Recyling after Thanksgiving

Recycling pick up on our block happens on Mondays and Thursdays, and often lands on a National holiday; Memorial day, etc...

Since we spent the whole weekend unpacking instead of gorging ourselves with turkey and comatose on the couch watching football, we ended up with more than 300 empty boxes to put out on the curb...only this pile ended up becoming a fire hazard blocking our entryway until the next time the Recycling truck came rolling by.

We Are So Brown.

It's not easy being green, as I've stated months back when I re-tiled the bathroom in Chaim's apartment on the Upper East side. Now after months of trying to live an Eco-conscious lifestyle, we are now throwing in our non-biodegradable towel and giving up. I got a package in the mail from HSBC bank, with a "go green kit". It contained a very dim fluorescent bulb, this note pad, (that's really just a waste of paper since there is hardly space to make a list due to all the ads), a reusable bag that's too small to use in my current lifestyle, and a whole lot of papers and pamphlets talking about being green. It seems that this green living promoted by huge corporations is a sham.

Let me explain though, that we did try very hard to be green:

1. Recycling Rain Water:
After we discovered how much rain water comes out of our rooftop gutter every time it pours, we began collecting bottles and bottles of it in the 2 litre Schweppes Seltzer bottles. The last time we had a downpour, Chaim was outside on the parapet getting soaking wet collecting rain water for about 20 minutes. He proudly dragged in 32 bottles and we brought them down to our side garden, being so proud of ourselves that we could water our garden guilt free the next time a drought hit Queens.

The bottles sat in our garden for about one day, looking as though we were about to throw a party or we ransacked the Schweppes bottle plant. The next morning, we awoke to 3 bottles sitting in our garden, with our front sidewalk littered with white caps. Apparently, the Hispanic recycling ladies came by and emptied all our bottles so they could get the nickel for the bottles. They had the nerve to dump out all our hard work and pollute our front sidewalk with non recyclable plastic caps.

2. The compost heap.
Early in the summer, I built a nice compost bin out of the lathe that came out of our house. It is compact, well fairly compact (3x4x3 foot box) with a swinging front gate. We have been throwing in all kinds or organic matter into it daily. The amount of organic waste we create, along with the leaves and vines we pulled off the tree proved too much for my little box. Now mind you, we have not had a kitchen for 3 months, so there is not that much food waste being produced out of our house. Just last week, Chaim cleaned out the table saw (though demolition is over, he is still in charge of garbage and food), and dumped five drywall buckets of sawdust into the compost heap. Since the heap is situated in the back of the yard, we thought that the flies and gnats that it attracted would help in deterring our next door neighbors (i.e. the Ecuadorian night club kitchen workers) from opening the Fire exit door to our garden.

It is now November and we still have gnats flying about, sometimes in our downstairs bathroom. Last week I found a slug that had meandered into the house dragging a hair of corncob husk from a summer barbecue, no doubt from the compost pile. There's so much stuff in there, that it is hard to turn the pile, which you are supposed to do every few weeks. And most people tell us that it will take a long time before we can use it for the garden. In the mean time, we need the space outside so that I can build a small shed for the new barbecue grill (given to us by mom and pop Mordecai) along with other gardening odds and ends, since there is no longer room in the garage for such things.

3. Fluorescent light bulbs.
I like the idea of having these low energy saving bulbs in every socket in the house. I've been collecting them, sending away for them, from places like HSBC every time they have a give away program. There are two problems with these bulbs, not including the fact that they are not bright enough to work under.

1. They are a weird shape and thus, do not fit under the glass fixtures in the ceiling lights. The two I screwed in the bathroom fixture immediately broke under the compression of the glass dome covering. The ones installed in the kitchen were too big also, thus, I had to remount the glass cover upside-down, and it looks ridiculous. The second problem is that the new dimmer switches we installed to operate the fans in the remainder of the rooms are not compatible with florescent lights. In fact we learned that no dimmer switches work with these bulbs. So now we have a lot of bulbs sitting in the laundry closet awaiting a new system.

The plumbers have not returned yet, so we are saving fuel, since we are only heating 1/3rd of the house. That's about all we are doing to stay green, or shall we say blue.....

We can almost see the light at the end of the Tunnel

Early on Saturday, Chaim began the demolition for the upstairs patio, aka, bump-out, parapet, smoking section.
I dug up my old cold chisel and sledge hammer, a tool I hadn't used since trying a hand at stone carving my Junior year at KCAI.
Apparently, that was the right tool, because Chaim finished the job in less than 3 hours.







After all the exterior rubble and stucco was cleared away, it was unbelievably simple for the rotted away wood wall to come down. Almost too simple!!!










Right after the guys took the 3 walls down, it began to pour. The weatherman had obviously lied about his forecast for the weekend. I went to the bank and when I returned I found this Rube Goldberg-esque set up, diverting the roof rain water from coming into the house.












