Operation: Pissing In The Wind, Part 1.

I spent all the free time I had this weekend kneeling in the ice room beneath the office building kneewalls for insulation. The idea is to add R-14 along the exposed sections of outside wall in an attempt to retain as much heat as possible, while keeping costs as low as possible.

Firstly, I had to seal up the lousy masonry with hydraulic cement, making sure everything is air and water-tight. Hydraulic cement is interesting stuff; it hardens in minutes, so it's best to apply with nothing more than gloves. Imagine mixing small batches of oatmeal and then smearing it all over the wall before it turns to stone.
Once that was done, I started constructing the frames. For a grand total of around $60, I got two 12' lengths of wall completed this afternoon, with two more left to do.

Additionally, because it seems to be the only window in the whole house with a correctly sized, in-stock premade replacement, I ripped the ancient, original hopper window out and installed a new one. I've been paranoid about this particular window since we moved in, because it's semi-visible from the road and looked about as secure as a convertible with the top down. For $120, we got a vinyl dual-pane slider with a low U rating that fit almost perfectly. I find that these projects get easier and quicker as I do them; this one took about two hours minus a trip for pressure-treated lumber. Eventually, I'll order three more for the rear and replace them as well.

After the basement section is done, I'm most likely going to have to crawl up into the attic above the porch ceiling and add another layer there as well. I'm really looking forward to that.

Posted on November 2, 2008 8:55 PM | link to this entry | comments (1)

Creeping Toward The Finish Line

After two days of all-out work, I've got the porch very close to completion. The baseboards, toe molding, and finish molding are all in and painted. Network drops are wired and ready. Jen picked out a beautiful Pratt-Lambert light gray for the walls, which keeps the room light, neutral, and accents the bright white woodwork. The only things that remain are the drywall above the door to the bathroom, which needs to be primed and painted, and areas around the switchplates which need to be sanded, primed and painted.

There is a little touch-up to be done with the color here and there, but I'll wait until the other stuff is ready to go.

Posted on September 14, 2008 9:15 PM | link to this entry | comments (5)

Get That Off My Lawn

The other day, I was hanging the light fixture in the nursery, a room which affords a beautiful view of the street in front of our house. Up on a ladder, I was attempting to untangle a bunch of ancient fabric-covered wires without stripping too much of the insulation and torching our house, when a strange sound caught my attention, and I happened to glance down at the hedge that fronts our lawn. A water bottle had just landed at the base of the hedge, and the remainder of the water was illuminated by the afternoon sunlight as it sprayed from the top and fell back to earth. The fellow who had thrown the bottle continued walking up the street past the house, oblivious.

A few things flashed through my mind at that moment, the first few of which involved violence. I imagined picking up the bottle and throwing it directly at the back of his head. I had a clear image of the bottle in my fist as it connected with his solar plexus. I could see how snugly one of our garbage cans fit his body as I brought it down over his shoulders, our household refuse mingling with his hair and staining his work shirt.

Instead, my feet landed on the floor of the room and in the low bark I learned from my father, I yelled at him to pick the bottle back up at a volume that stopped him in his tracks. He motioned the inability to hear me, and I repeated myself clearly: PICK THAT BOTTLE UP OFF MY LAWN. He peered up at the house, waved weakly at it, then said, "I'm sorry, Mister," and retrieved his bottle from the grass. I don't suppose he could see me clearly, but the voice yelling at him from the house clearly spooked the shit out of him. If he'd seen his conscience in the flesh, he may not have been so conciliatory—I'd guess he outweighed me by a hundred or so pounds—but he was the soul of contrition to the Voice Of God.

In retrospect, I don't know what made me angrier, the fact that he was littering, or the fact that it was my lawn. I personally can't stand litter, and the idea of simply throwing something out the window or on the ground as I'm walking does not compute. I suppose it's fitting, then, that I own a house on a minor thoroughfare where litter tends to be swept up by the wind and into our bushes so that I can clean it up. I'm not the tidiest of homeowners. I don't have thousands to spend on weekly landscaping, and my bushes aren't perfectly manicured. But that doesn't mean it's OK to finish half a bottle of water and toss it into my yard. What is it with people?

Posted on September 6, 2008 4:26 PM | link to this entry | comments (4)

From the Vine.

When it starts smelling like Bubblicious on our back lawn, we know it's time to harvest grapes. This year's initial pick was about 6 lbs., which Jen quickly made into jelly and canned.

Posted on August 26, 2008 10:16 AM | link to this entry | comments (1)

New Molding.

Posted on August 9, 2008 6:04 PM | link to this entry | comments (0)

Let There Be Light.

Could I be happier? No, I don't think I could be.

Posted on July 31, 2008 6:16 PM | link to this entry | comments (4)

Windows, Day One

This is what happens when you hire professionals to work on your house: shit gets done right. We are HAPPY.

Posted on July 30, 2008 3:55 PM | link to this entry | comments (2)

Potty Humor.

One of the little things that's been annoying me since we moved into this house is the general suckitude of the upstairs toilet. The whole bathroom is shite, really; the walls are uneven, the bathtub is old, the linoleum-over-tile floor is disgusting, and the sink is one of those separate-faucet deals where hot and cold come out of different spigots. Want to wash your hands with warm water? Sorry. Your choices are SCALDING or FREEZING. But the toilet has been the main offender lately. Dating back to the Korean War, it was a 5-gallon model that saw the harsher side of eight children before we ever got here. Tiny hairline cracks in the bowl refused to come clean. Stains in the porcelain (not ours) defied scrubbing and chemicals. As if that wasn't bad enough, it had a noticable instability from side to side—not the most confidence-inspiring feeling when taking care of business. Possibly the most annoying thing, though, is the fact that it didn't flush. There is nothing more embarrassing than having to stand in there with the door closed, flushing the thing four times to make sure the package has been delivered.

This past weekend I decided to use some of my hard-earned homeowner skills and replace the balky old beast with a pretty new low-consumption unit from Lowe's. I did a bunch of research (in a strange bit of serendipity, the latest issue of This Old House mentioned a Canadian-sponsored study on toilets, which I found online; there was so much exhaustive data there I pretty much gave up. Apparently Canucks have nothing better to do than chart toilet flushing power in inscrutable Excel spreadsheets and debate the merits of sponges vs. soy paste for test material) and settled on the American Standard Cadet 3, which will, apparently, flush a bucket of golf balls with 1.6 gallons of water. Sold!

Last night, I gathered up some buckets, plumber's wrenches, rags, and newspaper, and had the old toilet drained and off the floor in a half an hour. Cleaning off the flange and surrounding floor, I saw no glaring problems, and prepared the new toilet base for its maiden voyage. Settling it onto the flange, it bolted right up, and I was about to fetch the tank, when I tested it for stability. It rocked back and forth as badly as the old unit did. Bolting it as tight as I dared without breaking the porcelain, I couldn't keep it from rocking sideways—a bad omen. Wood shims on either side didn't correct the issue, which defied logic, and my stomach began to clench up as I realized what the issue was: I leaned the bowl all the way to the left and lifted it off the floor. Underneath, bolted snugly to the base of the toilet, was the brass flange, now unconnected to the lead pipe leading into the cement floor.

In a morning phone conversation with a trusted plumber, I was told the old-school way was to connect a lead junction up to the top of the iron pipe, and then a brass flange was fitted over the lead. The sides of the lead were hammered down over the brass to "connect" it, and the job was finished. Gotta love the old school, right?

So, until we can get a plumber out here to rectify the situation, my seven months' pregnant wife has to use the basement toilet, which is the aesthetic equivalent of making her pee in a prison cellblock. I've just cleaned up the toilet out on the porch and set it up for us to use in the meantime, but that solution is also substandard at best.

