Big News

Ok, big news on several fronts, but I’m going to keep this post brief. I’m sure that will come as a relief to those who look at the long line of paragraphs comprising most of my entry’s and sigh.

The Ikea delivery came today, two hours early, so I was in the Bronx getting a new window in the Volvo. Leigh stepped up to the plate and buzzed the guys in and they deposited a large quantity of flat boxes into our construction site, er…apartment. The best part is, when I got back home, I checked the list of items ordered with what was delivered…not one wrong or missing. Back in the day, when I was installing kitchens with my pal Jason, that almost never happened. Less than 5% to be precise.

The other big news is that until the second out in the ninth inning the Yanks were looking at loosing to the Orioles 1 to 7 in a NO-HITTER ! A single in the ninth was all that kept the impossible from happening. We were there, under a beautiful night sky, arms akimbo, jaws agape.

It’s those things you think will be big deals, that so often are not. And conversely, those things you neglect to flag as problems, are the very same things that will rear their ugly head.

Here is where the gas meter was.




I had stared at that thing for hours, wondering how I could move it from its unfortunate location to inside my newly created closet. I don’t like to mess with gas, but it seemed clear to me that there was a shut-off on the supply side of my ugly meter. So I could shut down the service at that point, detach the meter and pipe a new location. That was the theory. Oh, believe me, I called Con Edison. I begged for a new meter. They have digital readout meters now and everything. But go ahead, call Con Edison, I dare you. In New York Speak, "forgedaboudit".

So I grabbed some tools.



It worked, and it was done without much trouble. Everything is open, nothing smells like gas, gotta like it.

Rebuilding.

First thing is the floor. Let me first remind everyone that a building constructed in 1928 does many splendid things during its tenure. First and formost, it remains! This is a feat that I believe many homes built in, lets say the seventies, will not be able to repeat. It does, however, settle. Not for lesser tenants, but toward gravity. And so one of the main questions is what to level.

Level and Plum. These are very important terms and the beginning assumptions of sound construction. Most everyone knows that level is that line that is horizontal to the earth. When we hang pictures of the same size we want the tops of the pictures to be “level” to each other. ‘Plum’ is ‘levels’ counterpart. If you have a level line, say the tops of pictures, then you can say, “hey, I want the right edge of several pictures to be in line and perpendicular to the level tops of the horizontal pictures”, in other words, straight up and down.

In my remodeling of our apartment I have taken almost every opportunity to level and plum things. The main exceptions are the floor in the bedroom and the floor in the entry hall and living-room. I am refinishing these floors, which are oak, (the living-room floor is a nice parquet) but to level them would be a major construction task that I believe would not be worth it. That said, I have taken the opportunity to level the bathroom floor as it was almost completely destroyed in order to re-configure the main fixtures. If I had been truly anal (which is usually my wont) I would have dug into the main joists in order to meet a level bathroom floor with the hallway. As it is there is about a one and an eighth inch step up into the bathroom. But you see the problem. The building settles quite radically from the outside brick walls, which keep their integrity, to the interior wood-beamed stricture, which settles over time. When I “leveled” the bedroom ceiling, the new sheetrock was screwed directly onto the existing ceiling at the furthest most interior point, and by the time it reached the nearest corner to the exterior brick walls, it was two and seven-eighths inches away. That slope, in about twenty feet. So, in order to make things easier, I leveled the bathroom floor, knowing there would be a teeny tiny step as you entered.

The kitchen is slightly different. We batted this back and forth and I must admit that at several times I was ready to abandon the “raised floor” idea for the kitchen. Leveling the floor has a lot of benefits in terms of cabinet installation, appliances sitting squarely, everything looking good, not to mention being able to stand squarely on your feet as you wash dishes or cook. There has to be some orthopedic surgeon who can back me up on that. But I was reluctant to make that demand, that in order to enter the kitchen, you had to step up.

Granted, it’s only a six-inch step, but it is a thing. And I was counseled away from it by some quarters. Leigh was an unrelenting fan of it and, because it made so many things much easier, (running the ice-maker line for the fridge) I bought it. I mean I thought of it, but like so many thoughts of mine, they are second guessed to death, and only because my wife dismisses my second thoughts as no thoughts at all do I feel that no thoughts of mine are better than thoughts I never had. At least I think so.

It’s A Tough Town.

