Steve's blog

BrooklynRowHouse Site Redesign

2008-11-17T11:17:56-05:00

Working on your house blog is a lot like working on your house. You get a microscopic obsession with details like a hairline crack in your newly painted wall and a lockset that's a little too sloppy. And, of course, you know where all the "hacks" you made are and they'll bug you for years, or at least until early Alzheimers kicks in.

Same deal with BrooklynRowHouse. At the top of the list was cleaning up the menu clutter and upgrading the theme to make it compatible with Drupal Version 6. The menus are still a bit heavy, especially with the Administrator role, but it's a lot cleaner now. And I finally have a WYSIWYG editor that works (even though I generally dislike them on web sites).

I have another Drupal project nearing completion which will be of interest to house bloggers too. It's basically a Drupal module that works a lot like HouseBlogs.net. I built it as a POC for the Childrens Health Fund to aggregate child health care blogs. But I've been testing it with a few volunteer house blogs (thanks to Todd at Helpful Advice for Home Construction Improvement and Fred at One Project Closer for letting me hit on their RSS feeds).

I'll open it for more alpha testing with other volunteer houseblogs shortly. I haven't decided if I want to release it in the wild yet. If I do, I'll need to move it to an off-site server with more bandwidth than I currently have.

What lines?

2008-11-04T17:00:53-05:00

I took the dogs out for their walk this morning and decided to cruise my local polling place (the High School of Telecommunication Arts and Sciences... and, no, I don't have a clue what they teach there) to get an idea of how long my wait was gonna be. I figured it would probably be somewhere between the aggravation of the checkout line at the Hamilton Ave Home Depot and Zep reunion tickets.

I was shocked when not only didn't I see a line. I didn't see anyone even walking into the place. My neighbor across the street strolled out with her young 'un and told me that it was a ghost town inside. That really surprised me, especially because NY doesn't have early voting so it was all happening today. My buddy in Hoboken said he had to wait for over two hours this morning.

I decided to shorten up the leashes and chance it with the dogs. The polling place workers looked pretty lonely and thankful for the company. I saw three times as many people voting for the midterm elections.

Then it occurred to me. Bay Ridge is the most conservative district in Brooklyn. It's the home of the state's Conservative Party. Could it be that McCain voters saw the writing on the wall for NY State, where Obama has been leading him by as much 70% in some polls, and decided "why bother?"

I make no bones about who I'm supporting this election. After all, my older brother and sister-in-law are in a GOTV commercial in the midwest for Obama. But, come on, you've still got to turn out for your candidate. He's been on a 20-month road trip and you can't spend a few minutes to at least let him know you appreciate the effort? We're trying to have a democracy here, folks.

Cops and Robbers

2008-10-27T02:30:53-04:00

So we're experiencing a sudden crime wave in my peaceful 'hood. Nobody's said WHY this is happening but according to The Brooklyn Paper:

During a 28-day period starting on Sept. 5, crooks broke into 39 residences in Bay Ridge — an increase of more than 60 percent compared to the same four-week periods in 2007 and 2006, when there were 24 and 21 burglaries respectively.

Yikes! But I can't say I didn't see this coming. A few months ago, a junkie broke into a house a few blocks from here. Even though the place had central station, it was a vigilant neighbor who called 911 and the burglar was captured. This is a photo of his actual arrest, courtesy of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle.

A few months before that, the neighborhood went into an almost military lockdown when NYPD had a home invader trapped somewhere inside an eight block perimeter. The lightning quick and coordinated police response numbering at least 200 uniforms was really, truly impressive. A bit scary actually because I didn't know what they were looking for. They even had the Coast Guard Police manning some road blocks. The perp was caught by an "undercover canine unit". (What's that... a Rottweiler dressed like a poodle?)

This is where NYPD really shines: in these special ops. Maybe it's one of the benefits of having 38,000 cops that they can conduct these shock & awe responses. I lived on Manhattan's Lower East Side, a neighborhood that was a drug and crime free-fire zone for decades, when Pressure Point cops moved in and, within a few months, made it safe for market-value apartment development. Today, you'd never know that Avenues A, B and C used to mean "Always Be Carrying".

The problem is getting NYPD motivated to handle day-to-day police work.