In the meantime, say a prayer to the porcelain god for us: Our Dear Lord John, please show mercy on us. Let the plumber fix our problem without having to tear up half the floor in our bathroom; five projects in this house is enough.

I briefly considered posting some pictures, but you really don't want to be looking at my toilet drain. Trust me.

Update 11:49AM: Plumber #2 is on the case.

Update 1:28AM: We have a working, functional, shiny new toilet. And the old gas line in the doctor's exam room is capped off and gone! LET THE POOPING COMMENCE.

Posted on June 26, 2008 10:38 AM | link to this entry | comments (0)

A Strange Visit.

Working in the backyard on Sunday morning, Jen came to me and asked if I'd seen the instrument case hidden behind the neighbor's garage that abuts our yard. I went to investigate and found a full-size cello case laying on its side in a pile of brush behind our mulch piles, not a place I'd prefer to see a stringed wooden instrument stored. Fearing someone had stashed it there for nefarious reasons, I placed it upright and we left it there for the day to see if someone came to claim it.

At dusk, I went back out and swapped it for a small note taped to the wall of the garage: "We didn't want your friend getting wet. Ring the bell at the blue house." (It was threatening to rain last night). Inside the case is a full-size student cello, made last year, in great shape save a cracked neck arch.

Something about this is very wrong; the house behind us is occupied by a single woman with no children. The garage itself is locked, but there's a canvas awning to the side where the cello could have been stored out of the weather and eyesight. And why not the back porch of the house? If a child was locked out of the house, only to come back later, why not just leave it up there? This smells fishy to me, like someone stole it and stashed it.

So what should I do if someone actually does come to claim it? My respect for stringed instruments (I played upright bass for eight years) says I shouldn't on easy on the punk who left it outside; it's going to depend on who rings the bell, I suppose. If it's a concerned parent, it's a no-brainer. If it's a nervous kid, do I call their folks? If it's a tweaker, I ask them to describe it and see how they do, but what then? Ideas?

Posted on June 23, 2008 11:18 AM | link to this entry | comments (2)

Hardwood.

This is what an hour's work with a crowbar and a David Sedaris CD will result in; much of the floor here is in great shape, which makes me wonder why the ever covered it in the first place.

Posted on June 6, 2008 10:48 AM | link to this entry | comments (3)

File Under: No Thank You.

Damn. I just got a quote from Renewal by Andersen which included custom-built new windows, installation, and warranty. The cost of one of their windows was more than all six of the off-the-shelf windows I was originally considering, and three times the amount of the windows we picked out on Tuesday. The entire bill was enough to make me dizzy.

Posted on May 30, 2008 11:59 AM | link to this entry | comments (0)

This is How We Renovate...In the Ghetto.

My original intent, when I began the front porch renovation, was to keep the costs low by using off-the-shelf materials to replace the crap I was tearing out. I'd looked at stuff at the local superstores and found inexpensive candidates, but I knew I'd have to special-order certain things (windows) because nothing in this house is standard size.

With that in mind, I've been hemming and hawing over the replacement windows for weeks now, unsure of my plans. The window openings on the porch were all framed in by drunks, so their heights all vary by as much as an inch, and the horizontal level is off by at least a half-inch. In order to figure out what I was going to do (and what shape the framing was in), I pulled all three of the front-facing jalousie windows out on Monday to see what I was dealing with. The base of the frame on the far right was in terrible shape, and I had to pull the entire thing out in order to see what I was dealing with. For a temporary fix, I cut sheets of plywood down and nailed them up until we got our new windows delivered.

Aaaaaaand, here's where things go south.

Returning to Lowe's Tuesday with my 10% off coupon, Jen and I looked at the off-the-shelf offerings, and she helped me realize how shitty they look. The mullions (crossbars on the top window) were inside the glass, which looks funny from the outside, and the entire window is covered with a screen, which is ugly. After some discussion, we got a quote for better quality replacement windows which turned out to be about three times as much as I was originally expecting—not what I was hoping for. With the coupon and a firm quote I figure it will go down to about twice my original budget, but this is still putting a major dent in our plans. I've got a couple calls in to the better window companies to see what decent replacement windows will cost; I'm not expecting miracles but I'm hoping for one. The hard part will be getting a quote for the windows minus installation fees; I'm pretty sure that's where their markup lives.

Meanwhile, eating our breakfast in the upstairs bedroom has gotten more exciting due to the looks of shock and awe of the passers-by as they crane their necks trying to figure out what happened to the front of the house.

Outside, we wrapped a couple of branches of the cherry trees so that we might be able to enjoy some of the fruit this spring. With the exception of the Year of the Locust (when plentiful, if earthy-flavored food was burrowing out of the ground all summer), the birds have cleaned out all of the ripening red cherries before we've been able to taste it. The grape arbor also got wrapped on Monday to keep the bunches protected for the season (and to keep the vines off the stairwell).

* * *

In other strange news, I had a dream last night where I was asked by Daft Punk to sit in on one of their concerts. I knew all the parts to the songs, but the "instrument" they stood me in front of was like no other I had ever seen, and made no sense. They got pissed at me when I couldn't figure out how to play it (it was like a vibraphone stood on its side, with lots of added glowing sampler buttons that made no sense), yelled at me in French, and kicked me off the stage. I was so psyched to put on a helmet and a jumpsuit and rock out, too.

Posted on May 29, 2008 10:47 AM | link to this entry | comments (0)

A Little Subterfuge.

I was all ready to drive out to the gucci Lowe's in Columbia last night to write a big fat check for nine replacement windows. I had my clipboard, I had my measuring tape, I had my wife with me and we were going to make a side trip to try out the Parsa Kabob near the store. MMMM, yummy lamb kabobs. It was at the front door, ready to leave, that I remembered something: I wanted to see if there were any coupons or discounts I might find online that could save us a few bucks.

When we first moved into the Estate here, I got a packet in the mail from Lowe's for 10% off purchases of $5,000 or more as a "welcome to the neighborhood" sort of thing. They obviously check county records each week to see who's recently purchased land and then send out a blanket mailing. After moving in, I let the coupon lapse because there wasn't anything I needed to buy that would make a 10% discount worthwhile—the house needed elbow grease more than it needed raw materials.

After a quick search online I found the moving section of their website and plugged in my spamcatcher email address; the page says 3-7 days to fulfill via postal mail or email, which is plenty of time for me to continue insulating, running wire, and cleaning the space. 10% off a thousand bucks' worth of windows is nothing to sneeze at, in my book.

Update: Yeah, bitches!

Posted on May 21, 2008 9:16 AM | link to this entry | comments (0)

The Right Tool For The Right Job.

I've found all kinds of evidence of cost cutting here at the Estate, perpetrated by contractors, handymen, journeymen and bums who may have been "going through rough patches", trading services, or simply drunk on the job. Scavenged, straightened nails, scrap lumber joined to form studs, leftover wire joined by junction boxes doubling back and forth through walls where it could reach the farthest. THis kind of thing is so common now that I've factored in the added cost of redoing everything I touch, and my SOP is to gut everything to the bones so that I can fix everything possible.

With that in mind, I had to pull a section of floor underlayment out in order to install a wall between the bathroom and the office last week. As I started levering out the fibrous board, I realized the floor tile installers were probably the only professionals ever to enter the house, because they used approximately three metric tons of ring shank nails to hold everything down. Now for a little tool edumocation: Ring shank nails are specially designed with threads along the body to go into wood and stay there, offering twice as much withdrawal resistance than an average nail of the same size. This makes them specially suited for jobs like floor underlayment, where thousands of pounding feet over the course of years on the corner of a board will eventually work the average nail loose, leaving a maddening squeak in its place.