What a checkered day. I started renovation work around nine as Leigh was getting ready for office work. She was tasked with double-parking the car before eleven-thirty (so the street cleaner can go by) and I would move it back to the cleaned side of the street around twelve-thirty. Each move requires you getting out there a little early, shifting the car and then sitting with it until it’s legal. It’s a tough business and I’ve seen some monumental screaming matches erupt between people vying for the same spot!

Leigh left the apartment and no more than a minute passed when my cell phone rang and she told me that our car, which was parked directly in front of our building, had its rear left window smashed in and the contents of the way-back were gone. Some ne’er do wells had decided that the car jack ($35) and two jack stands ($25) were so valuable that risking imprisonment was an option.

I’m a liberal as many of you know. But for those who mistakenly conflate liberalism with “softie”, let me set the record straight. Generally, I don’t like people. I enjoy animals and inanimate objects far more than most humans and I have no sympathy for the stupidity that these goons displayed by stealing sixty bucks worth of stuff by throwing—get this—an old axel, through my car window. Our street has security camera’s sprouting from lamp-posts and building corners because of Columbia University’s effort to provide a safe environment for their medical students. I think I can get them to review some tapes. Maybe we’ll get these morons yet!

On a brighter note, I did a reading tonight of a play-in-the-making, penned by Carol Gilligan based on the The Scarlet Letter with myself, a young actress named Becky, Keira Naughton, and David Straithairn .

So, that’s New York for ya.

Oh, and here's a very confused Hank, trying to get used to the new layout.




Oh, and by the way. The two NYPD cops that came over today to take the smashed window report, They looked at Emerson from the hallway and thought he was a dog. I'm just saying, these cats are big! She wouldn't let it go either, she kept saying to her partner, "Damn, I thought that was a dog!".

Lucy! Chu gotta lotta splainin’ to do!

Here’s the renovated floorplan.



Let’s begin where the actual work began, in the bedroom. If one were to compare the two floorplans, one would immediately note that the offending corner closets were destroyed. One would also notice that a large corner of the bedroom has been captured, along with one of the two bedroom windows, and a doorway has been created between the captured officette and the livingroom. As part of that new construction a closet space was created to replace the corner closets lying at the bottom of some landfill.

Details will follow. Were talking floorplan here.

The next was the bathroom. Well, the only way to really describe the situation is “total gut”. What was the bathroom was dismantled and discarded. The floor and walls were broken into, and all of the plumbing was re-configured to allow the fixtures (sink, toilet, tub) to be re-arranged. It was then put back together. In floorplan terms, a four foot vanity with sink and cabinets is now the first thing you find to your left when opening the door. The toilet is next, partially hidden by a four-foot high wall that serves as the end of the countertop. The tub has been rotated 90 degrees and goes from wall to wall at the end of the bathroom.

In that little hallway that links the livingroom to the bedroom to the bathroom, there was a closet. These closets I speak of had huge tall doors but inside there was just a bar and a couple of shallow shelves high up. A very inefficient use of space. So the next project was to demolish the closet in that little hallway. It will become a built in unit that has lots and lots of drawers and then some upper cabinet space but also offers a high counter top.

The officette has a pocket door that was constructed from the closet door mentioned above. The officette still needs to be outfitted with cabinets and desktop etc. but that is part of what is currently happening.

The kitchen/livingroom reconfiguration, which is in progress, is mainly about creating a different entry to the kitchen. Now you enter the apartment, walk forward into the living-room through a double wide entry (that has been expanded because of eliminating the closet at the end of the hall) and enter the kitchen from the livingroom, through a four-foot archway. Closets have been created near the front door to replace the destroyed closet. They will be divided so as to serve as a front hall closet for coats and a utility closet. I will leave the details of all these things to a later post but these are the main structural changes.

One note that I am quite pleased with. Once you enter the apartment and stand under the archway that leads into the livingroom, you can see every window in the apartment. (partial views sometimes but every one). It makes it feel just that much bigger.

But the devil is in the details. Be prepared for a lotta lucifer!

Photo's from the Demolition

Here are some shots of the results of the demo process. Enjoy.

Just One Shy.

Almost the whole family on the bed.

A Confession

It’s taken me till now to come to terms with what happened on our second day of demolition. It was the twelfth of September and, having only spent a half-day the previous day on the job, I was anxious to get something done. Leigh was helping. She was in charge of rescuing hardware from the closets door and interior. The glass door-knobs are worth $25 bucks each. The five inch brass hinges are $40 or so. And the brass hooks (a half dozen) are at least five bucks each. Of course everything is covered in layers of paint, but a little stripper can fix that.