Because I usually work late, I take the dogs out for a long last walk every night between 1am and 2am. As the 3rd Avenue club scene expands closer to my neighborhood, I've been seeing a gradual uptick in seedy characters in the area.

Crooks are like street vendors. They go where the money is. In this case though, it's hookers, drug dealers and muggers specializing in drunks. In fact, for months a hooker who calls herself Georgette (literally every George I know is more appealing) has greeted me each night as I make the turn onto 3rd Avenue: "Good evening, dogs. Hello, dog daddy." I'd like to say she's innocuous but I also know that she's dealing crack as well.

I see her every night but one thing I never see is a cop. It's so bad that you can safely park your car at a fire hydrant all night long, every night, and never get a ticket. It's outrageous insofar as you can actually see the 68th Precinct house from there, which is also the headquarters for Brooklyn South, ESU (SWAT), Narcotics, the works.

That is, until this past week.

Marty Golden, our state senator and a former NYPD cop himself, held a town meeting last week to deal with public outrage over the crime problem and put the Deputy Inspector who runs our precinct over the coals. All of a sudden, cops are everywhere.

A few nights ago, I encountered a dozen cops searching a backyard a block from here. The night before that they were searching an alley with K9. I've even been stopped and questioned. The cop wanted to know if I'd seen anything suspicious, which made me suspicious that he was actually checking out me. So I volunteered my driver's license. Maybe he thought Jack and Auggie were the Doberman Gang.

I'm taking the dogs out now. I'll report back in a bit....

Well, I didn't see any cops but I also didn't see something else: Georgette nor any of the medicated skels who usually lounge on the benches in the pocket park on 3rd Avenue. That's a first for the year.

Looks like I missed a crackdown tonight.

Leaf Vacuums and Big Ideas

2008-10-23T00:06:52-04:00

In my relentless quest to acquire every possible tool before I leave this planet, this weekend I picked up a leaf vacuum.

Thanks to my neighbor's regrettable decision to plant a bunch of poplars in his yard, all of which grew to over 60 feet in a few short years, my back yard maintenance has increased several-fold, especially this time of year. If you have any experience with poplars you know that they shed like sheepdogs. It was all the excuse I needed to invest in a new electric tool. No more acoustic brooms for me!

Lowes carried Black & Decker, Toro and Troy-Bilt. They were all 12 amps, all fairly heavy, all injection molded plastic and they're probably all made in the same Chinese factory. So I looked for details on the box to close the sale. The B&D had a "metal impeller". I wasn't sure what difference that made, but it was ten bucks more than the others so it had to be better, right?

I wanted to write a review of the Black & Decker but it died on me five minutes into its maiden voyage. The motor started making a clicking noise, slowed down, started smoking... I took that as a clue.

I've never had much luck with Black & Decker, from the toaster oven that caught fire to the power screwdriver than came apart in my hand. Okay, their stuff is pure crap. I mostly acquire B&D junk only by way of well-meaning gift givers. Folks, I have no product advertisers here for a reason.

Lowes took the return in good spirit. The nice lady at the return desk said, "Another one, huh?" I thought she was asking if I wanted to replace it, which I didn't. Instead, without looking up she pointed at the wall where there were two more expired B&D leaf vacs.

Maybe this was a pretty useful product review after all.

Undeterred, I took the cash from the return and bought the Toro.

The Toro was a bit easier to assemble and it managed to get through its first fifteen minutes of life without grenading. But, man, it was one of the most un-bloody-comfortable tools I've ever used. And I thought power post hole augers were torture. I just couldn't get the balance of the thing. My back and arms were so strained from wrestling with this tool that my hands were literally shaking.

In its defense, it did a good job. But, you know, it only has a PLASTIC impeller so I had to be extra careful about what it sucked up. The manual is very clear about that: no rocks, no pine cones, no twigs... no twigs?! When poplars shed they also shed lots of twigs. What am I supposed to do? Get on my hands and knees and sort through piles of leaves looking for lethal twigs before vacuuming?

Looks like the Toro was a bust as well.

You know what actually works pretty well? I've used it for the past three years to clean up the back yard so I know it's up to the task: my old Shop Vac. There are only two problems. One is that the nozzle tends to clog. The other is that the unmulched leaves fill up that five-gallon container quickly.

