@BrooklynRowHouse

Hurry up, Maters!

2008-07-01T15:06:16-04:00

The rule-of-thumb is that tomato plants double in size every ten to fourteen days. With the sun, torrential rains and warm evenings we've had here in Brooklyn, plus my magic elixir of Miracle Gro, epson salts and fish emulsion, these plants made the mark.

This year, I'm growing mostly heirloom varieties with bizarre names like "Mortgage Lifter" and "Black Zebra". The grower I got them through wrote some appetizing prose about each variety but kinda missed on the specifics. For instance, I didn't know if I was planting any cherry tomatoes until the first fruit appeared and I deduced that "Sugar Nugget" must be a cherry tomato. Just in case, I planted a Sweet 100 cherry from the local nursery too.

Below is one of those "Mortgage Lifters". From the story, this hybrid was developed in the 1930s by a radiator repairman. His plant was such a success with tomato fanciers that he paid off his mortgage selling seedlings -- hence the name. When ripe, the tomato is two to four pounds and looks something like a small, red pumpkin.

The Mortgage Lifter doesn't only produce large tomatoes. It's also very prolific. Check out all the flowers here. Two weeks from now I could have sixty or seventy pounds of tomatoes hanging on this one vine so I need to figure out a way to support the branches better.

Here's an example of the pruning I posted about earlier. Once the flowers start to form, it's time to get rid of the suckers and low-hanging foliage below the lowest flowering branch. In a few days, I'll remove a bit more. This helps persuade the plant to stop making foliage and start pushing energy to the fruit.

One of the Italian growers around here told me that a healthy, productive tomato plant actually looks a bit scraggly. You don't want any foliage that saps energy from the fruit or which prevents air from circulating and increases the change of disease.

The Secret to Home Renovation

2008-06-28T21:21:11-04:00

I was chatting with a neighbor yesterday, consoling him for the lack of progress he complains he's made with his house. He discovered my blog last month and couldn't understand how I got so much done with my house, especially insofar as he's lived here almost as long as me.

He assumed it had to be my prior construction experience, my shop and the fact that I didn't have kids. All are true, especially the kids part. I've only got two dogs and I know how much free time they consume every day: an hour at the dog run in the morning, 45 minutes of miscellaneous walking, 20 minutes of feeding, an hour of play time at night. That's three hours out of the day where I could be hammering holes in the walls. Kids? Fuggedaboudit!

Still, he missed it. The #1 reason is because I telecommute. Total up how much time you spend every work day getting cleaned up and transporting your body X miles to your job -- in many cases only to sit in front of a terminal logged into the same server you could have accessed from home.

I did the math at my last office job. It took me, on average, 65 minutes to get to work, door to door. The return commute was even longer: 75 minutes. That's 2:20 lost out of the day. Then count all the hours you spend at work waiting for something that requires your attention.

At my last office job we were required to keep detailed job sheets (a/k/a the TPS Report) so the productivity ferrets in HR could know how much they were paying us to sit and spin. As a tech manager, my average was higher than most but it was still only around five hours a day of real work. That's quite a bit more than Peter Gibbons in the movie, Office Space, but it's three more lost hours, not including lunch (which I never eat). I won't include the pointless meetings, which were the root cause of the low office productivity, but I could.

Bob Slydell: "You see, what we're actually trying to do here is we're just -- we're trying to get a feel for how people spend their day at work. So, if you would, would you walk us through a typical day for you?"
Peter: "Yeah."
Bob Slydell: "Great."
Peter: "Well, I generally come in at least 15 minutes late. Uh, I use the side door. That way Lumburgh can't see me. And, uh, and after that I sorta space out for about an hour."
Bob Porter: "Uh, space out?"
Peter: "Yeah. I just stare at my desk, but it looks like I'm working. I do that for, uh, probably another hour after lunch too. I'd say in a given week, I probably do about 15 minutes of real, actual work."
Bob Slydell: "Uh, Peter, would you be a good sport and indulge us and just tell us a little more?"
Peter: "Oh, yeah. Let me tell you about TPS reports..."

So, working from home added at least 5 hours a day of potential renovation time to my schedule. Twenty five hours a week. Damn, that's a part-time job! That's why I got so much done.

You could pad this even more. If you chose to (ahem), you might skip an occasional morning shower. Since you work in tee shirt and shorts there are no dry cleaning runs. And no company outings after work. You could miss a few haircuts too.

So there's the secret. If you want to get a lot of work done on your house, get a telecommuting job.

Okay, it's not telecommuting so much as the time it gives you back at the end of the day. Just be careful that the boss doesn't hear the table saw winding down when he calls you about your progress with the Initech account.

Odds and Ends, Excuses and Alibis

2008-06-27T00:40:34-04:00

By now, I was supposed to have posted about the successful completion of my stained glass construction projects. Maybe because I was coming off that year-long second floor renovation I needed time to recharge before throwing myself into another marathon. Instead, I got obssessed with maintenance, humdrum projects and pontificating on the Old House Web forums.

First up: the garden, or more specifically my nine hybrid tomato plants. I've had diminishing returns from my 'maters the past couple of years. Last year, half the plants died shortly after flowering. So I decided to consult with the masters: the greybeard Italian gardeners in the neighborhood. They said that my soil was probably DOA and that nothing I could add to it now would fix that tomato bed. Just mix in some manure and let it steep for a year or two. So I put the tomatoes in planters this year.

Within two weeks I knew this was the way to go. With the rich, bagged topsoil the plants took off.

The black beast lurking in back is Jack, my newfie. He loves being outside but with his thick, jet black coat and natural body fat, he wilts in the sun. So he stays in the shade of the pine tree.

Another old-world trick revealed to me was to bury a dead fish with the plant. According to the Italians, a decaying fish has the best balance of organic nutrients needed by growing tomatoes.

With all the stray cats around here I figured that probably wasn't a great idea so I did the next best thing. I bought a big bottle of fish emulsion.

That seems to be working great too. I haven't had so much as a yellow leaf on any of these plants. And they're flowering like crazy. Another horticultural contribution, this time from a Brit, is epsom salts. Epsom salt is magnesium sulfate, which is great for all flowering plants. Every two weeks, scatter one tablespoon per foot of height around the base of the tomato plant. For other plants, use one teaspoon.

