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.

Someday There Will Be a Garden

It is that time of year again, the time when I wander around outside with a cup of coffee each morning looking at what sprouted or bloomed the night before. Planting all these bulbs was a true pain in the ass, and I was convinced that none of them would come up, but here we are. Tulips. Muscari. There were crocuses earlier that have already gone by, and daffodils, and scilla, and there are some narcissus blooming now that you can barely see in the photo, right between the stands of tulips.

Plants are truly amazing things. This is a yard that seems not to have had anything planted in it for twenty years that wasn't trash or a hosta (hostas are impossible to kill and appear to thrive on toxicity, so they were a good choice), and yet, improbably, things are growing. It makes one hopeful for the eventual reemergence of life on earth after we've poisoned ourselves off the planet. Not that I'm a cynic. Not at all. I am planting a garden in Brooklyn, after all.

To the right, a glorious view of the whole glorious yard, including the half-ton or so of dirt that Gibb and I moved into the yard on Sunday. You can see a large pile of it under the wheelbarrow on the left side of the yard. I really mean half a ton, by the way. I calculated it. Twenty-seven five-gallon buckets at about 35 pounds each, plus two garbage cans with another 200 pounds or so, well over a thousand pounds. Point being, the raw materials of actual garden beds are right there at hand, and pretty soon I'll be bedding. By, oh, August I'll be able to relax amid the flowers in my hammock.

If you click on the photo and enlarge it, you'll see that there is a field of beautiful dandelions all over the lawn. They are terrifically cheerful plants, for weeds. Since I want to plant things other than dandelions, and once there are enough dandelions there really can't be anything else, I spent an hour or so pulling them all out this afternoon.

"I Think We Should Blog When We're Drunk"

That advice from Blogger #1, name rhymes with Hen, to Blogger #2, name rhymes with ... hem... Bathroom? Sort of?

Bathrooms have been on our minds. Our bathrooms. Semi-separate ones. You think it's handy when you have teenagers? How bout having separate bathrooms when you're...people? Yes, it's pretty much always better not to be privy to (pun actually not intended, but appreciated in hindsight, and that wasn't intended either) each other's biological functions. We are citizens of the richest industrial nation on earth, don't we deserve some privacy?

Anyway. We find the bathrooms growing beneath us, with light fixtures and everything!

We cannot tell you how happy we are that our house begins to have bones, and nerves, and veins, and all those things.

What You Want Is For Your Plumber To Be A Comedian

Remember the Frank Bernie thing?

OK. So Erik calls me up today. "I have news," he says.

Turns out the DOB says we can't change the plumber on the permit. There's a whozimawatzis number on the permit, and you can't change it into a thingamahooey number, which is what you'd need to do to switch the yaddayadda license on the permit. So we're going to need to file a whole new permit set, with drawings and landmarks approval, from scratch, and it will take a minimum of 6-8 weeks, sometimes longer, and will probably cost another $3500.

Except, April Fools.

You got me, Erik. You totally got me. I'm going in for surgery now on the coronary you just gave me.

Raindrops Keep Fallin' on Our Tenants

Everyone following how the Northeast is being inundated by rain? I love me a rainy day or two, usually. When we start getting four, or five, every week... About 2 a.m. Monday, I woke up and heard the charming, soft sound of water dripping: plop, plop, plop. It was made less charming by the fact that it was in the kitchen. I got up and found that the ceiling of the bay window was dripping steadily. It being 2 a.m., I put a garbage can under the leak and went back to bed.

At 5:30 a.m., we got up and checked, and the garbage can was half full.

Jen went up to Massachusetts without me, and I put a tarp over the roof of the bay. I was not sure how much use that would be, but it was all I could think of doing, and the dripping did stop. Since there was no actual fixing that could be done until the rain stopped, I went up to Massachusetts myself.

Then, at 7 a.m. today, we got a text from one of the tenants. We have extremely non-complainy tenants, so when we hear from them, something is either leaking or on fire. Indeed, the window in her bedroom was leaking from the top. A few hours later, the window upstairs from that was leaking. And the doorframe between the bathroom and the bedroom.

