A Very Busy Week

There's so much going on I can't keep track...

Windows and French doors delivered, and stored in the garage until the boom truck can lift them up through the window opening, since they don't fit through the staircase.

more lathe that got taken away, wrapped up and bundled with festive red and green Christmas ribbon.7am, foam being pumped into the empty oil tank in our side garden. Finally we can put that job to rest.

We put up the 1 inch foam insulation on the ceiling, making it look a bit like a disco when the lights flashed on.

I painted a brighter yellow stripe in front of our garage.

The taxi strike went on for 3 days, and this cab was parked right outside our door for the whole duration. We finally saw the cab driver and he gladly moved the cab just so the boom truck could park in the necessary spot under our front window.

the boom truck lifts up the stack of sheet rock through the window opening.

After the sheet rock and windows get boomed up, Slappy and Taco install the front windows.

Putting in the first layer of insulation into the closet.

Chaim cleans up after we put up the second layer of wall insulation.

The young Argentinian guys put up the first piece of ceiling sheet rock.

Food Review #3

We have been patiently anticipating the opening of a new restaurant on Roosevelt Avenue. When we first moved into the neighborhood, the already closed down restaurant was called Arca Noa Noa, another Latin Restaurant. We got a little excited when we saw that the workmen doing construction inside the new place was Chinese. This definitely signified that there would be a new Asian Restaurant opening soon. Yesterday we saw a guy in the doorway, and so we introduced ourselves and asked what type of food he would have. He said Thai. My next question was, "Are you from Thailand?" and when he said yes, we got really really excited.
Tonight Chaim and I went for our first meal at EGB Thai & American Restaurant. We learned that EGB stands for Eat Great Burgers. The two different owners couldn't decide on what type of food to serve, Thai food, or burgers, so that's the reason for the weird name.
The menu is a bit bizarre but the food...(drum roll) was very good. We ordered a little of everything so we could get the feel for the place. Half the menu is your Thai standards, and the other half of the menu is burgers with a strange combination of toppings with interesting names. There is a mixture of Louisiana Cajun, Italian and burger joint fare.

We ordered:
curry puffs- $3.75 two puffy deep fried puffs with an interesting orange juice base sauce.
Chaim ordered the Tom Yung Koong soup $2.95, spicy and good with shrimp.
U-don salad (som tom-or papaya salad) $6.00 very spicy and good.
Pad Se iew (flat broad noodle) $6.00 with beef and egg. very good.
that was the first course.
Then we finished off the dinner with:
green chicken curry- $6.00 very good.
and a U-don burger- $6.95 which was topped with sauteed garlic, onion basil and cherry peppers. very good...but couldn't eat it all so we took the rest home.

The whole family seemed to be working tonight. The father, Paul came and sat at our table and we talked food, baseball and Queens stuff. The mother would stop by the table and make sure we liked the food. The daughter was our waitress. But the classic move by the son made it really feel like a mom and pop restaurant. We asked for some hot chillies, and he brought over a ceramic spice set filled with different sauces and spices. He began to say "My mom said to be careful...." and we thought he would finish off the sentence with "...the spices can be very hot", but instead he said "my mom said be careful because these containers break very easily." I think when his mother told him that, she met for him to be careful, not to tell the customers that we could break them. When was the last time you've been told that in a restaurant??? Then he came back a few minutes later and said "my dad wants to know how you want the burger cooked." It was just like being a guest at their home.

We will definitely be going back.

53-21 Roosevelt Ave.
718-205-6063
no liquor license yet.
grand opening still far into the future.

Labor Day Weekend

Labor Day Weekend signals the end of summer and the beginning of school. It also means that I will soon be retiring from my job as construction worker, giving up hammering nails and switching over to instructing students on how to use a hammer. I get to stay fairly clean all day long. I get to go into an air conditioned classroom, and better yet, work in an air conditioned shop. With the last push before my retirement, Chaim and I worked through the weekend, getting up as many 2x4's onto the ceiling so that the insulation can be attached to them next. That was the hardest job thus far. The demolition was bad, because it was so dusty and itchy. But putting up wood on the ceiling was strenuous, working above my head on a ladder, screwing in deck screws onto 80 year old very hard roof joists. I didn't realize I could get any more sore, but somehow, I did. My muscle memory brought back aches very similar to when I used to go rock climbing. Instead of a harness with carabiners hanging off if it, I had a tool belt strung around my waist, and realized that compressing rock face with my arms is very similar to holding up a heavy 8 foot 2x4 with one hand, as I balanced the drill with the screw in the other.