The guys set the new French doors in the spot where we think it should go.
One evening last week, a woman from Paris came over to interview me for her Ph.D dissertation. After the interview, I brought her upstairs to show her the reason my studio is still in storage.
We asked her "what are French doors called in France?", expecting an answer similar to-"Chinese food in China is called food". But instead she told us that French doors in France are called porte fenêtre or door with windows. So now we have both, a porte fenetre and a porte sans fenetre!
Slappy takes a break from the work to have a quick hamburger from our favorite spot across the street: EGB. He and PV ended up eating 4 meals in a row from there that weekend. Lunch, then a buffalo wing snack, then dinner with the rest of the crew, then another full day of eating on Sunday.










A view of the demolition bits and pieces from the upstairs parapet piled in front of the house after we threw it out the upstairs window. It sure beat having to walk up and down the stairs with it all!

Ralphie, a man of many hats.
Frankie, Ralphie and Joe, (aka Spencer, Giseppe, etc..)
return for the umpteenth time to install some more wiring.
Hopefully the next visit will be their last.

The 2x4 and plywood wall goes back up in the parapet, awaiting the final installation of our porte fenetre. But before the doors can go in, the roofer must come and put a new membrane on the area.
This Thursday Rico, the floor guy comes to sand and polyurethane the floors!!!! But before then, David and Flocko, the Argentinians have to come back and sheet rock the ceiling of the kitchen and the walls for the new parapet. We don't have time for the mud guy or painting before Thursday, so I suppose all that will get done after............

Our First Harvest

Now that the oil tank had been vacuumed out, I thought it was a good time to work on the outside garden. Also there was wood piling up in the garage from the demolition, that we couldn't easily throw away, I decided to make use of it and build a compost container. Queens Botanical Garden had sent us a pamphlet on how to get started, and what not to put into the compost.
I spent a few hours trimming the peach tree and thinning out the grape vine. At the end of the day, we had about 6 bags of yard waste, and with the construction garbage piling up in the garage, we didn't want to put the new bags on the curb.
The compost bin is built with old 2x4 and the wood lathe from the upstairs walls. Chaim thought it looked like a pig pen. With so much wood lathe left over, we probably could raise some pigs in the side yard. I wonder if you need a permit for that....

Our first grape harvest! We believe they are concord grapes.

The first peach to become pink.
In a few weeks hopefully we can make some peach cobbler.

A few weeks ago we began collecting rain water, trying to be more Eco-conscious. Here is our small collection system. It began to storm and we were bummed to see that our plastic system had only collected about one inch of water.

We later went upstairs to see the gutter from the roof was emptying gallons and gallons of water onto our first floor roof parapet. We realized that the next time it rains, we need to funnel the rain water from the roof, and forget about our Poland Springs bottle system.

Trash Pickup: Second Round

Joe Taco told Chaim that Joe the Malaysian from High Pearl Seafood Restaurant (one of Chaim's favorites) is in the garbage business. So for our next 2 tons (and hopefully our last) of garbage awaits in the garage for the second dumpster to arrive.

Chaim and Dumpster guy taking a quick break before our final garbage is driven away.

Mondays and Thursdays are garbage pickup days. So last Wednesday, Chaim stocked our fridge with beer and seltzer and went to the bank to get some cash for "Operation Sanitation Bribe". The plan was to run outside when we saw the city garbage men and palm a $20, give them some refreshment, in the hope to get them to take some of our bags. Unfortunately they were gone by the time we woke up.

At around 12pm, we heard the noise of garbage trucks, so Chaim ran outside to try again. Ray, the developer from down the street was already outside shaking his head. Apparently, the truck had gone by but the Sanitation Police was trailing behind, so "Operation Bribe" was abandoned for the whole block once again.

My First Dumpster

After realizing that the Sanitation Dept. was not going to pick up our garbage, we decided to call for professional help. How much garbage could we possibly have accumulated anyway? Chaim single-handedly carried it all down from the second floor to store in the garage.

I called about 15 companies and each one gave me totally different quotes; anywhere from $300 plus $150 per hour for 3 guys to load the garbage into a dump truck, to $2000 plus tax to get a 10 yard dumpster. I found out that a yard could differ depending on who I spoke to: one guy told me that one yard of garbage was 3 construction bags worth, another told me it was 8.

I chose to go with the company that I could understand, and the secretary was nice to talk to. A Polish woman named Helen who worked for a company called Carty (or maybe I liked them because they sounded like a character in an episode of of PeeWee's Playhouse.) Half of the companies I spoke to were rude, or I literally couldn't understand their English.