I had really been hoping that the culprit here would turn out to be the roof of the bay window in our kitchen. That's about four square feet of crisis to deal with. The problem, however, was clearly on the roof of the building, since the entire back of the house was leaking.

We got an early train home (luckily, since as we went south the tracks were flooding and we well might have gotten the last train out of Boston), surveyed the sad sad situation, and said to each other, The only thing this could possibly be that wouldn't be a complete disaster would be a problem with the gutter. Of course, that means there's probably a split the size of the Grand Canyon in the roof. We went up with extreme trepidation, and lo and behold, the gutter was full of water which was flowing over the side and down the house. Jen pulled some crap out of the downspout, and the water obediently vanished. For once, it was not the worst-case scenario.

Here's the crap that was in the downspout.



The work glove was the biggest culprit, but it was caught on a homemade screen of--do you recognize it? Hint: Satan's office is decorated with it. The road to hell is lightly scattered with good intentions over a bed of it. It is used as a general-purpose building material only by the insane or the extremely evil. Yes: wire lath.

Finally Building

Floor and wall! Or, at least, part of a wall. In the background you see Juan and Cesar putting insulation in the ceiling, so that someday one of us will be able to have a conversation downstairs without having the other one hear every word upstairs. The metal studs are making it look like a prison right now, but it will be a real wall with real doors before you know it.

We had to avert our eyes and hide upstairs when Cesar and Gallo took a sawzall to the supporting wall yesterday, despite the fact that they were doing it on purpose and with a frame build, but all went well, and we will be able to enter our new bathroom.

Now that we are finally done ripping things out, I took an inventory of some of the things that we found in the walls of the house in the process of demolishment. Some of them were things you'd expect to find in a wall--ancient leftover wiring that no longer wires anything; an original (incredibly inefficient) heating duct that led from a coal furnace downstairs to heating grates in the hallways; an old gas line. Some of them were amusing or somewhat puzzling. A red plastic comb, such as a little girl might wear in her hair? I guess they had a seven-year-old do the plastering. The Daily News sports section from March 22, 1959? Newspaper has always been a fine building material.

The best ones, though, are pictured at right. A bottle of roach powder, not only encased in the wall but actually cemented in, and a cheese grater. How do you get a cheese grater into the wall? Why do you get a cheese grater into the wall?

We Did Not Break Up With Our Plumber

My phone rang yesterday. It was our plumber, Erik, so I answered it. I have been known to screen calls from my closest relatives (not you Mom), but when the plumber calls, I answer. Erik sounded slightly panicked.

"Hey Erik! How are you!"
"I was ok until 2 seconds ago. Who's Frank Bernie?"

Building permits are a matter of public record, and in the internet age that sometimes actually means something. According to the DOB, Erik tells me, Frank Bernie of King's County Plumbing was our plumber. Now, that's gotta be something like Catherine Zeta Jones waking up one morning and reading an article in People that says she's Jack Black's girlfriend. With a picture of them holding hands. Except she doesn't remember.

Did Katherine and I get really trashed one night and cheat on our plumber?

I assured Erik that if we were going to break up with him, we'd do it in person and not just change our Facebook status. He seemed reassured. But it was an unsettling moment. You don't want your plumber mad at you. Think of the mess he could make.

We resolved to buy the best copper fittings for his work, and make sure the wax seal for the toilet was cedar-scented. We might send him a bouquet of Kitz valves on threaded rod, with a spray of tank fill assemblies. We think it's the right thing to do.

We Moved A Lot Of Crap Today

So, I had a plan. If you know me, you won't find that surprising. (Sometimes people tell us that they can't tell when it's me writing and when it's Katherine. Cheat sheet: if the post includes extra-erudite references, it's Katherine. If it contains a rant, it's probably me. Also, I'm the hyper-organized one. Katherine is the super-patient one. Anyway, back to The Plan.)

The plan was thus: I placed a materials order. Katherine booked the workmen to receive it. So very simple.

Except. Materials arrived. Workmen did not.