Joe Taco also hired our friend "Slappy", to help frame out the parapet wall and front windows. It was great to have a crew upstairs banging out a job in three days what it would probably take me 2 weeks. And their job would be done much more level and square than what I could have done.
The topic of permits is still a cloudy area. Some say that you don't need a permit if the work doesn't involve structural stuff, ie... tearing down a load bearing wall, or building a new floor. Other say that you need a permit for anything you do, and one person said that if you don't hire anyone, you don't need a permit. So far we haven't gotten any permits for much of the work, and are trying to work covertly. We have realized that things are less strict outside of Manhattan, and people are less eager to call the authorities and rat you out, if you live in an enclave of immigrants. We have also been giving out peaches off of our tree to passerby to keep a friendly rapport with the neighbors.
The plan is to take out the window, frame out the wall that the new windows will attach to, then put back the old windows so that we wouldn't have a gaping hole, or an opening covered with plywood until we could put in the new windows.

The new windows have been sitting in the garage for 2 weeks, but they are 3 inches too big to bring them up the staircase. So the plan is to have a boom truck lift the windows up through the window opening the same day that we get the sheet rock delivery. But we can't get the sheet rock delivery until the insulation goes up on the ceilings. But the ceilings can't be covered until Joe Taco runs more cable and wires up there. Its a never-ending domino effect of stuff.Here is Chaim in the open hole where the new windows will someday go.

"Slappy", is the cousin of Paul, and I had met him before, when Chaim and I went to a wine store in the East Village, where he had designed the interior woodwork. He also used to teach at Parsons, in the furniture department with my friend Kimberly, so I had a fairly good idea of what type of worker he would be: talented, efficient, artistic, and listened to NPR while working. All these things happily turned out to be true, and he had some humorous building trade knowledge as well like:
-the horizontal short pieces of wood that go between the studs are called "cats", because they keep the mice from climbing up your walls.
-we should get dog shit and strategically place it outside our house. Since we don't have permits, and can't block the sidewalk with caution tape, this is supposed to keep the pedestrians from walking right under our front window where debris and dust could be a problem for passerby.
He had funny problem solving tricks, like reusing the chain from the window weights by screwing it to a scrap piece of wood to prop up the window so it wouldn't fall out. Very decorative indeed.

At the end of the day, the old windows were put back in, so that if a building inspector drove by, it wouldn't look like we were doing any construction. Our neighbors probably think we are crazy, spending all day making all kinds of noise and dust, and in the end nothing had changed. Actually it got a little bit more white trashy looking, with the scrap pieces of wood holding the broken windows open.
So far we are still within our budget. Supposedly, we have saved about $10,000 by doing a lot of the work ourselves. Our General Contractor is working for beers, (this weeks special: Dinkel-Acker), and knows a lot of connections enabling us to get lumber and sheet rock for a lot less than cost.
I just can't wait for the sheet rock delivery. That is when I know the job will start to go down hill and the end is near.

Chaim and Paul looking out the old window and new frame job.

Busy Day: Furnace, Insulation and Peaches

Last week of August, two months before the weather starts to turn, we got our shiny new gas furnace installed, replacing the old sooty oil furnace. Rakeesh (the plumber), a type-A maniac from Guyana with four cell phones strapped to his belt like magazine cartridges, and his crew of three men, drove up at 11:30 am, just after the street cleaning vacuum truck passed by. It took 4 guys to unload the Burnham Furnace out of the van. They disconnected the old pipes and reinstalled bigger pipes to code.

The van that the boiler was delivered in. Notice how all the guy's homeland is represented on the graphics.

We disconnected the rest of the radiators on the second floor and moved the stove, so that I could demo the parapet wall and Joe Taco could look at the framing job that had to be done in that section of the house.

The parapet is the money pit of the job. It's where all the water from the roof drains onto and has been a problem area for a while, judging from the leaks on the floor below. We decided that the whole section needs to be redone; re-framed, re-insulated, re-plastered and concreted. But since we are technically starting from scratch, we get to redesign the area, which means we will be putting in French doors in the place of the windows, making the little parapet a lovely outdoor cafe on the second floor, as well as becoming the smoking section for our guests, when we have parties.

