows) that has grown into the retaining wall in the front of the yard. That I am a bit sad about, but it's going to be a big problem later if we don't do something about it now. Just in front of where I'm standing--the lower left corner of the photo, lower right of the previous photo--will be a small brick and slate patio with some chairs and a brass firepit. Yes, I know the tree roots will destroy it eventually. I still want it, and life is short.


Finally, this is a photo that has nothing whatsoever to do with my garden. Jen and I went to the march on Washington this weekend, and as we were all standing around waiting for the damn thing to start, our friend Jeff looked up and noticed that in the clear(ish) blue sky above us there was unmistakably a rainbow. This is a crappy picture taken with a cameraphone, but still, you get the idea. I know there is a perfectly scientific, reasonable explanation--bright sun, thin cloud cover, whatever--but it seemed to confirm two things: God in fact LOVES fags, and God is a sappy sentimentalist.

Our house is warm

...or at least lukewarm. We had forty or fifty people through the house on Labor Day weekend. Some of them were our local electeds and hopefuls, and some of them were former Obama volunteers looking for new ways to do good and still jonesing for that electin' folks buzz. Jen has decided to make the world a better place and what she decides to do gets done. And then, of course, some of our guests were our friends who just came to look at the crazy piles of stuff and eat.

Tish James, our council member, stopped by and said a few words. I have to say, it kinda geeked me out that our council member came to our house. We are sooo important!













Jonathan Tasini, Jen's boss (inasfar as anyone is ever the boss of Jen) and U.S. Senate candidate running for the seat currently being warmed by Kirsten Gillibrand, was also there. "I'm crushing her head! I'm crushing her head!" No, he's making a salient point about health care, probably.










And of course, Josh Skaller, running for city council in the 39th. Don't you just want to pinch his cheeks? Park Slope and Borough Park, you could have the cutest council member in the city. Run out and vote!

We started entertaining about one, finished up about 10, collapsed into bed exhausted and addled with drink a few minutes later, and then the neighborhood began to wake up and have its Labor Day celebrations. There was some sort of Celtic band playing into the wee hours. Or perhaps it was a jazz band. You wouldn't think they were at all mistakable for one another, but I was really, really tired.

Next!

Did we say quit? We meant pause. Briefly. We aren't going to begin tearing apart our living space for a while, but there are so many other things we can tear apart! We're going to get Jen's apartment in much better shape than it was when we lived in it (this seems to be a theme for us: We fix up spaces for other people to live in!), and then we're going to start ripping up the garden (first) floor.

On the garden floor, we have two large-ish rooms--one full of boxes, one full of tools--one small internal room (once a kitchen, like so many other places in the house), and a weirdly shaped, cramped, dark bathroom. The weird bathroom is conveniently placed so as to prevent us from fully opening the door to the backyard. (Did I hear "wackadoo"? Very good, class.) The other day Sue and I had to disassemble some not-very-big chairs just to get them through the door, which is of course the only way to get anything into the backyard.

So. Here's the plan.

We are going to knock down the two internal walls (knock-downs in red) and build a bathroom and a half (new walls etc. in blue) in the internal space. Then we'll knock down the awful bathroom and have an even bigger back room and one and a half baths, plus an office for me to be messy in, plus a big door out into the yard.
(See diagrams. This is my artist's rendering and Jen may well object to the way I've roughed it out.)

It's unlikely to turn out the way we've imagined it, but it's fun to imagine.

We Quit.

We have a living room in which we can live. We have a kitchen in which we can cook, and sit and eat. We have a working toilet (on one floor) and a working shower (on the other). So we quit--at least for now.Plants! And a toaster! That's civilization for you. At least, enough civilization for us for now. We have two whole rooms to live in, which is one room more than we've had for the past nine months.Look--a bed, and places to put our clothes. Most of them, anyway. So we're quitting. For a couple of weeks, anyway. I'll get a job, and Jen will rehearse for her next performance. We'll watch movies. We'll read books. We'll have a housewarming--or at least a lukewarming.