I've had experience, too much experience, with ring shank nails. They were used elsewhere in this house but applied with a fraction of the brio evidenced here: one nail every two inches, and on sixteens (every foot and a half, following the floor joists). Using a hammer to pull them is a joke, because they're designed to go in but not to come out. The heads shrivel and wilt like flowers in August drought, leaving their sharp stems sticking defiantly out of the wood. Of course, they can be driven below the surface with a hammer and a punch, but they have little or no shear (side to side) strength, so more often than not they'll bend or twist with one good hit. And if the floor has a date with the sander, the law of averages says they're going to shred a few belts.

My Dad had an old, blackened tool in his collection I always assumed was (and used) for snipping wire, but it was only recently that I learned of its purpose. End cutting pliers have a misleading name, because their primary design is not for cutting, it's for pulling. It's a blunt, wicked-looking tool with a shallow bite and a wide, curved jaw, designed with the same efficiency as a pitbull: It grabs the shank of a nail right below the head, and does not let go.

The curved edge is a lever very close to the fulcrum, which provides more focused power than a hammer and doubles to hold the jaw closed as that little SOB comes out. If, by some chance, the nail gives way before it comes out, a squeeze on the handle will snip the head as close the floor as you can get it. A tap with a punch will drive the remainder into the wood below sander depth.

I had to do some sleuthing to find a new one, because your average Home SuperStore doesn't carry them (or, at least, their websites don't) and I've got better things to do than wander the aisle of a Tool Corral trying to find where a stoned 17-year-old hid them last year.

I found mine at the local Ace hardware in under two minutes, and after I got it home I was pulling ring shank nails like daisies. I bought the 8" Ace store brand for $13. Buy something large enough to fit comfortably in your palm, because if your job is anything like mine, you'll be pulling nails for a long afternoon.

Posted on April 28, 2008 4:58 PM | link to this entry | comments (0)

Spring Fever.

Having just fired up our shitty balky lawnmower for the first time this year in breezy 73° weather, I am completely overwhelmed with the urge to blow off the next week of work and overhaul the front yard of our house. The problem is that I don't have the $10,000 it will take to have a crew come in to scrape, level, and replant our lawn, yank the hedgerow and replace it with a 6' privacy fence, bust out the lousy concrete walks, lay down a brick sidewalk, yank the retarded bushes flanking our front door, replant new evergreens around the perimeter of the house, and trim back the holly tree.

Posted on April 24, 2008 12:15 PM | link to this entry | comments (0)

The Sky Is Falling.

This is the result of another five hours spent on the front porch yesterday. Half the ceiling is gone. The drywall around the front doorway is down, and there are twenty contractor's bags full of blown fiberglas insulation waiting to go out on the truck.

I'm taking a break today, because my ass is kicked.

Posted on April 7, 2008 9:43 AM | link to this entry | comments (0)

Crash, Boom, Bang. Repeat.

I took up an offer of help today to demo and haul away the remainder of the drywall in the exam room. Hopefully I didn't drive away my generous benefactor for the remainder of time.

For those that have been in the side bathroom, this is where the big white cabinet thing used to be. The cabinet itself is now in little pieces in a landfill. After pulling down the nasty reddish paneling behind that, this is what I found. That makes two doors in the same wall. This is the one we knew about previously (that's my new electrical box in the lower left). The moulding and drywall you see here is all gone now.

This is looking towards the bathroom. All of the drywall and insulation on the outside walls is gone, a portion of the dividing wall into the bathroom is gone, and the ceiling is completely gone.

Alternate view. We hauled over a half a ton of debris from the room out to the dump in two trips. Words cannot describe my gratitude.

The ceiling was never insulated, which explains why the atrium upstairs lost so much heat, and why the doctor eventually had a drop ceiling installed. We threw the flouresecent lighting out, because the tubes were the old single-pole design (impossible to find replacements for) and the ballast in one of the units was leaking black goo into the housing.

Next, I'm going to shut the plumbing off and pull the sink and toilet in the bathroom so that I can gut that entire space and frame it out from scratch. And then I have to figure out a way to get the air conditioner, which is as large as a fridge, out of the window and down to the ground without killing myself or anyone else.

Posted on March 15, 2008 11:41 PM | link to this entry | comments (2)

All In A Day's Work.

I took a break from the day job today to do a little demolition in the old exam room.

This is so I know where to get replacement cartridges for my mask. (It's better than hunting through Lowe's aimlessly for a half an hour).

This is the shared wall between the house and the exam room. I figured the chimney would be in good shape when it finally appeared, and I was right. It's covered in eighty years of dust, but it's in great shape. The horizontal boards on the right side cover over the original doorway that used to open out into this space when it was a screened porch. Also note the original shingles at foot level, still nailed to the sheathing. Back in the day, instead of Tyvek, they used tarpaper, or in this case, heavy brown paper. Not very efficient.

I did a little exploratory digging under the floor sheathing and found some pretty good-looking pine. I'm leaving the sheathing down until the bulk of the heavy demolition is done, and then I'll pull it up to see what we have. This is very promising.

Here's the entire west wall minus drywall. I found a label on the back of a few of the sheets which patents it in 1919—much earlier than I'd ever thought—so the writing on the wall is definitely from 1928.

This is the shared wall between the bathroom and the exam room. I decided to pull both of the interior walls down first so I wouldn't have to deal with insulation just yet, but there's some up above the bathroom ceiling.

Now I've got to figure out a way to haul the drywall out of the middle of the floor and up to White Marsh, where there's a sanitary landfill (they won't let me dump it at my usual go-to location, right down the beltway from the house).

Posted on March 13, 2008 3:19 PM | link to this entry | comments (6)

Jet Danger Intake

Visiting Jen's father this weekend in the LP City, I played hooky for a few hours and brought the big camera over to the Patuxent River Naval Air Museum to shoot some planes.

The museum is a curious collection of donations, acquisitions and working machinery, and they have a remarkable collection of hardware parked outside spanning fifty years of aviation history. I am always drawn to older designs, so I spent hours skulking around the oldtimers in the group, trying to find good angles and interesting subject matter. Ducking inside for what I thought would be a quick review of the exhibits, I was shanghaied by a friendly, garrulous older guide who showed me every nut, bolt, and rivet of the exhibits inside on an hourlong personal tour.

Back at the house, I pulled the last of the shelving down in the corner, exposing a pencilled note from the original workmen. The room was, as far as I can tell, finished out in 98° heat, on July 12 19(28?)

Then, I pounded all the nails out of the debris on the floor of the exam room and stacked it neatly in the garage for disposal. Tomorrow I'm going to swap filters in my aspirator and start pulling drywall and molding from the walls to see what's underneath.

Posted on March 10, 2008 11:17 PM | link to this entry | comments (1)

Floorplans.

So here's the basic idea for the remodeling. We're going to do a phased approach so that the exam room is completed first, and then start work on the old offices so that the front porch space becomes one large office for our businesses. This way we can use that space effectively and reclaim one of the bedrooms upstairs, and we'll add about 300sq. feet of usable, centrally heated space to the floorplan.

The bathroom downstairs will get reorganized so the toilet faces outward and the doorway opens out into a passthrough, as opposed to the bathroom being the passthrough. While we're remodeling this part, I'm going to have a new chase and water lines run from that stack up through the wall to the atrium directly above, in preparation for conversion of that room into a master bath/dressing room.

Simple, right?

(shudders)

Posted on March 10, 2008 11:25 AM | link to this entry | comments (4)

The Doctor Is Out.

A few weeks ago, I started demoing the shelves in the old doctor's office, but several other things got in the way of finishing the job. Today the weather outside was shite so I took advantage of a free afternoon to continue working. In order to get anything done properly, I had to first move all the crap out of that room and reorganize it out on the front porch, which began with humping two steel flat files from one side of the house to the other. Then I busted out the socket set and started disassembling the exam table, which will eventually go out in the garage until we can get rid of it.

