tile

Miscellaneous Before/After Shots

the entry

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Inspection day. The plaster was being held together by gobs of a weird enamel drip paint. The stairway was covered in cheap latex. There had been a flood in this house -- a toilet which overflowed for three days, I’m told -- so the old parquet floors popped. There was only one electrical outlet in this section of the house. Three years later. There's about 200 feet of mesh tape in the walls and lots of new plaster. All of the walls in this shot were skimcoated using a nifty device I found on the web, Magic Trowel. Several new electrical outlets were added along with a central vac port, visible at the lower right. Besides the staircase, which is about 50% renovation, all of the woodwork in this picture is new. The old stuff was beyond salvage.

For details about the stair renovation, see The Staircase.
the computer room
Evidentally, the chapel. Now, it's my home office. Actually, all that was done here was to refinish the floor, patch, prime and hang some shelves. I got this room to this state a week after I moved in.

Since this picture was taken the room has been renovated yet again. It's now my guest room.
garage roof/living room deck
The original living room deck/garage roof. Besides bad leaks from a shoddy concrete job, which actually sloped away from the drain, the low railing was a trip hazard and code violation. That's probably why the door from the living room was siliconed shut. I recycled that railing for the backyard garden. The original roof was removed, new steel and lintels were added and eight inches of concrete was poured with a rubber membrane in the sandwich. Frank O'Donnell was the GC for this work; it was definitely not a one man job. The brick was matched to the existing house and laid by Jim Lally of Galway Bay Masonry. I did the slate.
living room
There were only two electrical outlets in the room, the parquet floors were gone, the ceiling fan was hanging on two drywall screws sunk into plaster lathe (scarey!) and the woodwork was too destroyed to renovate. The oak pocket doors were gone, replaced by a cheezy house trailer sliding divider. Go figure. Sometimes I think that people should have to be licensed to own a house over 30 years old. After an unsuccessful attempt at stripping, I rebuilt the bay window unit with red oak. To replace the old panels beneath the windows, I built open cabinets with low voltage lighting. They may get stained glass doors later. I also replaced the old radiator with a cast-iron baseboard unit and built a red oak enclosure for it, mostly out of leftover flooring.

There's another 200-300 feet of plaster mesh tape and plaster washers sunk in these walls and in the water-damaged ceiling. Cutting the angles on the crown moulding over the windows was the trickiest part. As I recall, they were 23-1/2 and 22 degrees, respectively. I made a lot of practice cuts before slicing into the eight-buck/foot crown moulding.
office
Inspection day.

This was a weird little room. It had a false wall built from street salvaged material and spray foam insulation, the latter of which was a bitch to remove. A neighbor told me that the resident of this room was deathly afraid of mice, although I've seen no evidence of rodents in the house.
After renovation. This was actually my second office, having moved it from the larger bedroom next door. There's nothing special to it. I replaced all the trim and laid down a Mannington engineered oak floor.

Excuse the weird camera lighting. I'm still struggling to learn my new Canon Digital Rebel.
some random renovation shots
Joyce Lariviere did this stripping too but there's a lot of new work here. The challenge was trying to make the new blend in with the old. The staircase balisters, newel post caps, casements around the living room entrance and crown mouldings are all new, as are the wrought iron exterior doors. The mudroom entrance floor will get a marble medallion. The new herringbone red oak floors are down with one coat of poly to go. Before that happens though I have to build a couple of china cabinets, which will go on either side of the doorway, and do the trim. I'm not exactly sure at this point what I want for this room. The original house had oak plate rail and decorative pressboard inside rail/stile paneling and gingerbread over the doorway. It was pretty nice. I may try to recreate that later.
When I vacated my loft, I decided to leave most of my furniture behind. This was all the living room furniture I took: a 15 year-old TV and a dolly. Okay, the sequences are confusing but I lied on the Dining Room page. I decided I needed one last built-in after all: a media center. This was after coming to the realization that my original idea to make one of those dining room cabinets a media center was dumb, if only because it was in the wrong room for a home theatre system. So it was back to the shop to build this. I still need to construct the glass door panels.
That entertainment center was a troublesome piece to build. For one thing, it was too large to make it out of my basement shop's door. It's six-sided and I could only construct the back three sides in the shop. It was carried upstairs and constructed in place. I thought that this was going to be my first major disaster.