Then, soon, we'll start knocking down walls again, and making ourselves a real grownup bathroom on the ground floor. We'll keep you posted.

Alien Visitation

This was probably not our best idea. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but then so did a lot of things in college..

So basically, we go to the bathroom and brush our teeth these days in a sci-fi version of a radioactive phone booth.



This particular photo is a bit exaggerated - the walls are actually the color of granny smith apples, and the ceiling is the color of cantaloupe. That sounds nice, right? Apples and melon? Also there's some banana yellow in there that you can't see in this shot.

This bathroom is so gross and depressing, we thought we'd paint it a cheerful color. Or two. Or three, really, because apples, bananas and cantaloupe are all good, right? We'll take this nasty depressing space and cheer it right up with a fruity mix!

Er, actually, no.

It turns out, our logic was akin to, "well, I like wine AND beer AND whiskey, so why not throw them all in a glass together? It'll be GREAT!"

We experienced similar nauseous results. We actually really have to repaint the place because we just can't be in there for more than a minute or two without wanting to hurl.

In the grand scheme of things, we could have made much bigger mistakes. But hey, there's still time.

The Only Thing I Care About At All

This is our bed. As of this afternoon, it is located in our new apartment. It has sheets on it and it is ready to receive my exhausted body.

And that is the only thing I care about.










This is a second view of the same room. As you can see, it is full of crap. Crap that will not be put away today. Crap that will remain mutely piled against walls and blocking fire egress until I'm good and ready to get out of the aforementioned bed.



There is one other thing that I care about a little bit, and that is the DVD of Harry Potter and the Order Of the Phoenix, which Katherine and I will rent and watch this evening, accompanied by not a little bit of wine, while we ignore the towering piles of crap to be unpacked. These are the rewards of being an adult and not incarcerated - if I choose to ignore duty and instead watch a dumb movie and get slightly drunk, then goddamn if that's not what I'm going to do. Happy moving day!

Moving! Really!

We are moving in, folks ... tomorrow. (Technically, that is today!) We all thought the day would never come, especially after we found that the plaster of the ceiling (the ceiling immediately above our bed, by the way) was sagging -- but that's another story for another blog post. The day is here (almost). By the time you read this, there will be furniture and boxes and another huge mess in the parlor.

Take a look at what we've finally gotten to. Our parlor is painted, and largely free of debris and heavy equipment.









And the kitchen! We have countertops (we tiled them ourselves, with salvage from the smashed-down wall). We have shelves. We have a functional stove. We have a clean, painted sink area.





We have countertops. (I know I already said that but I haven't had this much counterspace in my kitchen since ... well, ever, if you don't count the house I grew up in.) Compare this, my friends, to what we had just a few days ago. (It looks like there's an alien visitation happening in the bathroom, on the far left, but that's just ... well, that's another blog post for another day. Suffice it to say, it's not actually radioactive.)

And the Walls Come A-Tumblin' Down

We are finally getting to knock stuff down in our own apartment! We're not knocking down as much, because we are preparing to move in and then we'll redo the place. (That may not seem like a logical order in which to do things, but as with so much in this house, logic gives way to necessity.)

I got to tear down this completely weird and unnecessary wall that was bisecting the kitchen.





First I stripped off the tile and sheetrock, whereupon I discovered, to my surprise, that the wall had been constructed with an actual frame, studs and everything. Shocking.

It's actually much easier to take something apart when it's been constructed more or less competently.





When we got the whole thing down, we found that our kitchen is HUGE. Which makes you wonder why anyone would ... No, we've already determined, we cannot ask that question in this house, for that way madness lies.

Their Kitchen, Our Kitchen

OK, let's get right down to it, folks:

Their Kitchen











Our Kitchen.

We can't write much now because Metropolitan Home is coming to shoot tomorrow morning and we have to buff and wax the particleboard.














We're really proud of the stove and sink, both of which actually work. We read about how granite countertop wasn't so good for the environment, and we figured, you know, we can really reduce our environmental impact by having NO countertops!

