Teeny Tiny Tiles

The week and weekend has flown by and a lot has been accomplished. The bad news is that the bedroom didn't get painted as fast as I had hoped. There were a lot of areas to patch up and cracks along one of the upper corner seams. EZ Patch saved the day and it all look really good.

My gamble with the red accent wall was well worth it too...although it took a worrisome 4 coats and an additional trip to Sherwin Williams. So, everyone ended up crashing at Jens. Here's a few pics of the 'blood' being applied.



Teeny tiny tiles were the good news theme this weekend...and it's great they come on 1 ft x 2 ft sheets. Dad and I learned a few things about tiling from Uncle Steve and the bathroom made a lot of progress. It's exactly what I thought it would turn out to be...awesome! Here's a shot of Dad in action.


One of the humorous moments of the project this weekend was Dad hauling out a toilet for me from Michigan until I decide what I want to get. Just imagine the look on people walking by when we hauled a toilet out of the car and Uncle Steve was sitting on the throne, guarding all our stuff as the rest of us hauled it up to the apartment.

Humor aside, it was good that he brought it out as I found out it just fits with the tank touching the wall.

It's nice to have a toilet again though instead of running to the neighbors, down the street to Jen's or...well, you know...

If Picasso taped and mudded...

If Picasso taped and mudded his seams would probably look like the ones my dad did in a modern art style. OK, they weren't perfect but the having help with that process certainly kept things on schedule and moving forward these past 2 weeks after Christmas. Last weekend I finished mudding and sanding the kitchen and slapped on 2 coats of primer.

This week was some more mudding of the living room and yesterday was a full 8 hours of sanding and priming.

But now it looks great and I'm super pleased with how it all turned out and turned around so quickly. It took me from March - October to do bedroom from demo to primed drywall. The kitchen and living room only took me from the end of October to January! Maybe I learned something along the way...like rent a dumpster...as well as the process in general I'm sure.

So now the saga of the bathroom starts. I'm sure it will be interesting as I lose functionality in there and will need to figure out where to shower and do my #1 and #2. I may find myself showering at work quite often.

The goal is to get all the demo done in there and also get the work done on capping the dumbwaiter before I get any floors refinished. Ideally floor refinishing will happen while I'm gone in Aspen.

We'll see what the week brings us.

Super floored!

Today was a long back breaking knee grinding day laying down the kitchen floor...but it looks awesome.

The flooring took us a bit longer to complete then I expected. We had a bit of a learing curve with the manual nailers Dad got from a friend in Michigan. The short story was that you really have to hit these things a lot harder then you think.

Once we sorted that out, we got a system going where I was tapping in the boards and holding the nailer while Dad swung away to pound them in.



We finished things up around 4PM, 4 hours later then I expected, but that's OK. Both of us were extremely tired and sore from crawling around on our knees all day, so we decided to call it quits despite the large amount of mudding left.

So much was accomplished this weekend and I'm excited to finish up most of the mudding this week and hopefully begin priming half of the apartment this coming weekend.

Merry Christmas

The holiday glitz and glam of twinkling lights and Christmas carols quickly left with my tree on Saturday morning and construction dirt and grime started back up again with my Dad and brother in town.

Saturday was a busy day. I orchestrated the team and put Travis to work in starting the process of demolishing the bathroom.


Dad tackled finishing up framing the kitchen wall, primarily so we could level it out and place in boards to eventually mount cabinets to.


While this was all happening, I worked on mudding until we were ready to drywall the kitchen wall. Once it was done, it looked great and I was happy to say good riddance to the wall that has slowed this whole process down for the past couple of weeks.


The bathroom was a bit of a disaster with all the trash and other items in the tub we we could mud the walls in the living room and kitchen.


After a long day of work, Travis and I went out with Jen to grab some bar food and drinks...and pomegranetes.

Sunday was spent mudding. Dad and I tackled what we could but still didn't finish it up.