Believe me, both work wonders. I gave my neighbor, Betsy, three of those same hybrids for her planters. She didn't use the fish emulsion/epsom salt trick and her plants aren't half as full as mine.

While I was at it I sanded and re-oiled my teak garden furniture. I do this every year on the first sunny spring day. After a long, cold winter it's nice to be outside for any reason so it's a good time to schedule tedious jobs like this, which I'd never do otherwise.

You can also see the two outdoor speakers I mounted in this story. It's so nice to hang out in the back yard with XM's "Deep Tracks".

And on that note, another chore was stripping and refinishing the mahogany garage door I built and installed only three years ago. After all the work I put into that door and surround, it was a heartbreaker watching the spar varnish flake off.

But it was, and big time. I'm blaming the lousy Minwax Helmsman marine urethane so this time I refinished it with Cabot spar varish.

Right out of the can I knew this was better stuff. It smelled awful. The finish is also a lot nicer. It remains to be seen if it will work any better. If not, next time it's Sikkens Cetol.

The next real project, which I won't be doing, is painting the back of my house. You can see the color samples on the wall. I'll be going with the second blue from the bottom. The wall has been pressure washed so it's looking particularly funky now.

I would have painted it myself except that this north-facing wall gets beaten by winter winds and ice. Paint doesn't survive long on this old, parged brick so I wanted to try a super-thick substance I'd read about from a company called Wallcoat. It comes with a 15 year warranty. But it's only sold to franchised contractors so I signed a contract with a local Wallcoat contractor back in March for a job that was supposed to have been finished a month ago.

This is why I'm a DIYer. Doing a job myself is less aggravating than dealing with contractors and their excuse generators. In real life, I'm a contractor myself and if I've learned anything it's that contractors live and die on referrals. I get mine by delivering more than the client expects and, if possible, ahead of deadline. Sadly, most construction contractors haven't learned that one. The ones that have don't have to spend a penny on advertising.

Anyway, I'm taking it easy this summer. Maybe I'll get to the stained glass, maybe I won't. Renovating an old house isn't something that should feel like an obligation. It's a stress reliever.

On that point, Doc Karen has always been horrified by my lifestyle and has been ragging on me for years to get a physical. She was sure I had everything from black lung to AADD to lyme disease. The last time I saw a doctor for anything was in 1990 when I broke my wrist so, yeah, I figured that 18 years was probably pushing it. So I got a physical. BP: 120/81, sugars: 100, PSA: normal, cholesterol: high-normal, lungs: good, heart: good, damn... I can't match three numbers in lotto so I guess this is where my luck went. It's definitely not something I can take credit for.

The correct answer is: a ghetto blaster.

2008-06-19T00:36:05-04:00

I'm not saying anything that battle-experienced home renovators don't know. Sometimes, the simplest little task can consume gobs of time and a bucket of money before you realize you made a tragic mistake. Not always, of course. That's how you get suckered into doing it over and over again.

It started as a simple idea: I wanted to have music in my back yard. I could have bought a boombox a/k/a ghetto blaster for a hundred bucks and kept it under the deck. Problem solved and, when all is said and done, that actually would have been a more flexible solution than the mission I set for myself. Even if I wanted XM Radio (which I did) they make XM blasters too. The bonus would have been that I could have had XM in my car as well.

Instead, I wanted the speakers fed by the big, honkin' Denon home theatre system in the living room. Why? I don't freakin' know. Probably because it was there.

My Denon has two independent amplifiers. This way I can listen to TV on the big speakers in the living room and XM in the dining room. Have I ever actually done it? No. Why would I want to? The rooms are right next to each other. It would be like listening to two different records at the same time. So why did I buy the Denon? I don't freakin' know. You see the pattern here.

Whatever, in order to run back yard speakers, I needed a multi-pair speaker selector. It had to have independent volume controls because, even though both speaker pairs are Polks, the exterior speakers are quite a bit smaller and have another 75 feet of speaker cable. Also, I need to be able to turn off those outside speakers so my neighbors don't dump garbage in my yard at midnight.

So I picked up a Niles SSVC-4 speaker selector ($319), a pair of Polk Atrium45 outdoor speakers ($149) and seventy-eight bucks worth of Monster cable. Total bill, with tax and shipping: $547.98. Kee-ryst!

Then I had to pull cable. That wasn't as easy as it sounds. Even though I had the foresight to drop speaker wire through the basement ceiling when I built the home entertainment unit, it wasn't nearly long enough to reach outside. I also had to drill through two masonry walls and find a method to hang the cable along a steel beam so I wouldn't clothesline myself. Lots of construction adhesive with the wire held temporarily in place by spring clamps accomplished that.

I managed to get it loosely together in time for a small party in the back yard, when I discovered a critical flaw: the only way to adjust the volume on those outside speakers was to climb the stairs on the back deck, walk through the house and adjust it from the living room. But since I had no idea how loud or soft I was making it, it usually took three trips to get it right.

That meant another purchase: a weatherproof, non-impedance matching volume control in the back yard. Ka-ching! $96.98 and another two hours' work.

When I turned it on, the Denon went into overload after a few minutes and shut down, probably from the resistance of that volume control. I eventually found a balance of settings that worked but, man, what a disappointing white elephant this turned out to be.

Yes, it sounds great and having music in the back yard adds a whole nuther level of enjoyment to the evening hang outs. But I could have bought a mil-spec ghetto blaster from Halliburton for the 650 bucks it cost me, and saved myself a lot of work.

Up The Wankers, Amanda.

2008-06-08T13:53:53-04:00

Amanda Green passed away at 2am this morning from pancreatic cancer. She was only 49.

I moved to Brooklyn from Manhattan in 1999. In large part, Amanda is one of the reasons I'm here. What more or less brought me to Brooklyn, and what taught me that Brooklyn isn't "Injun territory", as so many Manhattanites believe the boros to be, is a Brooklyn Heights restaurant I became a part of in 1993 called La Bouillabaisse.