Result: 45 sheets of drywall, 17 sheets of wonderboard, and 20 sheets of plywood sitting on the sidewalk. Who moved it? Youbetcha.

We had to pile some of the drywall in front of the bathroom door, which means no shower for us tonight. Also we still have no electricity down there, so no photo of big stacks of crap. What we should have done was taken a picture of our neighbor's mother, who is first generation Chinese and very tiny doesn't speak much English, looking at the two of us hauling sheetrock like we were raving lunatics. I don't think they do that kind of thing in China. That would have made a good photo. She has a very expressive face.

We are now tired. End of post.

Joist Kidding

More and more of our house keeps dis- appearing all the time, although, if you look closely, you can now see through the floor into the basement. It could be argued that we are simply increasing accessibility. We could also say that we now have a 30-foot ceiling, which would be sort of true, but only in the cellar, which makes it less appealing. (You are also getting treated to the effects of my brand new fabulous wide-angle lens, which makes the downstairs look like it's the size of Wembley Stadium. It's not.)

Although we know very little about the previous owner of the building, we can be pretty sure that his tenants referred to him as "that f***ing landlord," since there was water pooling under all the radiators until the floors buckled. Either the tenants passive-aggressively didn't tell the landlord that there were leaks or the landlord didn't pay any attention, but in any case, f***ing landlord.

When we uncovered the joists, we found that a few of them had some dry rot. I'm not sure why it's called dry rot, because it is created by soaking the timber in water and letting it stand, but whatever. A hasty reassurance to all our parents, siblings, interested parties: I'm not talking about beams that are rotted through. I'm talking about a little crumbly on the top. Our contractor looked at them and said, Yeah, these are OK. In one place, however, we were nervous enough that we decided to drop in a new beam and nail it in next to the old one. Which we did. Me and Jen. Today. We are SO BUTCH.

See? Shiny new beam sitting in the joist hanger next to the old somewhat crummy one.











Another view of the beautiful new beam. Not that we're proud of ourselves or anything.

Cheap

We went up to Green Demolitions yesterday. Basically, people who have a lot more money than we do buy houses and take out perfectly serviceable kitchens and baths so they can put in something more to their taste. Green Demolitions removes the cabinetry, counter tops, appliances, etc, and sells them to people like us, who aren't so fancy and are happy just to have cabinets. My sister would call us cheap. I say thrifty.

(She'd call us cheap with love. Or, really, she'd call me cheap, because, well, I've been cheap all my life, and she hasn't known Katherine long enough to call her cheap to her face. Or thrifty. With love.)

Point being, yesterday we went up there and found a perfectly nice white raised-panel bathroom vanity, plus undermount sink and white Corian counter top, for $225. It's in good condition, we like it, it's the right size, and most importantly, IT'S NOW OFF OUR TO DO LIST. For $225. Probably would have cost $750 new.

Also, we like the reuse part of reduce, reuse, recycle.

We also found a really nice two-section cast iron enamel kitchen sink for $50. I found a similar one on the Kohler website new for $650. Cheap.

On our way we stopped at Eddie's Salvage and picked up a bunch of replacement balusters for our stairway. Fifteen custom-turned replacement balusters: $270. Fifteen salvaged balusters from Eddie who is real nice but you have to wait a while for him to find anything in his shop: $150. Sense of smugness and self-satisfaction from having saved a whole crapload of money: priceless.

So, it was a good day. A good, cheap day.

Wire Lath Is the Tool Of Satan

Wire lath and screw nails. Both. Tools. Of. Satan.

I knuckled down to do some perfectly straightforward destruction this afternoon. Needed to yank up a tile floor. Shouldn't be a big deal - you slam a big heavy sledgehammer into it, it cracks into a dozen pieces, you throw it in a garbage can. Lather, rinse, repeat. In an hour you're done.

Enter Team Whackadoo. They laid down a layer of wire lath first (we posted about its virtues, in a NON-INSANE application, HERE) and nailed it down with SCREW NAILS. So the mudbed is adhered to the lath. If it were not adhered to lath, I could get a crowbar under it and use it's inherent brittleness to crack it and pull it right up. But the lath is very, very flexible. It holds the mudbed together, even after it's cracked in a million pieces, and keeps it very firmly attached to the floor with SCREW NAILS.

