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finish carpentry

  • The Mystery of the Ducts To Nowhere- (Or "Why A Duct?", with a tip o' the hat to the Marx Bros)

    This house has ancient, single-pipe steam heating. From what I've been able to determine from digging in these walls over the past seven years is that it's always had steam heating. Nothing interesting there.

    What's baffling is why the house also has ancient metal air ducting buried inside the walls. I discovered this shortly after I moved here when I ripped down the basement ceiling and found three vertical ducts to nowhere. Over the past hundred years, various plumbers and electricians had used them for service pulls. So did I when I ran 3/4" copper to the second floor bath, the central vac piping and various electrical branches from the basement panel.


  • Miscellaneous Before/After Shots-
    the entry

    Click on any picture to expand it

  • Bathroom- The bathroom project started in May 2004, five years after I bought the place. This is Stage One in the second floor renovation. That's how long it's taken me to finish more pressing projects elsewhere in the house.
  • Phase 7: The Wrath of Details- Today officially begins the scheduled start of the next major phase of the renovation at My Old House: the rebuilding of the master bedroom and upstairs hallway. It started like most of my scheduled projects. In other words, it didn't.

    Dykes Lumber, which was given instructions to call me before delivery, arrived yesterday when I must have been out walking the grovelers. Granted, it's a contractor size order but, sheesh, even GC crews take lunch breaks, guys. They didn't call to confirm that they were even delivering yesterday so I could at least hang a note. For that matter, I still don't know what the charge is, although I'm figuring in the $2500 range.

    The delivery was rescheduled for Monday which isn't much of a setback because my weekend is shot anyway. I got volunteered to work with a bunch of dog people on the neighborhood dog run. DOT dumped 30 tons of wood chips just inside the dog run fence in a long mound, which provides a handy springboard for the more energetic pups (like Auggie) to jump the fence. So it's shovels and rakes for me this weekend. I'm glad my next door neighbor is a chiropractor.

    I thought of hooking the dogs to a plow and letting them do all the work. It would serve 'em right but where would I rent a plow in Brooklyn?
  • My toughest cabinet- 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.
  • At last, that curved baseboard!- I've been pushing off this little project for a couple of months. The bedroom renovation began with construction of the closet and the curved plaster corner I absolutely had to have (if for no other reason than I'd never done one before). I knew that was going to create problems with the trim later but, hey, later is later. Six months later, later became today.


  • Mea Culpa.- Forgive me, blog, for I have sinned. It's been a month since my last confession. I've been so busy that I haven't found the time to sit down and write about what I was up to.

    I should break this update into a few posts. Lemme talk about the bedroom reno first.


  • Dining Room-
  • Aaaand... done!- I completed all the woodwork on the bay window unit today. I won't play conquering hero either. With the weird angles and different depths of the windows, the embedded convection steam radiator, and more than a couple of measure-once goofs, I was very lucky to get through this without a major screwup.

    This weekend, I completed and installed that removable grill in the center of the windows. This was also a bit of work. There are seven boards and two store-bought but modified red oak grills in that face panel, all of them biscuited together with waterproof glue. I wanted no chance that heat and steam from a leaky air valve would cause problems with that lamination, as it did in the dining room cabinet. I was going to do some router scroll work between the grills. I caught myself just in time. It would have exposed those embedded biscuits.
  • Al Bundy, Home Renovation- A few days ago, Jeannie from House In Progress referred a woman from a new ABC reality show to me. From the email it sounded like she was looking for folks who had gone way over their heads on a home improvement project and needed 911 from the professionals to bail them out.

    I told her that this was my fourth major construction project in 25 years and that I wasn't (*harumph*) a rookie at this stuff. I politely declined. But the next day I wondered if I wasn't exactly the sort of Al Bundy cartoon character she wanted. After all, I was three weeks behind where I wanted to be on the master bedroom renovation. That's a Bundy point right there: unrealistic expectations.
  • Rule #1: don't kill yourself- Work here has come to a halt for a little while.

    Several weeks ago I was working on our community dog run, shoveling wet wood chips like a teenager on dexadrine. I woke up the next morning with tendonitis in my right elbow. My next door neighbor is a chiropractor and told me to knock off the room renovation for two or three weeks to let it heal. I forged ahead as did my elbow pain. This morning I woke up feeling like I'd fractured the base of my thumb at the wrist. Back to Dr Joe, who reminded me what he'd said a month ago. Because of the pain in my elbow I'd probably been shifting leverage to my wrist. Now it's injured too. And if I keep it up it will spread to my shoulder and neck. Then he'll put me in a sling.

    Oh, the ravages of age. This, by the way, is apart from the six-inch bloody gash I gave myself on the same arm yesterday, trying to catch a falling piece of plywood.
  • Bah, humbug- It looks like slow going at BrooklynRowHouse but you'll have to take my word for it: trim like this takes a lotta time. I probably have 60 hours of woodworking just into this tiny ante room and it's still far from done. So what's the hold up?

    I won't spend a lot of time talking about my "real world" obligations, but my two oldest clients, Children's Health Fund and Operative.com, both hit me with a pile of work to complete before the end of the fiscal year, which is 12/31 in both cases. It's SNAFU for consultants like me this time of year. I'm used to squeezing in Christmas during a cigarette break.