I met Amanda in 1990 at a small birthday party for me at the Oyster Bar. She was a friend of my sister's and was living in Stratford, CT, where she and her boyfriend sold exotic birds. She was a lively, beautiful and worldy woman but what really attracted me to her was her stinging British wit and that she could appreciate my sarcasm without wincing. We became fast friends.

In her teens and early 20s, Amanda had toured the world as a singer and dancer (the second title always surprised me because she was the clumsiest person I knew). She was trying to lay the groundwork for a relocation to NYC to do her music. Since I'm a former professional bass player, we connected on that vector as well. She always saw me as a musician who would eventually learn the error of my ways and return to playing where I belonged.

I was living in a large loft at Broadway and Bleecker and I had a spare bedroom so I offered it to her. There were no ulterior relationship motivations behind the offer. She was simply more fun to be around than the diminishing number of women I was seeing. In fact, Amanda's sister had then recently died of cancer and after my relationship with my blood sister turned sour we mutually adopted each other.

Amanda was a natural networker. When I came home at the end of the day I never knew if I'd be walking in on a dinner party or a pub crawl heading out to the LES or bringing a girl back to a loft full of Brits just off the boat. Amanda was like the unofficial British Embassy.

The one constant in our friendship was that Friday night, rain or snow, we had our cold saki slosh-outs at Sharaku or Hasaki on Stuyvesant. "Excuse me, may I have another saki, please?" became a running gag. Once she started slurring her words to that plea, we were done for the night. But not before the ritual of popping walnut sized chunks of wasabi mustard in our respective mouths for the walk home. She loved spicy food. Another point for Amanda.

Amanda was working as a bartender and soon got a job at Square and Compass, the Masonic club on West 23rd Street where she met the head chef, Neil Ganic. Neil and Amanda became involved. I admit that I was a bit jealous of him, not because of their romantic involvement but because she wasn't around much anymore. The obvious solution to that was to invite Neil to stay at the loft too. Neil was the original wild and crazy Eastern European guy. While he could be abrasive and over the top, he fit in nicely. He always suspected that Amanda and I had been more than friends and she enjoyed twisting that knife on occasion to keep Neil in line. After all, I had home field advantage.

One night while Amanda was seeing friends out of town Neil and I went barhopping, which is when we came upon the idea of opening our own pub. Neil had the skills and my Citibank contract provided the cash. Plus I had the construction know-how. Initially, the idea was to find something downtown in the seaport area but the rents were prohibitive, even in 1993.

I regarded this restaurant idea in the same context as "some day I want to ride my motorcycle through China" so I was knocked off balance when Neil called to tell me that he'd scrounged a storefront on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn from one of the Masons. It was currently operating as a funky curry house. He wanted to open in two weeks. My first trip to Brooklyn in probably ten years was signing the DBA and partnership papers for La Bouillabaisse at the Brooklyn court house.

Amanda thought we were both nuts however she agreed to help. She walked around the corner to Noho Star and recruited our entire dining room staff over a glass of wine. But she liked her bartender gig and wanted nothing to do with our hair-brained idea. After a hellish construction schedule, La Bouillabaisse opened to positive reviews and lines of waiting customers. After that, it didn't take much persuasion to get Amanda to agree to become a partner and for me to breathe a huge sigh of relief because running a restaurant wasn't something I wanted to do.

The demands of running the restaurant meant that it was only a matter of time before Amanda and Neil would have to move closer to it. In 1994, Amanda got pregnant and that was that. They rented an apartment in Cobble Hill. The loft felt empty without her but I knew that she'd found what she was made to do. She loved kids and she loved entertaining. She loved the attention too, especially the rave review which described her as "a cross between Maryanne Faithful and Annie Lennox with big hoop earrings", and was especially thrilled the night that the real Maryanne Faithful showed up at La B with Amanda's other super hero, Diana Rigg.

The rest is pretty much Brooklyn Heights lore. La Bouillabaisse was a big hit, they had two beautiful and talented kids, Nicholas and Layla, Neil opened a bunch more restaurants, they split up, Amanda conceived and managed Wine Bar on Henry Street. Amanda was one those people who always landed on her feet by the strength of her will, positive outlook and amazing people powers.

After I left La Bouillabaisse in '99 and got buried in this house renovation and life-sucking consulting, I lost touch with most of my friends. But being the networker Amanda is, she always took the initiative to call me at least once a week to see how things were going, even if it was during a quick dash to the subway. That's just how she was. Once you were "in", you couldn't get out. During her most recent hospital stay there were parades of people coming to visit her, flying in from as far away as Europe, some of them from Amanda's primary school years.

Amanda was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2005. After a touch-and-go summer, everybody thought she'd beat it. She was back to her fighting self last fall but the cancer returned with a vengeance this spring and claimed her life today.

Amanda was "stiff upper lip" through and through. The absolute last thing she'd want anyone to do is to think of her in sympathetic terms or to be grief-stricken for her. She celebrated life and good times more than anyone I've met. So to her I say what she always said to me after we paid the check on saki nights and she lifted her glass for a last toast:

"Up the wankers!"

Memorial service for Amanda

Monday, June 16 at 3pm

Grace Church
254 Hicks Street (between Remsen & Joralemon)
Brooklyn, NY 11201

Amanda C. Green Memorial Fund

A fund has been set up for contributions in lieu of flowers. Make checks payable to the Amanda C. Green Memorial Fund. The mailing address is:

Amanda C. Green Fund
c/o Zerline L Goodman, Attorney
15 Clark St
Brooklyn, NY 11201-2182

Well, isn't this special?

2008-05-28T21:02:45-04:00

New York Magazine's cover story this week is The Brooklyn Wars. Is this ominously titled article about drug gang violence at the projects or the racial tensions in Crown Heights? Or maybe something really volatile, like another pizza shoot-out between Grimaldi's and Tontonno?

Nope. It's a five thousand word feature about The What, an anonymous misanthrope who posts on a Brooklyn real estate blog, Brownstoner. Sheesh, I can't even get this blog mentioned as a footnote in a local shopping paper and New York Mag writes a cover article about a troll on another Brooklyn blog? It ain't fair.