Once the room was cleared of most of the furniture, I finished pulling up the rest of the floor tile, which took about twenty minutes—most of the adhesive dried out long ago, so a nudge with a flat screwdriver was about all it needed. Then, half an hour with a good flat crowbar was all it took to get the rest of the shelves down.

We've been wondering what's behind the drop ceiling and how bad the plaster looked, and now we know. The roofing problems that at one time afflicted the atrium above leaked down to the ceiling below, so there's some staining evident. The men who hung the drywall were obviously drunk and in a hurry, because there's little or no finishing work done anywhere. It's looking like all of the drywall needs to come down, which is fine, because the whole room needs to get reinsulated anyway. And once the interior sheathing is down, it will be easier to cut holes out for new windows.

Posted on March 8, 2008 8:17 PM | link to this entry | comments (3)

Special Delivery.

A long time ago, when I moved into my first house house, I found an old Cloverleaf Dairy cooler in the basement, and I considered myself lucky. I love the idea that a guy in a white suit drove a truck around the neighborhood and delivered dairy right to the doorstep.

For a long time, I stored charcoal briquettes in it, because I had noplace else to put them. It sat in my old kitchen for a while, and when we moved into the Estate, it sat out on the front porch, briquettes intact.

Recently, Jen did some research and signed us up with a local organic dairy that delivers to our neighborhood. They offer everything from milk and cheese to bread, poultry, seafood and coffee. Two weeks ago, we ordered some milk, cheese, and butter, and we got the chance to put our dairy cooler out on the front steps.

I'm happy to report the 2% milk is wonderful. It tastes almost as rich as whole milk. The half and half had a small layer of milkfat at the top when I opened it. The sharp cheese is the equivalent of extra sharp, and very tasty, and the butter is good too. And, by coincidence, I bought some bread from their partner bakery this weekend, and it's delicious as well. We're definitely continuing with the service—it's all hormone-free and locally grown, which is something Jen's gotten more and more interested in this year.

The best part: ordering everything online is just as easy as the sticker on the inside of the cooler says: DON'T FORGET. JUST LEAVE A NOTE.

Posted on February 13, 2008 9:54 PM | link to this entry | comments (4)

WIndow Upgrade.

One of the things I've loved about this leaky, creaky house we've called home are the warlbledy wooden windows it came with. Apart from the panes that have obviously been replaced due to baseball impact or misadventure, they all have the lovely bubbles, waves, and imperfections that mark century-old glass. Unfortunately, they also suffer from a fatal design flaw: The weight pocket on each side of each window is an open cavity which leaches our warm air outside.

Today I finally got the chance to install two Pullman window counterbalances, the first of what I hope are the solution to this problem. I've had them since early December but haven't had the time to put them in. Here's how I did it.

Seen here is what I have to deal with throughout the house: wooden casements hung with rope and pulley. Some are rope and some are chain; some windows have a mixture, and some casements have been opened to reattach the weights.

First things first.
I scored and pulled the sash stop molding off the window, exposing the whole front of the window and the nails securing the metal guide on each side. After I carefully pulled the nails along the front side of the guide on each side, I was able to coax the entire bottom sash forward, away from the casement, and put the guides to the side. After some convincing, I was then able to pull the rope out of the channel on either side of the sash (each side was secured with a toothed flooring nail, difficult to remove) and put the sash aside.

Now, here's the first roadblock. As with everything else in this house, nothing is easy. Lots of other windows I've seen have had pulleys installed with visible and accessible screws for simple replacement. Why should ours be similar? As you can see above, there was nothing on the outside of the pulley that hinted at how to remove it. After some exploratory prying and bending, I was able to remove the left-side pulley and found that it was designed to be pounded in with a hammer at the factory, and held in place with teeth on the top and bottom.

Knowing this, it was then simple to bend the top and bottom of the casing and insert a long screwdriver to bend the teeth back. After that, the second pulley popped right out.

Of course, the hole left behind wasn't large enough to fit the new pulleys, so I had to enlarge them vertically. I made three holes with a drill bit and then used a shiny new 7/8" wood chisel bought specially for this job to clean up the hole. I did some test fitting for the body of the pulley and then chiseled out a mortise to countersink it flush to the casement. It's ugly, but with a coat of paint, it'll clean up well—I have to figure out how to make a rounded mortise with the next one.

Fun with fibers
Next was the boring part. Knowing I wasn't going to pull the wooden molding off each window, I needed to find a way to get insulation into the cavity. These days, it's possible to rent a machine and blow fiber insulation into your own attic (why anyone would want to do this themselves is a mystery to me) so I knew I could find the fiber on the consumer market. After some searching, I found it at at the local HD in a 20-pound bag, with the brand name Green Fiber. The nice thing about this stuff is that there's no fiberglas in it, which makes it easy to work with. I made a wide funnel with some paper, taped it to the casement, and spent the next twenty minutes stuffing insulation into each cavity.

I predrilled holes and put both pulleys into place. From here, it was the reverse of what I'd started with: I attached each pulley tape to the channel of the sash with a sturdy wood screw, then slid each metal guide into the channel on the sides of the sash. Carefully guiding the whole thing back into the casement, I nailed the guides back into place and replaced the blind stop.

And there you have it. The window is in place, and the tape is just about perfect for a counterbalance—I'd say another added pound of pressure on each side would be perfect. It's too warm outside right now to determine if it's actually insulating or not, but we're getting back down below freezing later this week. Total installation time was about 3 hours, but I could probably get that down to 2, maybe an hour and a half, if I could find a good fast way to get the insulation into the cavity. I'm going to do a test with my shop vac on reverse to see how well it might work (and how messy it might get). At $25/pair, window pulleys are a much cheaper alternative to replacing each window with vinyl, so I'm hopeful it will work.

Posted on February 3, 2008 8:06 PM | link to this entry | comments (0)

New Pantry Shelves, Take Three

After finally taking the time to listen to Jen, I pulled the top six shelves down out of the pantry and replaced them with deeper versions spaced further apart. Instead of spending lots of cash on new lumber, I recycled the shelves from the doctor's exam room out on the porch, kicking off the process of remodeling that space. (strange factoid: the exam room was wallpapered with a fox hunting pattern at one point. Very, very strange.)

The original version of the pantry didn't allow enough room for multiple stacked items, and the shelves were too shallow to hold more than a can and a half of food. The new shelves are double the depth and have two extra inches of height, so they should be able to hold anything we can think of.

Posted on January 21, 2008 1:53 PM | link to this entry | comments (0)

New Living Room Floor

Remember those pizza boxes on the back porch? Here's the result. This was the morning after a 1AM installation session, where we had to move all the furniture into the dining room and jockey the white couch (the 4-ton sleeper) around the tiles as we laid them down. The result is a warm, comfy floor that brings a new color into the neutral space, and lightens up the whole room

Now, to get rid of that hideous brass fireplace surround.

Posted on November 29, 2007 9:46 AM | link to this entry | comments (1)

Pizza delivery

Posted on November 19, 2007 11:03 AM | link to this entry

The Replacements.

I like to watch the Home & Garden channel to see house porn and get ideas for our place. It's kind of a spectator sport sometimes, because the people featured on all of those shows have absolutely no taste. Here's the setup: an otherwise normal looking couple has their house on the market for eight months, and they can't understand why it's not moving—could it be the fact that they've decorated it in Early American Frat House? Young couples who would ordinarily throw judgemental looks at me in the Starbucks live in condos that look like the bed of a municipal waste truck.