My recording studio construction background came in handy here. I didn't want speakers cluttering the small living room but I also wanted something with a hefty midrange you can only get from a large driver. So I bought a pair of Polk in-walls and pulled Monster cable across the basement ceiling and up inside the walls. You can see one of the in-walls next to the dining room entrance.

A Polk subwoofer sits on top of the cabinet (I have to find a way to hide that better) and there's a center channel speaker inside the cabinet, everything driven by a Denon seven-channel receiver. The dining room also got a pair of slaves (Polk, of course). I have to say the system sounds freakin' amazing!

Finally, paint and furnishings! The green paint looks a little, I dunno, electric in this shot. It's another cheap digital camera trick. I built the coffee table and end table too, using some real nice quarter-sawn oak I found in the Bronx. The former has a hidden tray in front to stash the various remotes. One problem: Chopper is already starting to tear apart those tapestry sofas.

entry floor
The entryway/foyer floor was the final first-floor eyesore so I was anxious to get this out of the way. The problem was cost. I wanted a marble medallion but I couldn't find anything decent for less than five-hundred bucks. Then I decided to check the web, where I found an eBay store that specializes in them. This cost $139 so I grabbed it and finished off the field with green tumbled marble and ivory marble mosaics.

But before I did that I had to replace the concrete subfloor, which was crumbling due to a badly-placed air valve in the basement that was blowing super-heated steam underneath. I relocated it above the floor (you can see it in the upper left corner). A wet saw is mandatory for stone tile and cuts like this. 		View from the living room. From a distance it looks like the presidential seal. The key to tile applications like this is lots and lots of layout. I used up half a pencil drawing quadrants, lines and circles on the rough concrete. I also made a masonite template of the medallion for the tile cuts. Polished marble tile in the field would have prevented that wide, ragged grout line but that would have meant a dangerously slippery floor inside the main entrance.

stained glass construction

After getting some pricey estimates for the four stained glass panels needed for the LR french doors I built, I decided to make them myself. I saved money even after buying all the tools and materials I needed. Actually, the skills required to do a decent job for something as simple as this aren't much different than those required for simple woodwork joinery.

The layout. The design incorporates elements in the existing living room transom and entryway sidelight windows. My table saw extension is the layout table. Laying out stained glass is a bit like building a jig saw puzzle. Tight fits are important because stained glass is basically just a broken window repaired with lead cane. Gaps between cane joints or cane and glass will be weak points later.
Two down, two to go. The panels are puttied and polished and have to lay flat for three days to cure. So do I occasionally. The stained glass panels are installed in the living room french doors. Unfortunately, the ornate wrought iron doors behind it kind of obliterate the glass with the low winter sunlight beating on them.




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.

Faceframe construction. I was originally going to do this with solid lumber but I still had a lot of nice red oak plywood left over from the ceiling. I ripped some of the old oak from the original beams to use as banding to hide the plywood edge. I like the subtleness of the mitered picture frame detail on the faceframe and plywood adds dimensional stability you can't get with solid hardwood. Veneer plywood also makes it a lot easier to get matching grains, especially with lumberyard red oak.

Much of the face frame will be concealed by column details, which will be solid oak... mostly recycled stuff. 		The faceframe had to be strong because these cabinets are going to be heavy, especially with stained glass doors hanging on them. So I biscuit joined the rails and stiles and used a pair of pocket screws at each joint. I resisted pocket screw faceframe construction as an artless shortcut because so much cheap prefab cabinetry uses it, but I'm a convert. It only took one project to sell me on how well it works.
Frame assembly. Before this was done I half-lapped the edges for the side panels. I prefer using the router table for this, mainly because my Ryobi table saw sounds like it's about to grenade with a 3/4" stack dado set. Faceframe #2. When my tax refund arrives I'll make the decision between a Delta or Powermatic 66 replacement for the BT3000. Mainly, I need a saw on wheels so I can make room for an assembly table. Using the table saw for layouts is a pain.
The inside rails and stiles are glued and pocket screwed to the perimeter frame. These are solid oak, not plywood. The faceframes are done, awaiting sanding. The side panels are already cut and half lapped for the back. I've got to weasel someone with an SUV to help me haul a couple of sheets of 1/2" red oak ply for the back panels. My VW Golf isn't up to the task of plywood retrieval.
Milling the rails and stiles for the cabinet doors. The lowers will have raised 11" panels made from laminated and biscuited 1x6 red oak blanks. The uppers will either be stained or mullioned glass. I haven't decided yet. Dry-fitting the the lower cabinet door frames. These are 1x2" red oak that I ripped from 1x6. To accomodate the raised panel, I used a pair of router bits called rail and stile cutters. If you've never made a raised panel door before, it's simpler than it looks. I used to think this was a black art. One cutter does the visible profiling around the edge and digs a 1/4" x 3/8" dado for the panel. The other cutter is a reverse profile for the perpendicular member. It's used on the end grain of the lumber of the rail. See below.
I'm using the 'B' bit to cut the rail so it mates with the exposed 'A' cutter profile. The trick here is that you're cutting end grain which has a tendency to split out. You would normally back the rail with a sacrificial piece of scrap lumber to prevent tear-outs. Instead, I did this cut in several passes, which worked well enough. It's critical that the fence and guide be perfectly square and that the roller bearing on the bit is flush with the fence. The hardest part is getting the "B" profile bit to match the "A" profile's depth. You go through a lot of scrap lumber when setting up the bits so it's best to plan the cuts as a production line. Door construction. I built a jig to make sure the doors are assembled square.

