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Magazines

The house and home section of any magazine store is filled with an array of publications covering every style of home design imaginable. Most are glossy rags with glamor shots of spaces that I would never wish to inhabit. Yet, every now and then, I do allow myself to buy one to see if I am missing out on anything.

When it came time to find reference material for our home renovation I took the advice of those who had gone before me and signed up for a regular subscription to two magazines, both from the house and home section, just not from the glamor shelves. It has probably been 10 years sine I have had a magazine subscription , but home ownership is serious business.

The first and possibly most obvious choice was This Old House. I have never seen the show but for simple “how to” tips the magazine is pretty good. Their website is also a huge repository of information on home improvement. Also, on a green note, their last few issues have had one or two articles on environmental approaches to home ownership and improvement. In fact the latest issue has a 5 page ad by the US Green Building Council listing 50 ways to go green in your home. Its the usual stuff - compact fluorescent light bulbs etc. - but it reaches a huge audience who might otherwise not be bothered with this sort of approach.

The bigger surprise for me was when Smart Homeowner magazine arrived in the mail. The subtitle of the magazine is Innovative Solutions for Creating Efficient, Healthy, Eco-Friendly Homes. So far I have only had a chance to read some of the articles, but after skimming through the rest, it is clear that each item has a green bent. The articles are also pretty comprehensive and seem to deal with subjects in a more detailed fashion that TOH. For better or worse it also feel like its content is more to the point because of the lack of slick graphics, layout or eye-candy photographs.

Thanks to Matt for the SMO tip.

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Tree Pruning

On Wednesday we had the trees pruned. As you may recall we had an arborist look at the trees the day after we moved in. You may also wonder why the hell, with all the things we have to do, we would have work done on the trees. Well, let me tell you.

1. Whereas most people might put things like remodeling the kitchen, fixing up the bathrooms or cleaning the windows at the top of their list, I put the trees. Not because I like to hug trees, at least not in public, but because thats what I think about. Working as a landscape architect I think about the exterior of the house and its effect on the interior. Its not just aesthetics either (although in this case that was important), but the way the tree canopy controls the air and light for the whole property - inside and out. Here’s a little more on how trees are used for passive solar heating and cooling.

2. The work was a very generous house warming gift from my in-laws.

3. They needed it. Both for the health of the trees and the safety of those who choose to spend time under them. Also they looked out of shape - intercity tress don’t get the same freedom to grow and develop as their country cousins - but they also don’t get mugged on the subway.

Let me also address the issue of cutting down trees - as there was some concern about that when I posted before. Here is the definition of a weed from our friends at Biology Online

Any plant that is growing in a place where a human wants a different kindof plant or no plants at all. Any plant that crowds out cultivated plants.Clear of weeds; weed the garden.Plants that are considered a nuisance to man because they compete for resources in the same local environment as the crops we intend to grow for our own species.

Now I agree that there are some issues here regarding the need for humans to exert control over nature, but lets be honest, we live in a city and thats what we do. So I think of my neighbors mulberry tree as a big weed. And like I do with weeds that grow in the middle of the garden or cracks in the sidewalk, I want to pull it out. But… I also believe that any tree that we remove should be replaced by at least two new ones. The reality of this situation is that neither I nor my neighbor (who also wants the tree removed because of the mosquitoes it attracts) could not afford to do it at this time.

The whole subject of nature and the city has been written about extensively - one of my favorites is Anne Spirn’s The Granite Garden:Urban Nature and Human Design .

Thanks to Care of Trees for a great job… and the rope swing!!!

Some photos of the pruning action and the garden afterwards… more on flickr

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Welcome to Shim City

Let me just start the first post in a while by saying that moving house as a pain in the ass. Okay now that that’s out of the way… let me also announce that we are IN, installed, interred, interned, in heaven.

Saturday started with an early morning bike ride to UHaul to pick up their 17′ EZ Mover. Arriving back at the house at 9am we began the schlep. A word of advice - pack before you move. We didn’t. We were too busy getting the new house ready. Anyway with only a block between the new and old abodes it could have been worse - although it didn’t seem so at the time.

The highlight of the day was getting the sofa into the house. Because some genius removed the stoop many years ago everything had to come in through the basement and negotiate the narrow staircase to the parlor floor. The sofa wouldn’t do it. Not even with the legs and base removed nor with the doors taken off their hinges. We couldn’t even get it straight through the basement and out into the back yard and then in through the back door (as we had to do with the dining table). In the end we took it round the side of the neighbors house (they had a little alley way just wide enough) and over the fence and in through the back door. There were tears as we plonked it down in the living room.

Thanks to Paul, Jose and Nester for the backbreaking work.

