@BrooklynRowHouse

Got a shop? You need this stuff!

2008-02-24T22:52:12-05:00

Last weekend, my boss and I made the trek to the annual NJ Woodworking Show. Jeb has a pretty nice woodworking shop but his passion is car and motorcycle restoration. He's done several old bikes -- Velocettes and Moto Guzzis -- but his current project is a 1955 Land Rover. The Rover looked like it had been parked at the bottom of a river for the last fifty years but after two years he's nearing paint and finish, which means he needed supplies, which means we both needed to hit the show.

I've been looking for a decent steel tool deck cleaner for a couple of years. Nothing I've tried worked much better than WD40, #00 steel wool and carnuba wax. Jeb told me that he'd had good results with Boeshield and, sure enough, we found it at the show. It's expensive but it was worth a try.

Boeshield was developed by Boeing for cleaning metal airplane shells. It's actually a family of specialized products but the T9 aerosol is the centerpiece. It's like a super deluxe WD40 with an incorporated wax for longer protection.

If you don't have machined steel deck tools you probably don't know how vulnerable they are to moisture and stains. In extreme cases, the raw steel can actually get pitted from chemicals as mild as simple table sugar. My Delta Unisaw and Jet jointer were in bad shape.

Let's look a little closer. What the hell happened to this thing??

I know what a couple of those stains are. One was Karen's sweating Coke can (after I told her to keep it off the tools... do I really need to provide drink coasters in my shop?) And several off those stains were water drips from the overhead coolant lines to the upstairs split-unit air conditioners. I don't what that big stain to the left is. All I know was that WD40 didn't get rid of it.

The spray can is T9. That goes on last. Up first was the gum and tar remover. Spray, let it sit for 60 seconds, then scrub with #00 steel wool and wipe off with paper towels. Next was the rust and stain remover. As soon as I sprayed it I recognized the smell: phosphoric acid. That removed most of the stains, although it took three passes. Then it's sprayed with T9 and wiped down.

Success! Well, not quite. Fifteen minutes later the deck felt like it was covered in sticky old paste wax. I dug at it with my fingernail and that's exactly what it was. Old wax. Boeshield didn't do a very good job of removing that old wax. It simply suspended itself in the various solutions and then dried. Drat.

A wipe down with mineral spirits fixed that. In Boeshield's defense, there must have been 20 layers of carnuba wax on that deck. You really need a petroleum solvent to get it off. Anyway, after an additional treatment with T9 here was the result.

I haven't decided whether or not I should wax it too. I think I'll leave it as is for now to see how well Boeshield works as protection.

Afterwards, I did my table saw too. That was even tougher because an idiot had used the saw as an assembly table to glue fabric to some window shades. The spray glue soaked through and discolored the steel. I was that idiot, by the way.

Anyway, it's all pretty now. But it reminds me of an entry from the Tyromaniac's Notebook that I'd like to pass along. DON'T use Naval Jelly to remove rust stains from a steel table saw deck. The stuff is way too caustic. Those were the hardest stains to remove.

PS: I realize that I've been real lax about updating my blog since December. I even got a letter from one of the blog reflectors asking me if I'd abandoned BrooklynRowHouse. I haven't. I've just been neck deep in a software project for the Children's Health Fund. I'll be reporting on the upcoming stained glass projects soon.

The Greenville Horror

2008-01-06T18:04:35-05:00

A Google search shows that the house at #6 Whitten Street in Greenville, SC was sold to George C. Leventis on July 8, 2003 for $88,000.

Flash forward four years. The home's new owners are the Browns, who purchased the Whitten Street house for $75,000.

Cited text is courtesy of WYFF.

Jason and Kerri Brown of Greenville found a secret room in their home behind a bookcase, and what was inside was a nightmare beyond their wildest dreams.

"This can't be happening. This can't be true. It terrified me," Kerri Brown told News 4's Tim Waller.

A secret room! Who hasn't had fantasies of finding a secret room in their old house? But for Kerri Brown, it was about the worst nightmare a home owner could face.

The secret room in the old mill home on Whitten Street in Greenville's Dunean section contained a handwritten letter from the previous owner titled, "You Found It!"

"Hello. If you're reading this, then you found the secret room. I owned this house for a short while and it was discovered to have a serious mold problem. One that actually made my children very sick to the point that we had to move out," Kerri Brown read from the letter.

Leventis and his family were the first to discover the horrible secret of Number 6 Whitten Street. There is no indication the previous owner was aware of any mold.

According to the note, the mold problem was so severe that it made the whole Leventis family sick.

The Leventises did the only thing they believed they could do. With no money in their savings to have the mold removed, they stopped paying the mortgage and let the home go into foreclosure.

"I've never seen my kids that sick. And it was scary," Tricia Leventis said in tears.

According to Tricia, she and their two young daughters became desperately ill, and said doctors told them to leave the home immediately.

"It was adamant. Absolutely, get out," Leventis said. "It was to the point where my youngest was so sick, she was unable to hold any nutrition, nothing was working, she couldn't breathe."

The Browns subsequently bought the home from the Leventis' bank.

So was George Leventis a cad or something of a hero? According to Leventis, he knew the bank would re-sell his house and he wanted to be sure the future owners knew about the mold. Leventis said what better way to warn them than to leave a note hidden from plain view.

"I put it in the room because I didn't want anyone to find it if it was left out in the house. I figured if someone else who had another interest or a stake in the house found it, they would just throw it away or they wouldn't tell anyone," Leventis said.

The Browns say that is exactly what happened, and say if not for the note, their child may have become sick as well.

"I'm very thankful he left the note. In my opinion, there's a possibility he could have saved Megan's life," Kerri Brown said.

A mold engineering company was hired to assess the damage and it found elevated-levels of several types of mold, including Aspergillus, Basidiospores, Chaetomiu, Curvularia, Stachybotrys and Torula. According to the Browns, the cost of removing the mold exceeded the value of the home.

Lawsuits are, of course, flying although Fannie Mae agreed to buy back the house from the Browns at its sale price and has subsequently been dropped from the lawsuit.

Source: Hidden Room, Hidden Danger

Designing Stained Glass

2007-12-17T01:59:19-05:00

Rembrandt, I ain't. I can visualize things pretty well but there's a bridge out somewhere between my left and right brain. With woodworking, I usually wind up head jamming the fabrication. It works 90% of the time. The other 10% is handled by my hard-won skills in making dumb mistakes look like I meant to do that. But this ad hoc process doesn't work for stained glass construction, where you need to have a completed design and pieces cut before you start soldering things together.

