Our Stoop Gets Rebuilt

Posted on June 7, 2012 by BeatingUpwind

My apologies for not blogging lately… When we moved in I just sorta crashed, but the workers are still making good progress. They’ve been working on the stoop for what seems like forever…

We were going to have a sub-contractor do the work, but one company wanted to charge $53,000 (just for the stoop), and the other one kept missing and being seriously late for meetings (not a good sign on a critical path task). So our contractor is having his guys do the work.

The process starts by taking a jack hammer to the old brownstone, removing any loose stone, and creating a rough surface…

In some cases that’s quite a bit of stone (see below) – it all depends on how much damage there was over the years…

The next step is to coat everything in a bonding agent so the concrete-based mix they put on will adhere to the brownstone – that’s the while stuff in the picture below…

Then everything has to be built back up. For the stair treads they used PVC piping to create round edges…

That was filled in with concrete to form a new edge. When they did the front they embedded wire in the concrete to reinforce the leading edge of the step.

The flourishes under each step also had to be reconstructed…

You can also see how they’ve recreated the triangular detail on the side of the stoop. It was a multi-stage process – you can see the picture below has more detail in the design than the one above.

In the picture above everything is ready for the final “brownstone” finish coat. All the concrete work has a very coarse finish to it that’s not quite visible in the picture.

You can also see that they’ve recreated the low walls that were there originally.

Simultaneously to that another worker has been grinding all the rust off the original ballusters (and the ones we bought at Demolition Depot to fill in what we were missing), but that’s the subject of another blog post.

We had a hard time figuring out what to do with the newel posts. A building on 122 was willing to sell us their newel post and railing, but the price was high, and it didn’t give us everything we needed and it was only one newel post and one section of straight railing (plus a bunch of ballusters we didn’t need). In the end we decided to do masonry newel posts since it was less expensive, quicker, and what the National Park Service has approved (though we made a few changes to the approved design).

The first step in building up the newel posts is building up a brick core…

Then forms are built in the shape of the final design, and those are put over the brick cores…

Then concrete is put on the brick and a straight edge is drawn down guided by the templates to make the concrete into the correct shape…

That’s where we stand as of today. Tomorrow they’ll take off the forms, do the other sides and repeat the process with the other newel post.

The other thing you can see in the picture above is the brown primer for the final “brownstone” coat. They did a sample area of the finish today…

The house wall is painted, the retaining wall has the “brownstone” finish. It’s not the same quality as the $10M townhouses you see on the Upper West Side, but it’s better and hopefully more durable than a lot of what we see around Harlem. It doesn’t look like brown sandpaper. It looks better than brown stucco, but almost has a paint-like quality to it – though it has more of a texture than paint.

I think the newel posts will be painted (black), and not have a brownstone finish – that should make them look more like the cast iron originals. There are actually brownstones on 119 just east of Lenox that have all concrete railings, ballusters and newel posts. At first glance they pass for original, though when you get close you can see a concrete texture and as they age they get lichen in the crevices…

One thing I should mention is that we’re not refinishing the under side of the stoop because if water gets through the new finish on the top, it needs to be able to go through the stone and get out.

So we’re getting there… I just want them to be done though… But soon enough they will be done.

Dan’s Dirty Studio Gets Dirty

Posted on March 1, 2012 by BeatingUpwind

One thing that’s being worked on at the moment are the final steps for the staircase. Finding wide plank white oak has been a challenge. Each tread is 11 1/2″ or 12″ by 36″ by about 1 3/4″. There are 60 treads plus there are platforms at each corner which are the same idea with multiple pieces stitched together. Needless to say we had to buy a lot of pretty prime wood. They’ve got it all cut up and sanded…

In the process of cutting up all that wood sawdust was flying everywhere. There was so much sawdust being created that it has literally coated the walls of the dirty studio where they were doing the work…

The T is one of the workers starting to write his name on the wall with the air pump… They also wrote more mundane things in the sawdust on the walls…

Today the contractor discovered that the stairs aren’t square. Blame it on the foreman he had on the project initially, or blame it on the guy who fabricated the stairs, or blame it on the contractor himself for not double checking things – but the end result is that the stairs are pretty obviously out of square.