That set my inventive mind to work. Suppose there was a mulcher attachment for the Shop Vac? Basically, it would be a hose replacement. You'd have a little motor-powered mulcher that slides into the standard 2-1/2" diameter intake. At the other end would be a twelve foot 4" diameter hose.

That would be perfect! Of course it would have a METAL impeller.

My brother had ten US patents by the time he was my age. I need to get busy.

The Return of Tony Manero

2008-10-21T21:55:47-04:00

You forty and fifty-somethings will undoubtedly remember the 1977 anthemic film about the disco era, Saturday Night Fever. What you may not know is that it put my neighborhood on the map. "Fever" was about the disco days and the lives of several blue collar kids in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn.

I love talking with my neighbors about those days. They say the movie was an accurate depiction of what life was like here, at least for the disco heads. In 1977, I was a hardcore jazz poser at Berklee College of Music in Boston so I missed it all, geographically and socially.

The disco portrayed in the movie, 2001 Odyssey, really existed and was only a few blocks from here. In fact, it didn't shut down until 2005, although by then it had become a seedy gay bar. But it still had that famous lighted dance floor.

After "Fever", Bay Ridge's glory as a nightlife destination gradually disappeared. Brooklyners began migrating to trendy gentrifying Manhattan neighborhoods for their late night fun at clubs like The World, Infinity, Kamikaze, Tunnel, Limelight, Danceteria and music venues like CBGBs, Mudd Club and The Ritz. I lived in the center of that though. We referred to those people (now, people like me) as "the bridge and tunnel crowd".

Meanwhile Bay Ridge's night life returned to a strip of neighborhood bars and restaurants again. Rents dropped, restaurants closed. The future looked bleak for the party hearty.

But about two years ago, things began to wake up along the Third Ave strip. Nobody's sure why but more bars started opening -- trendy, Manhattan-looking places with names like Blue Zoo and Cafe Remy. Now the street's jumping again with 21st century, manscaped Tony Maneros and their tweezed eyebrows and coiffed razor cuts. And, unfortunately, with them has also come that old Saturday Night Fever idiocy: drunk kids, street fights, DUI accidents, pointless vandalism and even more pointless violence.

A few weeks ago, a drunk kid who was about a foot shorter and sixty pounds lighter than me stumbled up and slurred, "You think your fuckin dogs gonna save you, sucker?" I looked at him for a few seconds and said something like, "Are you stupid, crazy or on 'ludes, jackass?" Auggie, who also saw no credible threat from this skel but who hates drunks, gave him a low growl and a show of teeth. A dim glow of recognition of the predicament he'd put himself into suddenly registered on his flushed face. He turned, tripped and nearly impaled himself on a wrought-iron garden fence. His buddy ran across the street to hustle him away.

Truly pathetic. I should have given him directions to the Verrazano Bridge, where he could test his testosterone the "Fever" way.

As one of my favorite neighborhood bloggers, Bay Ridge Rover, recently wrote:

Let's face it, at least over the summer, Bay Ridge has ostensibly become the poor-man's Belmar - predominantly attracting steroid infused Dyker Heights/Bensonhurst wanna-be meatheads, who's greatest single achievement was selling grandma's house on 16th avenue to finance a Maserati, so they can showboat in front of a crap corner bar.

There's a video blogger in Bay Ridge, "Bay Rizz, the mayor of Bay Ridge", who shot a funny piece on the new Third Avenue bar scene.

The Death of the CFL

2008-10-20T23:31:56-04:00

I'm really getting fed up with the false lifetime claims of Compact Fluorescent Lighting manufacturers. On average, I've been seeing these bulbs fail at half their published life spans. Maybe we need a class action suit to force companies to publish the MTBF (Mean Time Between Failure) hours for these bulbs in the real world.

The issue isn't with fluorescent technology. In my last home, an industrial loft that was previously a paper bag factory, I took possession of two dozen large fluorescent ceiling fixtures. I could tell from the dust on those bulbs that they were already years old. Nevertheless, every single one of them was still doing its job three years later when I replaced them with ceiling floods. They KNOW how to build a long-life CFL.

The issue is with the crap ballasts and starters in these things. Among the worst brands are big box no-names and Phillips. I only buy Westinghouse and Sylvania now, but the jury's still out on them too.

However, yesterday I saw the future and it's coming a lot quicker than I'd thought: the LED. If there's any justice in the universe, the 8000 hour CFL you buy today will be a dinosaur when it's supposed to expire.