I guess I should be happy that the Manhattan media is taking such an interest in Brooklyn blogs at all. So congrats to... well, I'm not sure who to congratulate. The What sounds like a chronic malcontent who's pissed that he missed the gentrification boat and his detractors seem to be the same upwardly slithering, relocated latte sippers I moved to Brooklyn to escape from Soho. Folks, the neutron bomb was made to settle "wars" like this.

I love Brownstoner. It's one of my favorite blogs, which is why it's in the menu here. But while it claims to cover the borough, it doesn't take more than a few minutes on the site to see that it's focused on NOPE ("North of the Prospect Expressway") and real estate selling for well into seven figures. So it's not surprising that this feeds the class warfare on the site. Cats and dogs live together more peacefully than $1500/month apartments next door to two million dollar townhouses. Spoiler: dogs always win.

But why does The What deserve even 15 milliseconds of fame for this? It's the same gentrification gripe that's preceded every neighborhood upturn in the city for the past 35 years, from the Upper West Side to the Lower East Side, from Hell's Kitc... oops, Clinton to the Lower West Si... oops, Hudson Square.

The What should have been in Soho in the late 1970s or the LES in the early 1980s when it was more than just high rents forcing tenants out of their suddenly more desirable homes and self-indulgent hipsters posting anonymous vulgarities on bulletin boards. Back then it was sleazy developers turning off utilities and building heat, removing lobby doors, setting fires and paying street thugs to kneecap tenants resisting unsigned eviction notices. It was spending three years in Landlord-Tenant Court on a stayed 72-hour eviction notice and tapping gas lines to run your own space and water heaters.

Now THAT was a war of which you could be proud to be a veteran.

Brooklyn's "Blue Thunder"

2008-05-27T20:53:35-04:00

While this is generally a quiet neighborhood, we get quite a bit of helicopter noise here. Traffic choppers hover overhead during the morning news to monitor the "Belt-BQE split" a few blocks away. I always know when Bush or Cheney is in town because Marine One and its small convoy of support aircraft are uniquely audible, even in my basement.

Mainly, we're three blocks away from NYPD Aviation, where the police choppers refuel. So it's not uncommon to have the chirping birdies obliterated by the hellish thunder of a Bell 412 on approach, flying about 150 feet above my house. Fortunately, this only happens two or three times around mid-day. After the sun goes down they make their approaches over New York Harbor.

Lately though, people have been upset by non-NYPD helicopters using that heliport, one of them a silver 412 with no markings. Rumors were flying (pun unintended) that celebs we're being allowed to use the secure police heliport to avoid the paparazzi.

This morning, I saw it on approach over the dog run. It was so low that I could see the pilot's face and his NYPD jumpsuit. I also saw a lot of stuff hanging off it that didn't look like standard equipment for a corporate chopper.

A little Google sleuthing revealed the answer:

Police take crime fighting to new heights
$10 million, high-tech NYPD chopper quietly monitors post 9/11 city

Got a shop? You need this stuff!

2008-02-24T22:52:12-05:00

Last weekend, my boss and I made the trek to the annual NJ Woodworking Show. Jeb has a pretty nice woodworking shop but his passion is car and motorcycle restoration. He's done several old bikes -- Velocettes and Moto Guzzis -- but his current project is a 1955 Land Rover. The Rover looked like it had been parked at the bottom of a river for the last fifty years but after two years he's nearing paint and finish, which means he needed supplies, which means we both needed to hit the show.

I've been looking for a decent steel tool deck cleaner for a couple of years. Nothing I've tried worked much better than WD40, #00 steel wool and carnuba wax. Jeb told me that he'd had good results with Boeshield and, sure enough, we found it at the show. It's expensive but it was worth a try.

Boeshield was developed by Boeing for cleaning metal airplane shells. It's actually a family of specialized products but the T9 aerosol is the centerpiece. It's like a super deluxe WD40 with an incorporated wax for longer protection.

If you don't have machined steel deck tools you probably don't know how vulnerable they are to moisture and stains. In extreme cases, the raw steel can actually get pitted from chemicals as mild as simple table sugar. My Delta Unisaw and Jet jointer were in bad shape.

Let's look a little closer. What the hell happened to this thing??

I know what a couple of those stains are. One was Karen's sweating Coke can (after I told her to keep it off the tools... do I really need to provide drink coasters in my shop?) And several off those stains were water drips from the overhead coolant lines to the upstairs split-unit air conditioners. I don't what that big stain to the left is. All I know was that WD40 didn't get rid of it.

The spray can is T9. That goes on last. Up first was the gum and tar remover. Spray, let it sit for 60 seconds, then scrub with #00 steel wool and wipe off with paper towels. Next was the rust and stain remover. As soon as I sprayed it I recognized the smell: phosphoric acid. That removed most of the stains, although it took three passes. Then it's sprayed with T9 and wiped down.

Success! Well, not quite. Fifteen minutes later the deck felt like it was covered in sticky old paste wax. I dug at it with my fingernail and that's exactly what it was. Old wax. Boeshield didn't do a very good job of removing that old wax. It simply suspended itself in the various solutions and then dried. Drat.

A wipe down with mineral spirits fixed that. In Boeshield's defense, there must have been 20 layers of carnuba wax on that deck. You really need a petroleum solvent to get it off. Anyway, after an additional treatment with T9 here was the result.

I haven't decided whether or not I should wax it too. I think I'll leave it as is for now to see how well Boeshield works as protection.

Afterwards, I did my table saw too. That was even tougher because an idiot had used the saw as an assembly table to glue fabric to some window shades. The spray glue soaked through and discolored the steel. I was that idiot, by the way.

Anyway, it's all pretty now. But it reminds me of an entry from the Tyromaniac's Notebook that I'd like to pass along. DON'T use Naval Jelly to remove rust stains from a steel table saw deck. The stuff is way too caustic. Those were the hardest stains to remove.

PS: I realize that I've been real lax about updating my blog since December. I even got a letter from one of the blog reflectors asking me if I'd abandoned BrooklynRowHouse. I haven't. I've just been neck deep in a software project for the Children's Health Fund. I'll be reporting on the upcoming stained glass projects soon.

