649 6th

kitchen kinetoscope

The kitchen renovation was the first time-lapse series we shot. Now that we found a quick way to make movies out of them, we dipped into the archive and whipped this one up.

hung drywall

Ladies and gentlemen the final piece of m*%#@ f%#$% C%$@##!*" drywall has been hung. You saw the pixilated vision that was the ENTIRE weekend.

The electrical, the doorbell, the over head light, matching the soffit framing, installing the new door frame; again, futzing, futzing, futzing... hour after hour.

But at last! it is ALL behind us. Michael, being forced to take some banked-up days before they expire at the end of the year, fit the final pieces today.

Ring out a cheer: the most odious task has left the building!

admission 2

excellent point about the unseen cost of cheap labor, ms. peasy. everything has a price, even the things we don't pay for. no idea why our sheetrock guy came so cheap, and other than quality, don't know else wasn't getting paid for. can't remember if we mentioned that he called us once to thank us for the referrals and good references (we took calls from at least two people asking our opinion of him -- had all good things to say about him, and don't be afraid to tell him the jobs not yet done), then offered us a job for free. what? we didn't have any work for him at the time, but it still makes me wonder if we didn't dodge a bullet.

there's another anything you pay for: a sense of well-being as you let uncounted strangers in and out of your home for unsupervised hours. how much does trust cost? can it be bought? is it like paying for quality? we assume the more expensive product, whether person, place or thing, is better. this guy costs so little there must be something wrong. somehow damaged. perhaps he's desperate. reformed ex-con? recovered addict?   bad businessman?

what are we charging ourselves by not investing in each other?

admission

of guilt, not entry: we skimped on the walls. out of sight, out of mind, i suppose. so focused on the future appearance that we didn't really consider what we weren't paying for. attention to detail for one thing, the labor that goes into crafting a smooth finish.

or the personal investment in a job well-done? how much longer would we have taken doing it ourselves? how much more willing would i have been to smooth all those walls myself? was ready never to work joint compound again before i was done with third coat in kitchen.

almost makes me yearn for days of primer white. lighter colors seem to hide many of the imperfections. i think that's why we're now so struck by the rough finish wherever we painted richer colors. places on 2nd floor almost look unsanded, whereas few spots catch my eye on 3rd floor. could be the eggshell finish too. i've heard flat paint is much more forgiving in that respect, though no mercy at all when touched.

but if it weren't for the blips i'd probably be harping on the humps and bumps wherever old meets new. or the challenging, irregular angles. if not this, that. pick your layer. soon enough the paint will be a little scuffed, a little scraped, and i'll be dissappointed in that too. or am i standing on my head? in a year or so when the fresh paint's faded how much more mellowed and integrated will i see these walls? how much will be walls and how much me?

in search of the sweet spot where job's done right, neither obsessive nor ignored. ticket, please.

day 24: mcmansions in new jersey

Today was shuttle day. First I drove my niece's friend to JFK (and returned), then I drove my niece to camp in Southern New Jersey (and returned). I spent about 10 hours total in the rental car shuttling back and forth. The thing about driving across the garden state, especially once you get off I-95, is the crop of McMansions (as if I even need link to this widely- recognized term) that are being mono-cultured like potatoes in Idaho. Usually beside another monocultured crop such as corn.

I've talked some about community planning in the past. Mostly noting the difference between developing rural lands as a clean slate, as opposed to redeveloping urban areas. I'll admit it's my want to poke at the New Urbanist, stemming from the fact that I can't see it working in my neighborhood. From what I've seen and read, theirs is not a plan that integrates well with mixed-use urban settings. That being said, the cornfields full of tree-free, cookie-utter, ten-thousand-square-foot monsters made me quickly reconsider some of their ideas.

All I could think was, "what a wasteful, inelegant use of resources." I kept asking myself who lives in those houses? Are they mimeographed as the houses they inhabit? Do they care? Do they prefer? What's that mindset? Can someone please shed some light?

Tomorrow: enough commentary -- back to work. I've but one week left on my sojourn from working and I'd like to push the progress peg a bit further in the last few days.

day 23: coney island mermaid parade

It's kinda hard to post something to a home renovation/design blog everyday for a month if you're not actually working on the project. The only real forward progress today was finally getting all of the laundry done, folded, and put away after weeks of flaky appliances. Not one for the record books but if you only knew what joy it brings to me you'd cut me some slack.