My stained glass work to date has been pretty simple, angular and, yes, left brained. But for the new projects here I wanted something a bit more artistic. So I began the hunt for stained glass design software and settled on Glass Eye 2000 from Dragonfly. It's ain't cheap but it's not like stained glass people are a huge market. Nevertheless, it's a high quality product and the best design software I could find.

This is a window panel I designed in GE2k in about three hours.

GE2k is primarily a vector paint program. "Knots" determine ends of lines and also the arc points within lines. Making an arc is just a matter of grabbing a midline knot and dragging it where you want it. If you need a more complex arc, add more knots to the line. This might sound kind of crude but it's surprisingly flexible and, moreover, it makes resizing a design extremely accurate.

There are several ways to begin a design in GE2k. The easiest is to just Browse Designs and steal one. GE2k comes with over four hundred completed designs and bevels which you can use as-is or modify to suit. Dragonfly also sells packages of optional patterns ranging from Edwardian designs to cute li'l animals.

A very powerful feature in GE2k is AutoTrace. What you do is import a GIF or JPEG as a "background" and the software will create the outlines for you. This works pretty well for simple graphics, like a basic pencil sketch or a drawing from a coloring book. The tracing usually requires a little manual cleanup but the output looks surprisingly like a stained glass design.

You can also manually trace a drawing or a photo, like the artist did here. It's tedious but it lets you capture an incredible amount of detail, producing an almost photo-realistic stained glass piece. Basically, what you do is overlay lots and lots of knots on the photo and pull lines to match the contours of the picture.

A tool I've found indispensable for setting glass colors is ColorPic, built and marketed by a brilliant developer I worked with at Trafficmac, Nico Westerdale of Iconico. I can't imagine building anything relying on color without it. Nico has lots of free or inexpensive, super-valuable tools for web design on his site. It's a web developer's, or in this case stained glass designer's, toy box.

Anyway, this is a panel I designed to fit into the window frames I built last week. There's an article about that construction here. I'll be building two of these panels for the window from the master bedroom to the hallway. They're intended to bring light from the south-facing bedroom windows into an otherwise dark section of hallway while also providing privacy.

Here's an example of AutoTrace in action. I did this as an exercise to learn this aspect of the software. It took me about 45 minutes to complete the drawing, which I don't intend to actually build.

This is a sketch I found on the web; just a simple cartoonish Christmas tree. I imported it into GE2k using the Add Background command. It contains several lines which don't actually produce workable stained glass pieces. GE2k knows this and will tell you as much when you run the Suggest command (Ctrl-Q).

AutoTrace generated this template. Yup, it's got a lot of disconnected lines. Since the lines articulate borders for the glass pieces, they either need to be extended to meet the knots in other lines, or removed altogether. The tiny little bead-looking things you see on the lines are the knots. You can add/remove them or drag them to new locations to create curves and arcs.

Fifteen minutes of modification produced this. The Suggest command was really useful, telling me about disconnected knots on the pattern, pieces which were too small to fabricate, etc.

I quickly chose some colors and presto: a nearly complete stained glass design.

Clicking on another command automatically numbered all the pieces for me. When you print out the drawing you'll actually print two copies. One is the base template over which you fabricate the glass and the lead came (or copper foil). The other provides templates for actually cutting the glass. You cut out the paper pieces, fasten them to the glass with rubber cement, run a Sharpie around the profile and then cut the glass. Having those numbered pieces makes it easy to do all your cuts in one production run.

If I was going to actually construct this drawing I would almost certainly break up some of the long pieces and simplify the complex wavy lines to make glass cutting easier. Fortunately, that's easy to do.

There's much more to Glass Eye 2000 than this. One cool feature is Costing. The software comes with a large and extensible inventory of glass types, manufacturers and model numbers. You can assign square-foot prices to them, as well as to the lead stock. When you complete the design, Glass Eye will tell you how much the materials will cost to build it. You can even estimate your hours and use it to generate a formal bid for a customer. Pretty cool.

Talk about it the Stained Glass Forum.

New Stained Glass Projects

2007-12-11T22:09:35-05:00

I have several stained glass tasks in the queue here. Some, like the upper cabinet doors in the living room media cabinet, have been on hold since 2003. Others, like the funky stairway skylight, I've wanted to replace since the day I first saw the place.

While stained glass construction is fairly mechanical and basically just woodworking joinery using glass and lead came, the design, templating and piecing out can be very time consuming. Most of the glass I've done here is fairly simple and angular to match the existing stained glass. But I wanted something a bit more ornamental for these new projects.

The delay is mostly because I suck at drawing. I can muddle my way through Photoshop if I have to and I've even built a few nice web page banners using "creative appropriation" of assets conceived by others. Change a few lines, overlay a mask or two, morph a few elements and, poof, it's mine. Derivative art.

While a Photoshop geek might be able to design stained glass using it, I ain't one of them. So I plonked down a considerable chunk of money for professional stained glass design software from Dragonfly, Glass Eye 2000. This software does everything but cut the glass for you. While it's expensive, it's less than I would pay to have just one of these projects professionally made. I'll talk more about Glass Eye in a future installment.

Back to the project, up first are two pairs of doors for the master bedroom, technically the last piece of the long-running master bedroom renovations. One pair is for the bedroom cabinet I built last year and the other is for a window from the bedroom into the hallway. The latter was a redundant doorway after I had merged two bedrooms into one. I decided to put a window in that opening to bring natural light into what would otherwise be a dark section of hallway.

Measurements done, the first thing I have to do is construct empty frames for those doors. It will be made from red oak (of course) -- standard 1" stock ripped to 2-1/2". For all practical purposes, I'll be constructing them like a raised panel cabinet door. But instead of a raised wood panel I'll use a fabricated stained glass panel. There's a bit more to it than that, but later for that as well.

So it's downstairs to the shop to make the blanks for those doors. These were ripped from a couple of 1x6s I picked up at Lowes last summer. I wanted to give them a few months to season in the shop to make sure there weren't going to be any issues with twisting or warping. Believe it or not, the Brooklyn Lowes carries nicer red oak stock than our local hardwood yards. The boards were run through a surface planer to make sure they were of identical thickness. This is an important step for rail and stile construction. Then it was on to the chop saw to cut for length, then the table saw to rip it to width.

After the blanks were cut it was on to the router table. Paneled cabinet doors usually employ two stiles (the vertical perimeter members) and two rails (the horizontal members). Sometimes those rails and stiles have architectural beading. This is achieved by two bits, appropriately called a rail and stile set.