Let me tell you about screw nails for a minute. Screw nails are for exterior applications. They're good for nailing on shingles in a wind-shear environment. They're for nailing together the structural members of your house that you NEVER EVER WANT TO TAKE APART. So why are they to be found every damn where in our house? Screw nails holding on molding? Seventeen of them holding down a 4"x4" square of floor patching? (I counted, as I cursed.) Someone on Team Whackadoo just loved him some screw nails. He had a big old 20lb bucket of them, and by god he put every single one into his house. There are so many screw nails in this house, I imagine if you hovered a large enough magnet over our roof, we'd fly away like the house in Up.

But back to the floor.

Wait, no, not back to the floor. Screw the floor. With screw nails.

Not So Bad, It Turns Out

Quick update - I took down part of the tin ceiling we're hoping to salvage today. Turns out that most of the plaster had been removed before the tin went up, and what was between the tin and the joists was a layer of proto-drywall and some wooden strapping. The proto-drywall (essentially plaster board) was actually doing just fine, and not falling down onto the tin at all. Clearly the work of pre-Team Whackadoo owners.

Yesterday Katherine was fretting that, even if we managed to salvage the tin ceiling, it would eventually have to come down, because we don't want our eventual spawn to sleep beneath falling-down plaster. I pointed out that the tin would catch the plaster and start to sag long before said spawn was in any actual danger, but it's a future parent's job to worry and Katherine is on it. She's a woman who takes her job seriously.

Point being, she can find something else to worry about, because there's actually no plaster up there. Which is also too bad for our friend Maura Spery, who laughed her ass off at us when we told her we were going to try to save the tin. The thing is, Maura generally knows what she's talking about, so when she laughs at us we generally pay attention. Maura, we promise to try to do something else completely insane for you to laugh at real soon.

Ninety-nine bags of debris from the wall, ninety-nine bags of debris...

As Jen promised, here is live-action footage of us in full demolition mode. This is the really fun part; it lasts about 20 minutes, and then we have to clean up for 10 hours.

Did we mention that we reached the one hundredth bag of debris? We're now about 25 bags past that--and we aren't actually counting the big black bags of debris, only the little white bags, because we didn't start to count bags until we were onto the second demo project. We are on our second 100-bag roll of the black 33-gallon, 4mm contractor bags, but most of the first hundred were used upstairs on the tenants' apartment.

Our next task is to deal with the tin ceiling in the front bedroom. We really want to keep the ceiling, but there is naturally enough a wrinkle. In the course of tearing down the wall separating that room from the ex-kitchen, we discovered that the tin ceiling was not, in fact, original. It had been pretty well installed, which disguised its non-originalness (imagine that--renovation work that wasn't crappy!), but there was a painted plaster ceiling with an original molding underneath it (or, technically, on top of it, since the tin was installed as the second layer). The plaster, as is the way of plaster when it reaches the ripe old age of 100 or so, has fallen from the lath onto the tin below it, which is holding the plaster up through being attached to itself by a series of tiny wire nails. Does this sound like a disaster in the making to you? Does to me!

Our House Is Made of Doors

It seems like every time we open up a wall, there's a door in it. Isn't there some Christian-y saying about closing doors and opening windows? So what should we intuit god thinks of us if s/he has seen fit to lead us to a house in which the doors are sealed up in plaster and drywall from which not even a sawzall will free them?





You know I'm always up for having a good laugh at the expense of Team Whackadoo, but I honestly can't argue with this one. They wanted to close up the door opening - why not just use the door? Presciently eco-friendly, I call it. Anyway, here it is.












This is the wall that was the object of this week's aggression. (The previous picture is the other side of this wall, and the aforementioned door is sealed behind this drywall.) There's a fun video of me and Katherine whaling away at it with the 12-lb sledge, which we'll post at some point.