[Then again, the building isn’t square either – it’s bigger in the rear than in the front.]

So that means they have to make things that aren’t square appear to be square – which is more difficult than it should be, but the guy working on it is up to the task.

After they get things cut so they appear square, they have to stain and seal all those boards. Meanwhile another guy is painting all the steel white…

He’s actually a guy who I’ve had working for me sporadically for 3 years now. Good guy, but very afraid of heights. In the picture he’s about 40 feet up off the parlor floor. He said it was the scariest thing he’d ever done (which is why he’s wearing a harness)…

I’m pretty sure that’s just primer – so they’ll have to come back in and do it all again with the final coat of white.

Lots Of Little Things Are Getting Done

Posted on February 15, 2012 by BeatingUpwind

The last week or so there have been a lot of little things getting done… It’s feeling more and more complete…

The railings are being installed for our staircase…

All the steel will be painted white, and there will be milk white plexi panels mounted on those frames and wood handrails. The railings are a bit shaky because they’re so thin. We’re hoping the plexi and handrails will stiffen things up a bit.

One of my favorite features in the house is the laundry chute from the master bedroom into the laundry room.

It’s funny to find a hole in the floor exciting, but it’s pretty cool (as is the whole concept of a laundry room – I’ve never had in-unit laundry before).

And a bunch of electrical stuff has taken shape…

The lights are on the front of the building…

We’re not sure whether we like those lights or not – they were inexpensive – we’ll change them later if we decide we want something better.

The track lights are mostly in and the lights are being put on the tracks…

We like how minimal they are – the big part of the lens is just a little bigger than a quarter – so it’s pretty tiny.

And the smoke detectors have been installed, but the little protective plastic bags sorta defeat the whole point of detecting smoke…

The thing I’m not looking forward to is that NYC code requires all the smoke detectors to go off when one of them goes off. When Dan burns something on the stove it’s going to be LOUD. But on the good side, they’re all hardwired – so no dead batteries to worry about.

And the last of the bathrooms has been tiled (the master bathroom)…

That took one of the workers 3 weeks to tile… The guy is slow, but he’s an absolute perfectionist so it’s flawless when you look at it close up. The same guy is now skim coating some of the walls (like the walls in the bathroom above).

Hopefully in the next week some of the plumbing fixtures will start getting installed and there will be a big push on painting and finishing up the floors.

Today we went to Ikea to buy closets, but when we got there we hated them. They’re not nearly as well made as Ikea’s kitchens. The closet solutions at Container Store are about 50% more – so we’re not sure what we’ll do – maybe just have the contractor make what we originally planned.

Problems With DOB Continue

Posted on February 13, 2012 by BeatingUpwind

The insane bureaucracy at the Department of Buildings is causing us huge problems, AGAIN. Near the end of every job there are a host of little things that have to be corrected on the filed plans so when the final inspection happens, what the inspector sees matches what’s on the plans. The most critical issue in our case is that the sizing of the gas pipes wasn’t specified in the original plans, and the plumbing inspector won’t sign off on the work until they’re shown. Without his sign off we can’t get our “blue card” and without the blue card we can’t get gas service and without gas service we have no heat. Without heat we can’t really put water throughout the building for fear of frozen pipes. But pipe sizing is just one of many issues that need to be corrected on the plans – there’s a bunch of other stuff – none of which is major.

When we filed for a Post Approval Amendment (PAA) we were told our original plan examiner had been promoted – he’s now part of some centralized watch dog oversight group. The problem is the new plan examiner has to sign off on everything – not just the things that are changing. He found a pretty fundamental flaw with the original filing – the “construction classification”…

Construction Classification:
Existing:	3: NON-FIREPROOF STRUCTURES
Proposed:	I-D: 1 HOUR PROTECTED

The problem is 1D with 1 hour fire protection isn’t what we’re doing – that would require all floors/ceilings and significant walls to have a 1 hour fire rating – the job should never have been filed that way. The plans clearly show that only certain parts of the building will have 1 hour fire rating – between the units, around the boiler room and the stairwell in our unit. The architect and expediter got it wrong, I didn’t notice it, and the original plan examiner missed it. But it makes a difference. Apparently construction classification is something FDNY relies on when they go to fight a fire. They don’t send fire fighters in after a certain amount of time unless they know the building will be safe.