The Greenville Horror

2008-01-06T18:04:35-05:00

A Google search shows that the house at #6 Whitten Street in Greenville, SC was sold to George C. Leventis on July 8, 2003 for $88,000.

Flash forward four years. The home's new owners are the Browns, who purchased the Whitten Street house for $75,000.

Cited text is courtesy of WYFF.

Jason and Kerri Brown of Greenville found a secret room in their home behind a bookcase, and what was inside was a nightmare beyond their wildest dreams.

"This can't be happening. This can't be true. It terrified me," Kerri Brown told News 4's Tim Waller.

A secret room! Who hasn't had fantasies of finding a secret room in their old house? But for Kerri Brown, it was about the worst nightmare a home owner could face.

The secret room in the old mill home on Whitten Street in Greenville's Dunean section contained a handwritten letter from the previous owner titled, "You Found It!"

"Hello. If you're reading this, then you found the secret room. I owned this house for a short while and it was discovered to have a serious mold problem. One that actually made my children very sick to the point that we had to move out," Kerri Brown read from the letter.

Leventis and his family were the first to discover the horrible secret of Number 6 Whitten Street. There is no indication the previous owner was aware of any mold.

According to the note, the mold problem was so severe that it made the whole Leventis family sick.

The Leventises did the only thing they believed they could do. With no money in their savings to have the mold removed, they stopped paying the mortgage and let the home go into foreclosure.

"I've never seen my kids that sick. And it was scary," Tricia Leventis said in tears.

According to Tricia, she and their two young daughters became desperately ill, and said doctors told them to leave the home immediately.

"It was adamant. Absolutely, get out," Leventis said. "It was to the point where my youngest was so sick, she was unable to hold any nutrition, nothing was working, she couldn't breathe."

The Browns subsequently bought the home from the Leventis' bank.

So was George Leventis a cad or something of a hero? According to Leventis, he knew the bank would re-sell his house and he wanted to be sure the future owners knew about the mold. Leventis said what better way to warn them than to leave a note hidden from plain view.

"I put it in the room because I didn't want anyone to find it if it was left out in the house. I figured if someone else who had another interest or a stake in the house found it, they would just throw it away or they wouldn't tell anyone," Leventis said.

The Browns say that is exactly what happened, and say if not for the note, their child may have become sick as well.

"I'm very thankful he left the note. In my opinion, there's a possibility he could have saved Megan's life," Kerri Brown said.

A mold engineering company was hired to assess the damage and it found elevated-levels of several types of mold, including Aspergillus, Basidiospores, Chaetomiu, Curvularia, Stachybotrys and Torula. According to the Browns, the cost of removing the mold exceeded the value of the home.

Lawsuits are, of course, flying although Fannie Mae agreed to buy back the house from the Browns at its sale price and has subsequently been dropped from the lawsuit.

Source: Hidden Room, Hidden Danger

Designing Stained Glass

2007-12-17T01:59:19-05:00

Rembrandt, I ain't. I can visualize things pretty well but there's a bridge out somewhere between my left and right brain. With woodworking, I usually wind up head jamming the fabrication. It works 90% of the time. The other 10% is handled by my hard-won skills in making dumb mistakes look like I meant to do that. But this ad hoc process doesn't work for stained glass construction, where you need to have a completed design and pieces cut before you start soldering things together.

My stained glass work to date has been pretty simple, angular and, yes, left brained. But for the new projects here I wanted something a bit more artistic. So I began the hunt for stained glass design software and settled on Glass Eye 2000 from Dragonfly. It's ain't cheap but it's not like stained glass people are a huge market. Nevertheless, it's a high quality product and the best design software I could find.

This is a window panel I designed in GE2k in about three hours.

GE2k is primarily a vector paint program. "Knots" determine ends of lines and also the arc points within lines. Making an arc is just a matter of grabbing a midline knot and dragging it where you want it. If you need a more complex arc, add more knots to the line. This might sound kind of crude but it's surprisingly flexible and, moreover, it makes resizing a design extremely accurate.

There are several ways to begin a design in GE2k. The easiest is to just Browse Designs and steal one. GE2k comes with over four hundred completed designs and bevels which you can use as-is or modify to suit. Dragonfly also sells packages of optional patterns ranging from Edwardian designs to cute li'l animals.

A very powerful feature in GE2k is AutoTrace. What you do is import a GIF or JPEG as a "background" and the software will create the outlines for you. This works pretty well for simple graphics, like a basic pencil sketch or a drawing from a coloring book. The tracing usually requires a little manual cleanup but the output looks surprisingly like a stained glass design.

You can also manually trace a drawing or a photo, like the artist did here. It's tedious but it lets you capture an incredible amount of detail, producing an almost photo-realistic stained glass piece. Basically, what you do is overlay lots and lots of knots on the photo and pull lines to match the contours of the picture.

A tool I've found indispensable for setting glass colors is ColorPic, built and marketed by a brilliant developer I worked with at Trafficmac, Nico Westerdale of Iconico. I can't imagine building anything relying on color without it. Nico has lots of free or inexpensive, super-valuable tools for web design on his site. It's a web developer's, or in this case stained glass designer's, toy box.

Anyway, this is a panel I designed to fit into the window frames I built last week. There's an article about that construction here. I'll be building two of these panels for the window from the master bedroom to the hallway. They're intended to bring light from the south-facing bedroom windows into an otherwise dark section of hallway while also providing privacy.

Here's an example of AutoTrace in action. I did this as an exercise to learn this aspect of the software. It took me about 45 minutes to complete the drawing, which I don't intend to actually build.

This is a sketch I found on the web; just a simple cartoonish Christmas tree. I imported it into GE2k using the Add Background command. It contains several lines which don't actually produce workable stained glass pieces. GE2k knows this and will tell you as much when you run the Suggest command (Ctrl-Q).

AutoTrace generated this template. Yup, it's got a lot of disconnected lines. Since the lines articulate borders for the glass pieces, they either need to be extended to meet the knots in other lines, or removed altogether. The tiny little bead-looking things you see on the lines are the knots. You can add/remove them or drag them to new locations to create curves and arcs.

