Little by Little, Heat in Winter

Paul came in and figured out what was wrong with the boiler. The manual had the hot and cold water reversed!

So now our kitchen floor has warm, toasty hot water pumping through it.

A cat always lies on the warmest place in the house.

Kitchen Progress

Putting in a Boiler

I think this picture kind of tells it all.

But if you're not into the whole brevity thing:

Captain's Log: As of Monday, Dec 7th, the boiler hasn't been able to stay on. It turns on and then shuts down with some red light that indicates some gas issue illuminated. We had it ready to go this past Friday - We were minutes away from having the warm touch of heat pumping through our house... or so we thought. And not a moment too soon. Snow and Icy Rain were coming over the weekend. But it kept... shutting itself off....! Argh ! No! Nooooo!

So this past weekend, we braved another weekend of extreme cold in the house. By now, we're used to it. It used to phase me, but I've been learning the ancient art of patience and how to suffer gracefully. Perhaps we are characters in some sort of historical re-enactment. Titled... the first residents of Philadelphia. People wore wool coats, and generally suffered during winter, burning wood in drafty brick buildings. I imagine meals of thin potato soup with the occasional side of boiled shoe or wool coat.

So, you know... we're kickin' it old school.

Remodeling the 1st Floor of our House

We found an old sink and cabinets on Craiglist - found the door at a recyled materials store.  Catherine tiled the floor and this wall here.  I ran the wiring to the switches and put in recessed lighting, and our friend Paul did the plumbing.

  

This is what the old floor looks like, after we stripped off the paint, sanded it and here's a couple coats of polyurethane.   We believe it was used as the floor of a machine shop.

After we demolished the old kitchen, which wasn't much to speak of, other than a cool stove - The room looked like this.  

I believe Jeffrey Dahmer summered here.

Anyway, now the room is really...  poised to come together.  We started in July, and it's now October.  I don't think we'll be done before December.  

Why does it take so long?  One is that we wanted to put a radiant heated floor in our kitchen - and that was a lot of work. we cut the room in half, cut out part of the floor and placed radiant heating tubes and poured concrete.  We managed to run tubes under part of the wood floor as well.  That was quite hellish, crawling under the floorboards.  

Another Radiant Floor Heating System

The Irishmen, again with the concrete.  

Summer BBQ #2

July 11th BBQ with family and friends.  What is she finding in that sand?  Not sure I want to know.

When you're in the middle of tearing apart your kitchen is the perfect time for a party.

While we're working on the kitchen, we have basically moved our life into this chaotic scene here in the warehouse.   

Blasted Wood

A marked improvement.  Here's a photo from about 6 months ago:

There had been pigeons in the building, I blasted a lot of pigeon shit off the cupola.  When this picture was taken you couldn't stand up anywhere near there, and we were just walking around sandblasting standing on the 2 floors we have since put in - one at 10 feet, and one at about 25, that one just under the cupola.  That's a pretty marked difference.  I guess things happen everyday, but then again, so does breakfast - and sometimes the progress doesn't feel huge day to day.  Sometimes it does.  Recently there have been some major leaps and bounds.   It feels nice.  It feels like we have got this giant peach moving forward.  

Sandblasting

We rented a sandblaster for a week. It was an extremely dirty job.  We cleaned up a lot of the old brick and wood beams in the building.

I will post pics of a cleaner building soon.  As soon as I get the sand out of my nose.

The Cupola and Loft

How to explain this cabin on the top of the building?

Replacing Old Rotting Wood on a Roof -- pass the Steve Miller

With these stairs, we can now get to the Cupola from the Loft.

Have you ever seen the Loft?  It's sort of the unsung Treasure of this place... or shall be eventually... I think it's kind of cool already.  Dirty as all hell and in need of... everything.

Radiant Heat in a Concrete Floor

We hired an Irishman named Kevin to take up the old messed up slab with his excavator, put down stone, and pack the floor.  When deciding who to hire, there were a couple of guys named Kevin who were in the running and part of my conversation with Catherine included the following:

Cat: "Why do you want to hire this new Kevin over that other Kevin?" Me: "This Kevin is not a crackhead."  The other Kevin had reputedly cut off his wife's arm in a drug-induced skirmish involving a samurai sword. That story came from the same guy who had recommended him. He also smelled.  The choice wasn't hard.  The Kevin we did hire ended up being superb.  He came over with another Irishman named Cormack and it was grand.

Patrick McDonald, a local architect and developer - a friend of a friend, was in between projects, and helped us out by designing a radiant heat system to lay in the concrete.  These are his guys putting in Pex tubing.  Warm water will flow through these tubes and heat up the concrete floor.  It's like walking on a giant radiator.  It's also quiet heat which is perfect for a recording studio.