Why two bits? After all, cabinet beading looks like it could be done with just one. Actually, it is. The second bit cuts a negative profile of the first bit. It's used on the ends of the rails so they can fit snugly inside the stiles, something like a tenon. It creates a large glue surface and a very strong corner.

The trick with rail and stile sets is making sure that they (a) cut a deep enough recess for the panel and (b) they're aligned to each other. What I do is rip several pieces of scrap plywood and use them to set the router depth. While experience and eyeballing will get you in the ballpark, it's still pretty much of a trial and error process. Needless to say, when you've got the router adjusted for a bit you should make all your cuts that use that bit.

A few more tricks:

It can be tough to visualize the profile that a complex router bit will cut so label your bits with a Sharpie. I have my rail/stile bits labeled, "Lateral"/"End". I have three rail/stile sets so I've also got them color coded.
Make cabinet doors about 1/8" over-sized in both planes. A little trim on the table saw will gives you a smooth joint. This can also save your butt in case you slip up and build the doors slightly out of square (eh, it happens).
It's almost unavoidable that there will be some tear-out from the end grain bit. You can mitigate this by doing your end cuts first, working slowly and keeping the router RPMs high. But if it happens, don't worry about it. You can trim off the "hair" later with a utility knife.

Here are the blanks with the lateral cuts.

Here they are with the end cuts.

And here's a dry fit of the joints.

Finally, here's the assembly. I like to use Bessey K-Clamps for things like this because adjusting tension on the clamps helps bring the fabrication into square. You can test for square by measuring diagonal corners but on smaller assemblies like this I prefer to use a rafting square. I wish I had more room in the shop for a real assembly table. But then I'd probably want a hydraulic clamping system.

"HEY! You forgot to put in the panel, dummy!"

As I said, this is a little different than building a raised panel door. The problem is that while the edge channel on the stained glass panel will just fit into the 3/16" dado left by the router bit for the raised panel, once I solder it it won't. I'll have to whack out the thin backing lip with a chisel to insert the panel, then add a moulding detail to hold it in place. This actually works out better because the panel can be removed for repair later.

I have one more set of cabinet doors to make with a different beading and a frame for the bathroom skylight. My next post will probably be about the Glass Works design software.

Talk about it the Stained Glass Forum.

My Odorific Old House

2007-12-03T22:50:04-05:00

I'll be posting a new series of articles on stained glass construction in a few weeks. I purchased some new ($$!) stained glass design software from Dragonfly, Glass 2000 Professional, to help me complete the half-dozen stained glass projects I've got on my plate. So I'll post a review of that as well.

I'm gonna change gears and show a bit of my feminine side. I like fragrant houses. I spent my early years living in a small town in Japan, where my mother became a passionate connoisseur of oriental incense. She often had a subtle fragrance burning in the house long after we moved back to the States.

For me, a fragrant house smells like home. Since I moved out on my own, I've usually had a cone of incense burning, mostly temple fragrances. It beats smelling the dogs' microwaved breakfast all day.

After moving to Brooklyn I found myself estranged from my Manhattan oriental incense supplier. I tried buying it online but the stuff I was getting smelled more like a brothel or a hippy crash pad than the earthier stuff I liked.

On an early trip to Nantucket, Karen and I visited a fragrance store where the owner turned me on to something called essential oils and a device called an oil burner. While I still prefer the smokier fragrance of Japanese incense, oil lasts a lot longer. After feeding the dogs in the morning, I pour a 1/4 ounce or so into the burner and it's good for the whole day. Here's a shot of the burner.

Another cool thing about essential and fragrant oils (there's a difference: essential oils are extracted from natural sources; fragrant oils are made chemically) is that you can create your own blends. Some days I want a woodsy fragrance, other days I want a Christmasy smell. Here are a few of the scents I have stashed behind the kitchen sink:

Most of these are essential oils like pine, clove, cedar and other spices. But a few are fragrant, like Victorian Christmas.

I usually pick up these oils wholesale from two online sources:

http://www.soyandscent.com
http://www.wellingtonfragrance.com

Buying oils online is a bit of a crap shoot. The names only give you a general indication. For instance, "cranberry" can have a light, fruity aroma or it can stink like cheap candy. It's like going into a wine store without knowing the labels you like. Some stores offer one-ounce samplers where, chances are, you'll find one or two you like.

Bay Ridge Hum

2007-11-06T21:52:10-05:00

Out-worlders would probably expect Brooklyn to sound like inner-city traffic, police sirens and "Yo! Vinnie! T'row me down some money fa a' egg cream!" Actually, it's pretty quiet down here by the harbor, except for the low-flying NYPD helicopters.

Nevertheless, I have two "bizarre noise" stories. I'll talk about the most public one first and, if I can keep it short, I'll tell the other one.

In late 2005, I was at the dog run when an obviously exhausted woman told me that she was kept awake all night by a loud hum outside. She lives only three blocks from me so she asked if I'd heard it too. I told her I was sorry but I hadn't heard a thing. She bore on, telling me that it sounded like a low engine rumble, almost like a fog horn, except it was non-stop. I thought there might be a simple explanation: she was nuts.

A few months later, I read an article in our local paper, the Bay Ridge Courier. It was a brief interview with a resident on Colonial Rd complaining about "this awful noise". She had heard it too. I still hadn't.

Shortly after that, the Brooklyn Paper picked up the story. Then the NY Sun. Then the NY Daily News. I'm told that even FoxNews did a story on it. A local reporter, Matthew Lysiac, has made it a cause célèbre.

Okay, even though I still haven't heard it, lots of people in my neighborhood have. They can't all be crazy. On the other hand, I'm not deaf either and I'm usually out walking the dogs at 1am when it's so quiet I can hear a traffic accident across the harbor in Staten Island. Is this something like Tinkerbelle? You have to believe it to hear it?

Whatever, the local pols are all over it too. Last month our city councilman, Vincent Gentile, said that he'd solved the mystery. The culprit was the bizarre looking oyster toadfish and its noisy mating ritual.

Mr. Gentile had contracted the services of a prominent marine biologist and that was his conclusion. Case closed, right?

Not quite because nobody had actually seen an oyster toadfish in the waters along Owls Head. His former Republican rival, Marty Golden, had a little fun with the Hum buggers in this photo.

But Gentile wasn't sold on the answer either and asked a Cornell professor of Neurobiology with the improbably funny last name of "Bass" to confirm the toadfish story. He couldn't. In fact, he didn't hear or see any toadfish either.

So we're back to square one and all the convoluted and fantastical explanations: global warming and an inversion layer funneling refinery noise from New Jersey, wind causing the Verrazano Bridge cables to vibrate, secret underground tunneling for some Men In Black headquarters, which of course leads us to UFOs.