Tomorrow I'm taking the day off of work to lay the wood floor in the kitchen. I don't expect it to take too long, but we'll see.

"Trucking" Ahead

I can't believe how fast the past few weeks have gone by. A lot of work has been done with help from many hands, and trucks. I've been in the local ZipCar Toyota Tacoma all too much in the past 4 weeks. I think that I may be the only person renting it as the mirrors and seat position always seem adjusted perfect for me.

Yet, while the price of gas has gone down the cost to rent the ZipCar hasn't, nor has drywall and other construction materials. Yet, just about everything I need to finish the major construction is in the apartment now.

The plumbing was even finished on the 16th. The sink was successfully moved over 2.5' I know, it was probably dumb for me to pay that much to move the sink over but I really feel it is going to make a world of difference.


Although the plumbing is in, my permits haven't cleared yet compliments of someone else in my building who has a violation for construction without a permit...grrrr.

The lesson of the week has been to relate the finishes to the placement of the infrastructure. In my hurry to get the electrical done on the last visit from the Michigan crew I forgot about the mounting height of the outlet boxes in relation to the picture frame molding. Long story short, I ended up moving every electrical box down a few inches...which proved to be difficult for some.

Despite my earlier lack of attention to detail, everything else has been moving forward. The last of the drywall was hauled up on Wednesday night last week and I began to hang it last weekend. More was tackled this weekend and I'm really happy with how the room has been shaping up. I spent a fair amount of time last week running all the power and light switches to the island position.

Today was a bit frustrating as I tackled re-doing the 2x4 framing for the kitchen wall. The pipe re-routing threw a bit of a kink into the original location for 2x4's, but I think I worked out a decent solution. My internal interior designer started thinking about whether or not to extend the wall to the door or stop it at the drain pipe. I'm pretty sure that I'm going to extend it to the door but I'll sleep on it tonight.

Finally, I wired up everything for the kitchen - 2 counter outlets, 1 dishwasher whip (loose wires), 1 stove outlet and one whip for a range hood.

All this took much more time then expected so my ambitions to finish the ceiling were kill joyed.

Yet, I have started a bit of mudding and plan to do more this week in preparation for Dad and Co. arrival on Friday. The ideal plan would be to have everything mudded before they get here so we can sand, prime, install wood floor and demo the bathroom walls/floor.

More to come this week.

Jacked Up

A bit of radio silence for the past few weeks, but that doesn't mean there hasn't been progress. After a early AM trip to Brooklyn and a few weekends of work, the ceiling is insulated and the drywall is up. Leveling this ceiling in this area was a bit more tricky with the twisted beams. I tackled it as best I could but its far from perfect. Hopefully it won't be too noticeable.


Furring strips are up on the wall and I made the important decision today to glue/screw on 2x4's around the kitchen window. For some reason the plaster was directly applied to the brick on the West wall in the kitchen, unlike the living room. Of course this never posed a problem when the 2 rooms were separated by a wall, but now it is a different story. This should turn out to be OK.

Besides the basic labor of gluing and screwing there have been some other bits to figure out with flooring and plumbing. Moving the kitchen sink to the right has become more complicated then I first thought. All of the piping needs to be moved over quite significantly which involves shutting off the building water in addition to filings with the DOB. Making a long story short, I got three estimates that ranged from $1275 - $3300!!! Guess which one I went with...yes, the cheap one. Work starts on the 16th of Dec.

The flooring quest has really just been one to find a cheaper way to do the kitchen. After debating whether or not I could install flooring I just convinced myself I would learn how to do so. That's what the Internet is for, right? I got the goods and they are sitting in a warehouse in NJ waiting for me to pick it up. The plan is to install this when Dad is here just after Christmas.