We marked where the walls will go in the studio and put in these foam pieces so that when we pour the concrete, there will be separations between the rooms - which is ideal for killing sound vibrations from one room to another.  Start at the bottom - all rooms on independent slabs. This was fun.  Our architectural drawings were somehow a few feet off and it was messing things up, so we sort of scrapped it and spray painted the lines for the walls at night before the concrete went in.  That felt liberating and I think we ended up with a great design that responds well to the space. A little spray foam to close all possible gaps because I got a bit obsessed with the separate slab thing.

Irish Kevin and his Home Depot Day Laborers -- is that a good name for a band?

And after a little polish and setting... We have a nice new concrete floor.

You're supposed to keep it wet for 30 days

A whole mess of radiant pex tubes coming out in a future closet to deal with later.  Pressure gage is good, meaning we didn't poke a hole in any of the tubes.  So it's good to go.  That wasn't too bad at all... It's the boiler that's the expensive part...  It's almost summer now, and we might wait until we absolutely need it next winter.

Spring 09 Barbeque

We had a small barbeque with a few friends during a little April heat wave.  It was a llittle taste of summer.

Ping pong on a packed dirt floor

Tree Planting

On Saturday we worked with a bunch of volunteers planting trees in the neighborhood.  We planted 70 trees and quite a lot on 5th Street.

We put a "Serviceberry" tree in front of our place on 5th Street.  I was just looking for a photo of the day we put a tree in on Randolph Street, and found it on my phone.

Contruction Continues

Yeah!  Hi Fives all around!  Floor in the studio is nearly ready to be poured!

This was quite a dusty day... We had to hire an excavator to come and break up the old screwed up concrete in the space that will eventually be the studio. Behind him, starting the wall between the studio and the kitchen / offices.

Oops!  Took out too big a chunk of concrete.  We now have a hole in our bathroom floor. 

Salvaging / Reusing

We have been pulling stuff from a great old warehouse nearby.  There's a cool older eccentric couple who live there and who among other things have built a small cruiser boat powered with a wood burning oven steam engine.  They are getting rid of some of their salvaged stuff collected over the years.  We got about 20 radiators, a lot of wood - cedar and pine, some cool old movie lights and a bathroom and kitchen sink.  Not only is it cheap, but it's such cool shit and it's nice to breathe new life into it, build with materials from the industrial soul of the city. 

The Looking Glass Studio - the recording studio owned by Philip Glass that my uncle Michael has been involved with for years recently closed its operations in Lower Manhattan.  Quite a sad end of an era but I had the good fortune of talking to the right person at the wrong time.  I was put in touch with the guy doing the demo, and I got ahold of a truck, drove up to New York and got a whole bunch of 1" thick studio glass panels (5' wide), two huge double-insulated sliding glass doors, a bunch of acoustic sound baffles, some studio racks and all the studio wiring I could get my hands on... A huge amount of valuable stuff for virtually no cost.  It'll all come in handy. Anyway here's a link to the Looking Glass Site.

120 windows in about 10 trips in the Tacoma.  Why so many windows you may ask?  Stay tuned.  

Finding Materials

The other day Catherine was out running and happened upon a bunch of guys up the street who were breaking up a slate sidewalk and throwing it in a dumpster.  She got two truckloads of the stuff...!   Slate's actually pretty expensive when you buy it, so I'd say we got pretty lucky.  

Construction Photos

1 1/2" industrial pine flooring.  You can see here the remants of the old floor line by the window.  This floor we're building will not go all the way to the window.  There will be a 6' atrium entry hall  going all the way up the ceiling - which is about 40' high. It's at least some way to preserve the majesty of the building's height.

Our cat, Verna, poking her head up... She has got a nice playground.  What you see below: We don't have any storage space out of the weather except in this construction zone, so there's a bunch of furniture, suitcases, boxes of books etc that sits under all this stuff, getting rained on with nails and dust... oh well.

Hi 5 #3: Construction

There was a lot of masonry and a structural beam that needed attention first

We are building a 2nd floor level out of reclaimed lumber.  We spent a long time hunting down the right pieces - big 12x8 trusses from one site, steel ibeams from another site, floor joists from a house being taken down in New Jersey, etc.  You meet a lot of characters in the demolition-salvage business anywhere I imagine... and in Philly, they're even weirder.

Building a wall on 5th Street.  Some of our workers are Mexican guys who live next door. They're nice guys and do good work.

The holes in the wall were Catherine's idea.  Right now they are closed during construction but they will eventually be open so people can peep through.