Bottom line, there's an awful noise that's apparently loud enough to disturb the sleep of reasonable people over almost a square mile which I haven't heard and no one knows what it is. Maybe it's just an elaborate practical joke against me.

I'll tell my own strange noise story in a later installment.

My Product Review

2007-10-23T13:05:36-04:00

The last product I was asked to review was an in-floor Kryptonite locking system for motorcycles for Motorcyclist mag. I injured my knee tripping on that #*$% lock in the dark. Let's see if I have more luck with the EZ Clean paint brush that Jeannie from Houseblogs.netasked me to check out.

My project was painting my kitchen extension, which still had seven year-old primer on the walls. It's one of those Deferred Completion Syndrome items I was happy to check off the list for this product test.

I didn't have a clue what I would be testing other than it would be a "new painting tool". When UPS delivered the box and I saw what it was I have to admit I was a little disappointed. I guess I was expecting something dramatic like a high tech masking tape product or an ultrasonic paint stirrer. Those are jobs I hate doing. Cleaning paint brushes doesn't really bother me. In fact, I find it strangely cathartic.

I also have to say that I was skeptical when I saw the name. I've got a dusty box full of useless Magic Planes, EZ-Sharps and Miracle Klamps I've bought at tool shows during moments of low brain/wallet coordination. Such product names conjure up images of imminent suckerhood all by themselves now.

After a day of plastering to fix damage from an old leak in the extension's roof, I dove in with another coat of Kilz primer. I had my doubts that the EZ Clean would be as comfortable or useful as my trusty Purdy wooden handled chisel tip brush. For one thing, the EZ Clean brush I got has fairly short bristles (Note: the brush is available with bristles up to four inches long) so I wasn't confident it would hold much paint.

I did the usual latex prep of soaking the brush in cold water for a couple of minutes then shaking out the excess. This helps to keep paint from collecting and gumming up under the ferrule, which is especially problematic with sticky primers. Then I got to work.

I was surprised. The brush did a very good job with cut-ins. I was correct that it didn't hold as much paint as my Purdy, but the shorter bristles gave me greater control. With less paint on the brush there were also fewer drips. I'll gladly trade not having to stop to clean up paint drool for a few more trips back to the paint can. The ribbed ABS handle also has better traction than a wood handled brush. Two points for EZ Clean.

But EZ Clean's primary claim is clean up and here's where I was a bit put off. This isn't the fault of the idea or the brush but an assumption by its manufacturer that we all have garden hoses and places outside where we can let the paint fly. My back yard is covered with brick pavers. I could have cleaned the brush in one of the five-gallon buckets I have here but that's no more convenient than cleaning in the sink.

Which is what I did. There's no attachment for a sink faucet, or at least not for my cheapo Delta, so I tried holding the handle tightly against the faucet, sealing it as best I could with my hands. That was a mistake. Milky white water squirted all over me and the cabinets.

What should be included with this tool is a generic, slip-over faucet attachment like those you get with large humidifiers and portable dishwashers. Even if I had a convenient spot outdoors to clean the paint brush, I don't live in sunny Los Angeles. What do us northern folks do in January when it's 20 degrees outside and the garden faucet and hose have been shut down and drained for the season? What do apartment dwellers do?

I couldn't give the brush a fair test of its ez-cleaning because of this. But I saw enough of it through the geyser shooting in my face to postulate that it probably works pretty well, so long as you have a tight seal at the coupling. I can say that it doesn't give up any quality as a paint brush for this cleaning feature.

But, as I said, I don't mind cleaning latex paint brushes so I doubt I would pay a premium price for this over a conventional paint brush.

Stripping a Door: Part 1

2007-10-20T23:41:45-04:00

The prologue of this story is an old door that needed to be stripped. I brought in my amateur stripper, Doc Karen, to serve as my photo model for this two part pictorial. Even anesthesiologists have to moonlight to make ends meet these days .

I was gratified that she took our tutorial seriously enough to wear her surgical scrubs (mismatched as they were). I guess that makes me "House".

Karen's own house is full of painted architectural woodwork so she wanted to learn how the paint stripping process worked. Since it's her door now I was only too happy to hand her the tools and take my position behind the camera, tucking an occasional dollar bill in her rubber glove and yelling, "Take it all off, baby!" until she threatened to beat me stupid.

The first thing she did was get the door in a comfortable working position on a pair of sawhorses. Whenever possible, try to remove the woodwork and get it horizontal. This applies to baseboards and casings too. If you don't, you'll know why this is a good idea about twenty minutes into working with a heavy heat gun. These things ain't hair dryers.

Karen prepped the area so she would have the tools and supplies she needed when she needed them. I told her it was probably a lot like what they do before one of her operations. This is less important at the heat gun stage than it is when you start with the chemicals. Get all your scrapers and brushes together. Lay a plastic garbage bag on a convenient nearby surface where you can set down your grungy tools when the phone rings. Place a 40-gallon garbage can within arm's length and have a spare bag ready. Pre-rip a lot of paper towels into a pile. It's hard to do that while wearing heavy gloves.

Painted old house woodwork will commonly have varnish or shellac as the base layer. That's good news for two reasons. One is because it provides a barrier between the paint and the wood. This is a time saver when you're working with an open-grained wood like oak because it prevents the paint from melting into the grain, where the job becomes exponentially more tedious.

The other reason is because this makes a heat gun ideal for the first stage of stripping. Under heat, varnish liquefies before the paint so you can scrape off decades of paint in one pass and in one long ribbon, as Karen is doing above. If we had used only stripper on these five or six layers of paint, this door would have been a mess for hours. You can see from the photos how much easier the job becomes without having to clean up a witch's brew of funky melted paint and noxious stripper. Minimizing the use of caustic chemicals is important, not just for your health but the health of the wood.

She started by warming up a 4x10 inch area at the end of the door with the heat gun. You can tell the paint is ready for scraping when it just starts to lift, as you can see here. Don't let the paint burn or blister, especially if you suspect lead paint (wear a chemical mask regardless though). Always strip with the grain whenever possible.

I like this scraper because it has an edge like a dull chisel so it slices under and lifts the paint better than does a flat scraper. The technique is to work slowly in a forward direction, keeping the heat gun a couple of inches in front of the blade, as Karen is doing here. If the blade starts to hit resistance, slow down and let the surface get a bit warmer. Don't stop and go back to pick up something you missed. Get it in another pass. You don't want the warm, sticky paint you just lifted off the surface to reattach itself to the bare wood.