I was in the kitchen at long last dismantling the 1928 kitchen cabinets. I had unhooked the sink over the weekend and had capped off the water lines. The shut off valves were old style. The same kind of thing as you would find on your spigot for your garden hose. The cold had shut off pretty well but the hot didn’t take for the longest time, kept leaking. To play it safe I had installed a short length of pipe with a cap on the apartment side of the shut-offs, so if they didn’t hold, there was no place for the water to go.

I knew I was going to have to shut off the water at the risers in the basement when I got to the point of changing the old shut off valves in our apartment for new ones. This is somewhat of a big deal because you have to get the super to do it and it shuts off all the water for your line of apartments. In other words, all the ‘D’ apartments are without water.

All I was doing, this second day of demo, was taking out the old cabinets. I wasn’t even taking the plaster off the walls yet. Now I’m a fairly careful worker and I’m a first class worrier. That’s why I was such a good stage manager. You’re paid to worry. “What could possibly go wrong here?” is the life-blood of stage management. I was trained by, hands down, the greatest worrier I have ever known—my mother. So I’m pretty certain that if I thought trouble was around the corner I would have taken some precautions.

I was nearly done removing the cabinets and I had a grip on a vertical piece that was closest to the old sink. There was a ‘U’ shaped notch in the back of it where the hot water pipe ran through. I pulled it away from the wall.

What happened next was the third worst thing possible. Unbeknownst to anyone, the hot water pipe was so corroded that it was unable to support its own weight. Water started spraying everywhere. I exclaimed various exclamatory exclamations and alerted Leigh to the trouble as I headed to find the super to shut off the water. My valiant wife, armed with only her savvy and her Ivey League education, held up buckets, and rags and pots and dustpans, trying desperately to stem the quarts and quarts of water gushing out of our plaster wall.

I made it to the basement, found the supers helper Antonio, barked, “Where’s Nelson?” only to be told in broken English that he was on “bacation”. I knew that when he was gone his brother in 2F took over. Up I went, desperate to get someone, anyone to shut off the water!!

Long story short, (ok, I know, it’s too late already) the water was turned off. There is some minor damage to the second floor neighbors living-room wall. Most of the water was coming straight down through the walls and into the basement. I remodeled my downstairs neighbors kitchen in 2002 and their bathroom a couple of years later so they know I’ll fix up their wall.

The good news is the building sent out a plumber to cut away the corroded part of the riser and he gave me a nice new shut-off. It was a bad moment. What are the two worse things you were asking yourself? Second is a gas leak and first is a fire.

Here’s what the riser looked like after we had cut it out. The little threaded section is where the pipe that went into our apartment connected to this thing inside the wall. The most disturbing thing is when I held this length of pipe up to the window and looked down through it, there was so much corrosion on the inside that what used to be maybe an inch interior was reduced to maybe a quarter inch. This is not for the faint of heart, but our drinking water is running past some stalagmite and stalactites of good ole’ fashion rust.

Our River View

Remember the bedroom window I so desperatly wanted to free from the intrusion of corner closets? Here are two examples of what we see as we lay on our bed and look to our right.


This is also where that life-saving breeze comes from during the dog days of summer.

Original Ground Plan

Here is the original ground plan for our Haven on Haven. Aside from the ascetic considerations—bumpy and cracked walls; molding covered by ninety years of paint, atrocious bathroom tile, and kitchen cabinets (and I use the term loosely) from the nineteen-twenty’s. There was a greater consideration, that of space and how it was apportioned. Let’s be realistic people. Those of you who do not live in New York City need to do a quick calculation regarding square footage. Here’s the math. Six hundred and twenty square feet. And we have big cats! I mean BIG! Emerson weighed in at eighteen pounds a few years ago and although I am certain that he has lost at least three, Hank, who we brought in as a wee kitten, seemed to take one look at the former heavy weight Emerson, realized his personal safety was at stake, and promptly hooked up with Barry Bonds and grew. If Emerson is 15lbs, there is no doubt that Hank is 19lbs. But Hank is not fat. His shoulders are five inches across! His back, from nape of neck to beginning of tail, is 17 inches! He was the runt of the litter when my wife picked him out of a cardboard box in Margaretville New York,



but he is now , quite frankly, a small panther. Anyway, each of our cats takes up two square feet. So, that leaves us with Six hundred and sixteen.

