I've been asked what's my favorite power tool in the house. It's not my Delta table saw nor my router table. It's my central vacuum. In terms of pure usefulness, my central vac has done more work on the house and saved me more time here than even my cordless drills.
I remember when my gadget freak of an uncle installed one in his home when I was a little kid. I was always fascinated by it and pestered my folks to get one. But I think my dad envisioned his weekends being spent cleaning marbles and cat food out of the pipes. Shortly after I got this place I began researching central vac options and settled on the Vacuflo. It's proved to be rock-solid reliable for the eight years I've had it, and I've put it through more punishment than its designers probably ever intended.
Besides keeping my house clean, which believe me is no small feat with very active, long-haired animals and a permanent cloud of sawdust floating in the air, the Vacuflo also functions as the dust collector in my shop. On a typical shop day it consumes as much as ten gallons of sawdust and wood splinters from my table saw, router table, planer and sanders. After I told the local Vacuflo rep about my plan, he was so interested in learning if it would actually work that he sent me some spare hoses and couplings to jury rig connections to my tools. ]]>
I've been asked what's my favorite power tool in the house. It's not my Delta table saw nor my router table. It's my central vacuum. In terms of pure usefulness, my central vac has done more work on the house and saved me more time here than even my cordless drills.
I remember when my gadget freak of an uncle installed one in his home when I was a little kid. I was always fascinated by it and pestered my folks to get one. But I think my dad envisioned his weekends being spent cleaning marbles and cat food out of the pipes. Shortly after I got this place I began researching central vac options and settled on the Vacuflo. It's proved to be rock-solid reliable for the eight years I've had it, and I've put it through more punishment than its designers probably ever intended.
Besides keeping my house clean, which believe me is no small feat with very active, long-haired animals and a permanent cloud of sawdust floating in the air, the Vacuflo also functions as the dust collector in my shop. On a typical shop day it consumes as much as ten gallons of sawdust and wood splinters from my table saw, router table, planer and sanders. After I told the local Vacuflo rep about my plan, he was so interested in learning if it would actually work that he sent me some spare hoses and couplings to jury rig connections to my tools.
It works. It doesn't have the CFM of a professional dust collection system but it also doesn't occupy several square feet of valuable shop floor space either nor does it scream like a banshee. It's also never clogged on me, as the wankers on rec.woodworking told me it surely would. Central vac ports are designed to catch things before they get wedged in a pipe inside the wall.
Installation was actually pretty simple, taking just two days to complete. Of course, it meant knocking some holes in the walls but since the walls were coming out anyway that was a small matter.
Basically, it's a lot like gluing together PVC plumbing. Unlike rigid PVC, central vac pipe has a little flex to it, which lets it bend around small obstructions. It's also a lot lighter. So long as you know which way gravity is pulling, it's just application of common sense: keep your runs as straight as possible, don't make the vac have to suck anything "up", keep your T-Y's pointing towards the power unit.
The job is less daunting when you realize that most floors will probably only need one outlet. A 30 foot vacuum hose covers a lot of area. If you remember Geometry 101 and the formula for determining the area of a circle, Pi*r*r, a 30 foot hose can cover 2800 square feet. Of course, with walls and obstructions it's not as simple as that. Nevertheless, my floors are 1000s/f and I only need one port on each floor and there's still enough play in the hose to vacuum my back deck, front stoop and porch.
Another major advantage of a central vac, or at least the cyclonic action power units like Vacuflo's, is that the real fine dust that people buy expensive HEPA portable vacs for isn't an issue. The powdery dust all gets blown outdoors. Anything bigger than a fine dust particle gets caught in the unit's large bucket, which probably won't need emptying for months (unless you live in my house).
In the interest of fair disclosure, that leads to a central vac's only negative. If you were to vacuum up a pound of dry flour, your back yard might wind up looking like the set from "The Polar Express". After ripping down some old plaster here, I used the vac to suck up 100+ years of fine, gray spooge that had settled on the window headers. When I looked out the window, I thought I had a basement fire. The billowing gray dust cloud freaked me out. But this is a very unusual situation. Most people wouldn't be as careless as me.
Well, one more negative. That outside exhaust port can be noisy, sounding a bit like a small jet engine. I helped my neighbor three houses away install the same vac in his house and I always know when his house cleaner is working.
You probably don't want to be doing any midnight spring cleaning.
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The next level up in sophistication is how you build recording studios. Every room is a box within a box. There's no structurally born noise between these two shells because the inside box is built on top of a grid of neoprene vibration absorbers, specially selected for a weight range. These burn out structural energy mechanically.
This is a vibration isolator commonly used to decouple a floating floor from the outer shell.
Pretty slick, eh? Why didn't I think of doing that? I was blown away by how he got the aspect of the glass correct but he's an art director for a television station so he probably spends his whole day in Photoshop blurring out license plates and obscuring the faces of mob witnesses. That picture sold me. That was the design.
Here was my considerably less skillful rendering of the same design, different colors. I think the original colors work best with the cabinet but these work best in context with the room they'll be living in. Or maybe I'm full of shit. Incidentally, the white glass isn't white. It's opaque clear glass. That's just how it renders in GlassEye.