Or maybe it will.

Yesterday, I went to Lowes to replace an LED lighting strip that had blown out a year after I bought it... about 49,000 hours shy of its 50,000 hour lifetime claim. The problem was an exploded 10 uF 50V capacitor in the circuitry, not the LED. Sound familiar? Once again, the bulb was willing but the electronics were weak.

I bought these LED strips for accent lighting on a tall shelf in the bathroom. I didn't mind the characteristically dim and bluish light because it was what I wanted for that shelf. It's supposed to be night lighting.

Nevertheless, I was angry at lighting manufacturers for leveraging the "green" argument only to suck the green out of our wallets with false reliability claims. As I was sorting through Lowes' disheveled rack of lighting strips I was ranting to another shopper about it and not paying much attention to what I was actually buying.

As Karen and I were heading back in the car she asked to see my receipt. The bill seemed a bit high but I'd bought a lot of stuff, including a Black and Decker leaf vacuum, which started making noise and smoking ten minutes into its first use this morning... sheesh, I can't catch a break. The LED strip cost $59, or about double the one I was replacing. And it only had five LEDs versus the twenty or so in the other strip.

I decided to return it but was curious what made this twice as good as the one I had. When I turned it on I was unprepared for how bright and white the light was. If I had another one of these strips I could almost get rid of the ceiling lighting in the bathroom altogether. It was like 60 watts of incandescent lighting drawing all of 5 watts.

What a difference a year's made in consumer LED technology.

But it seems like we're paying drastically more for lighting in order to save a little on the power bill but which is costing us far more in the long run because many of these lighting alternatives don't practically outlive a standard incandescent light bulb by a heckuva lot.

Found my orginal C of O!

2008-10-14T00:46:58-04:00

NYC didn't start requiring habitable buildings to have a Certificate of Occupancy (CO) until 1938. Since my house was built in 1906... actually the city recently re-evaluated its records and moved this back to 1901 so I guess I've gotta change my banner here... it was very possible it didn't have a CO.

Even though NYC law requires either a valid CO certificate or a "Letter of No Objection" from the Dept of Buildings to be submitted at closing, I never saw one. A housing court judge was quoted as saying, "it is more likely that you will see a yeti crossing the West Shore Expressway wearing a Mets hat than a final certificate of occupancy at a closing."

That's why I was semi-thrilled to find the original CO for this place. I wasn't expecting to find it in the city archives but there it is. Apparently, even though COs weren't mandated at the time, if you did any work to a building which required a building permit, your CO came with the successful inspection report.

I redacted the address for privacy reasons but it's kinda cool to see my house getting its recognition so many years before I was even born.

It answers a question I've had for years: when was my garage built? The answer: it was completed 12/5/1935. So much for the snotty cow on another Brooklyn web site who tried to alibi her recently busted illegal driveway by claiming that my garage was almost certainly a bandit job too. There's my permit, darling.

So how DO you sell a home in this environment?

2008-10-10T17:15:00-04:00

Especially an expensive luxury condo that hasn't been built yet? Especially when it's NYC and the building isn't located in Manhattan or fashionable downtown Brooklyn? Especially when the land under it used to be one of the most polluted areas in the city?

The media's fascination with Sarah Palin continues. My friend saw this from the ferry a couple of days ago. It's a new building being constructed in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

Developer Jeff Levine of Douglaston Development Corp. hung a seven-story banner from a tower under construction in Brooklyn's Williamsburg area before the Vice Presidential debate. The idea was by media branding expert, Glenn Allen Zagore.

PS: much like Russia, the only way you could see Wall Street from Williamsburg is if you tethered a balloon to the ground. Of course, with a long enough rope you could probably see Russia from Williamsburg too.

What's a community anyway?

2008-10-03T18:08:03-04:00

I spent last weekend building a blog for our block. I'll post more about this later, and I'd like to get some opinions about it, especially as regards making it more useful. First, a little personal history.

For as long as I've been into computers I've been into virtual communities, particularly how computers can be leveraged to enhance real lives. I got sucked into Usenet and dial-up BBSes in the early 1980s. I was one of the builders of NYC's first multiuser BBS, the Ailanthus Tree in 1984. In 1985, I ported the A-Tree to MS-DOS and launched Magpie. I ported it to Unix in 1986 and released it Shareware, where it became one of the top three Unix BBSes though the 1990s.