Most peoples two-car garage plus a woodshed comprises our entire living space. My suburban friends (I have a few) tell me how lucky I am because I’m forced to cull my belongings. I think I know what they mean when I walk through their garage and basement and walk-in closets and storage rooms and see the gross accumulation of stuff. Is it an American disease? Or is it shared by the (relatively) affluent? We fight this battle even in our small space. My preference has almost always been to pare down to only what you really need. But everyone has their weaknesses. Some folks collect linens, others books, still others cars, sports equipment, knick-knacks, office supplies, and on and on. Mine? Tools. So my dream is to have a living space that is neat, organized, coordinated and efficient, (not to mention beautiful to look at) but a shop/storage space/basement/trailer stocked with tools that I simply could not do without. Everyone has a weakness.

Anyway, here is the original floor plan.



As I sat on the bare living room floor, waiting for the sale to go through, here were my thoughts.

The Bedroom. For the size of the apartment, the bedroom is too large. It had these hideous corner closets that obscured the best window in the apartment, the one with the river view, and it had a lot of square feet. Too many to assign to the bedroom. The bathroom had a terrible layout. Open the door and the toilet is right there. The sink followed, inches away, and the tub took up the rest of the southern wall. There is a window on the western wall and the northern wall was blank. Everything was in a line. The shower-head was piped straight down out of the ceiling! The tile was bad, the floor was bad. There was little good about the bathroom. The kitchen was large but poorly laid out. The entrance to the kitchen was from the entry hall. You opened the front door and immediately to your right was the doorway to the kitchen. If you proceeded past that you would pass through a doorway that led into the living room.

When the building was built no one wanted to see kitchens. The larger apartments in the building have maids quarters that abut the kitchens, and the layout is such that guests would enter the apartment, skirt the “working” parts and end up in the dining room and living room. These days we don’t mind seeing kitchens, and since most of us don’t have “help” anymore, the kitchen has become a focal point of design. How many parties have you gone too where someone remarks, “Why is it that everyone always winds up in the kitchen?”

My design jobs were clear pretty early on.

1) Steal some square footage from the ample bedroom for the inevitable office equipment glut. Computers, printers, copiers, cables, office supplies, etc., are eyesores whether they are in the corner of your bedroom or in the corner of your livingroom. There’s no way around them, because they are necessary. But what if you could create a space, however small, where they would be concealed?
2) Re-conceive the bathroom. The lay-out sucked. The question was, what was possible and did I have the skills.
3) Open the kitchen to the livingroom. This part of the design suffered from the most revision because of the realities of what passed through the walls.

Study this drawing. You will be quizzed later on. My renovated floor plan will follow.

A Blast From The Past

I found this paragraph, written in early 2002 when the first room of our apartment was about to be dealt with. It bears reprinting. Also, I have been charged with providing history. I'm interpreting this as a desire for pictures of what has come before, along with commentary. I promise to deliver what I can, with the promise that more detailed photo's of these rooms will come after the stacks of boxes now stuck in corners are removed. Until then I hope to deliver history and tidbits and anything else I can think of.

FROM THE PAST (EARLY 2002)

Yesterday afternoon I moved all of our furniture and clothing out of the bedroom and arranged it in the living room, recreating the feeling of living in the studio apartment on East 83rd street. Bed is opposite couch, desks are squeezed in corners, floor lamps are on top of chest of drawers—we have been shoe-horned again! Actually it has a kind of a cozy and romantic feeling—holed up in urban cramp with your babydoll.
The moving of the funiture marked the beginning of what I know to be a very long journey. This morning however, I am well aware that the crossroad is here and now. I can always spend a couple of hours before Leigh comes home for lunch moving all the furniture back. I could even vacume and dust and re-organize, hoping that these good deeds take the curse off of my apparent cowardice. The fact remains—it is possible to stop the madness now! No damage has been done, no ceiling removed, no wall stands agape, the closets still exist… In three hours all will be different. I will have hung some plastic in a near futile attempt to stop the dust of demolition, I will have moved up from the basement a few of my favorite ‘wrecking’ tools, and I will have fired the first shot. An action that will cause that familiar chain of reactions and actions and reactions that will define my free time for months and maybe years to come. Joe Coomer’s book Dream House lays on my desk which is now only eighteen inches away from my bed. I’m getting a sort of dull ache in the usual places in my back and the thought of grabbing Coomer’s tale of building his house by a pond and propping my head up on three pillows to ease the cramps is looming large.
Nonsense! Armed with my two stalwarts, earl grey tea and WNYC, I steel myself for the first volley over the bow. Truth be told, I am of course full of anticipation. A wonderful place to be. A little like early on a Christmas morning when I was a child, waiting at the top of the stairs for the rest of my brothers and sisters to awake. The vision of what I have planned—that wonderfully elegant, comfortable, warm, gorgeous bedroom—bursting with linen and light and trimmed with sturdy white oak with a kind of ‘Early American’ tone is crystal clear in my head. And that is what will sustain me through the toil. And that is what fills me now with invigorating anticipation.

