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.