    By the way, these are technically some of the worst pics I've ever taken but I liked the dogs in this shot.


  • Another mini-milestone reached- Just like software development, I like to break big projects down into milestones and mini-milestones.

    • MilestoneMini milestone
    Wall prep (done)
    Structural carpentry (done)
    Finish woodworking Wainscott east wall + outlets
    Window and door trim - large room
    Complete wainscott - large room
    Window trim and wainscott - ante room
    Construct and install dresser and cupboard - ante room

    Ahhhh... here were are (check!)


  • How to blow $300 in three seconds- Six years ago, I was building the bar for our new restaurant in Brooklyn Heights. The bar was four plywood cabinet carcasses with a laminated mahogany top.

    A friend of mine and I stood freezing in the unheated storefront staring at the chop saw, the bar, and a sixteen foot piece of 8" rabbeted mahogany cap moulding we were going to use to trim the edge. The object of our fixation was a ninety degree corner. It's a simple cut except when the moulding costs $18/lf and it's the last last piece that Dykes has. We only had one chance to get it right. Which one of us had the juevos to make that cut?

    We spent an hour measuring, second guessing, aligning the saw, making test cuts on scraps, postponing the inevitable. John was fed up and proved he had the bigger pair. The cut worked. Well, close enough for his Harbor Freight Special miter saw anyway.
  • It depends on what "almost" means...- I've been looking forward to this day for months. Almost all the trim, the doors, cabinets, etc are done! What's "almost"?

    By "almost" I mean that the center of operations moves downstairs to my shop. The remainder of the trim work -- the cabinet doors and drawers, the panels under the bay window, the stained glass window, the overhead closet doors and even the curved baseboard moulding for the closet corner have to be fabricated. I need my stationary power tools for this stuff.


  • Ten gallons of sawdust later...- I finished cutting 208 feet of bolection moulding for the wainscotting in the bedroom reno and guess what? I needed 216 feet to complete the job, dammit! I knew I was cutting it close (literally) but I only had a couple of (expensive) red oak 1x8s left which I need for the wainscotting shelf. I'll dig into my red oak scrap pile and cut the remainder this afternoon.

    Anyway, I was right. A bolection moulding is just an inverted base cap profile with a rabbet. After my router bit quest, I settled on a $28 base cap bit from Woodside.

    So it was back to the shop to rip a bunch of red oak to the 1-1/4" width I needed for 26 eight-foot blanks, which I thought would do the job if I planned my cuts carefully.

    Man, this shop needs cleaning and reorganizing after six months of this renovation!
  • Guest Room-

    Renovation By The Numbers


    A few House page viewers asked me to walk them through a typical room renovation. This room already had a lightweight renovation when I moved in and needed to set up my office quickly. Now it will undergo a complete refab for a guest room.

    Generally speaking, I have a few fixed strategies for renovation, at least in this house:

    • Preserve the plaster whenever possible. Some people do drywall rehabs, then spend a bundle paying someone to skim coat blue board so it looks like plaster. Plaster is superior to drywall for sound and durability so it makes sense to save it.
    • Replace old electrical with new BX and boxes. Romex is legal here but I don't like pulling plastic-sheathed cable through nail-strewn walls. Romex also means another wire hookup inside the box.
    • New floors.
    • The Staircase-

      When you tackle a home renovation project you'll inevitably question the taste and common sense of the previous owners. This is one example. It’s a hundred year-old, carved red oak staircase obliterated by cheap paint. Something like this would cost at least ten thousand bucks to build from scratch today and it would still lack the same wood quality. Then again, I've never understood why anyone would prefer paint to natural hardwood.

      Click on any picture to expand it

    • Shop Stuff-

      Shop Stuff


      This isn't my house. I mentioned on the home page how tasty the original woodwork was in these houses and how the previous owners of mine inexplicably ditched it all. This is the dining room in my neighbors' house. It's hard to believe that a hundred years ago this was how formula homes were built. You wouldn't find woodwork like this in a modern house costing seven figures.

      Originally, I wanted to replicate this without the dark stain but as I got into the project I decided to be a little more creative and a bit more practical.

      The Cabinets

      Labor Day weekend, 2002 was a rain-out so I holed up in the shop.

      I'm constructing the two built-in china cabinets for the dining room. One will be a media cabinet and the other a display cabinet.
    • Compound Casings (or What To Do With Scrap Lumber)- One question I used to get asked on the old blog was, "where did you buy your window and door casings?" As any old houseophile knows, in the olden days trimwork wasn't something you picked up at The Borg. Even in modest turn-of-the-century homes those mouldings were often designed by the home's architect. Constructing them was the job of a master carpenter. Elaborate trimwork is one of the major details of an old home as well as one of its greatest attractions today. People with old homes go to great lengths to carefully strip and rehabilitate old baseboards and casings. I can't stand stripping so I prefer to just remake them.

      Compound casings are one of my favorite things to build -- not because they're a woodworking challenge but because they're a lot easier to construct than they look. They're also a great way to disguise an uneven plaster wall.

      The trick is to create setbacks and shadow lines. Below is a relatively simple example, which I annotated to show the various components. This is the entrance to my living room.