The problem compounds itself since certain things that are allowed in fire rated construction aren’t allowed in non-fireproof buildings. For example closets and storage spaces under egress stairs aren’t allowed since a fire could start in the closet. So now we have to go back and pick the best/correct classification, and then see if there’s anything we’ve built that doesn’t comply with that classification. It’s fortunate at this point that we’re “fully sprinklered”, but my worry is that additional sprinkler heads might be required since “fully sprinklered” means different things depending on the situation. For example our power room on the parlor floor is under the stairs. Will it now need to be sprinklered?

The plan examiner made it clear that he wasn’t going to stop with the construction classification. Our appointment wasn’t as long as it needed to be and he had just started in on other items by the time it was over. He pointed to the stairs off the rear deck that go down into the garden and asked aloud if that they were a “permitted obstruction”. Because our rear yard is a couple feet below the level of the basement/ground floor the staircase from the rear deck goes (a couple feet) “more than one story” and that changes things. UGH… For god’s sake – it’s essentially one story – is it really that big of an issue? I’m thinking we may need to create a berm in the back yard that’s level with the basement/ground floor and have the stairs touch down at that point in the yard. IMHO, that’s just bureaucratic insanity, but we gotta do whatever it takes to get things done and signed off…

Unfortunately, you can’t get individual sheets approved. In our case we need the gas riser diagram approved, but all the other things are holding it up. On a larger project you’d file the plumbing as a separate job so you could do narrower PAAs, but that generally isn’t cost effective in project our size. If we could just get that one sheet signed off, things wouldn’t be so dire right now.

The bottom line when we left the plan exam was that, unless we do something drastic, it will probably take months of appointments to get the PAA approved. The new plan examiner is just going to keep finding one thing after another and draw out the process as long as possible – all things that have been signed off on in the past. We don’t have months to complete the project. We need gas, we need heat, and we need to move in so we can stop paying rent and storage fees on top of mortgage.

Our architect has worked on some really large, big budget projects and as a result knows expediters with decades of experience who have a much easier time getting things through DOB. We’re hiring one of those people to do code review and take over expediting. It’s going to cost us pretty big money, but delays and problems could potentially cost us even more. When we have our next plan exam, I’m hoping the plan examiner will know and trust our new expediter and when the plan examiner does bring up issues I hope our new expediter will show he knows the code as well or better than the plan examiner. And if competence and experience aren’t enough, after decades of working with DOB, I’m guessing the new plan examiner will be friends with enough senior people at DOB that the plan examiner will know that just being arbitrarily difficult could backfire on him.

I was thinking ConEd was worse than the DOB. Now I’m back to thinking DOB is worse. I’ll just be happy when things are signed off and we can move in.

Don’t Trash Your Townhouse’s Original Details

Posted on February 6, 2012 by BeatingUpwind

Friends are about to start renovations on their South Harlem brownstone. Their place is a total wreck and there aren’t enough original details to warrant a renovation with a traditional aesthetic. Still, there are some original details left and instead of just throwing them out they let Demolition Depot come in and rescue what could be rescued – mostly door and window moldings…

Demolition Depot is giving our friends a small store credit with which they hope to buy an “original” front door. Mind you, to actually use whats being rescued you’d need to strip 100 years of lead-based paint – so there’s a reason why the store credit isn’t all that large.

Below is one of the window frames Demolition Depot took out. It’s not all that special (I wonder why they wanted it), but some of the woodwork on the parlor floor was pretty cool and more interesting.

One item Demolition Depot discovered were pocket doors on the parlor floor that our friends didn’t realize were there. I was there when they were taking them out…

Our friends are now thinking they may use those doors as their front doors…

So if you’re doing demolition, don’t just throw everything in a dumpster – if you let a salvage yard rescue what details you have left, it may come in really handy to one of your neighbors. For example we got our front doors from Demolition Depot, and we’ll probably get a bunch of stoop ironwork from them as well.