Then, some expert blows in, forces them to dispose of their stuffed animals and model train periodicals in a humiliating yard sale. Afterward, they throw the remaining furniture out, buy some window treatments, paint the place in colors other than white, and Voila! the house sells. Miraculous!

There are other shows, like the ones that feature flipping (how's that working out for you this year?) and renovation, and I like to see what people have done with basket cases like ours. I steer clear of This Old House, which is made for WASP-y hedge fund millionaires who can afford to hire The Largest Crane In Connecticut to lift a barn over a pond, or install enough solar panels to light a municipality. I also avoid While You Were Out: even if you have the hottest carpenter on TV, a $1,000 budget will only get you cheap-looking custom furniture painted in one ugly color.

Mainly, I like to watch so that I can find solutions to problems that only this house presents. What do I do if I have no heat in my kitchen? How can I replace a slate roof without declaring bankruptcy? Where can I find replacement valves for my radiators?

Usually I'm disappointed because these programs are only interested in answering easy questions, like which end of the hammer hits the nail? But once, I saw something that got me excited.

For the last couple of years, I've been back and forth as to whether I should start replacing all the windows here at the Estate with vinyl, or find some way of making the existing windows better. A few weeks ago we had a guy come and quote on new basement windows, and on a lark had him quote separately on the dining room windows (which are long past saving). Surprisingly, the price was reasonable—much less than I'd guestimated.

As it suddenly got cold outside, I kicked around the idea of going room by room with vinyl. This place seems to have gotten draftier with each passing year, even in the rooms where I've scraped, repainted, and recaulked the storm windows. Where we're losing the heat is in the weight pockets on either side—a 6" deep cavity covered by two bare pieces of ¾" thick wood, hardly an energy efficient solution.

Vinyl sucks, though. It's ugly. I like the warble in our existing windows, which were built in the days when glass was still imperfect and contained lines and bubbles. I like the look of wood. And the two vinyl windows that predated our arrival are cheaply made and already discolored. Plus, some botoxed "realty expert" on one of the house programs said that buyers don't like vinyl, and are looking for natural wood windows wherever possible. This statement got me to thinking, but I took it with a grain of salt, only because the program was filmed in Southern California, where their idea of cold weather attire is long pants and a warm macchiato.

A couple of years ago I saw something on one of those programs, and dug around to find it online: the Pullman Manufacturing Company, who make a product called window balances. Essentially, it's a spring-loaded cord that fits into the pulley pocket used by sash weights. Cut the weight cord, pull out the pulley roller, and replace it with the window balance, then attach the end of the cord to the bottom side of the window, and there's no need for weights anymore—which means the void can be filled with insulation (somehow).

I missed the sales rep this afternoon, but I'm calling tomorrow to buy four. I'm going to test it out in the living room to see how much of a difference there is, before I make a final decision on vinyl.

Posted on November 13, 2007 4:21 PM | link to this entry | comments (1)

Sunday Afternoon Project.

Our friends Nate and Kristen just had their kitchen remodeled, and before demolition, they offered us two built-ins that came with the house. Never one to turn down another time-intensive project, we selected the smaller of the two, which was the top of a hutch. This piece has two solid three-pane doors with good brass, and the wood is hard (pine? poplar?) with a nice grain and no knotholes: perfect for a bookcase or even a buffet.

I got the entire outer shell heat-gunned and sanded yesterday, and about 1/3 of the lower shelf to see how thick the interior paint is. Both of the shelves actually come out, so doing the interior will be less work than I'd thought. Then, I have to knock the glass out of the doors and strip them carefully (windowrames are the worst) before we can start testing stains. Hopefully I can get it all sanded by Thanksgiving.

I would have had a 'before' shot here, but I forgot to switch the settings on my camera at first, and they're all blown out.

Posted on November 5, 2007 10:03 AM | link to this entry | comments (2)

Money Shuffling.

In the last couple of weeks, we've had a bunch of people in to look at the house in order to estimate some repair costs. As with everything else, it's all more expensive than I was hoping for. But I knew my hopes were completely unreasonable, so the prices are actually pretty good considering the amount of work to be done.

The first thing I wanted to check out were the basement windows, which offer as much security as a sheet of saran wrap, and half the thermal protection. And, of course, they aren't standard size, so every replacement needs to be custom made. I had a guy give us quotes for four vinyl windows around the perimeter of the basement, and while each one is pretty cheap, the total price adds up quickly. While he was here, we had him estimate the cost of replacements for the dining room windows as well, and it turns out they are much cheaper than I'd feared, but still expensive in the grand scheme of things.

Secondly, I had a strange little man come in to estimate repair and cleaning of the gutters on the south side of the house, which are about half a story too high for me to reach. (Also, the main power and phone lines run off the back side of the house, making three-story ladderwork very dangerous). This guy reminded me of a nervous ferret on valium—jacked up but super-mellow at the same time; I could hear his record playing at 45rpm but the words coming out of his mouth were at 33. Again, the price was higher than I'd hoped, but when I broke it down, it seemed reasonable. My next step is to have a larger company come out and price out total replacement of my existing gutter with a single-piece covered dripless version, because I got kind of a hinky vibe from ferret-man, and I wasn't all that impressed with his gutter guard choice.

Meanwhile, the driver's window in the Jeep decided to go down but not come back up last weekend on the way back from the airshow. Dreading the worst, I pulled the panel off the door and dug around in the guts to diagnose the problem: It wasn't the window motor, and it wasn't the mechanical linkage; it was the worm screw that connects the motor to the linkage. More specifically, it was a $.50 piece of plastic that keeps the worm screw in place to provide consistent upwards pressure. Calling around last week, I was quoted $500 for parts and labor, which was about what I figured. If I had more time to fool with it, and another couple of weeks of warm weather, I'd buy a used part and attempt the repair myself—I've spent some time cutting my skin on the innards of door panels before—but this is one I'm going to have to suck up and pay for, I think.

I have dreams of getting this basic stuff accomplished, but it seems like every time I get the cash together to tackle something, another need comes along and knocks it right back out of the realm of possibility. The most annoying part is that I'm in repair limbo: I could do all of this stuff—I've replaced windows, cleaned gutters, and repaired window assemblies—but I don't have the time to do it, yet I don't have the money to hire it out.

Posted on October 16, 2007 11:03 PM | link to this entry

The Punch List.

Jen and I have an agreement that covers any work undertaken in the house. I'm not allowed to start up any major new projects without first finishing all the niggling little things left to do on the rooms we've started, and she lets me keep breathing. Because of the schizophrenic order in which we've worked on the place (and my own obsessive-compulsive behavior), every room needs that extra push to get it over the hill so that we might actually call it "done". We have a page in a notebook called the Punch List, and it details stuff like touchup paint, cutting little bits of wood, fixing holes, and other room-specific stuff that takes lots of time to do for little immediate impact.

This weekend I decided to take a whack at the list and see how much of it I could knock out before Sunday evening. First up was toe molding, that essential, expensive little strip of wood that goes at the base of the kickplate around the perimeter of the room, and which keeps uneven 80-year-old flooring gaps hidden and cold drafts away from naked toes. This stuff is $.59 a foot, which sounds cheap, but gets expensive when there are two 12'x'12 rooms to be fitted out. It's also a pain in the ass to install when there's furniture in the way. Having the miter saw all the way down in the basement means careful measurements and allowances for dyslexia and stupidity must also be made. I usually wear running shoes for this, because I average about 50 flights of stairs before the job is complete.

Paint touch-ups take three seconds, but the process of running to the basement, washing and drying the brush, and returning to the same floor to touch up a different color all take much longer. Wash, rinse, repeat. Wash, rinse, repeat.