Today was my niece and her friend's last day in town. What better way to celebrate than going to the Coney Island mermaid parade? Pasties galore and more flesh than you could shake a stick at, however I think this photo summed it up best for me. Like the gentrification that tamed Times Square the last bastion of freakdom may also go the way of mall-ification that overtook Manhattan. There were many protesting "development" in today's parade, somehow if felt like the sun was setting on a golden age.

On the up side, we did take in the "freak" show just off the board walk after it was over. It's great to see that tradition carry on in it's neo-vaudevillian-freakier-than-thou sort of way.

day 21: a day at the cooper-hewitt

As part of the site seeing tour today we made our way to the Cooper-Hewitt. There are two shows currently running. One is the National Design Triennial the other is called Design for the Other 90%. Both of the shows are interesting in their own right but the contrast between is what, for me, held the intrigue.

Normally I try and keep blog to home renovation and design, I promise before this ramble is over I'm sure I will tie it back in. First off, just getting out of the house was a good idea. I realized I hadn't been out of Brooklyn since I went to get light fixtures way back at the start of the vacation. It's good to get out for a bit of non-internet or book delivered stimulation, right?

The National Design Triennial was quite the mix. The thing that it brought into focus more than anything else is how much we take for granted day to day objects and tools. Granted there were things that I hadn't seen before; ironic feral robot dogs that were designed to live in super-fund clean-up sites, and interesting use of fiber optic and LED's for lighting fixtures. However, things like the Apple Ipod and Nike free running shoes that I normally look at through the lens of function focused me back on the act of design.

Walking through the show I kept coming back to "the act of design" and the work we do on this house. As we move into the finishing stages the craftsmanship becomes more visible and the attention to detail becomes that much more critical. What struck me most about the show was the attention to detail that all of the pieces had in spades. It's funny, even though Michael and I both work for corporate America, we both have MFA's. Before we started working on the house there was a lot of art-- we made it, we talked about it, we went and saw it. Once we started this project all of that seemed to go away. I'm sure you can guess where this is going, but it was great to be reminded that the house didn't suck the creative life out of us it just gave us both a place we could collectively divert the energies.

Then I went to the garden for the other show and my world got rocked. Design for the Other 90% isn't a huge show in content, but it's ginormous in concept. The premise goes like this. There are 6.5 billion people on the planet. 90%, or close to 5.8 billion people, lack the means to purchase even the most basic goods. The show is about those designing objects that make life better for the other 90%. The piece that struck me most is called the Q drum designed by P.J and J.P.S. Hendrikse it is a way to move water. Millions around the world (especially in rural Africa) live kilometers from reliable clean source of water, leaving them vulnerable to cholera, dysentery, and other diseases. However, water in adequate quantities is to heavy to carry. The Q Drum is a durable container designed to roll easily transporting 75 liters of clean potable water. Rolling rather than lifting and carrying eases the burden of bringing water to those who need it. Talk about redesigning the wheel.

I mentioned the contrast between the two shows; one was indoors one was in the garden, one was high frills for a consumer culture the other was design to make life a little less nasty, brutish and short. The contrast, for me, was stark, but not off putting. It even provoked an interesting idea about how to control light and shade in the evolving porch space. Sometimes I guess it's good to get out of the house. If nothing else it makes me remember how much thought goes into what we do and appreciate what we have just that much more.

day 15: details

I've hit the half way point on my thirty day vacation-and-blogging spree. Today was an OK day at best. We're to a place where there aren't a lot of big jobs to do, rather scads of small ones. Around the house, various unfinished "tricky" places need drywall. A prime example, Michael bit the bullet and began addressing the kitchen-to-hallway transition. To square the original doorframe, now 2-1/2" out of plumb, he shimmed a plywood column around two sides. Big challenge was to preserve at least a 32" passage, so great lengths were taken to keep thickness of material to a minimum.

The other detail (and no small one at that) addressed today was less house and more house blog. We've been tagging content for a while now, and to be honest our categories sucked. They were created over time, didn't really encompass the project, and were poor information-design at best. Additionally, our friends over at houseblogs.net started using tags for discussion forums. This is a smart use of Web 2.0 networking, which essentially let the tags provide the forum. Housblogs.net is a great site. Most of our traffic comes through that portal, and I consider them an invaluable resource.