I may appear a bit behind on schedule, but I'm around every weekend through the end of the month, so I feel I'm make some more progress rapidly. I expect to start mudding the ceiling this week and I've already scheduled another drywall haul for next week. Back to the grind after entertaining my friends from the UK who decided to sleep in this crazy mess for a week. Who knew these wonderful workhorses could double as dinner tables?


In the mean time, the Christmas tree will take up a bit of space to add to the holiday construction cheer.

*ZAP!*

After the dumpster day on Friday, Saturday and Sunday were dedicated to electrical work. Dad flew in with Uncle Steve and a with a surprise guest, Dr. Bob Armstrong who also had electrical knowledge. I attempted to clean what I hadn't the night before and get things ready to go. I jetted out in a Zip Car at 11:30 to pick up the gang...and yes, the dumpster was already gone.

After doing some damage @ Home Depot we grabbed some food and dug in. We re-wired a lot of old stuff and decided to make another Home Depot trip to get lumber, a new fuse box and other small supplies. The night dragged on and before long it was 12:30 AM and we were in bed.

Sunday we tackled more of the same. I got Zapped by the new fuse box and hit my lip with the leatherman that flew out of my hand. Luckily that was the only stupid move of the weekend. The best part is that the doorbell works for the first time ever!

Dad and I felt a bit lost with all the electrical, but we got some other things accomplished, particularly framing for the kitchen wall cut to size and the old sink back up and connected.


I'm off to Miami on Wednesday but should be able to get the cable TV and loudspeaker wire run this week so I can think about insulation and drywall the week after.

Primed in 26 hours

It's been an extremely tough week at work. I've been getting home after 8 PM typically and jumped right into mudding so that all would be ready to go for the weekend.

Luckily Friday was a easy day. I woke early and rushed down to Sherwin Williams on 46th St to get supplies. Somehow I managed to connect with a friend who we hunt with to set me up with a contractor discount there although it still bit $79 out of my wallet!

Dad flew in early to tackle sanding when we could be legit about making noise. Unfortunately a dual failure of the alternators on the plane kept him in NJ much longer then expected so I started in without him around 5:15 PM.

After he arrived with Kathryn at 6 PM and I spent 35 minutes to find a parking spot we dove into the sanding. I set 10 PM as the cut off time for using power tools and shop vacs, completely ignoring co-op rules but with the knowledge from my neighbor Brian that it only sounded like I was vacuuming.

You may recall my description of mudding and how much "fun" it is. The fun of mud has now been surpassed by sanding seams. I literally thought I was on a TV set where it was warm but snowing. Our eyes burned multiple times from dust flying into them and choking/sneezing seemed like a normal epidemic. I thought about taking a picture of this, but feared I would damage the camera with all the dust.

By 11 PM, we had finished 90% of the bedroom and bedroom closet seams. Dad and Kathryn went to bed while I touched up some spots with mud and finished seams I hadn't gotten to in the closets til 1 AM.

Saturday morning's 8 AM trip to home depot sucked my wallet dry a bit more, but we also discovered Stew Leonards which was a grocery shopping experience similar to the Disney World ride It's A Small World.

With a ladder and food stuffed in the trunk we unloaded and finished up sanding by 1 PM. Jen joined us for some painting and by 3 PM the first coat of primer had been applied. With a quick hour topcoat time, another coat was applied within 40 minutes. This work goes real fast when you have 4 able hands to help.














Jen split at 5 and Dad started prepping dinner while Kathryn and I finished sanding the front closet, cleaning, etc.

By 8 PM, everything was done and we were all proud of what we had accomplished in just 26 hours and I went out to wash down the dust with a few beers.

It was nice to make progress again this weekend and its funny how paint on the walls makes all the difference, even if it is just primer.

I have to admit that I was getting discouraged this week, questioning why I was even doing this. I thought about the support from my close friends who have also spent many hours here with me as well as my crazy family who brings me tools and labor all the way from Michigan.