More demolition details to come.

A Brief History

Four months had passed since I first laid eyes on her. I put the key in the door, swung it slowly open, and stepped into her foyer. The furnishings that I had seen in late October were gone. Nothing but bare walls, open floor space and kitchen appliances remained. The entire process was dragging out to the point of frustration. The deal was simple enough, buying a co-op apartment in Manhattan…

My girlfriend at the time (now happily my wife) and I had been sublet-hopping since arriving in the city near the end of July, 2000. I was returning to New York City after a two-year hiatus, so I had been previously educated in the hassels of the NYC’s housing market.

Our entry point, arriving by car from a cross country trip, was West 83rd Street. A friend of ours has a rent-stabilized studio apartment that she is almost never in. She had a two-week chunk of time between long-term sublets that we took advantage of. It’s a nice enough place. Not very much light but well laid out. There was a level change that set the “bedroom” apart from the main space. The bathroom was in good shape and a decent size for a studio. The kitchen was one of those horrible teeny tiny kitchens that so many New Yorkers make do with. Creativity had utilized every possible space saving notion and our friend had stories of serving six people a Thanksgiving dinner from its confines, but New York is kitchen-challenged, no doubt about it.

We then took a one-month sublet from a lighting designer friend of mine. Again, a studio with some charm. Exposed brick wall. Fireplace that didn’t work (but looked nice anyway). Loft bed to save space. Crappy bathroom. Non-existent kitchen. It was on First Avenue and First Street, a great location, but it had BUGS!! I mean them New York cockroaches that rearrange your furniture. My girlfriend/wife was not a fan.

My task was clear. GET US OUT OF HERE!. I immediately went to “The Equity Board” which is located in the lounge of the Actors Equity building on West 46th street, just off Times Square. It’s a place where actors post sublet and roommate listings. These days things are online but way back when you would go to the lounge and scan the 3 by 5 cards for anything you could afford.

We found a Hell’s Kitchen sublet on 45th street between 9th and 10th Ave for eight weeks. It was a decent place, sublet by a fairly neurotic middle-aged actress heading off to do a ‘regional’ gig. It was a well kept railroad apartment with that kind of charm that can come from exposing a brick wall or two, carefully lighting the 80 percent of the apartment that gets little or nothing natural in that department, and making the best of a crappy bathroom. Short of breaking out the sledge hammers, she had made it a nice place. It was a rental, so why would one remodel? That is the rub for most folks in NYC.
We had been scanning the listings on the online version of the Village Voice in advance or our scheduled homelessness. Finally we got a bead on a long term sublet. Six whole months! It was a little studio apartment on east 83rd street between First and Second avenues, alittle east of the money but within walking distance of great east side restaurants.

SIDEBAR: From 1984 to 1990 I wouldn’t go above 14th street cause I’d get these horrible nose bleeds. If I HAD to travel north, I’d stuff cotton in the nostrils and suffer. As time passed I slowly acclimatized to lands above 14th street. The upper west side became tolerable but the east side was and has remained a foreign land. It’s not that it doesn’t have its attractions, but at the end of the day you want to go back to where your roots are, where your tribal identity gives you that warm fuzzy feeling.

The college age girl we rented the 83rd street place from had returned to Florida. She seemed a little nutty but not surprisingly so. It all began to unravel when we caught wind of the fact that she wasn’t paying the rent. My guess is her father forced her to abandon New York partying for something slightly more promising. I’m sure she figured that the security deposit and the last month rent she had given the landlord would square with the last few months rent not being delivered. The landlord didn’t seem to agree. Leigh and I were on notice to find something else and fast. It was during those frantic months that we put out feelers to everyone we knew that we were looking for an apartment in New York City. My expectation was to get another long term sublet, or if we were really lucky, to stumble upon our very own lease. And then came a phone call from the wife of one of my best friends with a lead. And so I paid a visit to Haven Avenue in Washington Heights. My nose was spraying blood, like I’d hit an artery.