Fifteen minutes of modification produced this. The Suggest command was really useful, telling me about disconnected knots on the pattern, pieces which were too small to fabricate, etc.

I quickly chose some colors and presto: a nearly complete stained glass design.

Clicking on another command automatically numbered all the pieces for me. When you print out the drawing you'll actually print two copies. One is the base template over which you fabricate the glass and the lead came (or copper foil). The other provides templates for actually cutting the glass. You cut out the paper pieces, fasten them to the glass with rubber cement, run a Sharpie around the profile and then cut the glass. Having those numbered pieces makes it easy to do all your cuts in one production run.

If I was going to actually construct this drawing I would almost certainly break up some of the long pieces and simplify the complex wavy lines to make glass cutting easier. Fortunately, that's easy to do.

There's much more to Glass Eye 2000 than this. One cool feature is Costing. The software comes with a large and extensible inventory of glass types, manufacturers and model numbers. You can assign square-foot prices to them, as well as to the lead stock. When you complete the design, Glass Eye will tell you how much the materials will cost to build it. You can even estimate your hours and use it to generate a formal bid for a customer. Pretty cool.

Talk about it the Stained Glass Forum.

New Stained Glass Projects

2007-12-11T22:09:35-05:00

I have several stained glass tasks in the queue here. Some, like the upper cabinet doors in the living room media cabinet, have been on hold since 2003. Others, like the funky stairway skylight, I've wanted to replace since the day I first saw the place.

While stained glass construction is fairly mechanical and basically just woodworking joinery using glass and lead came, the design, templating and piecing out can be very time consuming. Most of the glass I've done here is fairly simple and angular to match the existing stained glass. But I wanted something a bit more ornamental for these new projects.

The delay is mostly because I suck at drawing. I can muddle my way through Photoshop if I have to and I've even built a few nice web page banners using "creative appropriation" of assets conceived by others. Change a few lines, overlay a mask or two, morph a few elements and, poof, it's mine. Derivative art.

While a Photoshop geek might be able to design stained glass using it, I ain't one of them. So I plonked down a considerable chunk of money for professional stained glass design software from Dragonfly, Glass Eye 2000. This software does everything but cut the glass for you. While it's expensive, it's less than I would pay to have just one of these projects professionally made. I'll talk more about Glass Eye in a future installment.

Back to the project, up first are two pairs of doors for the master bedroom, technically the last piece of the long-running master bedroom renovations. One pair is for the bedroom cabinet I built last year and the other is for a window from the bedroom into the hallway. The latter was a redundant doorway after I had merged two bedrooms into one. I decided to put a window in that opening to bring natural light into what would otherwise be a dark section of hallway.

Measurements done, the first thing I have to do is construct empty frames for those doors. It will be made from red oak (of course) -- standard 1" stock ripped to 2-1/2". For all practical purposes, I'll be constructing them like a raised panel cabinet door. But instead of a raised wood panel I'll use a fabricated stained glass panel. There's a bit more to it than that, but later for that as well.

So it's downstairs to the shop to make the blanks for those doors. These were ripped from a couple of 1x6s I picked up at Lowes last summer. I wanted to give them a few months to season in the shop to make sure there weren't going to be any issues with twisting or warping. Believe it or not, the Brooklyn Lowes carries nicer red oak stock than our local hardwood yards. The boards were run through a surface planer to make sure they were of identical thickness. This is an important step for rail and stile construction. Then it was on to the chop saw to cut for length, then the table saw to rip it to width.

After the blanks were cut it was on to the router table. Paneled cabinet doors usually employ two stiles (the vertical perimeter members) and two rails (the horizontal members). Sometimes those rails and stiles have architectural beading. This is achieved by two bits, appropriately called a rail and stile set.

Why two bits? After all, cabinet beading looks like it could be done with just one. Actually, it is. The second bit cuts a negative profile of the first bit. It's used on the ends of the rails so they can fit snugly inside the stiles, something like a tenon. It creates a large glue surface and a very strong corner.

The trick with rail and stile sets is making sure that they (a) cut a deep enough recess for the panel and (b) they're aligned to each other. What I do is rip several pieces of scrap plywood and use them to set the router depth. While experience and eyeballing will get you in the ballpark, it's still pretty much of a trial and error process. Needless to say, when you've got the router adjusted for a bit you should make all your cuts that use that bit.

A few more tricks:

It can be tough to visualize the profile that a complex router bit will cut so label your bits with a Sharpie. I have my rail/stile bits labeled, "Lateral"/"End". I have three rail/stile sets so I've also got them color coded.
Make cabinet doors about 1/8" over-sized in both planes. A little trim on the table saw will gives you a smooth joint. This can also save your butt in case you slip up and build the doors slightly out of square (eh, it happens).
It's almost unavoidable that there will be some tear-out from the end grain bit. You can mitigate this by doing your end cuts first, working slowly and keeping the router RPMs high. But if it happens, don't worry about it. You can trim off the "hair" later with a utility knife.

Here are the blanks with the lateral cuts.

Here they are with the end cuts.

And here's a dry fit of the joints.

Finally, here's the assembly. I like to use Bessey K-Clamps for things like this because adjusting tension on the clamps helps bring the fabrication into square. You can test for square by measuring diagonal corners but on smaller assemblies like this I prefer to use a rafting square. I wish I had more room in the shop for a real assembly table. But then I'd probably want a hydraulic clamping system.

"HEY! You forgot to put in the panel, dummy!"

As I said, this is a little different than building a raised panel door. The problem is that while the edge channel on the stained glass panel will just fit into the 3/16" dado left by the router bit for the raised panel, once I solder it it won't. I'll have to whack out the thin backing lip with a chisel to insert the panel, then add a moulding detail to hold it in place. This actually works out better because the panel can be removed for repair later.

I have one more set of cabinet doors to make with a different beading and a frame for the bathroom skylight. My next post will probably be about the Glass Works design software.

Talk about it the Stained Glass Forum.

My Odorific Old House

2007-12-03T22:50:04-05:00

I'll be posting a new series of articles on stained glass construction in a few weeks. I purchased some new ($$!) stained glass design software from Dragonfly, Glass 2000 Professional, to help me complete the half-dozen stained glass projects I've got on my plate. So I'll post a review of that as well.

