There's a Pay-O-Matic Check Cashing shop near my house (there's one in every fine neighborhood, don't you know). Is it just me, or does their logo remind anyone else of the old Mr Yuk logos people put on poison containers? When you see it out of the corner of your eye, it looks like this sour frowny face. It makes me feel sorry for the people who patronize the establishment. Then I realize if I had gone to Pay-O-Matic right when I got my deposit check back from my landlady, she wouldn't have been able to stop payment and proceed to take back two-thirds of said deposit for dubious 'repairs' to the apartment. Then I console myself that it was worth it just to never have to deal with her and her flaky behavior again. Then I realize I too am sporting a sour frowny face, just like the Pay-O-Matic logo. Then I play some Sudoku and forget all my problems.

Ah, Banterist has also noted the peculiar nature of the corporate logo.

Labels: Funny to Me, Renting

Now that some of the house repairs are beginning to die down (well, actually it's more like outright ignoring), I can get back to other methods of shortening my life through external tasks. Tonight that means wandering around on the cold streets to go see some bands. I've already got my flask of Jim Beam, so the journey shouldn't be too painful.

The show is USAISAMONSTER, one of my favorite bands of the past several years, they're playing at the Glasslands Gallery. I've only been there once before, over the summer at what I think might have been the first show in this incarnation. That was also a USAISAMONSTER show. The trick now is I no longer live on the G train line.

Normally, that wouldn't be considered a handicap, but in terms of getting to this location in Williamsburg it would actually have helped. Used to be I could take the G to the L train to get where I was going (in this case, Kent Ave & S. 2nd St.) but now I live only near the J train. There paradox is that the J stops at Marcy, which is pretty much the only train in all of the South Williamsburg area. But it still leaves me almost a mile from the space. Though the L train drops me off at Bedford and 7th, it's about a half mile to the joint from there. And that's as close as mass transit will take me.

Or so I thought. Thanks to the MTA's Trip Planner (what a catchy name), I see that the Q59 bus will pretty much take me right to the club's front door. But to get to this bus I gotta take the J to Lorimer St, exit and catch the B48 bus first. I dunno if I have it in me to stand around waiting for the bus in this weather (and forget about it when the show is over, there'll be one bus every 6 hours).

Now, I can take the J train down to Broadway Junction and transfer to the L, whipping around the eastern edge of the neighborhood until it hits Bedford. This will take forever, and now that I think of it, also involves standing around outside (both trains are elevated at Broadway Junction). Or I could walk half a mile to the Bushwick Ave L station and take that over. Either way it looks like I'm gonna be out in the cold for much of the night. I better stop, I'm starting to talk myself out of it.

Labels: Mass Transit, Music, The City

The Ugly Tile has largely been banished to the hallways and interstitial areas of the house. We have painted, stained and finished 3 floors of the house, more or less. for some reason the 2nd floor is all hardwood, while the 1st and 3rd floors were only partially hardwood (4th floor was 100% Ugly Tile).

So here's what we've been fighting against:

This is the tile that covers more than 50% of our home. It's a mottled, beige-based affair which has been liberally splashed with that lovely orange paint that adorned every bit of molding in the house (still working to cover all that up).

• What's good about the tile: hides dirt
• What's bad about it: fugly
  

I guess it's pretty sturdy stuff (it's really heavy when you pile it up). But it looks bad, it makes everything around it look bad, too. The way we dealt with it varied from floor to floor. In the 1st floor kitchen we ripped up the tile and painted over the plywood (this was sort of the experimental stage, we'd proabbly shoulda left the tile and painted over it). On the 3rd floor we painted the tile, both in the main room and its adjoining hallway, effectivley covering every bit of tile on that floor. On the 4th floor, we ripped up tile and plywood, revealing the pine subfloor below. The subfloor was repaired and refinished. There's still tile in the upstairs kitchen, hallway and office, and in the hallway on the 1st floor. But at least it's in the minority now.

Here's some before and after photos of the progress:

BEFORE: This is before we bought the house, you can see not only the tile but also the Evil Orange everywhere.

Here's the primer (note the orange is also gone).

Floor painted.

AFTER: Floor with final finish. I used a satin tone this time, that glossy stuff is too much. Even this stuff looks al ittle too shiny to me. Do they make flat polyurethane?

BEFORE: To reiterate, here's the fireplace on the 3rd floor before we did anything. Why did they paint one panel and not the other?

AFTER: Ah, that's better!

I'll put together some more examples of the other work, if only to give me something to do around the office.

More exciting tales from the Land of Flooring! Fresh on the heels of our 4th floor refinishing, we moved down a floor to deal with the Gross Tile of the third floor. The floor is covered with this ugly institutional type tile, I guess it's linoleum or something like that. It was on the 4th floor too, but Buzz and Sylvia ripped it all up for us to get at the wood underneath. We don't have time for such a project here, so we're just painting the tile. It's amazing how much more tolerable it is already.

Tonight we just have to put the polyurethane down and it'll be finished. Since we chose a really dark brown I've been debating if we can convince people it's a special type of parquet floor, but ultimately we're just shooting for the 'innocuous' look here.