3 tons of garbage getting ready to be hauled away

The parking situation proved to be the most stressful. Helen told me that we had to have at least 30 feet of space so that the dumpster could be dropped off and picked up. I felt a bit guilty hogging 4 car spaces in front of the house when we didn't even own a car. The dumpster got dropped off right after the street cleaning crew swept through our side of the street, in a rainy downpour. Christine came over for some physical and moral support, and being a home owner and previous dumper of illegal construction rubble, she told me that we had to begin filling it IMMEDIATELY!!! or others would come by and start throwing in their garbage.

So Christine and I spent most of the day dragging the dusty bags from the garage into the dumpster. Thank goodness it was a rainy day or the dust would have been unbearable!!!!

In the end the scale at the dump-site read 3.29 tons!!!!! We made another 8 bags of garbage since the dumpster went away, which we drove over to Dumbo, and left in my studio building garbage room. Believe it or not, we still have two more walls to deconstruct.

Construction- Day 2

Another hot and sweaty day, especially since I donned on the demo-getup: my uncle Mitzi's car mechanic coveralls on top of another layer of clothing, with a mask and constantly fogging up goggles. But even with all these layers, somehow the particles of fiber-glass from the ceiling managed to get inside my clothes.
Chaim has been helping to take down the bags and bags of rubble and bundles of lathe, to store into our garage until we can figure out what we can do with it.



As I trudged on during the hot afternoon, I had flashbacks of the days back in the Midwest, when a bunch of us recently having graduated from the Kansas City Art Institute, spent a year trying to renovate a derelict warehouse. Back then, the grueling job was a team effort choreographed to a repetitive soundtrack of Guns and Roses, with a high learning curve and lots of breaks for beers and open fires for barbecues. Almost 15 years later, there is no soundtrack, I work in silence except for the hammering and my own breath (since I cut all power for fear of electrocution), my body is not used to the work, because I have not swung a hammer over my head for more than one or two poundings to get a nail into the wall to hang a picture.

We wake up very, very, very, very, very, very, extremely sore.

On the third day, we take a break and go to a barbecue pool party in New Jersey, where I proceed to float and wash away the last two days.

A Weekend Project: its not easy being green

I was reading the Styles section of the paper today and came across the article about everyone jumping on the green wagon and living with a false sense of greenness just because it’s trendy and fashionable. Instead of buying the new designer biodegradable pants, wear the jeans you bought last year. And just because you shop at Whole Foods, doesn’t mean you are contributing to the environment if you are buying raspberries in the winter, since they are being flown in from Chile.

So I’ve begun thinking more about the 3 R’s as spelled out on the EPA’s web site.

Reduce, reuse, recycle.
And we decided to add another R:
Refuse-refuse buying all that crap that litters your life, if at all possible.

Bottled water consumption is another hot topic of the moment. Apparently there is an estimated 38 billion bottles that are thrown away and end up in landfills every year (even with those who recycle). “In a world where there are more than a billion people with no reliable source of drinking water, this seems very wasteful:, especially if we can drink water out of our taps.

So last month I moved in with my husband, into his tenement style apartment with a bathtub in the kitchen. Ever since we met, and I had the pleasure of touring his museum apartment, I’ve wanted to update the corner between the kitchen sink and the front window where this bathtub sits, swathed with yards and yards of shower curtain liner. There is so much fabric, yet the floor around the tub still seems to get wet when ever I take a shower. And I am too short to reach the hook that holds up the hand held shower head, so I have to precariously jamb this hand-held device between the shampoo holder and the washrag hook in order to free up my hands to wash my hair.

Thus the bathtub in the kitchen improvement job began this weekend. Actually this project began about a year ago, when Chaim and I began looking for tile, being thrown out on the street or being sold in thrift stores, and stoop sales.

AFTER the tiling.

Since I am not working this summer, and because I decided to follow the 4 R's of living, I had Chaim go out and scour the neighborhood for some more tile. Since moving to the luxurious Upper East Side, I've found that this Manhattan neighborhood is a difficult place to live. For example, hardware stores here do not sell hardware, just a lot of plastic containers and lightbulbs, or operate on some type of extortion system with their pricing, or in the case of Home Depot, (across the street from Bloomingdales) they don't stock anything in their one square block store, but rather everything is stored in Jersey and we would have to wait a week to get anything. Oh how I miss Brooklyn and Sids Hardware!

Therefore, Chaim, following in his great grandfather's footsteps, who was in the "merchandise redistribution business", set out for a day of dumpster diving. He spent a good portion of the last Saturday in June, looking for tiles on the U.E.S. It proved to be a good day to troll for trash as people were moving this weekend, and throwing things out. Along with a pile of old plates and marble floor tiles, he returned with a few more items of interest. True to the weekend recycling theme, they were all green in color.

a much needed dustpan found on 76th street.

a green jacket found on 1st Ave.
notice the recycled K-SHE 95 patch Chaim sewed on,
which covers the Nautica logo.

Hallway gallery with art found in a 10 block radius of our apartment.