Next up was the closet door in the Blue room, which has never closed properly since we've been in this house. I've always meant to get to it, but never have. The doorjamb is as crooked as a politician, a victim of drunken carpentry practiced as the moldings were installed in 1925, so I popped the hinges off and trimmed the top of the door with a circular saw. That process took all of fifteen minutes, but locating, installing, and adjusting an original striker plate so that the door would close took a half-hour.

As I was swearing at adjusting the plate, I looked around and thought about the work that the Doctor did in this house, and how all of it was absolute shit. Not one thing in this house was done professionally, competently, or with any concern for the future; things like the "electrical work" in the living room come to mind, where his handimen wrapped two crumbling live wires with inches of electrical tape, stuffed the switchbox with newspaper, and then plastered over it. Or the hallway "plumbing repair", which involved a handmade rubber gasket and a plaster wall patched with cement. I could also go on for hours about the stuff that was ignored—separating plaster, substandard insulation, cheap replacement windows, nonexistant water drainage, etc., etc.

At first this thought made me mad. But then I realized the house got exactly what it needed when we moved in, and I felt better that we're taking the time to go through and undo as much of the damage as possible. I just wish we were independently wealthy so we could hurry the process up a few years.

Posted on October 1, 2007 3:42 PM | link to this entry

More Progress (Plumbing Division).

This afternoon, we've got two nice fellows down in the basement wrestling part of our heating situation back into submission, which will increase the standard of living at the Lockardugan Compound. When the good Doctor expanded his waiting room outwards to the enclosed front porch, he moved the radiator from the dining room out there so that his patients wouldn't freeze while thumbing through Reader's Digests. Because the whole porch is so poorly insulated, any heat released out there immediately gets sucked outside, requiring the boiler to be run at dangerously expensive temperatures. Our first year here, I turned the valves out there down to 0 and waited until we could afford to make changes, but it always annoyed me to know we were heating the front yard.

Additionally, when we gutted the kitchen, we made a decision to remove the radiator there to make room for more cabinetry. The upshot of this decision was that there was no heat on the west side of the first floor last winter, which made entertaining (and cooking) a chilly prospect.

This is the first of many steps to reclaim the front porch for a habitable space within the house—we have dreams of using the reception room and office for another usable living space, as well as the exam room for a TV room/den. Having the radiator moved back inside will not be cheap, but I think that in the long run it will make the first floor a better place to live, and it's great to make a little forward movement.

Posted on September 26, 2007 1:43 PM | link to this entry | comments (2)

Sunday afternoon

This sunday we prevailed upon Jen's sister and her boyfriend to help us with a little outdoor project. I've been wanting to get our woodpile up off the ground and split ever since we felled the tree, and we finally rented a hydraulic splitter to take care of it all this weekend.

The first thing we needed was a new cradle to store it in, so I built one out of pressure-treated lumber.

Meanwhile, Jen disassembled the old pile and got it ready for splitting.

With four people, we made pretty short work of the job. All the huge stump-sized hulks are now fireplace-sized bits, we have a full stack stored six inches off the ground, another pile stored under the porch, and we gave some to our neighbor as a show of goodwill. Addendum: According to this site, a cord of wood is 8' x 4' x 4', or 128 cubic feet. The cradle I built is 12' x 4' x 2', or about 96 cubic feet. Adding the pile under the porch, I'd say we split a cord of wood yesterday.

Of course, it's hard to get manual labor without some kind of bribe, and in this case it was beer and a homemade dinner of brisket, fresh corn, mashed potatoes, cornbread, and stuffed jalapeno peppers from our garden, in front of a roaring fire. MMMM, home cooking and woodsmoke.

Posted on September 17, 2007 12:31 PM | link to this entry

After the Flood.

Last night we finished up our washer comparison shopping at Sears, after temporarily raising the hopes of the floor salesman at Lowes. They all get the same look on their faces when they see us comparing models—it's a predatory look, masked with the "I'm here to answer your questions" smile, and it's a little comical to see how quickly it fades when they realize we're carrying a fistful of Consumer Reports articles with notes scribbled in the margins.

I react pretty poorly to hovering salesmen, I'm sad to say. Jen compares my tone of voice to an old-school running back, where I'm carrying the ball with my arm straight out, aimed directly at the forehead of the oncoming rushers. I'm the type of person who does not care for the hard sell. I don't need the expensive accessories, and I've most likely already made up my mind what I want, just please tell me if you have the stupid thing in stock and in white, mmmkay? Sears, unfortunately, tries to push the extended warranty thing, which is always a comical bit of salesmanship—you're selling me a $700 metal cube and now you're trying to sell me an insurance policy with scare tactics? I understand that appliance margins are tight, but I'm not stupid enough to buy that line of crap. Also, if I say I'm not interested, I'm not interested. Take a hint.

Knowing we're looking at adding to the herd this year, we bought a front-loading washer in preparation for mountains of baby clothes, and I imagine we'll be down there with shovels, constantly feeding it, like coalmen on the Queen Mary. We found a Kenmore model next to lots of little red bubbles in the Consumer Reports chart, and within about three minutes had it set up for delivery on Friday. Which means I need to build a platform for it by tomorrow night (the metal platform sold as an accessory is $199—HA) and clean up the last of the flood debris so that they can haul away the 3-year-old GE unit that crapped out on us.

Posted on September 5, 2007 9:20 AM | link to this entry

Jammed Up

The back porch of our house has been smelling like grape Bubblicious for the last week, something that takes me back to grade school and Krauzer's (New Jersey representing!) and chewing three pieces at one time to keep the flavor going. We inherited a grape vine next to the stairs with the purchase of the house, and one of the many dreams we've shared is to be able to do something cool with the grapes. However, in years past we've been robbed of our fruit by bad weather, critter infestation, and bad luck.

This is the first year we've enjoyed a bumper crop of grapes, due in part to the dry weather and also to the netting I purchased early in the season to keep the birds from eating the entire vine clean. Jen did a whole lot of reading online and found several ideas for what we could do with the bounty, settling on an Epicurious recipe for jam that sounded good.

After helping her pick five pounds of grapes off the arbor yesterday, she got to work peeling, cooking, milling and canning, and the result is five jars of grape goodness waiting for a taste test. (We need another 12 hours or so.)

Posted on September 4, 2007 12:27 PM | link to this entry | comments (6)

Hurricane Frederick.

At some point last week, Jen looked at me after I'd finished wrestling my hair into some sort of shape, and compared the results to Art Garfunkel. When she starts doing that, I usually start considering making an appointment to see my stylist. It's taken years of patience and painful jabs with a cattle prod to get me to drop the idea of a $6 barber and move to a $60 salon, one in a long list of notions she's had to wean me from. After several unsuccessful relationships with stylists across town (Candace, my last favorite, left her affordable digs to move up into Timonium to some sort of sports bar/hair salon hybrid, an idea lost on the sorry fools like me who are blind without their glasses and therefore unable to appreciate HD-quality basketball while getting our hair cut), she put me in touch with my new stylist, who has the kind of hair I wish I had—somewhere between Greek god and hipster nonchalance. You know, the hair you leave the salon with but can never re-create in your own laboratory.

He has shown me wonderful and amazing things I can do with my hair, even if I can't master his hair-fu, so I go back to him in the hopes that I might learn by osmosis. And, I've fallen in love with the idea (and practice of) the shampoo/scalp massage. Oh, Holy Mary, Mother of God, there are fewer finer legal ways I can think of having someone else who is not my wife touch my body for an affordable fee.