Talk about it the Stained Glass Forum.
This is a home renovation blog so I try to keep personal stuff, especially gloomy stuff, to a minimum. But if you've scanned the Photo Diary here, you'll find lots of shots of Chopper. He was a big personality in this renovation from Day One. He's the one who discovered the termite infestation here before my basement stairs collapsed. His relentless meowing clued me into a potentially devastating trash can fire in the shop. When I took a progress picture of some aspect of the renovation, Chopper would invariably jump into the shot as if he thought he deserved some credit for it. As one lady friend wrote me today, "Chopper was always a part of my rituals when I visited. He seemed to be a focal point in your life." It's true. He was to some extent my alter ego, my straight man, and my sidekick whatever I was doing: ripping plywood, hammering masonry, banging on pipes, whatever. He was fearless. If I was on a ladder working on a ceiling box, Chopper would climb up behind me, jump up on my shoulders and lick my cheek with his 30 grit tongue. I've had cats since I was born but never one like Chopper.
When I saw the yellow signs pop up all over the street I thought it was going to be yet another annoying film shoot. Over the past couple of years Brooklyn has gotten to be a hot location with Hollywood.
Down went the orange cones that evening and in came the tow trucks at 8am on the dot. Anyone unlucky enough to have missed seeing those signs planted the day before was probably going to spend the next couple of hours hunting for his car. DOT tow trucks haul them off to the first legal parking space they can find, sometimes several blocks away.
The show begins and it was like a precision armored assault. There was a method to what looked like mechanical chaos. Jackhammers and specialized vehicles began prep work for the big beast waiting at the bottom of the street.
This was one of those bizarre machines. It has a lethal looking drum with tungsten teeth sticking out its side. Its job is to rip up the pavement around objects like steel gratings and manhole covers that would damage the larger pavement shredder. The driver was obviously no rookie by the way he flew around this manhole. It looked like he was doing a donut.
A few minutes later, this hulking machine showed up looking like a cross between a tank and a locomotive. This is the pavement shredder. It rips through an eight foot wide path of asphalt and concrete, spitting the remains into a dump truck.
Other machinery trails behind the shredder, mostly scooping up loose asphalt, breaking up any chunks too large to get tossed in the truck and laying down temporary asphalt fill around any deep holes. That's because the street needs to be reopened for traffic ASAP.
Three weeks later, the signs went up again and a new set of strange machines arrived. I was awakened at 6:45am by a bullhorn warning that any cars left on the block were being towed in fifteen minutes. By 7:05am, about a half dozen forgotten cars had disappeared. Then the street was swept by a street cleaner on steroids. Following this was a tanker truck that sprayed parallel rows of very sticky oil on the surface.
This was followed by a crew of guys spraying some kind of release agent on the manhole covers.
The crew immediately got to work cleaning this sticky stuff off the manhole covers and curbs before it sets. The paint marks on the sidewalk tell them where those covers are buried. It's hot, smelly, back-breaking work so these guys stop about every 30 minutes for a rehydration break. Unfortunately, a couple of them must have taken a break on my front stoop because they left oily boot treadmarks on the limestone steps. It took a half hour with a citrus cleaner and a pressure washer to get that crap off.
The finale was the noisiest machine of them all, a vibrating roller. This vehicle literally shook the house. I was amazed how precise the driver was though. This monster could pulverize a cement curb on contact but he managed to compact the asphalt within a half-inch of its edge. And he did while waving to the dogs.
All done. Just one lone roller doing some final cosmetic touches to the pavement before departing. Three hours after starting, only the shiny new street and the thick smell of asphalt was left to show they were even there. Jack and Auggie christened it just before the street was reopened to traffic.
I'm beginning to think that stained glass in general is too heavy for this cabinet. I considered using cane instead except my cat would make short work of that. Trixie hops up on the window sill, opens the sock drawer and sleeps in there. Giving her a climbing wall would be a mistake.
I've mentioned my lovely and lively neighbor, Betsy, a bunch of places in my blog. She and I are always coordinating on house reno projects. For instance, we designed and built the back fences and designed our new front stoops. I built her a planter stand; she made me macramé curtains for the guest room. She feeds me at least once a week; I decorated her cabana with every cheesy neon and hanging light I could find. We did stained glass class together. Betsy has been a great resource for Brooklyn Row House so I figured it was time to show her pic. Betsy is the queen of B Court, doing business from her cabana, B52: The Rock Lobster.
Breezy is a blue collar family scene and the regulars wouldn't have it any other way. Lots of cops, firefighters, bus drivers, building contractors and small business owners. Lots of kids, teens and grandparents too.
I have to send a shout-out to Kathy, one of Betsy's cabana neighbors who I learned is also a BrooklyRowHouse fan. She's on the left (toasting a glass of my white sangria). It's always nice to know that one or two people actually read this crap. Hi Kathy!
Actually, the white sangria this year was made by Doc Karen. I think she's finally gotten the knack of it. She's a surgeon so she's a lot better at chopping up the fruit than me too. Karen's the designated driver at the Breezy parties.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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