This is our dust. Don't I look cute with a respirator on?

(quote of the week from sometime around this moment:

Katherine: I think I just sawed through a supporting beam.

Turned out not to be supporting, but you gotta love hearing something like that said out loud, and not on a madcap half-hour sitcom with Scott Baio.)



This is the ex-wall. Stay tuned for hilarious videos of dust and destruction.

The Drawing Board

I (Katherine) have spent the last six days mostly horizontal, for I have been sick. On our last day in LA--which, much to my astonishment, I did not hate--I started having sore-throat-ness and runny-nose-ness and body aches and fatigue, and by the time we got home I was a mess. I have been asleep most of the last few days, when I wasn't coughing or blowing my nose. I'm sure it had nothing to do with all the little germ sinks lovely children I was hanging out with in San Francisco.

So I have not been knocking down any walls, to say the least. I thought this might be a good time to go back a step or two and look at the planning process, which we didn't blog through as it wasn't very photogenic. Everyone will be shocked to learn that Jen got obsessively detailed about making the plans. As you might be able to see in the photo, she made scale drawings of the house, and little scale cutouts of our furniture, and moved everything around until she was completely happy with how everything was.

Our full plan is to basically knock everything down in the garden level (which you knew) and rebuild the center of the house so that it's full of bathrooms. (If you click on the picture, you'll get an enlarged version that is probably more comprehensible. What it looks like now is here, if you're curious.)
There will be a bath and a half on this floor, plus a gigantic closet where I can live when I'm bad. (Or, maybe, when I'm very good.) We've (very cleverly, in my opinion) put pocket doors in strategic places that will allow a sort of shifting configuration and access to the tub/shower combined with privacy for everyone.

Then, once that's all squared away, we'll move our stuff downstairs and knock down the wall upstairs.
What we're basically creating is a huge open space with a galley kitchen on one side. We'll delineate kitchen/living room with flooring and furniture, and we'll have a big rolling island near the kitchen, and a dining table near all the fabulous huge windows at the kitchen end. When we need to, we'll be able to move things around and put out a long table to seat the Mongol hordes. Oh, and we're putting another half-bath next to the stairs, where the hall has been blocked to make two separate apartments, because all those Mongols will need someplace to pee.

Raining in LA

We arrived in LA on Thursday morning and got the tour of my brother's new house. He and his girlfriend Andrea bought this place from a pot farmer, and it had been ill-used, to say the least. Go ahead and make a sweeping generalization about how a pot farmer might treat a house, based on stuff you've seen in the movies, and you'll be about right. The garage was extra-special - fourteen power outlets and a grid for hanging grow-lights. The place needed a ton of work, which they did, and now it looks like a photo spread for Dwell Magazine.

So when my brother looked at our place last summer and said, "Wow. Holy shit," we took that as a bad sign.

It turns out that there's really nothing to do in LA when it rains. Everyone gets confused and disoriented, people don't know how to drive, and all the cool stuff is inaccessible. And extra-special for us, it's rained most of the time we've been here. Fortunately, my brother has a lovely house that is really nice to hang out in, and lots of citrus fruit we can't get in the Northeast right now.

Also, he and Andrea got a Tibetan Terrier named Potsie who looks like Jim Henson designed the Platonic Form of Muppet Dog and gave him to Tinkerbell to hit with an Extra-Cute and Alive spell. So Potsie's been entertaining us thoroughly.

We had lunch with Jessica Dellecave yesterday, which was great. She's getting her PhD in queer performance theory and I only sort of kept up with the conversation, but she looks happier than I've ever seen her and it was great to catch up.

We had dinner with Lynne Kuemmel, one of my oldest friends, and pretty much laughed our asses of through a pan-Asian dinner and drinks. I had Soju, which is kind of like Korean rice vodka, and is apparently an LA thing.

We return to Brooklyn on a red-eye tonight. By Wednesday we should know how much our new plumbing and electric is going to cost. Because nothing says "Welcome Home" like a $10k estimate. Yahoo!

Fleeing the Filth

It was dirty in our house. So we went to California.