The panel can't be glued or nailed into the rails/stiles because humidity will cause it to expand and contract, especially across the grain. It has to float in the frame.
The panel cutter is the third bit in the exciting raised panel trilogy. There's not much to say about it. Cut across the end grain first so the perpendicular cut will remove any tear-out. Also, this should be done with a variable speed router set to low speed. Panel cutters are wide bits and the torque at a router's nominal speed can cause the carbide tips to fly off... not reassuring on a waist-level table tool and a bit spinning at 200mph. The lower doors are done, awaiting sanding.
The upper doors frames are done. I'll decide this week what I want in those panels. Whatever, it will be leaded glass. I needed another photo to balance the page so here's a shot of the cabinets before the door installation. By the way, I've since removed the center stretcher in the upper cabinets. It was a useless obstruction.

If you're into this stuff, there will be a "Son of Shop Page" in the near future, if only because I haven't started the second floor renovation yet. I have big plans for that, including a bunch of computer room built ins. For now this project will continue on the Dining Room page.




Kitchen and Extension



I decided to approach the kitchen renovation and replacement of the rear extension as one project. Both were in such bad shape that it made no sense to build new on to old.

Click on any picture to expand it
The original kitchen was pretty funky. The cabinets were 1950s vintage and suffering from dry rot. There were no countertop electrical outlets. The ceiling fixture, as I soon discovered, wasn't even mounted in an electrical box. It was hanging on taped cloth wires. It was depressingly dark, requiring artificial lighting 24 hours a day. But the major problem was no countertop space. The original rear extension was a drafty laundry room, with a floor that suddenly dropped at a 15 degree angle. It was so riddled with termites that the owner had braced the shed with 2x4s, which were themselves chewed to pulp. It was neither insulated nor heated. There was evidence of old pipe breaks. The large, ugly attachment at the upper right corner is a kitchen vent, the soffet made from sheetrock. There was a mini-rain forest growing in there. I'm still killing centipedes that once called it home.
Pictorial anthologies have a deceptive way of compressing time, so I'll be honest here. This job started in early July and wasn't completed until the following January. Actually, it's still not completed. I've saved the final finish trim for one mondo project when the dining and living rooms are completed.


Thanks to the help of fifty generations of termites, the old extension was razed in about thirty minutes. A trench was dug below the frost line to accommodate a concrete and cinder block foundation. Unfortunately, work began on the first day of the hottest ten consecutive days in NYC history. Due to the heat and despite constant spray from a hose, the foundation set up quickly. I decided to turn the bottom into a tool shed and unheated storage area. The rough framing went up in a day and was braced in anticipation of a thunderstorm due in town that evening.
I know, bleh... vinyl siding. But it's inexpensive, low maintenance, easy to install and insulate, and it's only visible to my immediate backyard neighbors, who don't offer me much of a view either. A six-foot Anderson slider, a four-foot Anderson window and a five-foot sealed skylight closed it in. Electrical was rerouted for the spotlights and to add another set of spots on the extension. These, like all the house lighting, are computerized with X10 protocol switches, under the command of a Linux server. There was a bit of time between these two shots. In the interim, new thermopane windows were installed along with a whole-house security system. You can see one of the sirens mounted under the soffet. The steel deck was extended three feet so it would be flush with the new extension. The location of the air conditioner was a bit of a disappointment. I would have liked it over the window but there wasn't enough height available because of the upstairs window unless I went with a flat roof.
Interior finishing begins. A dedicated 20a circuit feeds the outlets in this room as well as the outside GFCI. A 220VAC outlet was installed for the 18,000 BTU wall air conditioner. The walls and ceiling were insulated and the sheetrock hung. Purists will be skeptical of all the small pieces of drywall I used over the window but I under-ordered for this stage. I only owned motorcycles and I didn't feel like paying a lumberyard $50 to deliver an eight-buck sheet of Type X. I'm pretty good with a taping knife though.
As a solution to a dark kitchen lacking in countertop space, I decided to blow out the wall between it and the dining room. I wasn’t sure at this stage exactly what I wanted to put in that hole, just that I wanted a hole there.