When that ribbon of paint starts to fall back over the unscraped stuff, dump it in the garbage can. If you need a second pass with the heat gun, make sure to clean the scraper blade before starting again.

After the heat gun, the next steps is to scrape off the hardened residue with a pull scraper. Most of this will be hardened varnish. The center panel in this door will be removed and replaced with an architectural metal screen so Karen's not stripping it.

Now we go to the chemicals. My apologies to the "green" folks but none of the soy/citrus strippers work nearly as well as the hard stuff. Here we're using Klean Strip. Karen bought the stuff you spray on; I like the KS3 gel that you paint on. Same stuff, just that whatever convenience you gain with a spray bottle you give up with having to refill the small spray bottle frequently.

The axiom is, "let the stripper do the work". I like to let the stripper sit undisturbed for at least ten minutes. Resist the temptation of toying with it during this step. Chemical strippers are designed to create a seal to trap the active chemicals next to the paint. Breaking this seal lets in air and weakens the chemical action.

Then go at it with a fine wire brush, like Karen is doing. This is followed by a wad of clean paper towels. Then another spritz of stripper, another wire brushing, another wad of paper towels.

Usually, that's all you need. This was Karen's first time at stripping so we'll need to do one more light pass to remove the last film of varnish. Then we'll neutralize the stripper with MEK, which is optional but saves sanding later. Then it's an overnight dry before sanding through the grits (100 and 150), which should always be done with a dust mask after stripping. If you have fine detail to clean out, use a metal dentist's pick and a small wire brush.

Saving The World: Black Pixels and Termite Farts

2007-10-14T14:23:59-04:00

Tomorrow, Oct 15, is Blog Action Day and tens of thousands of bloggers like me have each committed to writing an article about the environment. BrooklynRowHouse is about old home renovation and improvement so this topic is a low, slow ball over the plate for people like me.

Do you like how I worked in a baseball metaphor during playoff season? This will be a long article and I need to use whatever cheap literary devices I can to hold your interest because there are thousands of bloggers out there who write better than me and we're all writing about the same thing.

I think a lot of us old house shut-ins are going to contribute something along the lines of this:

If you're thinking about downsizing from the SUV parked in your garage, consider what's possibly parked in your utility room: a 30 year-old, low-efficiency heating system and a 20-year old water heater. Unlike your gas guzzler, your heating system is cranking 24/7 during the winter months, spewing money and dead dinosaurs up the chimney. You might spend 30 minutes a day with the engine idling in gridlocked traffic. But your water heater is idling all day and all night, burning unnecessary fuel, waiting for someone to come along to wash Fido's bowl. For the sake of the environment, your pocketbook and the diminishing buying power of your ~~yuan~~dollar, think about investing in a new heating plant and an on-demand hot water heater now.

I could write about that.

But despite the topical slant of this blog, my professional title is "techno geek", not "HVAC installer". Truthfully, I don't know if changing my boiler would result in much more than a change in environment for my plumber's Christmas vacation plans. I spend most of my day debugging code (sadly, my own) looking for polluting little cockroaches sucking the energy out of my programs. So I have another perspective on this energy/environment thing.

There's a company out of Australia with a web search site called Blackle. If that sounds vaguely like Google that's because it is Google, or rather a rebranded one. Check it out.

A black Google? So what's that got to do with global warming?

According to the company, a white pixel takes more energy to generate than a black pixel. A US Dept of Energy report states, "White and bright colors (especially in backgrounds) can use up to 20% more power than black or dark colors." One web site actually calculated that difference. An all-white background consumes 74 watts versus an all-black background at 59 watts. They further went on to extrapolate this with a prediction that if Google switched its site to a black background this trivial change alone could save a whopping 750 megawatt hours a year!

750 million watts saved?! Wow, even a million is a lot!

Is black the new Green?

Wellllll... 750MWh is the equivalent of 17,700 gallons of oil, which refines down to about 8500 gallons of fuel. That's still a lot but it's probably what Air Force One burns on just one of Bush's 75 vacation trips to Crawford since 2001, which segues to...

We're not going to change anything in this country, let alone the world, without honest leadership and politicians who, even if they're also taking a vacation from developing a meaningful national energy policy, can at least attempt to set an example for the rest of us to follow. Not just more "go shopping".

What my Blog Action article is really about is common sense and perspective. With increasing focus on new energy technologies, we all need to kick our bullshit filters up a notch. I don't mean just with self-serving pols and pundits yammering about "hydrogen cars" and "carbon credits" but with some of the voodoo technologies piggybacking on it as well.

Using RF to set seawater on fire, miracle energy tubes that break the Second Law of Thermodynamics and magic energy from magnestism are only the latest wave of snake oil solutions which will unfortunately and probably increasingly eclipse hard science in the mainstream media and it's typical "Ooo, pretty lights!" coverage of anything more technical than MySpace.

PS: I love my older brother's comment about John Kanzius, the radio engineer who discovered that salt water igniter in the first story: "The only thing he discovered is something we already knew. Retirement sucks!"

That's not to say we should be cynical about unconventional energy concepts because the real science that's being practiced in our universities is actually a lot stranger and more interesting than this hype.

For instance, here's an unlikely but intriguing new bioreactor idea which is getting some attention in the conventional research world. Ironically, it's also one which is sadly all too familiar to those of us with old houses. The termite.

To its credit, the mainstream media actually did pick up this story, then blew it out of scale as usual: Bugs in Termite Guts May Offer Future Fuel Source.

I've been casually following this curious discovery for a while. My neighborhood is a termite free-fire zone so I've done a lot reading on these little buggers. It turns out that they may be little heroes instead. They address two large problems. One is generating biomass fuel so that it doesn't consume more energy to make it than it produces. The other is what to do with the mountains of unrecycled organic refuse we generate every year. That includes the huge amount of organic waste left over from current corn-based biofuel production. The microbial brew living in the intestines of termites may provide an answer for both.

Here's an interview with Berkeley Labs', Steve Chu, who adds some perspective to the termites-as-energy-source story.

But if my admiration for these creepy little bugs wasn't enough, there was an even more curious discovery. One of the byproducts of termite digestion is hydrogen. A termite generates two liters of hydrogen as a by-product from consuming a single piece of letter-sized paper. This is stunning because conventional hydrogen production is a very expensive process, requiring as much energy to make it as it delivers.

Can the world be saved by termite farts?

But, wait! These critters may have something else to teach us about energy conservation. It seems that African termite mounds possess some pretty amazing properties that might find a practical application in constructing stronger, more energy efficient buildings.

Real science is even more amazing than the fake stuff.