(the wooden thing on the right there was built by Katherine out of salvaged lumber to address the no-countertop-having situation. She did a really good job, actually. At some point it will be a potting table in the backyard, but right now it makes our semi-kitchen more semi-usable.)

What's really exciting here is that we're starting to talk about our apartment, the tenant's apartment being almost done. And we can't tell you how happy that makes us.

Adventures in Bathroom Tile

This is a picture of Katherine doing something we don't see much of these days. It rhymes with tiling.

Seriously. Katherine has become an expert tiler. See that big butch-looking bucket? It's full of mortar. My girlfriend is such a tough-ass.







This is the newly-tiled floor. The alignment got a little wacky, but "done" is the new black.
















These are Katherine's expertly laid wall tiles. Above the blue are the tiles so arduously grouted by me (see my semi-coherent whining HERE). Below are ungrouted tiles. If you are a grout connoisseur, like me, you can infer all kinds of metaphysical information from the grouted vs. ungrouted tile. But I wouldn't expect the uninitiated to understand. Do, however, please pause to appreciate that Katherine mitered the blue accent tile. The accent tile is rounded, and protrudes from the other tile, so the place where it meets at the corner is a little complicated. Katherine, dork that she is, figured out how to miter tile, and I love her for it.


This is another of our adventures. Katherine dutifully tiled right up to the pipe. It was so neat and tidy! She attempted to fit the thingamahooey that controls the water temperature onto the pipe, and was stymied. It didn't fit. Turns out that the plumber had installed a plastic guide so the tiler would know where to stop tiling. The contractor who hung the drywall helpfully removed that weird piece of plastic that looked like it wasn't doing anything and didn't replace it. So I fitted our handy Dremel tool with a ceramic-cutting bit and started cutting. This hole took over an hour, but what was really exciting was the nerve damage from the vibration. Yahoo! I can't feel my hands but the f-ing shower works!






And the moment you've all been waiting for - the finished bathroom. Actually, I'm sure you haven't been waiting for it, but we bloody well have. Voila!

Why didn't we create a food blog?

Then we would be going to restaurants instead of painting, sawing, trimming, screwing (not the good kind). If the ceiling leaks in a restaurant, we are not responsible.

Oh well. Too late. The ceiling leaked, and we are responsible. (The light fixture is, indeed, full of water.)

We are almost at the end of the road with the upstairs apartment. A little painting, and really, that's it. Oh, and the ceiling, I almost forgot: cutting out the damaged drywall, patching, compounding, sanding, and painting. That'll only take, say, two days. Grrr.

It won't be long before we can start all of this again (whee!) on our own apartment. Unlike with the upstairs, however, we can take our time, limited only by how long we are willing to live in total chaos. Don't you wish your living room was filled with handy tools and lumber like ours is? We're short on the sofas, chairs, and general comfort of the traditional living room, it's true. But we've got ambiance. Perhaps we should open a restaurant.

Mumble. Grunt.

That's the height of my ability to articulate tonight. It turns out that grouting tile is really, really hard work. I think that if I grouted tile for a month or two, I would look like Michael Phelps. Well, like a girl Michael Phelps. Well, really, probably not like Michael Phelps at all because he's really tall and not Jewish and he has no body hair. Yeah, pretty much not like Michael Phelps.

I'm tired. From grouting.

We're not posting a picture tonight because it would be really undignified. Katherine is adhered to the bed like, well, grout, and I'm attempting to remember how to use my opposable thumbs.

I think we got a lot of stuff done in the house today, but honestly, I'm not sure I remember.

Watching Paint Dry

It's actually fascinating when it's YOUR paint.

In a paroxysm of patriotism, we have decided to paint the entire interior red, white, and blue. Uh, not really. The blue is tape, the blinding white was supposed to be a creamy linen color, and the red will, we trust, darken and mellow out when it dries and then gets a second coat. But right now, it looks like we live at Engine Company No. 10, doesn't it?