After getting my hair shorn, I met up with a friend to grab a cup of coffee and catch up, which was a great change of pace. Sitting in a coffee bar and talking with him, as well as discussing the Bathroom Senator affair with the grandmothers sitting next to us,reminded me why I work for myself in the first place, something that's been lost on me in the last two weeks or so: flexible coffee scheduling. About the time we were considering a bite to eat, I got a call from Jen, who asked me where I was with a voice that registered unease. She told me that our washer had somehow decided to quit draining itself and had then pissed two hundred gallons of water all over the floor of the basement, and that I'd better get home to help in the recovery effort she'd started.

After some initial panic, I calmed down when I saw the extent of the disaster, and silently cursed the original builders of this house. I have two separate curses, one for the builders and one for the Doctor, for all the ass-backwards stuff that's been done with this house since they broke ground. A dirt floored garage? A pox on your children. A staircase designed in a way that ruins any chance of adding a convenient entryway to the third floor? May the fleas of a thousand camels infest your armpits. A kitchen built with four (and at one point, five) doors? May the flatulence of twenty elephants descend upon your buttocks. And a basement with no sump, not even a simple gravity drain? May your bladder loosen and soak your bed every time you fall asleep.

So, with nothing left but good humor and a nasty smell, we folded up our sleeves and got to work with a mop and a shop-vac. I'd have pictures here to share the horror with you, but the local government did not allow press access to the devastation, and it's probably for the best anyway. Suffice it to say the levees around the cat litter held, barely, and the lumberyard got its feet wet. Thankfully though, the water level didn't reach either pilot light on the furnace or the boiler, and the tools remain high and dry.

We have fared better than the survivors in the south, and for that we are thankful; we have three dry floors, a heavy-duty dehumidifier, and a weekend of low humidity ahead. We also have a 2hp. shop-vac that drained the lagoon in under an hour, in case the rains come again. But that consarned washing machine is getting sent up the river as soon as we can get the scratch together for a quality replacement.

Posted on August 31, 2007 3:07 PM | link to this entry

We're #49, And Still Trying

Apparently, our little 'ville is #49 on Money Magazine's top places to live in 2007. It must be the picturesque Friendly's downtown that tipped the scales. Or, maybe it's the drunks stumbling out of Bar at 9AM. Whatever their criteria, the fact remains: we still don't have a good restaurant within walking distance of the house. (Word has it that the one restaurant that's actually worth a damn has been chasing off other prospective restaurateurs with obscure liquor ordinance rules, something that has soured us on ever ordering crabs from them again.)

I was talking with a client who's in a semi-related field a few weeks ago, and he mentioned the recent implosion of the Baltimore advertising community. He compared this town to New York and DC, and said that we've never fostered a real advertising community here because all the shops in town are founded on a burning hatred of one another. Everyone steals clients from everyone else, the employees bounce from place to place, burn out, and eventually all the firms blow up and reform into other firms.

If that's how it actually is, then they should take a chapter from the bustling restaurant scenes downtown, in Fell's Point, and over in Canton. Having one good restaurant in town is great, until the regular patrons get sick of the menu. Having two restaurants across the street from each other is better, because A. if one is full, people can go to the other, and B. people flock to areas where multiple restaurants are concentrated. We are Americans. We want choices, because we're fickle Wal-Mart shoppers, not Soviet citizens waiting in lines for soap and toilet paper. Look at every homogenized strip mall erected in the last twenty years: there's a mexican chain, a steakhouse chain, and an italian chain. Around them are smaller fast food chains. None of them are hurting; on the contrary, there's a two-hour wait for an overcooked, underflavored slab of meat, and there's only Miller Lite on tap. But there are choices, and that makes us happy.

There is strength in numbers, in both advertising and local restaurants. When an area has enough of one thing to reach a critical mass (quality advertising shops or locally-owned restaurants) then people will start showing up. People will come from the other side of the country and the other side of town to check out the scene. And if the food is good, they'll keep coming back.

Posted on August 22, 2007 8:27 PM | link to this entry | comments (2)

New!

Posted on July 13, 2007 12:25 PM | link to this entry | comments (1)

Weekend work

I rented a 40' ladder to finish painting the siding on the house this weekend. I painted the house blue three years ago, and the west peak (the highest point on the house, at nearly four stories) was still grayish-white because my 28' ladder won't reach. It's nice to not have that hanging over my head anymore—literally.

The photos are shit because the light meter in my D70 is messed up somehow...more on that later.

Posted on June 25, 2007 10:22 AM | link to this entry | comments (14)

Furnishing

My lovely wife found this light fixture online at Lumens, and she knew it would be perfect for our dining room. It's a new edition of a George Nelson classic, and I think it fits the room (and the vibe of the house) perfectly.

Meanwhile, we've got a different light up for sale on Craigslist. Honk if you're interested!

Posted on April 30, 2007 4:09 PM | link to this entry | comments (2)

From The Consumer Affairs Desk

A few months ago, Jen and I bought a Pur water filter from Sam's Club, the kind that screws onto the end of the faucet and hangs over the sink. For $40, I figured it was better than buying another stupid Pur filter for the pitcher in our fridge. Installation was pretty easy, and when I turned the water on, it flowed through the tap smoothly. When I turned the filter on, however, water began shooting from each seam in the plastic housing, bypassing the filter and spraying the entire sink. No amount of tinkering fixed the problem, and I gave up on it in disgust.

The second contestant is pictured here:

It's a Whirlpool WHCF-SUF under sink main faucet filtration system. Theoretically, it's supposed to sit in between the cold water supply valve and your kitchen faucet, and filter out all sorts of harmful impurities from your cold water. In reality, it's a waste of money and time.

See the little blue hoses there? Some genius engineer at Whirlpool decided to substitute them in place of normal $.50 threaded hoses, the kind that are easily obtainable at any hardware store. This is a halfassed plastic hose and pressure clamp attachment that does not stand up to normal water pressure. This means that after one has spent fifteen backbreaking minutes under the kitchen sink, disconnecting the old hoses, screwing the filter head into the cabinet wall, and attaching the plastic hoses, water will spray all over the underside of the cabinet when the pressure is turned back on. No attempt to correct the situation will result in success, and only result in soaked frustration.

I'm no plumber, but I've run a couple hundred feet of PVC tubing and sweated my share of copper joints. I should have realized this was a bullshit product when I opened the box, but I chose to give it a try. Don't make the same mistake I did.

We're going to have a real plumber come in and give us a quote on installing a whole-house filtration system, something that goes in with copper tubing, pressure relief valves, and a warranty. Enough of the mickey mouse bullshit.

Posted on March 13, 2007 9:38 AM | link to this entry

Houseblog Update, 1.28.07

Well, several weeks of farting around have resulted in the first of a series of howidunit articles about the fireplace mantel, which you can see here. Comments are open and welcomed.

Posted on January 28, 2007 11:58 PM | link to this entry

How To: Fireplace Mantel, Part One.

Disclaimer: I don't claim to be a professional carpenter. I don't even claim to be an amateur carpenter, because that would mean I might have read a book about carpentry at some point. This narrative is in no way the recommended method of completing this project; I'm just documenting my experience so that others can learn from my mistakes. All the materials here were purchased at my neighborhood Home Improvement Warehouse(s) and tool rental centers, which kept my costs way down.

In a recent copy of This Old House, I found a gatefold article titled "Installing A Mantel", with diagrams, instructions, and a few prefab examples with links to manufacturers. What amazed me was not the simplistic, breezy instruction list, but the cost of the prefabbed examples-all of them were over $1,000, and none of the featured models matched the simple woodwork in my house.

A year before I found the article, I'd decided to build my own mantel to match the woodwork in our house, a 1925 foursquare. When we bought the house, my wife and I inherited a brick fireplace with a simple slab of oak as a mantel. The brick, from what I can gather, was originally a dark color, and the mortar was set back from the edges by 1/4", an aesthetic I wouldn't have appreciated in any decade. To top it off, it had been covered in successive coats of white paint and left to absorb years of cigarette smoke, so that it became a shade of what she dubbed "Phillip Morris White." The brick hearth was painted black, and a square brass surround was installed (poorly), which kept the heat in the house when the fireplace was not in use.