Other achievements on Saturday.

1. We put all of the radiators back on and turned on the heat for the first time in 3 weeks. I used a little plummer’s tape to ensure there were no leaks and also had to replace a few of the steam vents that seems to be disfunctional.
2. Cablevision/Optimum installed the cable modem and I got the wireless working - obviously couldn’t survive 24hrs without an internet connection! Cablevision had to install a junction box (they referred to it as the brown box and it is indeed brown - and big) on the back of the house earlier in the week.

Almost forgot… I had become accustomed to the sloping floors, but when we all of the furniture it became all to apparent  just how slanted the floors really are. Welcome to Shim City.

Photos from the day on Flickr

A shim

And another

Paul hard at work

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Second Coat High

Painters are notorious for getting high on the job (and I’m not talking paint fumes here). After spending two long-ass days with a paint brush in my hand I can almost understand why. The mini buzz for the low voc paint barely got me through the day. But, for me, the euphoric intoxication of seeing a second coat of paint cover up the disappointments of a feeble first coat nearly made me want to do this for a living. Nearly.

First and scrumptious second coat on stairs

A moment of ecstasy

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Paint and Finished Floors

With 6 days to go until we move in the floors are finally finished. To pick up from my previous post on the subject, we decided to use the old subfloors on the 2nd floor, the original floor on the parlor level and both sets of original stairs. There was a bit of repair work to be done first with some 10″ wide pine boards from the local Home Depot. For the paint we picked two colors from the Benjamin Moore enamel floor paint line. It was bugging me that this was not a low VOC option so in the end I went to Bettencourt Green Building Supplies in Williamsburg - primarily just to check out the store (more in a future post on Shopping Local) - and got them to color match the BenMoore paint in their AFM Safecoat line. This is a NO VOC enamel - you may remember that I previously knocked this paint when I priced it at Green Depot - also in Williamsburg. Anyway I have learned a thing or two about paint prices since then and here is the skinny…

Based on what I bought, expect to pay the following per gallon for Low / No VOC (5 gallons might be cheaper)
White Primer - $19 (BM EcoSpec)
White Flat (for ceilings) - $22 (BM EcoSpec)
White Eggshell (for walls) - $25 (BM EcoSpec)
White Semi-Gloss (for wood trim) - $26 (BM EcoSpec)
Tinted Eggshell for Walls - $41 (AFM)
Tinted Enamel for Floors - $46 (BM EcoSpec and AFM)

So I still think Green Depot are overpriced on their basic white paints.

Also I got way too much paint. Go by what the store tells you and then buy about 3/4 of it - or maybe I just overestimated on the square footage. But not to worry - if it’s not a custom color and you haven’t opened it you should be able to return it.

Some photos from this weekend… more on flickr

Repairs to the hallway

Baby’s room before

Baby’s room after - the only room in the house that’s not white!

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Greening a Brownstone : RiverWired TV

From RiverWired TV on YouTube. Greening a brownstone in Brooklyn - a professional contractor’s approach.

Thanks to my brother John in Dublin for sending this.

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Keeping Your House in Order

The current approach to this project, with its lack of planning and compressed time frame, is not exactly how I had envisioned things. Bit it does make for lots of excitement - it feels like we are racing against the clock in some reality TV show trying to make a home for some messed up family for whom everything that could possibly go wrong, has. But be warned, there are drawbacks to this approach.

The main one that occurred to me this weekend is that it makes for a super ghetto job site. A properly run job site is vital to the success of any project and this was not a properly run job site. Tools, equipment and materials were strewn all over the house. Floors were open to the ceilings below. Finished surfaces were covered in power tools or made home to radiators in various stages of paint removal………That is until my friend Jeff arrived on the job on Saturday morning. Jeff took control of the situation. A table was set up in the living room for all of the tools which were collected from various corners of the house. The living room and kitchen floors - both in great shape prior to demolition - were covered with the red rosin paper that I had bought for under the new wood floors (that never happened). The kitchen counter tops and the cupboards were covered in plastic sheets.

Now it looks like a real job site. Now the house is safer and I won’t have to do any unnecessary repairs. I can also find the tools when I need them (well some of the time) and nobody is going to trip down the stairs over a randomly placed hammer.

Thanks to Jeff for all the hard work.

Here is the protected kitchen.

Jeff’s leg (as he looks at an accident waiting to happen)

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Floored. What were they thinking?