Last weekend, Harley and I also began putting up the first layer of insulation.

before

and after insulation.

At the end of the day we gave the plumbers some peaches picked from our second harvest. We also realized that to keep the peaches from getting out of control, we need to pick a bowl full everyday.

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.

Let There Be Lite

After a month of construction, we finally have electricity on the second floor and garage, no walls but power!

After the insulation and drywall is put up, then we can install the ceiling fans and switch plates.

Panel with added switches. Now we are waiting for an all house surge protector, a little box that will connect to this box essentially turning our whole house into a power strip. Hopefully we can get one from the brother-in-law. No more extension cords!

Eureka! Eureka! Oil Tank Mystery Solved

Chaim posing with the oil vacuum truck

When we bought the house, we knew that we would have to decommission the buried oil tank in the side yard. The problem was that everyone we got estimates from (Oil company that used to deliver the fuel, to 3 different contractors) could tell us what size the tank was. The best guess was that it was either a 550 gallon or 1100 gallon tank. If it was a 1100 gal tank, that would mean a space the size of a small studio apartment was buried in the side yard.

The oil tank was the scariest unknown of our whole construction job. We had read and heard nightmares of people going bankrupt because of oil spills. Chaim told me that his brother-in-law's company had moved to Iowa because of a 250 million dollar law suit for contaminated soil in North Carolina. When we told one of Chaim's High School buddies named Captain Video, about the fear of oil in the ground, he came back with - "where did all the damn oil come from in the first place?"
hmmmmmmm, something to think about as we called the final company for an estimate.

Today two guys from Pro-Test, Andres and Tommy, the company we had hired for the soil test, came to cut and clean out the tank. Whew!

After they cut the top of the fill pipe in the front of the yard, the guys took a brand new tape measure and used it to see how far back the tank was buried in the yard. They stuck it into the hole just like putting a dipstick into a car to check the oil level. After pulling out an oily tape measure, they told me the tank was buried 26 feet back.

Next they dug up a 4x4 foot perfect square down to the top of the tank. Andres used a gasoline powered saw to cut this hole into the tank. Here is the cut hole with smoke coming out of it.



Then another company drove up, double parked in front and vacuumed the oil out of the hole.








Here is a view of the empty tank with the sludge at the bottom.

Yuck!

While the guys were occupied in their quadrant of the yard, Chaim took the opportunity to use their shovels to dig up the ivy roots.
At first we liked the look of ivy on the brick, giving it a nice collegiate feel. But later with our new home owner eyes, realized that the vines were not so good for the mortar on the brick and it was filled with bugs.
So a week ago we had cut the vines and they had all died, still clinging to the side of the building, and with every breeze, bringing a bit of fall early to 54th street, as brown leaves swirled about on the street. In one week, the hardy tough roots had began to sprout new ivy. So Chaim was determined not to have to keep battling with them. He was going to get to the root of the problem.
Tommy told Chaim at one point to go to their truck and get a tool called a mattock (similar to a pickaxe), to really do the job right. Here is a picture of Chaim with their array of orange painted tools battling it out with the tough roots.
After the tank was vacuumed out, Andres donned a Yellow suit and jumped into the hole to clean out the sludge. He told me that the tank was 4 feet in diameter but could not tell me how big it was until he was inside. As he was sludging out, I yelled down- "Well, how big is it?????"

In a resparator muffled voice he answered back-
"2000 gallons"

Holly crap!
Chaim and I looked at each other as dollar signs added up in our brains.

After about 10 minutes, Andres climbed out of the hole and said, "Just kidding, it's only a 550 gallon tank"

Ha Ha.

Now we have a 55 gallon drum of oil sludge sitting in the yard, to be picked up before next week. The guys filled in the hole and put a temporary PVC pipe from the tank so that in a week or so, another crew can come to fill the empty space with foam and sand. Then we can all exhale a sound of relief from this ordeal.

The Multi Ethnic Mart

On 58th Street where Roosevelt and Woodside Avenue intersect sits a small grocer called Big Boy's Farm. We assumed that it is Latin owned since it is packed with Mexican products, and an array of Goya products I've never seen. The first time we went in to inspect the produce, we were very impressed with all the fresh herbs

yerba buena

papalo

and greens we hadn't seen before. What was even better was that they are all labeled with hand written signs in English.