One of the myriad problems with renovating old houses is lumber dimension. These are real 2x4s while modern 2x4s are actually 1-1/2” by 3-1/2”. That extra half inch means trouble with drywall later so I opted to toss them all out and reframe the wall with new lumber. This wall also had old sheet metal air ducts hidden in them, which is curious because the house has ancient steam heat. 		The pass-through is framed and another dedicated 20a circuit is run for the outlets on that wall. The old gypsum ceiling was pulled down and furring strips tacked up to accommodate a tin ceiling. The front wall was in such bad shape that I tore it down and reskinned it with sheetrock. Another 20a line was pulled for the fridge. The old refrigerator was originally sharing a circuit with most of the first floor.
Without a doubt, the most miserable job was cleaning the brick in the foreground. Because the new extension is wider than the old one, this was originally outside brick so it had a hundred years of paint, cement parging and ThoroughSeal on it. I used a heat gun, K-Strip, Peel Away, a grinder and four gallons of muratic acid to get it to this stage. If I had it to do over again, I probably wouldn’t. I still have to tuck point it.
The same picture from another perspective. The interior on the extension was skimcoated using a nifty tool called Magic Trowel. Thinking ahead to winter, I added a steam baseboard unit under the window. I'm real glad I did that. You'll notice my cat, Chopper, on the window sill. He manages to find his way into a lot of these shots. The plumbing fun begins. After ripping down the old cabinets, it was like urban archeology: the Yellow Period, the Sea Green Period, the Creosote Period, etc. The pipes and drain were shot. I ran new copper down to the basement and new no-hub drain and vent. There's Chopper again.
The tin ceiling is almost up, except for some missing crown moulding (yet another under-order). The cement board is on the floor and walls. The new cabinets are being hung. I was deep into that stage of home renovation where friends knew better than to return my calls so I did this job by myself, using temporary scaffolds. My cabinet workshop. I bet Norm doesn't have a chandelier in his!

I finally decided what I wanted in that pass-through: a granite counter with a brick eyebrow arch, inspired by a Mexican restaurant in Dallas.
The cabinets are up, the granite is down, cement board is on the floor and walls, and the new appliances are installed. I decided to go with an inexpensive stainless sink for now, figuring that no matter what I used would get destroyed once I started the basement renovation and lost my slop sink. I refaced the existing dishwasher with oak veneer. The original fridge is still working so I decided to put the dollars for a new one elsewhere.

Most people opt for solid color granite. I think this is a mistake. Not only does it wind up looking like an artificial countertop, granite has a tendency to scuff and scratch. Patterned granite will hide this and keep looking good for years. Black granite especially is a maintenance queen. 		The tile floor is down. With the tin ceiling, the natural oak cabinets and the granite counters, I decided to complete the retro ice cream parlor look with one-inch hex tiles. I really wanted a border strip too but was eventually talked out of it by a neighbor because it would draw attention to how narrow the kitchen is.

Here's a tip I learned the hard way: when working with small tiles like this you're going to get a lot of thinset oozing in the joints. You'll make life a lot easier for yourself if you color the thinset to match the color of your grout.
Moulding is added in the extension and the brick eyebrow is up. Then I waited two weeks for the mortar to cure before daring to remove the scaffold over that granite countertop. I wish I'd gone with divided light windows in the back, but it would have delayed closing in the extension for another week.

 Crown moulding is added to the cabinets, the walls are hung and skimcoated and the tile is on. Looking at the photos, I think I need to do something special with the addition. It's too plain.
The tile backsplash is in. I used the same green and 1" white marble accent tiles that I used on the foyer floor, but with a grey grout to tie it in with the granite countertops. I also built some butcher block to cap that brick kneewall next to the stove. This is the real deal. I made it with 3/4" maple strips and 3/8" threaded rod, finished with mineral oil. No glue.




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