What I thought I was viewing was an apartment that was being rented by a couple who wanted to move out and needed someone to take over their lease. Fair enough. During the tour of the place (ok, it’s 600 plus square feet, “tour” is stretching it) the guy said, “listen, if your looking to buy, the guy that owns this place wants to sell”. Buy? A completely foreign idea. I scrambled quickly and realized that I had to do it if I could.

That visit was in late October of 2000. We didn’t move in until early March of 2001. But for a few months before that I had the keys to the apartment and the tenants had moved out and I would go over there and sit cross-legged in the middle of the floor and draw in my mind. With a few adjustments along the way, I have built those imaginings.
Here is a lovely image of what I have accomplished so far to leave you with.




Isn't it beautiful?

Craftsmen Converse

Yesterday I was removing the window casing from the living room windows. After prying off one of the vertical side pieces I noticed this wedged in the space behind.

In pristine condition with the imprint, "Made in Germany" . I would guess a rose wood handle, pinned with small brass nails through a brass collet. It's very small, only about six inches long and it was once and most certainly wielded by a fellow carpenter in 1927 when this place was built. My first thought was did he miss it? At the end of the day, as he touched pockets and checked bags, did he scratch his head and say, "what the sam hell happened to my little flat head?"
Forgetting that he had momentarily wedged it into the window sill to pry it away from the wall ever so slightly as he nailed in the two-piece reveal.
I forget many many things, as those who know me would attest. But I can, with a decent degree of certainty, tell you which box or bag or cubby the red handled wire strippers are. I would have missed this little flat head. It's pretty. And I dig pretty tools.

Say What?

Things you would never hear unless quarantined within a dust barrior with all of your belongings piled one on top of the other.

"Honey, where's the wine?" (as if the questioner had lost his mind) "its in the hallway".

"Sweetheart, you know you have crackers on your stapler?"

"Bad news. The cats defeated the portal"

"Whole family on the bed!! Whole family on the bed!" (intoned as a gleeful alarm when all four of us are occupying the top of our full size bed)

The Day Before

An important consideration when contemplating a major renovation. If at all possible DO NOT live in the apartment while the work is taking place. If, however, you happen to be the contractor (and crew and designer), go ahead! What the hell! It cuts down on the commute.

Federer is just about to break Roddick in the fourth set of the Men's Finals at the U.S. Open. Leigh, Emerson, Hank and I are safely ensconced in our bedroom, having completed the preparations for the first day of demolition. Unbelievably, our progress will be slightly delayed as yours truly has to go downtown for not one but two commercial auditions in the AM and then drop in at the offices of the Agent who has decided to begin sending me out on these little tasks. So, I will return in the afternoon and begin to demolish. We have a lot of catching up to do…the bedroom, the bathroom…but that means I have to write a lot more. So, to keep us current, here’s some pictures of the preparations.


A dust barrier has been erected, sealing off the back of the apartment from the kitchen and livingroom areas to be demolished. We have set up a little mini kitchen just outside the bathroom as we have disabled our kitchen completely as of this afternoon. The office-ette has been stacked high with boxes that are storing our books and kitchen stuff and anything else we can do without for a couple of months while the work takes place.


And here is the offending kitchen. The smartest way for me to share this stuff with you guys seems to be to load pictures to here and have you guys view them from there. So I'll occassionally link to additional slide show stuff and keep the blog free of all but essential images. Hope this works.

And So It Begins

Welcome all. An Actor Prepares (sorry, Repairs) will attempt to do many things. It will chronicle the last stage in our remodeling of our Manhattan apartment. It will catch you up on what has been completed. It will become a forum, offering heaps of advice and opinion about remodeling without a lick of evidence supporting those opinions or advice. It will make wild comparisons between remodeling an apartment and creating a character. It will offer how-too advice on both fronts. For example; How To Approach Othello, followed by How To Sweat A Copper Fitting. It will sometimes make you laugh, mostly make you cry and occasionally make you exclaim out loud, “There but for the grace of God go I”

A brief history. Bought apartment in March of 2001. Remodeled the bedroom in early 2002. Remodeled the bathroom in Spring of 2003. And now…

First step. Site protection. Discard all unnecessary stuff including large pieces of furniture that you mean to replace anyway.



Our couch of five years on the hard scrabble streets of New York. Notice the Southwestern flavor. Notice how you'll never see it again.