This is the last hugely inconvenient project for a while. We really need to focus on fixing up our apartment in the smaller ways that make a place livable. We still don't have any pictures on the wall, curtains on the windows, or any idea where to put our boxes of crap that don't seem to have anywhere else to go.

Since we're just waiting for the paint to dry now, I had time this weekend to clean up the cellar somewhat. I took out the paneling between the two small rooms, making a room just big enough for band practice. I even hooked up my guitar and played for the first time in 3 months. Jeez, I rusty, but lucky for me, all the work I've been doing on the house seems to have maintained my calluses.

The floors are pretty much done for now! What an exhausting procedure. Considering what we were up against, I think the floors came out well. We're still a couple of Louis Cattorze chairs away from getting added to the House Tour, but we're managing.

For some idea of what we went through between this photo and the one in the preceeding post, check Sylvia's Flickr site.

Oh, and for some reason the servers at work are blocking my ability to post on the comments page, so to electricgreek: yeah the floors are sealed, that's what the whole finishing process is, right? Is there some miracle product that wasn't mentioned in our how-to guides?

I had Friday and Monday off from work. Sounds like a relaxing 4-day weekend! However, the opposite is true, it was a near-constant tumult of rental vans, heavy equipment, runs to the hardware store, and fitful sleep the entire time. Our friend kept saying that refinishing our own floors would be "gratifying" but I didn't start feeling particularly gratified until late last night, when the second coat of polyurethane went on.

We refinished the subfloor in two rooms on the 4th floor. Much of the floor is fairly intact, but a lot was seriously yucky. We got some salvaged floorboards from our friend who's a lot more savvy than us on these things, with which we replaced the worst of them. We rented a drum sander and were told we wouldn't need the heaviest grit (16) since our floors are pine. Again, the opposite is true. Pine though they may be, the floors had many layers of gunk on them, from old adhesive to paint to what may have been stain. It looks like we weren't the first ones to think of using the subfloors for this purpose.

When you read up on floor refinishing, you see these pictures in which a drum sander coasts across a floor, effortlessly removing every bit of finish in one pass. It looks as easy as vacuuming. This was not the case for us, the old finish/paint/gunge didn't want to come up so easily, even with 24-grit sandpaper. It took many a pass to get things cleaned up, plus some nonstandard use of the edger (which came with 20-grit paper and worked like the dickens until the paper ripped at which time it would leave black gouges on everything it touched).

Between the drum floor sander, the edger, the little belt sander and the paint scrapers we eventually got things down to bare wood. It looked pretty good, but due to wide variation in plank quality, as well as all the patching that was necessary, we pretty much had to stain it to conceal some of the shortcomings.

Staining was a lot easier than the previous tasks, and compared to that stuff it's pretty hard to screw up. Then the polyurethane was applied. And it's still not finished. Tonight I gotta caulk up some of the larger gaps between planks. Then we add another coat of polyurethane, and I think that'll be it. God, please let that be it.

I'm taking the day off tomorrow! Actually, I'm taking every Friday in January off. My boss was kind enough to let me use my 2006 vacation days in 2007, they're not supposed to carry over. I gotta plan better this year to use these days. After 6 years of having no kind of time off whatsoever, it's been difficult adjusting to the idea that I can pick days on which I will be paid for not showing up, and not doing anything. Of course, this would be easier for me to grasp if they really left me alone on my days off. Invariably however, someone calls me and asks me to do something. That's one of the reasons I didn't mind working through the end of last month, most everybody else was out and I certainly wasn't gonna bug anybody.

Anyway, tomorrow's itinerary is pretty full: I'm getting an electrician over to do some work, I'm renting a cargo van, hitting the hardware stores for supplies, stopping by an acquaintance's house to pick up some salvaged wood flooring, then replacing planks and cutting filler slats to prepare the floor for the Big Kahuna on Saturday: the drum sander.

We're refinishing the subfloors on the top floor of the house, sanding, staining and sealing. Like the kitchen floor, this is a not-forever type of thing, it's just to make the place more livable for now. I'm not totally sure how it will come out, but it's way cheaper than putting in real hardwood floors for the time being. Worse comes to worst, we can always invest in a mess of throw rugs to cover up what we do this weekend. I'm picturing an entire floor covered in strung-together bathmats. Hmmm, that might not be a bad look.

Yep, it's becoming quite clear, I have terrible taste.

The other night we were enjoying a lovely evening out at the Wreck Room, which is pretty much the bar closest to our house. This kind of sucks, since I'm used to years of strolling over to the Alibi whenever I felt like it (and more recently, to Sputnik which was even closer). But southern Bushwick has a dearth of boozing establishments (though no shortage of boozers, to be sure). Are there other bars in that area? I'll have to investigate more thoroughly soon.

Anyway, we were sitting outside smoking, when this small, older Latino guy walked by. I could see him out of the corner of my eye and knew he was gonna creep up on us, you can always tell when somebody has to make the decision to brace a fellow human, even the seasoned panhandlers.