Summing up, it would be nice to dump that fat-arsed SUV you don't really need. You should invest in higher-efficiency appliances and tighten up your home. But hybrid cars, CFL light bulbs and black pixels are just a sideshow. We need to realize that no matter what political stripes we might wear, we're all fighting the same survival clock, if not for ourselves then for future generations which are counting on us to fix what they didn't break. This isn't a liberal/conservative issue or a democrat/republican issue. It's a smart/stupid issue.

Moving the world to newer, safer forms of energy and putting ourselves on an energy diet in the interim is one of the toughest challenges we've ever faced. It will require visionary leadership committed to its success, not more sock puppets telling us what we want to hear and only what they want us to know.

This message was written using recycled, old-growth ASCII characters.

Cheap digs

2007-10-04T23:33:43-04:00

Jeannie from Houseblogs.net challenged us blogger monkeys to write a show-and-tell post.

Considering the probably millions of bucks that we housebloggers collectively squander annually on new roofs, new additions, central air and glass door knobs, if there was a ever a low, slow ball over the plate for this group, this was it!

Bragging about my tool collection was the first thing that popped into my head. but I just got off a nine-month ~~drunk~~ bedroom reno project where I blabbed relentlessly about them. What about my central vac? Nah, I did that one recently too. My dogs, Jack and Auggie? Furry pets are always a safe fallback post when you've got nothing else to talk about. I wish I could boast about my auction and flea market finds but I've been pretty disappointed by them the past year or two. All I bought at the last one was a bag of kettle corn. Home automation? Not again.

Instead, I want to talk about something I've had since I was 11 years old: a book that my dad bought in 1950 before I was born and later gave to me to learn how to help him frame a new room in our basement.

Here it still sits on my bedroom bookshelf, along with several other books he gave me -- some from his own childhood. Can you spot it?

No, not the flight instruction manuals. Not that 1938 edition of Treasure Island.

Let's go in for a closer look.

Your Dream Home - How To Build It For Less Than $3500 by Hubbard Cobb. Published by Wm. H Wise & Co., 1950.

At a time when $3500 is a monthly mortgage payment for many people, this must seem like a cruel joke. But the book was dead serious. In fact, according to the book, the plans were submitted to building supply firms in four different areas of the country. $3500 was the highest bid.

Okay, it's a pretty basic cottage. It might not be Camelot but it's not Tobacco Road either. There are two good-sized bedrooms, a 12x18 living/dining room, an 8-1/2x17-1/2 kitchen, a stone terrace, a semi-finished attic and an enclosed garage. And not just one car but two! And central heating.

This, my friends, was the start of my long slide into Stage 3 tyromania. This book is what introduced me to the skeletal, cardiovascular, muscular and (yes) urinary anatomy of a house. I read this thing from cover to cover before I picked up a hammer to help dad build that basement bedroom for my older brother -- before slamming it on my thumb about a minute later. It hurt like hell but I persevered. Bonus: I had a blackened finger to gross out my female classmates the next day.

A year later, when I was 12, this book was also my guide to laying a concrete sidewalk in our Virginia back yard. Thanks to the excellent drawings and unpretentious commentary, even a fairly ADD kid like me could understand the mysteries behind the paint. Except in those days "ADD" meant "bratty".

In fact, it was my bible until I turned 26 years old, when I started investing in headier construction and construction theory books like two others you'll see on that shelf, Michael Rettinger's, "Studio Acoustics" and "Acoustic Design and Noise Control".

What really kills me though is this page:

Including mortgage, insurance and taxes your monthly nut on the loan to build this house would have been $42.68! Or at least it would have been for my dad, who was military. For the draft dodgers it would have been a whopping $43.63/month. And that's with the 40% loan amount cushion the book recommends for DIY types who tend to overestimate their competence with major building projects.

At least some thing don't change.

A Prodigal Door Returns

2007-09-28T22:21:29-04:00

Okay, it's a lightweight job and it's not even for my house. But after several months of heads-down work on a software task for my client, The Children's Health Fund, I've got another DIY project. Maybe it will kick me back into gear to finish the cabinet doors and stained glass projects that have been dogging me all summmer. Well, some of it for a lot longer than that.

The job is stripping an old interior door and replacing its center panel with some sort of a screen. Karen is a licensed wildlife rescuer and needs this door so her animal room has adequate ventilation. She wanted to install an aluminum screen door but my relentless bleating about what a hideous scar that would leave on her old house succeeded. I suggested that she instead do some dumpster diving for a 30" door and we'd modify it so it would at least have some architectural integrity with her old federal style house. She agreed.

More importantly, I figured that would keep her busy until sometime next year, when she might forget all about it.

No such luck. She brought over the door on Wednesday. I noticed something strangely familiar about it until I realized it was MINE! I tossed this door out eight years ago, the week I moved here. My kitchen had one of those double-hinged swinging doors. These damned things are navigational hazards. I've always hated them. There's either a hundred pound dog sleeping on the other side or the rebound catches a surprised cat. It didn't appear to be original to the house and the hinge hardware was broken so I chucked it.

What I didn't know is that Karen had recovered it from my trash night and hauled it out to her sister's house on Long Island. Sis wanted a door like this for her kitchen but it turned to be too narrow. So it sat in her garage for all these years.

Now it's back home, at least temporarily.

It may not be original to the house but there's still six to eight layers of paint on this door -- so much so that I can't tell if the center panel is wood or glass. Over the next couple of posts I'm gonna walk through a typical stripping job, or at least typical to me.

Then there will be an atypical butchery of an old door.

My toughest cabinet

2007-08-29T01:22:04-04:00

My dogs are killing my floors! They're large and energetic pups who like to use the floor as a skating rink. I decided to look in my photo archives to see what they look like now as opposed to five years ago.

Thankfully, it wasn't as bad as I thought but I'll probably get the floors lightly sanded and refinished when I'm done with the construction here and the dogs are a little older and more sedate. One of the reasons I don't stain floors is so I have the option to screen them if they need refinishing rather than having to do a thorough sanding.

While looking for those old photos I got sidetracked by a few pix of the nearly completed media cabinet I had built for the living room. This project started as an afterthought. Because the living room isn't huge, I had originally planned to stash most of my media hardware in a basement locker. It was a poorly conceived idea.

The location of the cabinet was dictated by the layout of the room. It was going to have to be a corner cabinet. But I piled on a few more requirements. It had to hide all my audio and video gear as well as my favorite 300 or so CDs. Even though I didn't own one yet, it had to support a 38" wide HD monitor. There would be no visible wiring and there would be a hardwired Ethernet connection. It had to blend into the finish trim style of the room, which meant that it had to be a built-in.