Seriously, you can't imagine the level of filth engendered by the Accidental Enormous Project. Ev. Ry. Thing. Covered in a layer of very fine dust. Which would make any sane person less sane.

Plus, there are a lot of people we like in California. Like Katherine's oldest friend, Hilary, who is seriously high-octane entertainment, and her equally wry and hilarious partner Wendy, and their three great kids - two boys who tear around the house at 100 miles per hour and one girl who watches it all calmly and has already figured out that boys are dumber than girls.

And like my old friend Antoun, who we adore, despite his insistence on dating women who are crazier than he is, and who took us to eat sushi we didn't even recognize as a fish product, but was revoltingly delicious. Monkfish liver I think it was. Really, really delicious, as long as you didn't think about it very much. We love Antoun and he makes us laugh a lot.

And Katherine's old buddy from college, Seth, whose daughter Sophia is charming and who tolerated the very small future sociopath at the tot park with aplomb, and her other daddy Jerry who seemed really lovely but who we didn't get to spend much time with.

And another of Katherine's old friends, Johanna, with whom we had a super-fast, super-stimulating lunch for about an hour and then she had to run back to work to continue being frighteningly good at what she does, which is high-end publishing of books written by really smart people, many of them probably not quite as smart as her.

And my old boss and mentor, Michael Warr, who is responsible for my current professional competence, and who is also just great fun to be with.

And Carl Tashian, who is coding the OurGoods site but is so much more interesting than even that.

So if you got to choose between Hilary, Antoun, Michael, Johanna and Carl, or filth wafting up through every crack and crevice and making your snot black, which would you pick?

We thought so.

The Accidental Enormous Project

There was a time, not that long ago--only a day ago, as a matter of fact--when our basement looked like this. We had put much of our stuff nicely and neatly into the basement for safekeeping while we bashed up the rest of the apartment. Tonight, our basement looks like it does at left. You may notice that there is something missing, to wit, a ceiling.

See, we knew there was a problem that was someday going to have to be resolved with the ceiling. Long, long ago, the ceiling was built fresh and new with lath and plaster. Then, presumably, the lath started to let go and someone brilliantly nailed up a bunch of sheetrock. That worked for a while. Then someone else came along and nailed up metal firesafe sheeting. Okay. But as the years (and years and years) went by, the lath continued to fall onto the sheetrock; and the sheetrock disintegrated and started to fall onto the metal; and the metal started to bow and bend under all the weight, and rust, and come apart. And, better yet, over all those years people were running water and gas pipes and electric cable below the now seriously unstable ceiling.

So, someday, someone would have to very carefully pull all the ceiling material down and replace it with new stuff (that would be us). We just figured it would be next year, or even the year after. But when we began knocking things down on the floor above, bits of ceiling began falling. We took down a panel or two, hoping to arrest the problem with the removal of the most serious offenders, but the project quickly spiraled out of control. This was the epitome of mission creep. As soon as we started it, there was no way we could stop, but also no way that we could finish it by ourselves. (Recall Jen's comment about how someone who knew what they were doing and would not get electrocuted should do the job.)

Onto the scene come Carlos, our intrepid all-round carpentry star, and his brother Wilson, and in one day they had the whole damn thing down without breaking a single thing we didn't want broken. Of course, every particle of dust that had drifted through the floor above in the previous 100 years also came down, and piles of broken plaster and sheetrock.

You know what I love? Respirators. Take a look at what didn't go into my lungs in the two hours or so I spent in the basement today. Jen, Carlos, and Wilson were down there far longer and their respirators were even dirtier, on the outside. We just might live through this.

Tomorrow the trash haulers come to remove the bags and bags and bags of debris from the house. Our neighbors will no doubt be quite relieved.

No Wall and New Toys

The wall is now completely down, as you can see here. There's really not anything witty or wry to say about it - there weren't any problems, or I should say, any additional problems that we haven't already made fun of. The wall you can still see is coming down next. I plan to spray paint "Supreme Court Decision on Corporate Campaign Contributions" on it and then smash it with a sledgehammer. Smashing actual Supreme Court Justices, for instance Samuel Alito, with sledgehammers is, I'm told, illegal.