Paint is such an interesting industry. Most of the effort and ingenuity of paint companies seems to go into making up clever names for the paint colors, rather than products that, say, don't kill us or all the fish in the Hudson. There's no such thing as light blue; that's Dreamscape! Your walls aren't off-white, they're Morning Rest. The paint we're using is Ivy, made in Brooklyn, and it has no VOCs and promises not to kill any fish. Safe enough to drink, practically. But the colors still have silly names.

Remembering Some Things

Today being Memorial Day, we pause to remember some things.

Remember when we didn't have any balusters and the second floor looked as if it were going to collapse? (That bit of hyperbole is brought to you by Ms. The Glass Isn't EVEN Half Full and the Water Probably Has Arsenic In It.) Well, look at us now. Balusters for days, and nine of 'em are spanking new.









And here is Gibb memorably painting them.













Remember when everything kinda looked dirty? Um, 'cause it was? Now everything is gleaming (and, belying our blog name, we protected our wreck nicely, thank you). Note Barbara and, below, Etkar putting the finishing touches on the paint job that we were helplessly thinking was going to take us a week.







What we're really going to remember about this Memorial Day is how amazing it was to have our friends show up for us ... again. Thanks Gibb, Barbara, Etkar, and Jeanne (who sneakily dodged the camera).

A Little Help From Our Friends

Actually, kind of a LOT of help.

May we please take a moment to hail the fabulosity of Gibb, Barbara, Jeanne, Ellice and Nicole? These beautiful, wonderful, amazing people came to our house yesterday and helped us paint.

I will freely admit that Katherine and I are watching the end of our ropes rapidly receding into the distance. Painting a 1600 square foot apartment was, to put it mildly, daunting.

In addition to some long hours, Gibb and Barbara brought some really necessary expertise to the job, which was really good because K and I have become increasingly ill-equipped to make judgment calls. Our brains are basically running out our ears at this point.

We got three out of six rooms painted, plus about half the hallway. Katherine says we're a little shy of half done, I say we're a little more than half done, which pretty much describes our natures. I tend toward "the glass is half full" and Katherine tends toward "there's a chip in the rim of the glass and it probably means I have a brain tumor."

(Look! We can still make jokes! We're not licked yet!)

Anyway, the sight of the cavalry rolling in was as good for our states of mind as for getting the work done. So thank you, thank you, thank you Gibb, Barbara, Jeanne, Ellice and Nicole.

My Best Friend Is Joint Compound

Jen said that to me the other day, and it sounded so much like the title of a blog post that I'm using it as the title of a blog post, even though I'm not going to write about joint compound. (It's great stuff, though. Conceals all manner of things. Gigantic holes in the ceiling? Gone!)

In the last few days we've been doing stuff that wasn't so photogenic. Priming walls--well, it looks better than unprimed walls, but there's a limited wow factor. Today, though, I got to do some tiling, and the result is the first thing that looks like it might someday be a finished product that someone might use.

Isn't it pretty? (The little red and white things are spacers, to keep the tiles even.)

If you squint, you can sort of imagine that it's a finished room. Which it better be pretty soon, because we've got (drum roll) tenants.

Strippers

Not really. More like Scrapers.

Katherine discovered some weeks ago that the living room in our apartment had some peel-y paint. It comes off in sheets. It's the kind of thing you start picking at when you're thinking about something else, and an hour later you're totally obsessed and there's a pile of paint peelings at your feet.

We thought, notwithstanding the weird fascination and satisfaction we derived from picking at the paint, it was probably going to end up being a somewhat daunting and large job to take care of the whole room. And the woodwork was going to be a real pain.

The diagnosis, of course, was latex paint over oil paint. Someone hadn't bothered to prime the oil layer properly before slapping a coat of latex over it.

The other day we were prepping to prime the back 4th floor bedroom, and I absently suggested we should probably make sure there wasn't oil paint up there too. A small scratch on the wall revealed...peeling paint.

You know on TV when someone does something they think isn't a big deal, and then there's a montage of a ginormous problem exponentially unfolding at a breakneck pace and suddenly their entire existence comes crashing down around their heads? We had a moment like that.

the. en. tire. house. is. covered. in. peeling. paint. every. square. inch.