Magpie made a sort of name for itself during the Bosnian crisis with Magpie sysop, Sinisa Novasel, as an information conduit between people suddenly stranded in Zagreb and their expatriated families and the Red Cross. Before the web, Magpie was used in Philadelphia for the first online AIDS information system. It was later adopted by six of the ten largest school systems in the US, including NYC's NYCENET.

My personal web site was launched in 1993. The first thing I did with it is organize NYC Motorcyclists as a cyber club. Then I ran mailing lists for bass players, Triumph and women motorcycle owners, a local sushi club, and several others, most of which are still going strong over a decade later.

My current job is designing and building software to network medically-underserved families with physicians and hospitals for the Children's Health Fund.

Where am I going with this?

This is a long way of saying that I take electronic community building seriously as a Force for Good. So it really torques me when I see relative newbies to this medium piss on that ethic for no other reason than because they can.

The post previous to this one is an announcement for a pet adoptathon being held tomorrow in Bay Ridge. Mary Jo Tobin, who is one of Brooklyn Paper's "100 Unsung Heroes of Brooklyn", has been sponsoring these adoptathons for years. To date, she's adopted out over a thousand homeless animals, including my Newfoundland, Jack. She sent me the flyer and asked me to help circulate it. I was happy to post it on the three sites I run. I also uploaded it to a few other community sites and lists.

This cuts to the heart of what a community site is supposed to do: support the community, especially others who are giving of their time to do admirable work. Many of those animals tomorrow will be on borrowed time. If they're not adopted they'll be taken back to ACC and euthanized tomorrow night. So, yes, I consider this a very worthwhile event to promote, even within the narrower context of a homeowner site. You'd have to be a completely self-involved twit not to think so.

Brownstoner.com apparently doesn't agree. A couple of hours after I posted the same notice on Brownstoner, "Mr Brownstoner" deleted it. Why? Because it hadn't been submitted in advance to be "included in one of the two weekly listings posts run on the home page" (sic).

Never mind that these instructions aren't published anywhere on Brownstoner. So, you know, fuck the animals. Let 'em get the needle.

How well does Brownstoner enforce its strict posting policies? One can usually log into its forum and find two-day old spam promoting everything from Beijing timeshares to sleazy local locksmiths to unlicensed general contractors. And endless, boneheaded economic blustering from self-important misanthropes ("Some day this war is gonna end", whatever the hell that's supposed to mean). And pleas from dainty Slope townhousers for workers to clean their gutters or fix a broken tile.

But saving animals' lives and networking a needy pet under a death sentence with a willing home owner? Not on Mr. Brownstoner's radar.

Pet Adoption This Saturday

2008-10-01T15:32:44-04:00

Mary Jo has another one this weekend, folks! Spread the word.

Winter's coming. Time to get these homeless dogs and cats off the cold streets and into warm, loving homes.

This adoption endorsed by Jack, Belvedere and Patches.

NYC's Most Expensive House

2008-09-26T01:44:22-04:00

I don't know which is more remarkable: the price tag or the appreciation.

The 18,500-square-foot, 103-year-old Henry T. Sloane Mansion at 18 East 68th Street just went on sale for $64 million, the most expensive officially listed house ever in New York. I thought that rocker, Lenny Kravitz, had set the unbeatable bar a couple of years ago when he paid a reported $40 million for the Duke-Semans mansion on Fifth Avenue. But since then there have been several townhouse sales in the $50 mil range. Not surprisingly, many of them are owned by ~~weasels~~ financiers, probably paid for by fat Christmas bonuses.

Since none of us will probably ever set foot in a house this expensive, let's take a virtual tour of this joint.

The outside is nice. Okay, it's a mansion. Maybe it's not the largest or most impressive crib in the neighborhood but, hey? No garage? Where do you store the garbage cans? And for $64 mil I want a second floor deck overlooking the peasants so I can pose like Mussolini. Something maintenance-free, maybe Trex. A few potted plants. Some string lights. Yeah.

The limestone could use a good cleaning. For this scratch, don't you think the sellers could invest in a little curb appeal?

The entryway is impressive. I can see coming home from Abercrombie & Fitch to a roaring fire in that hearth.