Some generous friends and family members gave us Home Depot gift certificates as housewarming gifts. Between the three gift cards, we were able to buy some really cool new toys. This is a mitre saw. That blade comes down and makes a nice, clean, exact cut in your molding or floorboards or what have you. But the really cool thing it does is rotate so it can make mitre cuts. Look at your door frame. See how the two pieces of molding meet at a 45 degree angle? That's a mitre cut, and they're actually kind of tricky. Even cooler (and if you hated geometry you should skip this part), the blade itself rotates off of vertical, so you can make a cut that is diagonal on two different planes. Plus, the blade slides forward and back, so you can make a cut as long as 10". I don't expect you to think this is anywhere near as cool as I do - in fact, I'd worry if you did.

This is our new angle grinder. It's going to make it possible for us to destroy new and exciting things we were not equipped to destroy before. Like that metal that's falling off our basement ceiling. Or screws that have been stripped. Pretty much metal you can find, it can destroy. Yahoo!! Thank you Risa, Howard, JP, Donna and Chuck for our fabulous new toys!!

More Hole Than Wall

There is now more hole than wall. The woodwork is coming off more or less intact. We did somehow manage to shut off the electricity to the entire floor as we took the wall down, though. Go figure.

Early bedtime tonight for us.

It's On

Dad and Laura came to the house today and the gloves came off. Here is the object of our aggression:

This is an original wall, and so we thought it would be easier to take down - things that are built well are generally easier to take down than things that are built by Team Whackadoo.


This is me taking the first swing. (The thing about the gloves was metaphorical.) If you take a look at the bit of wall below the bit of wall that I'm destroying in this picture, you can kind of see the problem. Rather than finding a plaster and wooden lath wall, we found a layer of sheetrock covered in a layer of wire lath covered in a layer of Structolite (we posted about Structolite HERE back in the spring). Team Whackadoo was definitely in evidence. So instead of the Sawzall going through the wall, as they say, like butta, it was a struggle.

Here's Dad having at a surprisingly ruggedly-built bump-out. The room he is in (on the other side of the wall that was today's preoccupation) is an ex-kitchen from when the building was being used as a 5-family. If any bank thought we were planning to use the building outside of it's 2-family C of O, they would not lend to us, so the seller had to cover up all traces of the building being used illegally. This bump-out covered up the plumbing for the ex-kitchen. Let's just say it was no match for Dad.

Laura is an old hand at demo. Here she is turning a closet wall into an ex-closet-wall. Get on with your bad self, Laura!




Team Whackadoo returns. See that weird suspended piece of wood in the middle of the wall? Turns out they built the wall out of a half a door. Not a whole door - they bothered to cut it in half. Whatevs. You can see what remains of the original wall at the far right - I've smashed out the plaster and the wooden lath is exposed.

Shall we pause to consider the resiliency of the common cockroach? This is an ex-telephone outlet. Chock full of ex-cockroach bodies. Guess what's for dinner?












Here's how we left things for the night. Despite the satisfyingly large hole, we're only about half done. The next big project is to try to remove the millwork from the doorways without destroying it, so we can use it to replace badly-damaged millwork upstairs. That's a slow and picky process. Stay tuned.

But I need your love to keep away the cold

Before we could go any further with anything, including thinking or cooking or living, we had to deal with the heat. Lots of heat. Wearing tank tops (or sometimes nothing) in January heat.

We've got (sssst) steam heat. That is a great lyric for a song, but there are some practical problems, it turns out, with a steam heat system, particularly one that has seen essentially no upkeep in, oh, twenty-five years. There is the familiar banging of pipes, a phenomenon known as steam hammer, which results from hot steam meeting undrained cold water in a cold radiator. There is the godawful hiss of a calcified air valve, which is supposed to allow air to be pushed out of the radiator and then close when the hot steam arrives but gets stuck open after a while (or stuck closed, in which case the radiator doesn't heat properly). There is the problem of the valve to the radiator, which is supposed to allow us to turn each radiator off and on, but in reality gets corroded and makes noise and no longer turns off the radiators efficiently, if at all. Finally, there is the insoluble problem of the basic design of a steam heat system: the steam arrives at the bottom floors (us) at its hottest and cools as it gets up to the top floors (our tenants), so we are boiling hot when they get to a comfortable temperature.