I'm gonna change gears and show a bit of my feminine side. I like fragrant houses. I spent my early years living in a small town in Japan, where my mother became a passionate connoisseur of oriental incense. She often had a subtle fragrance burning in the house long after we moved back to the States.

For me, a fragrant house smells like home. Since I moved out on my own, I've usually had a cone of incense burning, mostly temple fragrances. It beats smelling the dogs' microwaved breakfast all day.

After moving to Brooklyn I found myself estranged from my Manhattan oriental incense supplier. I tried buying it online but the stuff I was getting smelled more like a brothel or a hippy crash pad than the earthier stuff I liked.

On an early trip to Nantucket, Karen and I visited a fragrance store where the owner turned me on to something called essential oils and a device called an oil burner. While I still prefer the smokier fragrance of Japanese incense, oil lasts a lot longer. After feeding the dogs in the morning, I pour a 1/4 ounce or so into the burner and it's good for the whole day. Here's a shot of the burner.

Another cool thing about essential and fragrant oils (there's a difference: essential oils are extracted from natural sources; fragrant oils are made chemically) is that you can create your own blends. Some days I want a woodsy fragrance, other days I want a Christmasy smell. Here are a few of the scents I have stashed behind the kitchen sink:

Most of these are essential oils like pine, clove, cedar and other spices. But a few are fragrant, like Victorian Christmas.

I usually pick up these oils wholesale from two online sources:

http://www.soyandscent.com
http://www.wellingtonfragrance.com

Buying oils online is a bit of a crap shoot. The names only give you a general indication. For instance, "cranberry" can have a light, fruity aroma or it can stink like cheap candy. It's like going into a wine store without knowing the labels you like. Some stores offer one-ounce samplers where, chances are, you'll find one or two you like.

Bay Ridge Hum

2007-11-06T21:52:10-05:00

Out-worlders would probably expect Brooklyn to sound like inner-city traffic, police sirens and "Yo! Vinnie! T'row me down some money fa a' egg cream!" Actually, it's pretty quiet down here by the harbor, except for the low-flying NYPD helicopters.

Nevertheless, I have two "bizarre noise" stories. I'll talk about the most public one first and, if I can keep it short, I'll tell the other one.

In late 2005, I was at the dog run when an obviously exhausted woman told me that she was kept awake all night by a loud hum outside. She lives only three blocks from me so she asked if I'd heard it too. I told her I was sorry but I hadn't heard a thing. She bore on, telling me that it sounded like a low engine rumble, almost like a fog horn, except it was non-stop. I thought there might be a simple explanation: she was nuts.

A few months later, I read an article in our local paper, the Bay Ridge Courier. It was a brief interview with a resident on Colonial Rd complaining about "this awful noise". She had heard it too. I still hadn't.

Shortly after that, the Brooklyn Paper picked up the story. Then the NY Sun. Then the NY Daily News. I'm told that even FoxNews did a story on it. A local reporter, Matthew Lysiac, has made it a cause célèbre.

Okay, even though I still haven't heard it, lots of people in my neighborhood have. They can't all be crazy. On the other hand, I'm not deaf either and I'm usually out walking the dogs at 1am when it's so quiet I can hear a traffic accident across the harbor in Staten Island. Is this something like Tinkerbelle? You have to believe it to hear it?

Whatever, the local pols are all over it too. Last month our city councilman, Vincent Gentile, said that he'd solved the mystery. The culprit was the bizarre looking oyster toadfish and its noisy mating ritual.

Mr. Gentile had contracted the services of a prominent marine biologist and that was his conclusion. Case closed, right?

Not quite because nobody had actually seen an oyster toadfish in the waters along Owls Head. His former Republican rival, Marty Golden, had a little fun with the Hum buggers in this photo.

But Gentile wasn't sold on the answer either and asked a Cornell professor of Neurobiology with the improbably funny last name of "Bass" to confirm the toadfish story. He couldn't. In fact, he didn't hear or see any toadfish either.

So we're back to square one and all the convoluted and fantastical explanations: global warming and an inversion layer funneling refinery noise from New Jersey, wind causing the Verrazano Bridge cables to vibrate, secret underground tunneling for some Men In Black headquarters, which of course leads us to UFOs.

Bottom line, there's an awful noise that's apparently loud enough to disturb the sleep of reasonable people over almost a square mile which I haven't heard and no one knows what it is. Maybe it's just an elaborate practical joke against me.

I'll tell my own strange noise story in a later installment.

My Product Review

2007-10-23T13:05:36-04:00

The last product I was asked to review was an in-floor Kryptonite locking system for motorcycles for Motorcyclist mag. I injured my knee tripping on that #*$% lock in the dark. Let's see if I have more luck with the EZ Clean paint brush that Jeannie from Houseblogs.netasked me to check out.

My project was painting my kitchen extension, which still had seven year-old primer on the walls. It's one of those Deferred Completion Syndrome items I was happy to check off the list for this product test.

I didn't have a clue what I would be testing other than it would be a "new painting tool". When UPS delivered the box and I saw what it was I have to admit I was a little disappointed. I guess I was expecting something dramatic like a high tech masking tape product or an ultrasonic paint stirrer. Those are jobs I hate doing. Cleaning paint brushes doesn't really bother me. In fact, I find it strangely cathartic.

I also have to say that I was skeptical when I saw the name. I've got a dusty box full of useless Magic Planes, EZ-Sharps and Miracle Klamps I've bought at tool shows during moments of low brain/wallet coordination. Such product names conjure up images of imminent suckerhood all by themselves now.

After a day of plastering to fix damage from an old leak in the extension's roof, I dove in with another coat of Kilz primer. I had my doubts that the EZ Clean would be as comfortable or useful as my trusty Purdy wooden handled chisel tip brush. For one thing, the EZ Clean brush I got has fairly short bristles (Note: the brush is available with bristles up to four inches long) so I wasn't confident it would hold much paint.

I did the usual latex prep of soaking the brush in cold water for a couple of minutes then shaking out the excess. This helps to keep paint from collecting and gumming up under the ferrule, which is especially problematic with sticky primers. Then I got to work.