But that marble floor... so Home Depot. For $64 mil I want a big compass rose or a coat of arms medallion or something.

This must have been the sitting room. Or maybe the ballroom. It would make a great media room, but where do you put the big screen TV?

Now, THIS is nice. Very homey, beautiful woodwork, another firepla... wait! Is that a window air conditioner?? For this cheese, the place doesn't have central air?!

No wonder I can't find any pictures of the kitchen. I bet there's not even a Subzero in there.

That's what $64 million buys you in New York City, folks. Or at least it does in 2008. Funny thing is, Sloan Mansion sold in 2003 for "just" $7.6 million. That's right. It appreciated by $56 million in just five years. Actually, it sold for $20 million just last year. Do the math on that!

When they talk about the disappearing middle class and how we're becoming a nation of poor working class slobs and the obscenely rich, this place proves the point.

Synchronicity, flashbacks and old photos

2008-09-21T17:37:56-04:00

Yesterday was one of those strange "theme" days we all experience from time to time. It began with my neighbor, Betsy, and me taking a trip to an art store on 3rd Ave to get some old Brooklyn photos framed that I'd collected over the past year.

The centerpiece was something I'd bought from shorpy.com, which I'd discovered on the recommendation of a forum regular on Old House Web. It's a shot of a freezing cold, February day in Brooklyn Heights circa 1908 with the Manhattan Bridge under construction in the distance. The detail on the photo was mesmerizing (click here to see what I mean).

I bought a large copy of it. My intent was to frame it myself. After all, if I can construct cabinets and stained glass, how difficult could it be? However, as I started researching the techniques online I kept seeing comments recommending a web site, http://www.customframesolutions.com/, which would build the frames for you for about the same price as stick building them. You provide the dimensions and they ship it to you in two to four business days. I priced out a nice frame, matte and foam board for around a hundred bucks. Pretty good deal.

But these photos were challenging insofar as some had borders, some had title print, and they were all subtly different sizes. I wasn't sure how to matte them. Since my intent is to have a whole wall full of old Brooklyn photos I figured it would be safer to have a professional do these and I'd just copy the framing techniques for the rest. If it cost another hundred bucks to rent the eye of an experienced professional, it was worth it.

Well, that $100 frame became a $597 frame! Holy cow! I definitely have to learn how to do framing, if only to augment my retirement income some day. In the store's defense, the artsy woman there chose a much more appropriate frame and matte for the photo and it will have real glass instead of Plexiglas so it will look much nicer. The framing for the smaller photos was much more reasonable.

Chapter Two: Later That Day

Nevertheless I came back home, still reeling from buyer's remorse, when my neighbor rang my doorbell to borrow my pressure washer. As I was standing on the sidewalk explaining to her how it worked, a nicely dressed couple, Dorothy and Alec, stopped their car and were staring at my next door neighbor's house. He rolled down his window and said, "that was my grandparents' house in the 1930s".

It sounded like this was gonna be a good story so I told them to hold on while I got Betsy (it's her house). Betsy, who is mid-40s now, was born in the place. Her grandparents bought it when they were a young couple. So these peoples' grandparents might have been the previous owners.

As it turned out, he had spent a lot of time in the house when he was a little kid in the '30s. Betsy took them on a tour of her place, much of which is still original, and you could tell he was having flashback moments as he recalled the things he used to do in the house and what things used to look like. He related lots of cool stories about the block, what it was like here during WW2, the Liberty ships jamming the harbor waiting to be loaded at the Brooklyn Army Terminal, etc.

The visit ended too soon for me. They had to leave but they promised they'd email. Tonight they sent Betsy a photo of my house from the 1930s. So very cool.

I have an old tax photo of my house from the 1940s but this one is so much better. Was that a previous owner on the steps? That's obviously the owner's Model A(?) parked in the driveway, who apparently had the same problem with the garage's low ceiling that the house still has.

Dorothy and Alec said they have more photos of the neighborhood so I hope I can persuade them to send them too. I'd love to publish them here.

But... check this... look at the railing around the deck on top of the garage when I bought the place (right). It was a low wrought iron railing I removed shortly after moving in because it was a dangerous trip hazard. I rebuilt that deck in 2001. Now, look down at the brick balustrade I replaced it with. Then look at that old photo again. Here's the kicker. I did the deck renovation before I'd seen any old photos of the house.