The first thing I did was to build a simple skeleton around the existing brick, anchoring two support studs into the wall on their sides to reach out past the brickwork. To this framing, I added studs going across the front of the brickwork and down to the hearth, forming feet, and then built out a box for the mantel at the top.

To this skeleton, I stapled some cardboard and whitewashed it as well as possible so that we could get a feel for how large the finished box would be. And there it sat for about eight months, while we worked on the room around it-installing new electric wiring, recessed lighting, and putting in drywall to shore up the old plaster and lathe ceiling, etc.)

When the baseboards were finally ready to go back in permanently, I started to work out how the mantel would look in my head, and how I wanted the diferent elements to look in relation to one another.

Our woodworking is done in a simple style; the doors and windows are framed in 5" boards with round beveled edges, topped with a 1/2" beveled cap. Above the cap is another 5" square-finished board, and on the top edge of this board is a cap molding in a size no longer mass-manufactured. The bottoms are finished off with a beveled "foot" which is a true 1" thick board, at a height of 4". (Finding wood to recreate this foot has been lots of fun, but I've found that better Lowe's locations carry 1" thick pine these days.)

Pic of woodworking here

For the face of the mantel, I started by selecting the best sheet of wood I could find in a 4x8' size, which turned out to be 3/4" sanded birch plywood. Later, on a return trip to the same store, I found a sheet of 5/8" MDF for half the cost, hidden around the corner-oh, well. I've never worked with MDF before, but I imagine it's a lot more forgiving than plywood. The moral of the story: Keep your eyes open.

For each of the sidewalls I used poplar, which comes in many of the same sizes as pine, but is usually a better grade and free of knots. It's a harder wood, which can be more difficult to cut, but the flip side is that it's usually dry and straight at the store (something the standard-grade pine is usually not.) Wood with knots is harder to smooth and paint, and often sap will drool out of the holes.

I first shimmed out the original frame I'd built to be as square and level as possible. The mantel is actually 3/4" further from the wall on the left side than the right, so I knew milling the sidewalls was going to be difficult. Once everything was level, I measured off the front of the brickwork (figuring it had been put up level and square, and the house had settled around it) to make sure the front of my mantel wouldn't stick farther out on one side than the other.

My first step was to cut the sidewalls so that I had square, leveled edges to work from. My original plan was to cut them shaped like an upside-down L so that the leg would form a box for the mantel itself. I measured off the brick once again so that the forward edges were both equally distant from the brick face, and cut two pieces on my table saw down to the right depth. Then I cranked the blade to a 45° angle and cut the bevels on the forward edges. Upstairs, after checking each side for fit, I used a hand planer to shape the backside of the planks to fit the, um, peculiar shape of the wall. After about eight hundred test fits, I got each side to fit the wall correctly and then tacked them into place with some 2" nails. (Let me just take a moment to preach The Gospel of predrilling any nail holes used to construct anything serious. It's almost important enough to warrant buying a second drill specifically for predrilling, so that a primary drill can be freed up for other tasks.)

After shimming and fitting the sides so that they were level and equidistant (measure from side to side and then in an X shape from each corner), I moved on to the face of the mantel. First, I set up a straight jig for a circular saw along a short edge of the board and cut down the length with the blade at 45°. Measuring the width of the front face one last time, I set the jig up on the other side and cut it down, making sure I made a straight line with the saw.

Next, measuring the opening, I marked up the back of the plywood for the cutout on the inside. I've read in various places about minimum firebox clearances (essentially, keeping anything flammable away from what is called "heat and glow") and several places mentioned 16" as a firm number. The This Old House article says "The National Fire Code says that all combustible material must be 1 inch away from the firebox opening for every 1/8 inch it protrudes from the surface, with a minimum 6-inch clearance all around." I had to contend with the damper handle above the opening, so I used that as my point of reference and measured the sides to fit aesthetically with it. My sidewalls are a little inside 6", but I found that anything thinner on the sides began to look spindly and weak. (Please don't rat me out.) The inside walls of the mantel were also going to be beveled so that I could fit it snug to the edge of the brick, but I knew this would get tricky quickly. For the left side of the mantel, the job was easy. I made another jig and ran the saw up to my line.

I clamped a fence for a jigsaw along the top edge, adding 1/2" to the final measurement so that I'd have some excess on my finished board. Then, I drilled a pilot hole on one side and cut the top edge out. My scrollsaw has a very thin, pliable blade, so it can't be counted on for a straight 90° cut. I'll come back to this in a little while.

But here's where the fun starts. The circular saw will do a 45° angle going one way, but won't adjust to go the other way, even if the board is flipped on its back. I had to be creative here. Looking through the tools at the store, I found a bit for my router which cut a 45° angle at a depth slightly more than 1/2", which wasn't deep enough to go through the entire board.

However, when I thought about it a little while longer, I found a straight bit which cut a square groove at a width of 1/2", which was exactly what I needed.

What I finally worked out on a scrap plank was this: First, I made a straight 90° cut along the edge so that I could take the entire interior piece out. Then, I flipped the board and routed two parallel grooves along the interior of the cut so that the depth of the remaining board was less than the depth of the 45° router bit. Next, I measured the distance between the edge of the angled router bit and the edge of the router deck, and made a fence for the router to guide it in a straight line. Finally, I cut the edge of the board with the router slowly and carefully, stopping the router about 1/2" before the 90° angle at the top of the mantel.

Finally, I clamped a fence on the top horizontal cut to clean it up—this is where I used the jigsaw with the flexible blade, remember—and cut as much as I could going one way with the circular saw, then measured, realigned the fence, and cut it to the edge going the other way. Cleaning the edges up with a handsaw, I had both the beveled cuts completed and the face ready to go.

With the mantel and its sidewalls cut, it was time for the first test-fitting. I pulled out the level and tape measure, and tacked the sidewalls into place on the framework. Then, I fitted the mantel face up to the sidewalls and made sure everything aligned and leveled correctly. With some minor trimming to the bottom of the face, the board fit up almost exactly to the sidewalls.

Yeah, I know—I'm as surprised as you are. But it actually worked.

Next: Building the box on the top, take one.

Posted on January 28, 2007 10:05 PM | link to this entry

Recipe: Steamed Italian Mussels

2 lbs. of live mussels are $3 at our local Korean grocery, and that's just too cheap not to take advantage of. Most of the recipes we've found have been very bland and tasteless, so I went looking for something with some flavor to make for our holiday party. After some experimentation and testing, here's a home-brewed recipe for steamed mussels which has great flavor and tasty broth:

• 1/4 cup olive oil
• 1/4 cup butter
• 2 cups of white wine
• 1/4 teaspoon dried red pepper flakes
• 6 cloves of garlic, minced
• 1/4 cup chopped basil
• 3 tablespoons of fresh chopped parsley
• 6-8 chopped vine tomatoes
• 1 onion, chopped
• 4 shallots, chopped
• 1 red pepper, chopped
• 4 lbs. mussels, scrubbed and cleaned (use a vegetable scrubber; clean off any of the "beard"-the stringy stuff that may be still attached to the shell. Cut or pull that off.) Dump any with broken shells or that don't close when they're run under water or tapped with a fingernail.

In a big lobster pot, heat the butter and olive oil over medium heat. Add the onion, garlic, peppers and shallots and stir until the onion is cooked, about 4-5 minutes.

Add the tomatoes, parsley, basil and pepper flakes. Reduce the heat and simmer for about 25 minutes, stirring occasionally.

Add the wine and put a steamer