Maybe one of the best parts about the weekend was when David Cunningham stopped by. He's the architect who I paid to make my DOB drawings and stamp them. It was great how excited he was to see the progress and seemed happy at the attention I'm giving to the details such as the trim.

David also asked me if I had any regrets of doing it on my own. I paused for a second and then told him no. I've learned so much about construction as well as how much related services and materials cost. He made a good point saying that it makes you think a lot about when you design something and how sensitive a client may be to the cost associated with it.

But enough of the deep thoughts. It's been a few long and laborious weeks and weekends so I'm off to bed. Floor sanding takes place this week, but more on that later. Here's a parting shot of the near finished product.

Mud mud mud mud mud....

Progress is slow and the mud keeps flowing. Yet, this week is the final push before the "big sand" on Friday and the "posh paint" on Saturday and Sunday.

That's right, Dad is coming into town again and he's bringing the drywall primer. Yet, I still have a bit of work to do. I made a good push this week and weekend again, getting mud on almost every last bit, minus a few closet corners. All the closet drywall is glued up, after a tight ride in the Honda Element from Home Depot to get some more drywall. The Peel Away was brought back from the dead to finish off the front closet door frame. Exciting!

Unfortunately, my absent mind won again and I forgot to buy more mud so now it will be a chore to carry it from Home Depot on 23rd St. which is never fun. Luckily, I'll only need to get 2 more bags to finish the job.

Look for a big progress post after next weekend...

Finishing the Drywall

With a lot of progress made last weekend, my Dad got the itch and headed out from Michigan again to finish up the drywalling process and hopefully to begin putting mud on the walls. Somehow, he not only convinced my Uncle to come again but also my aunt. Turns out she's never flown before and never been to NYC as well, but she's braving it out to help my get this apartment done.

I grabbed the ZipCar Friday night and headed out to Caldwell County Airport (in NJ). I've got the pickup down to a science in a one hour time frame. We dug into the drywall Friday night and put up a fair amount that was remaining in the bedroom.

Saturday morning was more of the same, but I had to zip off to Brooklyn for a softball game, which I felt fairly guilty about. In the meantime, the rest of the gang made a trip to Home Depot on 23rd St. I can only imagine the look on my Uncle's and Aunt's face when they were walking into a Home Depot in the middle of NYC. After my 5 hours of absence, I returned to find most of the drywalling done and a fairly tired crew. I re-energized spirits a bit and then we went to grab dinner.

Sunday morning we focused on finishing the foyer ceiling which was more difficult then we all expected, but furring strips came to the rescue. I got a quick mudding and taping lesson from Uncle Steve and Aunt Sandy and will be doing the rest on my own (yikes!).

After dropping them back at the airport, I finished up drywalling the front closet.

So, a fairly productive weekend and a room and closets with walls again. Yeah!

ZipCar to the Rescue!

Last night I realized, yet again, that I wasn't going to have enough supplies and that I'm not ready for my Dad's arrival tomorrow evening. I ran out of furring strips the night before and not all of the insulation is in the walls.

ZipCar to the rescue! I hopped into a Tacoma pickup truck and made my way to Yonkers. After buying 4 bundles of furring strips, a bag of durabond, 5 boxes of 32 gallon contractor bags (you have no idea how hard these are to find) and one 12 pack of Coke (yeah, fuel for the weekend) I made my way back to Manhattan.

By 10 PM I was unloaded and had brought everything up to the apartment. I started into putting the furring strips up by 10:30 PM and had to saw a bit. Given the crap I've gone through with the co-op and the storage installation lately, a bit of noise at this hour should be tolerated by my neighbors.

By 1 AM, I was done. All the insulation is out of the bags and I have room to work again. Yeah!

2 Milestones in 2 Days

With such a big project on my hands, it's hard to see the little changes and bits of work completed as progress. There have been many of those throughout the project thus far, but as of today there are two big milestones that are complete.

1) The bedroom and closet ceilings are drywalled!
2) I've taken all the plaster out to the curb! Complete in just over 2 months! Remember?