Weird, huh?

I love that old garage door, especially the curious glasswork but, sadly, that was long gone before I bought the place. Instead, it had a cheap fiberglass door with a broken counterweight spring. According to a neighbor, the original front door was removed in the 1970s. He was stunned when the POs replaced it with a door apparently scrounged from a dumpster dive. His assumption was that the PO sold the original door along with most of the original assets here to an architectural salvage company.

In 5 years I'll make another plan

2008-09-16T23:08:02-04:00

Want to know how out of shape you are? Paint your house. Between squatting down to cut in baseboards and torquing your body into dramatic poses while standing at the top of a ladder with a roller, you'll find out. Do it for several days and you'll have lactic acid boiling in muscles you didn't even know you had.

The colors here are a little off because of the flash but, believe me, it looks nice.

Because of my job I had to break the painting marathon of my mudroom, first floor hall, stairway and second floor hall into several evening sessions ending as late as 2:30 in the morning. It concluded this weekend.

I really and truly hate painting. Sure, it takes some technique but on my scale of interesting home renovation tasks, where building a cool hardwood cabinet is a '10' and cleaning up 300 pounds of plaster rubble that the cat peed on is a '1', painting is maybe a '3'... just slightly edging out it's close cousin, stripping paint (a '2.5').

It wasn't all pain and tedium though. I learned that XM's Deep Tracks channel saves its best music for after midnight. I was grooving so much to a Joe Bonamassa live track that I dropped the paint can while cutting in around the ceiling. To add to my troubles, as I started to climb down off the ladder the clock struck 2am. That's when I programmed my Insteon home automation controller to do a safety kill of every light in the house. The only music that seemed appropriate at that point was the Looney Tunes theme.

At least the color was right, which I can't say for my kitchen which is on its fourth pallette. It's exactly what I expected from Benjamin Moore's online Color Viewer. It's called "Beverly Hills" and I got it in a matte finish. I hope that a low luster finish wasn't a mistake for a stairway wall but I didn't want a tall, glossy wall in the stairwell. The color, which is actually pretty close to historic ocre, blends well with both the natural oak trim on the first floor and the stained oak on the second as well as the green and red paints in the living and dining rooms.

The only problem with the color is that I have daylight CFLs inside a yellow stained glass hanging lamp. Yellow on yellow kinda makes you feel like you've got jaundice. Well, I've been looking for an excuse to replace that hallway light.

My nemesis on this project was this stairwell. It's sixteen feet from the steps to that (soon to be replaced) skylight. I may have a shop full of some bizarre tools but one thing I lack is a ladder that expands this tall. I had to borrow a very heavy, articulating ladder from a neighbor. It was like unfolding a 70 pound Swiss Army knife. Sorry, gimme a plain ol' telescopic ladder any day.

With all the fresh paint, the walls suddenly look very naked. I don't have many wall decorations but my intent is to fill them up with old Brooklyn photos. To that end, I've already acquired a half dozen great old photos from sites like Shorpy and the NY Public Library. I just need to get them framed, which I haven't dismissed as a DIY project.

With this paint on, it ticks off the last item in the original renovation plan (which was a Five Year Plan but, you know, scope creep). So why aren't the champagne corks popping? Because it's sorta like Bush's "Mission Accomplished" -- just a meaningless milestone. The war's far from over. I'm still about three years-plus away from actually being done, and that's only if I don't think of something else to do between now and then. Next up is the stained glass, followed by refacing the stairs. Then I've got to rock the basement ceiling and stairway walls, add a banister to the basement stairs I built, refinish the first floor, rebuild the outside entry, lay ceramic tile on the basement floor... yup, another Five Year Plan coming up.

The view from BrooklynRowHouse HQ tonight

2008-09-11T00:37:26-04:00

I shot this from my office window a few minutes ago.

Tomorrow, of course, is the seventh anniversary of the Sept 11 attacks. Seven years ago tonight, I saw two tall, bright buildings standing there. They were my night light.

Tomorrow, the TV will be full of somber ceremonies and remembrances of the 2,998 people killed and the 6,291 injured by sick fanatics. Barack Obama and John McCain are both scheduled to be here for the ceremonies. Flag pins will be worn, anthems will be sung and much patriotic hay will be made. It will continue over the next couple of months.