I'll leave search-engine optimization for another discussion. In meantime, I'd like to get a simple search going soon too; stand by.

day 10: perspective

Over the weekend, we went down to Philadelphia to visit friends from college. Our hosts live in a shingle-style Victorian in Elkins Park, an older suburb just north of the city. We kept commenting how big their house was, and they kept saying "it's really not that big".

This morning we were talking about gardening when it began to dawn on me: it's all about scale. I was thinking about Michael and the tweezer-like precision that he tends our new sprouts; our entire yard is about the size of one their flower beds. Peter (our host) went on to explore a metaphor about size. He said, "You basically want to do the things that beat it into submission with the biggest pay-off for the effort. Gone are the days when I thought I could manage the entire yard with any sort of precision."

When you have a yard that large you paint in much broader strokes. As my father used to say, "A man on a galloping horse will never know the difference".

I then started thinking about up-keep, renovations, and how size plays there as well. I'm skating off into "not so big house" territory by saying this, but the scale of our project allows us to attend to detail in a way we (two part-time people doing almost all the work) couldn't otherwise afford.

I mean, we rip into stuff and gut rooms with little regard, but none of the projects are really that big. At 2500 sqaure feet (including the basement) this house just isn't that expansive. I sometimes wonder what I would do with a bigger house. I think customization would be the first thing to go. Everything would need to be more pre-fab. I guess that's the route to McMansions and what makes them so uniquely sterile. Or you'ld need a vast crew of people to get the work done in any reasonable amount of time (with  deep pockets to match).

What about you other housebloggers out there? What are your thoughts on scale and detail? How do you manage? How do you mitigate? Just curious.

day 7: bathroom lighting fixtures

This morning I got up bright and early to head into the big city. Ordering the remaining lighting fixtures was the goal. I convinced my friend Greg (who's on summer break from NYU teaching, nice for both of us I know) to tag along. After placing the order and shopping about we ended up at Jerry's in SOHO for an early lunch. Ah brings back memories-- in my new job I will be back downtown. It's funny to see how the neighborhood has changed and not all for the worse. But more on that in second.

The lighting showroom of choices has become Lighting by Gregory. I'm not sure why other than my friend Domenic recommended them, that and they always have what we want. The sales people know their stuff too. Ask for Vanda she'll have you out of there in a jiffy.

The lighting order (get it, Greg standing in front of place called...) went a little something like this:

1) 6' two tube, flourescent fixture and ballast. Nothing fancy here. It will go behind the drop cedar ceiling in the bathroom for fill. It's NOT a 70's drop ceiling I promise; it will look good. They gave us two regular tubes with the purchase. I'm going to see how they do and consider switching over to full spectral.

2) 2 24" Bathroom vanity lights. They will have chrome bases to match some of the other finishes. I say "some" as we have a big surprise coming in a week or so...

3) 2 small halogen spots and bases with chrome shades.Three separate parts; six pieces in all, probably 15 for the entire package, not bad. Many months back we got the cable lighting system for the dining room (I was eager to jump the task line once again). While the bathroom lights might seem like a lot it's far less than the gagillon little pieces that need be orchestrated to make the other room work.

3) 3 bookshelf lights for the second floor. They will mount near the ceiling on the soffits and point downward onto the books.

4) An industrial looking half difused have reflected flourescent fixture for the kitchen. They're still checkng availability on it so I don't have a photo just yet. Nothing really that out of the ordinary.

It was great to head into Manhattan and be able to take advantage of a neighborhood like bowery/chinatown. I've talked about it before; the ever incroaching luxury mushroom phenomena and the disappearance of the small shop owner. For some reason "lighting fixture row" way down on Bowery is practically unchanged. Of course with the pricing for fixtures and the volume they turn over, not that surprising. When I first moved to new York in 1990 I lived in a loft on Bowery I would give the address but (after checking the mail slot) it appears that the bitter old hippies that I shared it with are still firmly ensconced. At least some things are slow to change down there.

One thing I will say. Not all of the change is bad. Maybe it was because of yet another crisp cool summer day, but there are new places and architecture that sort of caught my eye. I'll be glad to back in the hood