We are building a green roof on the show house. Green roofs are heavy so we are paying a lot of attention to the weight on the roof. We were going to lay the green roof materials directly on top of the tar roof that was there. It was in good shape. But the we […]
55 Years of Roofing Read More »
I’m trying to design some stairs. They are from the basement to the cellar. You enter on the side and it spirrals to the right 90 degrees then follows the wall down. Once it reaches the cellar floor it spirals to the right again 45 degrees. Below is a diagram of it. The cool thing
Stair Design (old) Read More »
One thing brownstones have in abundance are bricks. And I keep seeing dumpsters full of them. It is heartbreaking for me. These are beautiful bricks, a hundred years old, with character and texture. Here is one job site where they knocked down the whole building. There were thousands of perfect bricks. The next day they
Bricks, Bricks Everywhere Read More »
We found about 500sq.ft. of 5 inch wide maple plank flooring in a dumpster. It had a very slight warp to it due to it not being installed correctly. But with a little sanding we could get rid of that. So we happily installed the flooring. Despite our good intentions there were complications 1. Maple
The Maple Floor Fiasco Read More »
The magic of thermal heating is amazing. on one side you can use thermal mass to heat and on the other you can use the lack of thermal mass to also heat. Combine of Thermal Mass And you can even combine the two. For example you could have a low mass sun room, with just
Using Thermal Mass to Heat Houses Read More »
Here is an image of the proposed plumbing setup for the green show house in Brooklyn. Chester Birchwood from New York Solar Systems is installing it. It has three interesting components. These apply to hot water only since we are really managing the amount of energy we added to the hot water. The cold water
Hot Water Home Run, Return and Mixing Read More »
I am really enjoying the renovation of a one hundred year old building. As I uncover layers of material I come across the craftsmanship of the builders from a hundred years ago. This house has not had a such an in depth renovation since it was first built in 1908. I connect to these builders.
Building for the next generation Read More »
Dumpsters, Job Sites, Garbage Night Streets, Damaged Store Stock, Craigslist, Neighbours, Salvage stores, Ebay, our building… these are some of the places we get our materials from. The rules are simple: it needs to be dangerously close to being sent to the dump or once used. Here are some of the things we have saved:
We have these old rickety stairs in the show house. They are good craftsmanship but have had to endure a hundred years of big Italian boys bouncing up and down them. And they are old, old and tired. We need to keep them, though, because the space is too steep and windy to be accepted
Our budget for the Brooklyn green show house got decimated with this banking crisis. So we don’t really have a budget any more. It is basically as cheap as we can make it. For our kitchens for example we were going to buy salvaged kitchens, make them in house out of salvaged wood or find
Quality is tied to quality and no longer tied to price Read More »