I was here that day and it didn't strike me then, or now, as a patriotic moment in American history but a day when something terrible happened to a lot of innocent people. It's a bit presumptive to apply "patriotism" to this tragedy when, if nothing else, the victims represented over 30 nations, including Iran, Egypt and Yemen.

After seven years of investigations and congressional hearings, one thing is abundantly clear to me. This tragedy very possibly wouldn't have happened if those who were constitutionally charged with making sure it didn't happen hadn't utterly failed in their jobs -- before, during and since. Regardless, some of them have cynically leveraged that tragedy for political self-promotion and used every cheap, sentimental device in the book to misdirect the public away from their delinquency of duty in the days leading up to Sept 11.

One of those failures was made by a former NYC mayor who has practically trademarked "9/11" for his personal glorification. Fact is, if he hadn't overruled his security experts and ordered NYC's Emergency Management Center moved to the #1 terrorist target in the world he wouldn't have been wandering the rubble-strewn streets of lower Manhattan with his staff looking for something to do while firefighters, EMS and police couldn't communicate under a central command.

Don't let 9/11 become a shallow marketing opportunity for politicians to wrap themselves in patriotism and shill themselves as national security experts. 9/11 was the systematic failure of politicians to heed the many early warnings of Sept 11, and their neglect of taking action to try to prevent it, and for making the wrong decisions for the wrong reasons, and for committing us to a pointless war under knowingly false pretenses, and for their failure to even bring the criminals responsible for this tragedy to justice.

All I want to hear from them now is an apology. The first one who does it is the first one I'll consider (possibly) unlikely to make the same mistakes again.

Construction Gibberish

2008-09-09T12:08:31-04:00

It's not complicated enough that a novice DIYer has to learn the skills, tools, techniques and best practices for what is otherwise a simple job in the hands of the All Knowing. He also has to learn the Babylonian nomenclature for the stuff he needs to do it. For instance, last year I was derailed for two days trying to find the name for a particular type of moulding I needed for the wainscot in my master bedroom renovation.

I had the same problem trying to find the rooftop vent "thingie" for my bathroom fan. The not-too-bright helper for the GC I'd hired to rough-in my upstairs bathroom a few years ago had installed the wrong kind. It's not called a "fan vent". It's called an "exhaust roof cap". It took me an hour in Google just to find the correct name for it.

Igor may have known what it was called but not what it was for. It's intended for a pitched roof. I have a flat roof. As a result, this was the source of three years of water leaks which were damaging my pristine walls and kept me scratchin' and fixin' until I sussed out what the problem was. After finding the product (a Broan #636 roof cap) it took three seconds with the literature to find "DO NOT INSTALL ON A FLAT ROOF".

On a pitched roof, the exhaust port (on the right) is oriented "downhill" (I'm sure there's a construction term reserved for that). What happens on a flat roof is that any storm force wind blowing into that port will pop open the lightweight damper and the rain will pour in.
What I needed was one of those vents that looks like a mushroom. You know what I mean. Of course it's not called a "mushroom vent". It's got its own special ConstructionSpeak nomenclature. It's called a "flat roof jack". It took me longer to find the name so I could buy one than it would have taken me to install it.

While waiting for it to be delivered, Brooklyn is once again being hammered by a storm this morning. An hour ago, I climbed up on the roof and stuffed three wadded-up plastic garbage bags into that port. That should, I hope, stop the leak.

In the meantime, I'm selecting paint colors for the entry and hallways.

I bought several 2oz Benjamin Moore color samples and painted them on the wall for comparison. I've decided on a gold-ish color to blend in with the woodwork and also not clash with the deep red and green of the dining and living rooms respectively (not to mention the pumpkin bronze of the kitchen). It's not an exciting color but with all the strong colors I used here I've got to be careful about having a Barnum & Bailey house.

But none of these colors do it for me. They're either too dark, too yellow or too brown. To the rescue, Benjamin Moore's online Color Viewer. A couple of the color samples interested me (#1 and #3 from the right) but I wanted to see them in a paler hue.

I entered their names, picked a sample photo and found the color I want: Lion Heart. I've been burned by online colors before (see the atrocious tub color in my bathroom reno) so I'll get a quart of this first and make sure it works.

For an extra ten bucks, I could have this tool use my own photos. What a great online resource!