Yah.

So we melted down a little bit. We get very quiet when we do that. Some people throw things at each other. We just get very quiet. That's because Katherine is a WASP from the midwest and I take after my mother.

I called my cousin Jeanette, who was a professional painter, and she very calmly told us what to do. We were to Bin it. Bin is an alcohol-based tinted shellac. It melts through the latex and bonds directly to the oil paint, creating a base for a new layer of latex. Or something like that. It's super-toxic and we need to wear those Darth Vader respirators or we'll pass out. So much for green renovation. But it works, it works well, it's expensive, but whatever. It works.

So we began to Bin. We are now master Binners. But if we can't compose coherent sentences or start drooling at dinner, you now know why.

The Free Kitchen Happy Dance

I am doing a happy, happy dance. Sooooo happy. Shall I tell you why? I think I shall. I will keep dancing as I tell you.

Katherine and I have become denizens of a particular blog, called Brownstoner, that has a particularly good forum. We're both a little addicted - lots of good info from people who are doing the same kind of thing we're doing, and some entertaining characters as well.

Saturday I was trolling the forum and found a post for.....

(breathless anticipatory hush)

FREE CABINETS!

The first brilliant amazing thing is that they came out of a space that is the exact same shape as our kitchen-to-be, and are just 2 linear feet less than the space we have. Their original layout was almost identical to the layout we're going to use. The second brilliant amazing thing is that they are high-quality Quaker Maid cabinets with plywood boxes and solid wood doors - not crappy MDF. The third brilliant amazing thing is that they are pretty much exactly what we would have bought if we were buying new - simple paint-grade raised panels. We'd have spent about $4k if we'd bought these new.

Happy happy happy kitchen dance!

They need some cleaning up, and probably a paint job, which is a non-trivial task but one we're looking forward to. They're 20 years old, but they've got another 20 good years in them if we treat them kindly. They were built to last. We'll build a pantry to fill up the last 24" for a fraction of what we'd otherwise pay for cabinetry.

(dance-y dance-y dance!)

(Did I mention that we've spent somewhat more money than we'd hoped on the tenant's apartment, and were sweating it a bit about what we were going to do with our own? Did we also mention that we don't actually have tenants yet and are a little nervous about that money situation as well?)

So a big shout-out to Helen and Mark in Cobble Hill who totally made our day/week/month. This happy happy happy kitchen dance is dedicated to you!

(tra lalalala keeeeetchen!)

Equal and Opposite Reaction

You know what's funny? We thought we were done tearing stuff out of our house. See, we've gotten to the part where things are being built rather than being destroyed. As you can see in this photo, the space that used to look like this now looks like this.





The part I'm excited about is the part where there are walls and stuff, rather than big piles of rubble. Katherine and I will be tiling this space next week. Whee!











But yesterday, Carlos told us we had a little problem with the floor in the 3rd floor hallway. It seems the balusters (the lathe-turned spindles that sit vertically below the railing and hold it up) needed to be pulled out in order to lay the floor. Don't ask. I told him go ahead and pull them out, but I'm going to go somewhere else and pretend I don't know that more things are being destroyed in my house. If I were Catholic I would have crossed myself, but I'm really, really not Catholic. This is our railing sans balusters.



So, things go up, things fall down. Thus is the nature of all things. I breathe deeply and call my therapist.

Dreaming About Sleeping

These days my life is like this:

Wake up at 7am. Get to house at 8am (we are not living in our beautiful new(old) house yet, we are living in my 350-square-foot studio) and patch holes/sand walls/hang drywall/whateverwhatever for two hours. Arrive at work at 10. Work until 5. Return to house. Resume patching/sanding/hanging/whatevering until 10pm. Stumble back to the apartment, collapse. Lather, rinse, repeat. Weekends are the same, without the leaving for seven hours to attempt to earn a living part.

Please don't mistake this for a complaint. I really, really like working on the house. I'm a little sleep-deprived though. And Katherine and I get a little obsessed. Yesterday we arrived at the house at 8am and worked until 11pm.