"Happy new year, Papi," he said to me, extending a hand. I shook it and he didn't let it go. He made some more small talk and then said grimly, "I don't wanna have to rob nobody ... could you help me get some Chinese food?" The guy was totally nonthreatening in a paternal sort of way. Of course, he already had me at "Papi." I gave him a dollar and he immediately said, "Chinese food ... it's $2.50." So I gave him another buck. Somehow not giving him that last 50 cents allowed me to feel like I hadn't been taken (some complicated personal rationale on my part).

Now of course we're wringing our hands over whether crime is too high in Brooklyn, and whether or not we should flee to the suburbs. Oh, what has become of this city? Alas!

We've got our kitchen back, more or less. The varnish is supposed to cure for a long while before you can really treat it like a floor, but at least we're not all crowded into the living room. This project has been a good learning experience, I would have liked to done things differently, but eventually we'll redo the kitchen entirely on a, shall we say, more professional level.

Now that the lower floors are getting squared away, we can focus on getting some stuff done upstairs. This weekend we'll be refinishing the top floor. Looks like we'll paint the remaining floors for the time being, anything that's not an actual wood floor is covered with this atrocious linoleum tile. I've seen good uses of this stuff, but this looks like somebody dropped a hospital floor into the middle of a house. A disreputable hospital.

I got several power tools over the holidays, they're all piled up around the house, forcing me to run up and down many flights of stairs to complete even the simplest job. I need better organization; in short, I need some pegboard! God I should panel the house in pegboard. It's so very handy.

I'm trying to dig up some info about my house, specifically when it was built. See, there was some kind of fire or something that destroyed most of the property records in Brooklyn around the turn of the 19th century, so many houses have estimated construction dates. My house was supposedly built in 1915, which may be late enough that it is actually correct. But I have yet to figure out which houses exactly are affected by this.

Anyway I found out that the entire archive of the old Brooklyn Eagle newspaper is available online at the Brooklyn Public Library site. So far I've only found a couple of references to my property, but of course these articles only reference the address; there's no way of knowing if it's my house or a previous house on the same plot. Anyway, it seems the criminal element of my place dates back to at least 1899:


And also from 1899, I'm sure the family who posted the below want ad will be pleased to know that there's finally a young German girl upstairs:


I've been looking up other stuff about the street in general, I've found there was a rollicking "social club" across the street in the 1880's, and the place next door used to be a boarding house that once housed a couple of guys (one named Frankenstein!) who got scammed into buying a neighborhood bar and a hotel in Jamaica. Suckers.

I found a description of Bushwick when it was mostly farmland, which compared Bushwick Avenue then to its contemporary version in 1894. I think it's still pretty accurate, no?

Bushwick avenue is a broad and beautiful drive, and is, in some respects, like the highway of life. Its birth is at a church, from which it gets its christening; it wanders among the breweries and then becomes a broad and beautiful thoroughfare shaded by trees and bordered by flowers and shrubs, and finally ends at the cemetery.

At the risk of sounding like a one-note blog, I'm getting frustrated with my kitchen floor. We set about painting it a few days ago (patch, prime, paint, poly) and I thought we'd be all done by now. However, I neglected to read the full set of instructions in which it states we have to wait up to 3 days for the paint to dry before laying down the protective polyurethane. Grrrr, I want my kitchen back! All the cabinet and stuff are in the living room. I'm using a door as a counter top. But now I gotta wait until at least tomorrow to get it over with. I don't mind the work of it, it's all this waiting around I can't stand. It's hard to shift gears and work on other projects when your brain is all set for something in particular. And for me, for now, it's turning my uneven, sloppily-patched plywood floor into a marvel of red paint and shiny coating stuff. Why, it'll look like a Pizza Hut! A glorious Pizza Hut!


New Year's Eve found us sticking around the neighborhood, at the 11th hour we realized ToddP was having a show right down the street from us, so we went to that. Considering we've spent pretty much every New Year's at some kind of show, it would have been odd if we hadn't followed suit this time around. We haven't spent much time on the Wycoff side of the neighborhood so it was a good opportunity to get acquainted. It's a pretty fun area, or maybe it was just the exuberance of the season. The show was in a single-story commercial space, repurposed as a living space and performance room. Nice place, but whoa was it hot in there. If I ever open such a place, I'm gonna tack up coat hooks all over the place before I open my doors. Then again, that might lead to lawsuits after some kid slamdances into the wall and impales himself.


When the makeshift bar ran out of booze, there was a conveniently-located Exxon Station down the street, which had not only beer, but Corn Nuts, a product that has always eluded me in the Big Apple. The climate became much more tolerable after the bands finished (The Fugue, Japanther, The Black Lips), as most of the people skipped out. Did everyone go home or was there some other place everybody to be? We walked home, which probably took a long time but I wasn't really paying attention. It was nice to be able to walk home from a ToddP show, hope there will be more down on our end of the neighborhood.

So with the holidays over, it's time to resume the drudgery of home improvement. Next up, how to secure the 3rd floor so Mr Bones can't get down into our part of the house and eat our cats' food. He's one evil feline.