As with most immigrant run businesses, there are one or two humorous spelling errors in the store. We now call the store the Bong Juice Seller.


The other night, we stopped in to get some watercress and watermelon. As we stood on line, I noticed that the Asian man and customer were conducting the exchange speaking Japanese.

When I got up to the counter, I asked him
"anata wa nihonjin desu ka?".
(are you Japanese?)

And he answered back in Japanese that he is Kankoku jin (Korean.)
He asked me: "Furusato wa dokodesuka?" (where is your hometown?)
Then told me that he had lived in Kobe for a time.

As we were leaving, Chaim told the Korean man, who spoke Japanese, behind the counter at the Mexican Grocery store:
"Muchos Kamsahamnida", and I said "Oyasuminasai!"

A Four Dollar Movie

We discovered our local movie theater this week. On Tuesdays, all day, you can see a movie for $4.00!!!!!! That means that 3 people can see a film for almost the same price of one ticket in Manhattan. They also have matinee prices: any show before 5pm is $5.00.

The films are your usual mega-plex fare, but for $4, I'd sit through almost anything on a hot summer day or night. This evening we saw "The Bourne Ultimatum". It was not as bad as we expected, and we actually thought it was pretty good. But it was a $4 good. We probably would have been more critical if we had paid $10.50.

The Sunnyside Cinema definitely has character. The interior hasn't been updated since probably the 1970's, the films are scratchy and there is soda splashed on the screen. But I can't believe it's only 4 bucks!!!!!!!!!

Ode to Julius Schmidt

While tearing out the plaster and lathe walls, the guys unhooked the main radiators so we could get behind them to frame out the window wall. These old behemoths are very heavy (about 300 lbs each) but beautiful at the same time. We plan to get rid of them and install baseboard heat, similar to what is used in Europe.

These old radiators and the heat brings me back to another day from my past.
My sophomore year at the Kansas City Art Institute, our professor Dale Eldred brought in his friend, Julius Schmidt, a master caster. He had been teaching at the University of Iowa, but rumor had it that his way of casting was not up to the safety standards so OSHA periodically shut down his foundry. In the casting world, he was a legend. He is responsible for introducing iron casting to the academic art departments first at Cranbrook Academy, by designing his own furnace system and was so dedicated to his craft that he had a cult-like following.

I remember the casting process being very strenuous and built muscles in my arm I never knew I had. The first week with Julius, he drove a group of us to the local dump to look for old cast iron radiators. We hauled the heavy pile of scrap back to the sculpture studio and then took turns crushing the radiators into 3" pieces with a heavy sledgehammer. That took about a week, hammering every day. We looked and felt like ex-cons working on a chain gang.

Julius taught us the process of melting iron in a cupola of his own design. He used a method discovered during the Industrial Revolution, of alternating coke (derived from coal) with the iron to to be used as fuel. The handful of us donned heavy leather gloves, jackets and boots in the late September heat and spent hours shoveling the mixture into the furnace.

When Chaim and I first came to our house to an open house and met the owner, Rachel White, I noticed a cast iron sculpture of a nude figure in the side garden. Rachel told us she had graduated from Alfred in the sculpture department and had studied with Julius Schmidt. She had bought the building hoping to turn it into a sculpture studio and make art. Unfortunately the grind of this city chewed her up and spit her out, landing her in Coral Gables Florida.

I hope this does not become my fate.
Julius Schmidt, is still alive and casting. I think he is probably in his eighties and is still a professor emeritus at University of Iowa.

The Crew of Joes

At 8:35 on a Sunday morning, Frankie and his crew of four people came to begin the electric job on the house; Ralphie, Joe, Johnny and Ralphie's brother, who we thought was named Spencer, but later found out his name is also Joe.

We got lucky with the weather, and it wasn't as brutal as it had been. Very efficiently they snaked cables, drilled holes, knocked out patches of plaster and re-filled the holes. They also convinced me that I can frame out the whole house and save $1000. So tomorrow I order about 50 2x4s to begin the framing job, and hope to have it finished before we order the sheet rock. The guys left around 6pm after a few Heineken's. All in all, it was a very pleasant and an unsweaty day for me.