Can you believe it? I barely can! We worked hard this weekend to get it done though. I was up til 2:30 AM on Friday night getting things ready to go and ensuring that the AC units were in the windows since the weather report called for a hot 95 degree weekend.

At 2 AM I realized that I didn't have enough insulation to get the job done. After 3.5 hours of sleep, I hopped in a Zipcar over to Brooklyn to get more of the recycled denim insulation. It's 3 times the price of regular insulation, but to me it's worth the extra costs since it's a green product and there is no dealing with fibers all over your skin or worry about breathing them. After unloading, returning the car and bringing it up to the apartment, it was time to get my Dad, Kathryn (his lady) and my Uncle Steve from the airport in NJ. They got in just after 9 and we made a 30 minute Home Depot stop for supplies. $147 later and a 30 minute car ride and we were ready to rock.

After assessing the situation and a sandwich, we started in. Kathryn and I busted out the insulation while my Dad and Uncle started hanging drywall. We had too many people as it was, but it was nice to have a bit of a utility role to hand up tools, etc.

I was a bit intimidated by the drywall hanging, but not anymore. With the drywall jack, things were fairly simple. I'm confident I can probably even finish up the foyer on my own (although I won't...but I could if I needed to). First you level/shim, measure and cut the drywall, put it on the jack and test fit, glue, raise and screw. Easy, right? Here's a sequence of a sheet going up.

We worked through til 10:30 PM, finishing the bedroom, insulating everything and wired and partially pulled the remainder of the cable. We called it a night and sat on the roof with a few cold drinks, gazing at the moon and bridge. For the first time in months, there was an actual bed in the bedroom.

Sunday was a bit more of the same, but we were all moving a bit slower and it was harder to work in the tighter spaces of the closet. There was a bit of reinforcing of the framing too as well as some electrical wiring for the j-box in the foyer.

I can't thank my Uncle enough for braving the trip out to NYC. He's not a big city person and I know he stepped outside his comfort zone a bit. I hope it wasn't too bad for him and that maybe next time I can show him a few of the sights of the city.

Over a half mile

Having cracked through the most difficult pieces yesterday, we made headway again today and completed the first finishing coat on all of the trim. It rained all night and our setup in the 3 car garage proved to be invaluable, although a bit tight on drying space. By 1 PM Mr. Sun poked his head out and the fog had cleared. We continued to finish up our last batch while the morning batch dried in the sun.
By 3 PM, we were finished painting and began to move what we could into the basement to cure for the next 2 weeks. Unfortunately, most of the trim will need a 2nd coat and I hate to leave my Dad here with it. I’ll try to get out here again to finish it up.

By the time all of the trim is painted, we will have painted about 1,000 ft. of trim 3 times...over a half mile! Yikes!

Sweet Strokes Dude

Another full 10 hour day of painting. We’ve tackled some of the most difficult of the trim pieces…and learned a few lessons too. Lesson #1 – Don’t roll primer on wood when the sun is beating down on it! This caused the paint to set a bit quickly and resulted in an orange peel look. We should have followed it with brush strokes right away.

Lesson #2 – The orbital sander is a close 2nd to the Sawzall…at least for now. This saved the day in eliminating some of those annoying roller marks.

Besides the frustration of a few mistakes made yesterday and hints of rain that threatened, but didn't “dampen” our work day, my Dad and I made a lot of headway. We put the first finish coat on about 50% of the trim.

The difference is amazing. Here’s a picture of a finished piece of wall molding and the original. So much detail restored and a finish that looks fabulous.