I was surprised. The brush did a very good job with cut-ins. I was correct that it didn't hold as much paint as my Purdy, but the shorter bristles gave me greater control. With less paint on the brush there were also fewer drips. I'll gladly trade not having to stop to clean up paint drool for a few more trips back to the paint can. The ribbed ABS handle also has better traction than a wood handled brush. Two points for EZ Clean.

But EZ Clean's primary claim is clean up and here's where I was a bit put off. This isn't the fault of the idea or the brush but an assumption by its manufacturer that we all have garden hoses and places outside where we can let the paint fly. My back yard is covered with brick pavers. I could have cleaned the brush in one of the five-gallon buckets I have here but that's no more convenient than cleaning in the sink.

Which is what I did. There's no attachment for a sink faucet, or at least not for my cheapo Delta, so I tried holding the handle tightly against the faucet, sealing it as best I could with my hands. That was a mistake. Milky white water squirted all over me and the cabinets.

What should be included with this tool is a generic, slip-over faucet attachment like those you get with large humidifiers and portable dishwashers. Even if I had a convenient spot outdoors to clean the paint brush, I don't live in sunny Los Angeles. What do us northern folks do in January when it's 20 degrees outside and the garden faucet and hose have been shut down and drained for the season? What do apartment dwellers do?

I couldn't give the brush a fair test of its ez-cleaning because of this. But I saw enough of it through the geyser shooting in my face to postulate that it probably works pretty well, so long as you have a tight seal at the coupling. I can say that it doesn't give up any quality as a paint brush for this cleaning feature.

But, as I said, I don't mind cleaning latex paint brushes so I doubt I would pay a premium price for this over a conventional paint brush.

Stripping a Door: Part 1

2007-10-20T23:41:45-04:00

The prologue of this story is an old door that needed to be stripped. I brought in my amateur stripper, Doc Karen, to serve as my photo model for this two part pictorial. Even anesthesiologists have to moonlight to make ends meet these days .

I was gratified that she took our tutorial seriously enough to wear her surgical scrubs (mismatched as they were). I guess that makes me "House".

Karen's own house is full of painted architectural woodwork so she wanted to learn how the paint stripping process worked. Since it's her door now I was only too happy to hand her the tools and take my position behind the camera, tucking an occasional dollar bill in her rubber glove and yelling, "Take it all off, baby!" until she threatened to beat me stupid.

The first thing she did was get the door in a comfortable working position on a pair of sawhorses. Whenever possible, try to remove the woodwork and get it horizontal. This applies to baseboards and casings too. If you don't, you'll know why this is a good idea about twenty minutes into working with a heavy heat gun. These things ain't hair dryers.

Karen prepped the area so she would have the tools and supplies she needed when she needed them. I told her it was probably a lot like what they do before one of her operations. This is less important at the heat gun stage than it is when you start with the chemicals. Get all your scrapers and brushes together. Lay a plastic garbage bag on a convenient nearby surface where you can set down your grungy tools when the phone rings. Place a 40-gallon garbage can within arm's length and have a spare bag ready. Pre-rip a lot of paper towels into a pile. It's hard to do that while wearing heavy gloves.

Painted old house woodwork will commonly have varnish or shellac as the base layer. That's good news for two reasons. One is because it provides a barrier between the paint and the wood. This is a time saver when you're working with an open-grained wood like oak because it prevents the paint from melting into the grain, where the job becomes exponentially more tedious.

The other reason is because this makes a heat gun ideal for the first stage of stripping. Under heat, varnish liquefies before the paint so you can scrape off decades of paint in one pass and in one long ribbon, as Karen is doing above. If we had used only stripper on these five or six layers of paint, this door would have been a mess for hours. You can see from the photos how much easier the job becomes without having to clean up a witch's brew of funky melted paint and noxious stripper. Minimizing the use of caustic chemicals is important, not just for your health but the health of the wood.

She started by warming up a 4x10 inch area at the end of the door with the heat gun. You can tell the paint is ready for scraping when it just starts to lift, as you can see here. Don't let the paint burn or blister, especially if you suspect lead paint (wear a chemical mask regardless though). Always strip with the grain whenever possible.

I like this scraper because it has an edge like a dull chisel so it slices under and lifts the paint better than does a flat scraper. The technique is to work slowly in a forward direction, keeping the heat gun a couple of inches in front of the blade, as Karen is doing here. If the blade starts to hit resistance, slow down and let the surface get a bit warmer. Don't stop and go back to pick up something you missed. Get it in another pass. You don't want the warm, sticky paint you just lifted off the surface to reattach itself to the bare wood.

When that ribbon of paint starts to fall back over the unscraped stuff, dump it in the garbage can. If you need a second pass with the heat gun, make sure to clean the scraper blade before starting again.

After the heat gun, the next steps is to scrape off the hardened residue with a pull scraper. Most of this will be hardened varnish. The center panel in this door will be removed and replaced with an architectural metal screen so Karen's not stripping it.

Now we go to the chemicals. My apologies to the "green" folks but none of the soy/citrus strippers work nearly as well as the hard stuff. Here we're using Klean Strip. Karen bought the stuff you spray on; I like the KS3 gel that you paint on. Same stuff, just that whatever convenience you gain with a spray bottle you give up with having to refill the small spray bottle frequently.

The axiom is, "let the stripper do the work". I like to let the stripper sit undisturbed for at least ten minutes. Resist the temptation of toying with it during this step. Chemical strippers are designed to create a seal to trap the active chemicals next to the paint. Breaking this seal lets in air and weakens the chemical action.

Then go at it with a fine wire brush, like Karen is doing. This is followed by a wad of clean paper towels. Then another spritz of stripper, another wire brushing, another wad of paper towels.

Usually, that's all you need. This was Karen's first time at stripping so we'll need to do one more light pass to remove the last film of varnish. Then we'll neutralize the stripper with MEK, which is optional but saves sanding later. Then it's an overnight dry before sanding through the grits (100 and 150), which should always be done with a dust mask after stripping. If you have fine detail to clean out, use a metal dentist's pick and a small wire brush.