This unfortunately also meant that it needed to be a five-sided cabinet and I'd never built anything like this before. Worse, to get the correct TV viewing angle from the sofa, the front had to be a sixty degree angle off the left wall. So the cabinet had to be irregularly shaped. More good news: in order to hide all the cables I needed a wiring channel in the back. So that meant a six-sided cabinet. The geometry was making my head explode.

The first thing I had to do was eliminate a major unknown: the practical dimensions of that flat screen monitor. I spent an evening with a tape measure at Best Buy and Circuit City before nailing down those numbers. I tried mocking up the cabinet in a CAD program but I couldn't get a handle on the software. In the end, I just hacked away on a piece of scrap masonite until I got a horizontal profile that worked. Then I ordered several sheets of 3/4" red oak plywood.

Ever since a friend of mine built a beautiful bar in his shop which was too large to ever leave his shop, I've always been afraid of the "boat in a basement" syndrome. Unlike our Fearless Leader, I always plan around an exit strategy. In this case, the exit was a 36" wide door from my shop through the garage. The strategy was that I could only build the rear three sides in the shop. It would have to be assembled in place, over those aforementioned newly finished floors.

I wasn't sure how strong I could make a six-sided cabinet either. All of my experience was constructing standard cabinets using standard bar clamps, which wouldn't work very well here with the mix of angles. The clamping solution was nylon ratcheting tiedowns that I use for trailering the motorcycles. To increase the strength of the joints I used Gorilla glue. After my neighbor, Joe, and I hauled the three-sided back up from the shop, I constructed the other sides as individual units resting on a common base.

The face frame went on last, after the seven shelves were slid into their respective dados. In the end, making that template out of masonite was a life saver because it gave me a common reference for cutting all the shelves, the base and the top.

Anyway, this was (almost) the finished project. I still need to build stained glass inserts for the upper cabinet. The bottom one uses translucent colored stained glass around the edges and clear glass in the middle so the infrared remotes will work.

The wiring is all hidden. The receiver/amp is a seven channel Denon pushing a pair of Polk in-wall speakers, a center channel midrange driver, a subwoofer (located on top of the cabinet) and a pair of Polk bookshelf speakers in the dining room. There are two more pairs of speaker wire looped and stored in the basement ceiling for future expansion. One of them will probably be run to my back yard next spring

I come from a pro audio background and was skeptical that I could get the audio quality I wanted from in-wall speakers. So it was a pleasant surprise when they wound up sounding great. I insulated around them to eliminate the muddy, booming effect that in-wall speakers often have. Not only do the Polks sound great, the stereo separation is amazing.

But I still need to get that LCD/plasma/whatever monitor. Fact is though, I never use the living room except for bass practice.

The Flamingo Kid Rides Again

2007-08-27T23:49:09-04:00

This weekend I was invited again to my neighbor's annual court party at her cabana at the Breezy Point Surf Club in the Rockaways.

Breezy, a/k/a the Irish Riviera, is as definitively "boro" as it gets and as timelessly shabby as a summer camp. Anyone who's seen Garry Marshall's 1984 movie, "The Flamingo Kid", with Matt Dillon might be able to imagine the place. In fact, that movie was filmed on location only a mile down the beach from Breezy at a similar, although higher-end, beach club.

My buy-in for the annual invite is my sangria, which I immodestly admit has few peers. It's loaded with good wine, brandy, Triple Sec, at least six fresh fruits and a few secret ingredients. (I'll cop to one of them: cinnamon sticks). I come laden with six gallons of the stuff, both red and white.

It's too easy to take cheap shots at Breezy. After passing through the gates, it looks less like a beach club than a refugee camp with tiny, cluttered wooden cabanas abutting the parking lot. The second thing you notice is what's not there: ocean. The Surf Club is a good quarter-mile+ hike from the surf, separated by a federal sea bird sanctuary. Nobody really cares though because the action is on the cabana courts.

Overhead, passengers on final approach to JFK must take a gander at Breezy and wonder if they've been hijacked to Cuba and are seeing the infamous Gitmo. Breezy only has the basic amenities of a beach club: a big swimming pool, a tennis court and a small ball field. That's about it. Nevertheless, there's a waiting list for the hundreds of 8x16, $4000/season firetrap cabanas built on a nondescript strip of sand on the western tail of the Rockaway Peninsula.

Why? Because Breezy is a non-stop, summer long party scene.

I only visit the club once or twice a year so I could never get a handle on what the attraction was. I mean, Club Med it ain't. It was only on this trip that I finally figured it out. It's a cult, in the cultural sense. Breezy people are a congregation of like-minded people who worship this place. It's a scene where everybody knows everybody, where a party can break out any minute and where there's no shortage of what my Rhodesian buddy calls "liquid chicken" to keep spirits elevated. One Breezy legend has it that more alcohol is consumed per acre at the Surf Club than anywhere else on earth. Nevertheless, it's very much a family-oriented place. American flags fly everywhere, owing mostly to the large number of cops and firefighters who are members here.

Breezy even has its own community theme song. No court party is complete without the DJ cranking up "Hooked On A Feeling" to a mass sing-along, complete with choreography.

Even though the cabanas are rented unfurnished with minimal electric and a cold water hookup, it's amazing the creativity people have used to tart up their little shacks. Most have showers, most with tiny electric water heaters. Most have refrigerators and small stoves. I don't know how they manage this with just a 15a fuse (yes, I said fuse) but the few electrical hookups I've seen were frightening. Why this place hasn't disappeared into ashes by now is an act of divine intervention.

As always, my hangover the next day was epic. I know there were at least a dozen people who had to have crashed in their cabanas rather than brave the DUI checkpoints. But I can't wait for next year's party. I thought of a new sangria recipe I want to try.

A Tree Blows Down in Brooklyn

2007-08-08T21:04:50-04:00

About 5:30am this morning I was suddenly awake. I'm not sure if it was the threatening thunder approaching from the northwest or my shivering, hundred-pound Newfoundland desperately trying to crawl under the covers with me.

Outside, it was like War of the Worlds... real Wrath of God stuff. Lightning was flashing like a paparazzi frenzy and the thunder was getting progressively angrier. I heard the rain starting. Within minutes it was coming down in buckets. Seriously, that's what it sounded like: someone dropping buckets on my roof.

By now, most of you have probably heard that Brooklyn experienced its first tornado since the 19th century (and that one was barely a dust devil). Because modern Brooklyn doesn't like to do things small, this one was an EF2, as classified by the National Weather Service this afternoon. My immediate neighborhood was its landfall before it worked its way north-northeast and into Sunset Park, Boro Park and Kensington.

