649 6th

sticky nipple

What were you thinking of!? I've been, um, thinking to myself for the past week as I failed day after day to remove the close nipple on our dining room radiator (to center it better on the wall). WD40 to the rescue, plus lots of patience. I'd spray the seam and exposed threads every day, give it a push with the beater bar -- and strip the nipple to shiny steel. Then I'd give it another spray and prop it against the wall to seep.

The first day I tried to twist this rusty-stuck nipple I watched the WD40 in the hope I would see evidence of it penetrating the threads. Yesterday there was reference to calling a plumber to work some additional torque on the problem. This morning I asked myself. Where does the clinging pool of WD40 go? Is it working some slow alchemy or is it evaporating? Can it evaporate? Just what the hell IS WD40?

This evening I held the radiator on edge and took a seat before spraying the threads. Where does the WD40 go?  And the meniscus of light... fluxed? I watched on with re-doubled attention. It pulsed again. What else could it be but the wonderous WD40 sleekly seeping. I lay the radiator down, assembled my pipe-wrench lever, and gave it a pull. I've been stripping that nipple for over a week so believe me when I say this felt somehow the same but different. I reset the wrench and pulled again, this time closely watching the nipple's threads. They turned. See the impossible happen.

dining blue

Love the color. Really enjoy the pleasure of painting new construction. Absence of molding is such a relief. Remarklably clean experience.

Looking forward through the stairs at split view of 1st and 2nd floors is going to be so hot when we're done. Very exciting.

Toby found a metal manufacture and is discussing specs and cost estimate for the dining table frame.

Ideas are popping. Toby has a great design for shelving that integrates the chimney-sides both upstairs and downstairs: floor-to-ceiling poles that will likely be ordered from same shop that makes the table. Assuming that order goes well.

what color is offwhite?

Three different tints in there. Can you tell the difference? I've convinced myself the right side and left side aren't the same. And the middle's neither one. Not much less subtle in person, especially in natural light. Hadn't seen the point of offwhites until now: separate but unified spaces in a big ballooning room.

The painted 3rd floor walls. Toby did a crackerjack job picking the colors and selecting which wall got what.

And last night we finished assembling and mounting the handrail. Was a tight fit, and all the more stable for it. Not that I was worried about our floating rail once both flanges were mounted. There's zero bounce vertically and only a bit of hum horizontally. Funny how quickly the hand goes to it when there's something to grab.

pipeworks

Third floor walls are painted! So where's the picture? Shades of off white will be tough to capture so remote viewers may need to be satisfied with statement of fact for now.

What's much easier to see (and feel!) is the stair railing that had to wait for wall finish before it could go in. The vertical rail and short horizontal run provide a good handle around the stair winder. In design I planned to use black iron to synch with raw metal of the radiators I stripped last year; however, the fittings and pipe have such different finishes that I switched to galvanized.

So far the assembly's been fairly easy in that I've had to make only a couple tweaks to fittings estimates, eg replacing close nipples with 2" nipples in the wall bracket assembly so that rake rail runs parallel to wall. (Pun alert) But real test is right around the corner. Feel like I'm so outside intended use of threaded pipe that I can't even articulate the challenge, though it's possible the challenge is all in desire to pre-assemble as much as possible. To counter this, I'm taking a one-piece-at-a-time approach and hoping for the best.

Seen here: rough assembly out of spare fittings so I can measure for horizontal railing. Plan on using a union fitting in short horizontal rail to join 3rd floor section to what's already installed. I wanted to avoid this "cheat" but I can't see any other way to draw the whole thing tight.

eaves done

We finished up the back of the house today. With the closing up of the eaves all of the pieces were finally working in concert. The draft coming into the kitchen dropped to about none!.

nice backside

Kitchen exterior is ready for winter. Used the rest of the corrugated galvalum that's been stacked in backyard since oh almost exactly a year ago when we sided the 2nd floor. Looks great thanks to major assist from our friend A.B., though better to say we were providing the assist since A.B. has way more experience installing this stuff. Almost made it seem easy. And he steered us toward a J-trim that made for a simple, clean finish.

Though you couldn't prove it by the blog, we've been working steadily on the house for the past month. We'll post the status of a different project each day for the next week.  Thanks to everyone who's asked what we've been up to and for encouraging us to keep up with the blog.

polished-up

there is no tin

280 holes

sparks flew

The time had come, the unabomber siding on the back of the second floor rear had to go. The corrogated metal siding that had been lying in the front room for over a week had to be installed. The forecoast is for our first snow of the season. They're saying a couple of inches (I'll believe it when it see it). Regardless the season was closing in, and this was technically our last chance.

Galvanized metal siding seems to be the meme dour jour. I keep seeing it everywhere-- or perhaps I started noticing it more  once we decided to go that direction. There's a place up on 7th avenue accros from Greenwood Cemetary that we bid on about a year before we bought this place. Whomever bought it did quite the architecture number on it. It is covered in corrogated brushed metal installed horizonally. The borders around the windows and edges are all mitered aluminum. Quite the piece of craftsmanship I have to say. But, it does have a bit of "architects students first real project" about it-- down to painstakingly paintng the original dental work on the cornice a San Francisco muliplicity of colors.

Before cutting and putting up the actual siding we had to prep the back of the house. Clearing back some of the numerous coats of roofing product where our house joins our neighbors (row house remember). Then we cut and bent flashing for one side (the other side just got roofing goop out of a tube) and the bottom where the exterior wall joins the kitchen roof. Next we cut, squared and screwed in 1 5/8" galvanized channel to frame the edges and around the windows.

Then it was time for some metal cutting. We used a metal cutting blade on the circular saw, with a bit of shaping coming from a pair of tin snips. We laid the metal over a piece of plywood, snapped a chalk line on it and started cutting. It was loud (we wore earplugs of course), it sparked, and it smelled like hell. Since the front of the first floor is still a construction zone and it was cold outside, we did it inside. It was nice to come in and warm up, a stinky metal dust mess, but still nice to be warm. All of the sparks made it kinda hard to see the chalk line and the chalk line did'nt really stick to the the sheet metal. Other than that it was easy to cut a straight line where you wanted it. We prefabricated all of the necessary pieces to their specifed lengths and headed back out into the cold.

We wanted to avoid cutting out notches for the windows so our arrangement of whole sheets to fill vertical spaces between windows had a lot of overlap. Additionally there were these tiny 4" pieces that had to be installed under each window with a lap in the middle. Running a bead of silicon sealant on the edges of each lap was recommended by the internet so we did that too.

It was not fun work. The pieces needed a lot of adjusting, bending, snipping, and filing. We were using self-piercing tapping screws that are essetially a screw with a drill bit head. Getting them to set, cut and drive pushed both of us to our limits a couple of times. That combined with the cold (vanity note: I have a down vest on under that sweatshirt, I haven't been packing on the pounds) made for quite the frustrating day where nerves wore a bit thin.

I finished (read: I was the last man standing and it still needs more) screwing it up around 8:00pm. Granted we didn't start until 10:00am, but it's still a long day. Under the bright work lights it looked pretty damn fine (if I have to say so myself). I hope I have the same feeling when I see it in daylight.