So onto the scene came the plumbers. They replaced the valves to four radiators, capped and removed one radiator (we had one small room downstairs with two riser pipes and two radiators, guaranteeing subtropical temps), and best of all, replaced the gigantic kitchen radiator with the much more moderately sized one from downstairs. Illustration to the left. The kitchen is now at a perfectly reasonable temperature having the small radiator on for maybe one heating cycle per day. Imagine what we suffered with the Radiator That Ate Manhattan that we couldn't turn off, ever.

One more radiator problem remains. You can replace an air valve with nothing but your bare hands, a new valve from the corner hardware store, and three inches of Teflon tape. Easiest repair in the house. Unless, as in our tenants' apartment, the radiator in question has been BUILT INTO THE WINDOW FRAME. Then you have to take the radiator out completely to change the seven-dollar valve, which your plumbers will charge you $125 to do. So we're trying to figure out a way around that one.

We're back in the saddle, people

When we last left our heroes, Jen and Katherine had completed three months of heavy renovations on the upstairs apartment (see pretty much every post from April and May), installed a working temporary kitchen in their own apartment (see THIS POST), packed up, moved, and landed with a thud at their new home. And they were starting to get on each other's nerves.

Something like 40% of all divorces are the result of a major moving, building or renovation project, and we discovered there's a good reason for that. There's nothing like the combo of total exhaustion, filth, physical chaos, and a seemingly endless string of tiny little collaborative decisions to get two people really up each other's noses. So we took a nice, long break.

In the meantime I finished my show (you can see what the New York Times thought about it HERE and what Eva Yaa Asentewaa thought about it HERE), we fixed up my old apartment, and started planning for (insert bad James Bond music) PHASE TWO.

My apartment sold in November, which was good, because without the money from that sale we would not have been able to afford (bad James Bond music) PHASE TWO.

Katherine is going to post cogently about the Phase Two plans, so I'll just say the basic idea is this: live on parlor floor while renovating garden floor. Move down to garden floor and live there while renovating parlor floor.

Here's the catch though - the garden floor was full of the accumulation of about fifteen years' worth of crap in boxes. Each box needed to be gone through, the two or three treasures we couldn't be parted from extracted, and the rest disposed of. That last is actually a non-trivial task in New York City if you, like us, prefer not to put perfectly usable stuff you don't want in the garbage but would rather find it a new home. (Which is why we have not let our mothers empty their garages into our apartment, despite their desperate desire to do so.)

Here's the other catch - the basement, where the boxes of treasured crap that had been painstakingly separated from the non-treasured crap needed to be stored, was an unholy disaster area.

The ceiling was falling down, raining showers of crumbled sheetrock and resting sheets of metal against live electrical conduit and plumbing pipes. And there was an inexplicable inch of very fine dirt on the pitted and uneven concrete floor. That needed to be addressed before our boxes of crap could be stored down there so we could start destroying the rooms the boxes were in.

Which is mostly what I did in December.

The ceiling is just going to get shored up, because taking it down is just too ginormous a job and, given the risk of electrocution and/or flooding, should be done by someone who knows what the hell they're doing, ie, not us.


I did clean the floor though, and bag up all the dirt and debris:


That was a pretty disgustingly filthy job, and big thanks go out to my old and dear friend Lynne Kuemmel, who was visiting from LA and volunteered (despite my warnings) to help. Lynne, you rock and I love you, and I hope you don't develop lung cancer from whatever the hell we were breathing yesterday, but if you do, I promise to come empty your bedpan and bring you peanut butter sandwiches.




So this is our basement now, with swept floor and neatly organized boxes full of treasured crap,




and this is me, post-sweeping-and-dirt-bagging, and ready for a nap.