At 5:45am I crawled out of bed to check my bathroom vent. I've had problems with it leaking during heavy storms. It was almost gushing. The bathroom floor was completely wet. I broke out some towels for the floor, pulled off the vent fan cover and stuffed a couple of more in there. Then I went to the window to check the status of the furniture on my front deck.

The sun was just starting to come up and the air looked strangely green. Somewhere an old memory recalled that that's a bad sign. I just didn't know of what. Then the wind picked up and the rain started blowing sideways. I watch the Bug Channels. I knew what that could mean. But I also work with folks from the National Center for Disaster Preparedness and everyone's always told me that the topography of NYC almost precludes tornadoes from making ground fall. They can't happen here. Or were they just talking about Manhattan?

The rain outside looked like it was blowing in a wind tunnel. Wait, isn't there supposed to be a sound like a freight train? I made a quick decision that if I heard that train a comin' I would beat a hasty retreat to the basement with the animals. But the dogs and cats had already hopped on the clue bus and were downstairs in the shop wondering what was taking me so long. I was the lone moron left staring out a second story window with a tornado bearing down on me.

Then the wind suddenly stopped. A few minutes later, the rain became a drizzle. The block looked fine -- just a few small branches and lots of leaves in the street. But even my hanging planters were still hanging. Big deal.

My satellite TV finally got a signal again around 7am. There was talk on the local news about a tornado warning in Brooklyn until 7:30. I was glad we had dodged that bullet. A tornado in Brooklyn -- now that would be something to see!

When the rain finally ended around 8am, I took the dogs out for a walk. My street was fine, the park looked fine. But two blocks away it was destruction city. All that was missing were flattened house trailers. I was shocked. There was no question in my mind what had caused surgical damage like this. It was a tornado and it missed me by about 500 feet. And there I was, staring out a plate glass window at it while the animals had the good sense to head for cover.

It was incredibly hot and humid so I brought the dogs home, grabbed my camera and did a tour of the neighborhood. Here are a few shots. You can find the full set here.

This is Ovington Street, two blocks from me.

This is Shore Road, where the tornado made its initial land fall. It's still not certain where the tornado formed. Speculation is that it started as a mild F0, dancing across Staten Island. Then it gained strength as a water spout in NY harbor, which is visible beyond the trees in this shot. The destruction on Shore Road and neighboring Narrows Blvd was among the worst in Brooklyn. Cops shut down streets with heavy structural damage so my pics are mostly foliage shots.

Almost every block in the lower 70s from Shore Road to Third Ave had a scene like this. At least.

This picture is subtle. No trees down, no smashed cars, no destruction, right? So what's wrong here? Look at the stop sign. It was twisted about 100 degrees, in the same direction as a tornado's rotation. That stop sign was facing the right direction two nights ago because I almost ran it accidentally .

This used to be one of the most heavily tree-lined blocks in Brooklyn. Out of probably forty hundred-plus year-old oaks and sycamores, this is all that remains of them.

Robot, robot

2007-07-05T13:31:20-04:00

There was a song by a Chicago band called The Flock that I used to love during my trippy teen days:

Robot, robot arms and legs
Teeth, bones, hair, its all there
Robot, robot arms and legs
Battery's dead, head's dead.
(Mechanical man, mechanical man!)

Whenever I muck with my home automation hardware this song plays over and over again in my head. It's pretty maddening.

Sitting on my dining room table since last Thanksgiving was a small pile of boxes containing Insteon controllers, in-wall dimmers, relays and the like that have been waiting patiently for me to complete the master bedroom renovation. I was intending to do client work over the Fourth but after sixteen consecutive days of building database stored procedures I needed a break! So I assembled my tools and got busy making that pile smaller.

Anyone who has read the X10 primer I posted here knows that I'm a nut for home automation gear. And anyone who has read my blog knows that I've been very faithful with renovating and reproducing the original assets in this old house. But you can keep your Chicago Electric rotary and push button switches and your old pull chain fixtures. I want my electrical system state-of-the-art!

In fact, even my five year-old X10 installation had turned out to be... well... so five years ago. Insteon was the way to go now. I won't delve into the problems I had with X10. Anyone who's worked with X10 protocol knows what they are and I harped about them plenty in my X10 primer. Bottom line, I was ready to trade those X10 aggravations for a whole new set of exciting problems.

Fortunately, upgrading an existing X10 installation to Insteon isn't much more involved than replacing a switch. And of course writing a big check to SmartHome.com, my drug dealer.

While I was removing the old X10 switches and relays I was reminded once again how flimsy and hobby-grade this stuff is. Insteon devices even feel more substantial and professional. The controllers are smaller than their X10 counterparts, which is really nice because X10 devices hog the outlet box and don't leave much room for wiring. Overall, Insteon is just nicely designed, technically and ergonomically. Insteon switches have a pale lavender backlight displaying the switch status. I've never understood the logic behind X10 switches only showing a status light when they're activated. It's when you're stumbling around a dark room that you need a light to find the switch!

One of Insteon's biggest strengths however is that you can do all your programming from a seat in front of your computer. With X10 you have to run around the house removing switch plates to change codes, and it's exponentially worse if you have X10 receivers buried in a ceiling box with a 50-pound fan between you and it.

Here is the brains behind an Insteon household installation: the HouseLinc desktop software.

From here programming a device is just a matter of dragging a controller to a responding device and then clicking "Save all changes to INSTEON network". Done. Installing a new Insteon device is a bit more involved. You can let the software "spider" your house looking for new devices. But this process can take ten minutes or more and it invariably gets confused over a device or two, disabling them.

Or you can type in the hexadecimal identifier code for the new device, select a device type from the pulldown and force Houselinc to accept it. However, you still need to have Houselinc read the device's internal link database with "Rediscover device", which again can leave you with a disabled Insteon device.

After a couple of hours trying to get the software to recognize the Insteon switch for my kitchen extension sconces, I reloaded the software and it found it. HouseLinc is very much a piece of software-in-progress so there are some rough edges. Fortunately, it automatically downloads updates every time you load it.

You also use the same process to set up your timers, which automatically control selected devices. For instance, I want my outside lights and the "whorehouse lights" in my dining room to go on thirty minutes before sunset. Here it is:

And here's my timer list. Note that at midnight I want to turn off the outside lights and dim the inside lights to 30% (which is actually brighter than it sounds because they're CFL bulbs).

All in all, I'm very happy with Insteon. And with Smarthome too (you'll find their ad in the right hand navigation here).