So this morning when we got to the house at 8am and Carlos, the genius man who is helping us put this disaster area in order, asked us to decide what to do about the saddle in the bathroom doorway (the saddle is the piece of wood/marble/whatever you put down to cover where two different types of flooring meet), we just kind of melted down.

We decided what we were going to do (we are NOT ripping out the saddle), and then we made possibly the best decision in the renovation so far. We asked Carlos if he was likely to need us to participate in any further decisions before about noon, and when he said no, we went back to the apartment and WENT BACK TO SLEEP. Holy crap did we need some more sleep.

I needed to sleep so badly that, while I was asleep, I dreamed about being asleep. It wasn't that agitated I-need-to-get-to-sleep-but-I-can't-get-to-sleep kind of anxiety dream. I believe our exhaustion level is past the point of being able to be anxious. In my dream, I was aware of the deep deliciousness of sleeping when one really, really needs to sleep. I was peacefully, deliriously, asleep. God it was good.

So Totally Hot

Our plumbing is so hot. Holy crap. So totally hot. We could buy, like, twenty pairs of Manolo Blahniks with what we paid for this plumbing, THAT'S how hot it is.












That dress Penelope Cruz wore to the Oscars? I could buy, like, two of those. And you know how hot Penelope Cruz is. Penelope Cruz is hot. But my plumbing is, like, twice as hot.




















But I have to say, I'm partial to the wiring. It's not as flashy, mind you. On the hottness scale, wiring is to plumbing as Bettie Page is to, say, Barbara Stanwyck.








Don't get me wrong - the wiring isn't cheap. We wouldn't do cheap wiring. This is top-shelf, Nobu-level wiring. But it doesn't, you know, shout about it. If you pay attention, though, you'll see that the wiring is actually EXTREMELY hot.








I know you all look to me to keep up on the latest trends, so I just wanted you all to know before anyone else, plumbing and wiring are the new black. If you don't believe me, just check the cover of Vogue in about six months. ALL about plumbing and wiring. I guarantee it.

Trash Mountain

These are the various mountains of debris we pulled out of the 4th floor of our house. Lest anyone think we've been sitting on our tuchuses (and a better Yiddish mind than mine will have to testify on the plural of tuchus), all this crap was ripped up/destroyed/demolished/smashed/bludgeoned/pulverized by our very own hands. It was carefully stacked on top of that charming vinyl flooring we told you about last month so as not to scratch up the kind of crappy laminate flooring in the living room that we're trying not to replace.











A hauling company took it away for us, and did us the favor of dragging it across said laminate flooring (rather than lifting it) so we now have a deeply crappy (rather than kind of crappy) laminate floor in the living room. We're still not gonna replace it though.

Yes, We ARE Still Renovating. How Did You Know?

You haven't heard from us in several days but we continue to work apace. Look at our beautiful new plumbing! It may look to some of you much like our crappy old plumbing, but all plumbing is not created equal.

Now obsessing us: holes. The electricians are doing a wonderful job of ensuring that we will be able to use toasters and computers without having the house burn down, and we're appreciative, but they do leave a lot of holes. Our battle against holes, in which we are emerging victorious, proceeds thus.

First, there is a hole, or in this case a trough, through which the electricians have fed lines encased in BX cable.





We have to first fill in the troughs, or holes, with a base cement called Structolite. It is not lite, but it is Structo.






More often than we would like, there's nothing but hole for the cement to bond to, which means we have to put something in the hole for it to be mushed up against. The stuff we're using is called lath, which is confusing because it is not lath the way all the rest of the lath in our house is lath, as in the lath-and-plaster walls, but a wire mesh. Behold: wire lath attached to lath ready to be Structolited.








The last step, or at least the last step we've gotten to (there are a few more), is putting joint compound over the dry Structolite. You spread it on like cake frosting, but it's more the consistency of French onion dip. (I get hungry when I'm working.)

And once we've sanded, compounded again, sanded again, primed, and painted, you'll never know there was a huge gouge in the wall. Easy!