The past 7 days have been consumed by thoughts on the floors. It started on Wednesday evening with my friend Dan and I doing a little urban archeology. Before deciding what to do regarding the floors, we needed to investigate further. Armed with a variety of hammers and crow-bars we began lifting the exiting floors in several high traffic places - top of stairs, bottom of stairs living room entrance. To date I had lifted three layers of flooring from the whole house - a carpet, underlay and linoleum tiles (now I think they were vinyl) - and we were left with a layer of plywood covered in glue. The weekend before we did a test in the corner of one of bedrooms and found the original floors under the plywood and a layer of particle board - we assumed we would find the same everywhere else.

Anyway to cut what is starting to be a long story short - we found another 5 layers of flooring. Yep five. That makes 8 in total. What the the fluck? These peeps liked to change their floors - often - and weren’t too interested in getting rid of the ones that went before.

Here’s what we found…

1. Carpet
2. Carpet underlay
3. Vinyl tile
4. 1/4″ Plywood
5. More vinyl tile on some sort of
6. Masonite backing
7. Probably the oringinal wood floors
8. A layer of linoleum with the original jute backing - from 1899.
9. The original subflooring (which we had thought was the original floor the weekend before)

So for the rest of the week I sweated what to do. Maybe leave the plywood and paint over it? The guy at the paint store said the paint would not stick to it and the glue and I would have to use some seriously toxic shit to remove it. Or maybe I should remove everything down to the joists and build it back up? Someday but not now - at that time we will think about remodeling and leveling the floors. In the end I decided to remove everything down to the original subfloor and place plywood over the top and live with that for a few years - hence my frantic last post.

However in reality what actually happened was that we ripped up everything to the original subfloor. They looked good and were pretty solid so now we are going to scape and lightly sand them, fill the hole and cracks, replace the broken ones and paint the whole lot with a water based floor paint. Ahhhh… what a pain in the ass… but we are nearly there. Here are some photos…

1. Wednesday night’s detective work

2. Water damage from a leaky radiator in one of the bedrooms. The upper layers on top of this subflooring were black and moldy.

3. Great floors in the other bedroom,

4. The hallway upstairs need work

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For Green, A Plan is Needed

One thing that is becoming extremely obvious in this quest to use ‘green’ materials and practices is that it is vital to plan ahead. Although I have great hopes for all of the future projects after we move in, the current crazy attempt to have the house ready for April 1st (16 days away) does not lend itself to ‘green’ anything.

Projects of this kind should be approached in an orderly fashion with lots of time allocated for each phase. They say ‘green’ design might cost up to 25% more (I don’t think it is that high, but I do think you need about 25% more time to plan.)

Start with a solid design. Draw it out. Make a list of all of the material you need and then try to find them. Simple, right?

Someday all building products, in fact all products, will be environmentally sound. They will be manufactured in efficient, non polluting ways from locally sourced renewable raw, or reused, materials. They will be available around the corner in the local hardware store. And, when you are finished with them, you will have a plethora of options for their reuse, or if not, they can be recycled into something else.

Ahhhh… that sounds nice. My reality this morning is unfortunately somewhat different. If I had a design - which I don’t - I would draw it out - which I didn’t - and I would go to the corner hardware store - which is crap - with my shopping list and pick up the materials. My planning is more like hours spent on the internet trying to find No VOC radiator paint (to replace the standard one that almost guarantees ill health on the label) or FSC, formaldehyde free Plywood.

Anyway, its 6:30 am and today is a big day of work and I need plywood, or OSB or plyboo or something.

Here is one of the many guides for planning you project.

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Freak Out Wednesdays - Someone Spiked my Drink

It would seem that it is traditional for Blogs to run a weekly special column. Not to be left out, I present Freak Out Wednesdays. Think of these posts as the equivalent of the media’s coverage of “The War on Terror”… hyped up scare tactics. On Wednesdays I will post the most disturbing story from the week relating to your home and you decide weather to freak out or not.

So I have been thinking about water filters for the house. Usually I just drink tap water and when it tastes weird (like this month) I bust out the Britta. For the new house we have been thinking about a more permanent filter, either on the faucet or even a whole house filter.

Then I read about an investigation that the Associated Press just completed on water quality and the high levels of prescription drugs found in drinking water…

Some snippets include…

A vast array of pharmaceuticals _ including antibiotics, anti-convulsants, mood stabilizers and sex hormones _ have been found in the drinking water supplies of at least 41 million Americans

…and how do they get there???

People take pills. Their bodies absorb some of the medication, but the rest of it passes through and is flushed down the toilet. The wastewater is treated before it is discharged into reservoirs, rivers or lakes. Then, some of the water is cleansed again at drinking water treatment plants and piped to consumers. But most treatments do not remove all drug residue.

I may not need the water filter anymore. I may switch from water to something more environmentally sound.
::First seen on The Dirt

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