One more day of painting…

The Great Wall of China wasn't Built in One Day

The trash pile has been slowly dwindling in the bedroom. I've been very diligent about taking out 6 bags of plaster three nights a week. There's been a few nights where I could only take out two or three due to other bulk items the building put out, but so it goes. I was pretty excited this week when I was able to see the floor again where one area of trash bags was. Yet, my engineering mind quickly took over and I distributed the remaining bags for 'structural safety'

Dad came into town this weekend to see my brother (in from SF) and I. We finished taking down the plaster in the corner of the bedroom...managing to fill up at least another 12 - 18 bags of plaster and creating a pile of lath with nails. So much for that extra space on the floor.

At this point I have no idea how many bags of plaster there are and I can only gauge the rough number based on the stack of twist ties I have. At least it's all off the wall though. I'll be consistent in taking out six bags three nights per week. As they say, the Great Wall of China wasn't built in one day.

The five hours we spent on the bit of demolition that was left was more then enough for the weekend. I need to get out of this tiny space. We'll see what progress we can make next weekend.

Bags, Bags & More Bags!

There are 130 bags of plaster + lath sitting in my bedroom right now. After two solid days of work with my Dad, we're not doing anymore. It's unbelievable how dense this stuff is. You can really only put three coal shovel scoops into a bag and it is just managable to pick up. Heavy heavy stuff. I didn't quite demo the whole bedroom, but the little bit left is nothing to fret about and can be done easily later.

I'm a little worried about the structural load of all this on my floor, but that's why I have insurance I guess. I've spread it all out and plan to take some out every other night for the trash pickup. My garbage truck contact is going to come next week and give me an estimate to haul this all away, but I figure it's going to be out of my budget at the moment, so I will probably risk the city sanitation route for now.

This old construction is really interesting to me. The wooden beams look to be in good shape and there are a few spots where there is clearly some water damage, but hopefully the co-op stops dragging their feet and we get started on the roof soon. I find the combination of metal and wood lath in the bathroom oddly fascinating too.


All in all, we worked super hard this weekend. I'm so thankful my Dad came out to lend a helping hand again. I'm not sure what I would have done without him...well, I would have been bagging plaster every night this week is what would have happened.

I'm really tired, so it's off for a relaxing evening.

It's Official, I'm Clinically Insane

I just the day off of work to tear apart my apartment. I've got to be clinically insane. I've made a way bigger mess then I can handle and now I've got to clean it up. The dust is killing me, much worse then knocking down the kitchen/living room wall, likely due to the bigger space I'm working in. I was able to squeek out cleaning the foyer up tonight, but that was more necessity then anything else as I do need to get out and go to the bathroom.

I'm taking Friday off (not for Good Friday) to continue working and clean things up. On the bright side, my Dad called me today and had a change in plans. He is going to come out tomorrow to help me out with this mess. I didn't know how much time this would take me so I didn't call any of my buddies to ask for help this weekend. I'm sure they are all booked with family plans anyways and this is the nasty part of the renovation process. I want to subject as few people as required to this mess if I want any friends in the future.

All in all, I'm sure this will be worth it in the long run. Cracking plaster, 1/8" of paint, no insulation and water damage were all the reasons for this. I'm not insane to try to make this place loads better...am I???

Two Layer Tile Cake...Yum Yum!

It's Christmas Day and my Dad is visiting. I think he's the one person who's more enthused about this renovation then me and the likely reason for this is that he's not living in it. He shows up, tears apart stuff with me, and then leaves. Good plan. I look forward to the day my friends start doing this and I can show up with a crowbar, safety glasses, a six pack of beer and some Led Zeppelin to pump while we tear down a wall. Then I leave with a full belly of pizza. Good plan.

The itch got to me today, and I couldn't wait any longer to not do any work before I get these building permits. Since all my renovation work has been approved, re-tiling should be fine to start, especially since this doesn't require board approval. Remember, I've got a two layer tile cake.

We decided to quietly go-ahead and take an hour to rip up the old tile. Here's Dad hard at work on that checkerboard pattern.



The final result is the old tile is exposed. After a bit of Comet and elbow grease, it looks like...well, not new, but lts say "charming, 1923 style."