Posts by milton

Honor system

Posted on 8 June 2013

I have the pleasure of working with some really great people.

Today, we were in the final stages of pre-demolition work on a large renovation project. A couple of folks from Castle Electric, my usual electricians, were on the job yesterday pulling light fixtures and generally making the place safe for the guys who will be taking down the plaster next week. I had asked them to be careful with a number of the fixtures so that we could donate them to the Reuse Center. This morning I found a collection of fixtures ready for new homes along with this note:

Broken light fixture with note in apology

Categories: trade secrets, Uncategorized

Tagged: Castle Electric, Electrician, light fixture, Reuse Center

Housemates

Posted on 3 June 2013

As I was coming home the other day, I was puzzled to see what looked like mildew on the casing of my front door. I’m not immune to such things, but there hadn’t been any in the morning, and it wasn’t a particularly humid day. I got closer and realized that the new life forms were much higher on the evolutionary ladder. It seems there’d been a hatch of little spiders during the day, and some had taken up residence in the space beside my storm door. I checked in with a couple of bug-savvy friends (this happens more than you’d think), and got the unanimous ID: Araneus diadematus, the Cross orbweaver, a common late-summer garden resident.

And just so no one thinks the entomologists have hijacked the blog, the storm door in the image above is made from Spanish cedar, and the primed door casing (no, nothing on my house is ever done…) is sapele. For scale, the door reveal is a heavy sixteenth.

Getting a little closer:

That’s a dime, again for scale, in the image below.

Categories: entomology

Tagged: Araneus diadematus, Cross orbweaver, Roslindale, spiderlings, spiders

Glass magic

Posted on 26 December 2012

One of the key fringe benefits of my work is getting to see other trades at work. And the very best part is seeing the brilliant, magical techniques that other tradespeople regard as completely routine. The other day I had to pick up a piece of laminated glass from Sarno Glass and Mirror in Hyde Park, MA. We were making a door for a medicine cabinet (for the third time, but that’s another story), and we needed to use safety glass so that a slipping client wouldn’t bump into the cabinet, break the glass, and sever an artery. There are two kinds of safety glazing — laminated and tempered glass. Tempered glass is a pain, as it has to be cut first, and then…

Categories: trade secrets

Tagged: alcohol, cutting, fire, Glass, Hyde Park, laminated glass, Sarno Glass and Mirror

Collateral damage

Posted on 6 November 2012

We were using West System epoxy to repair a window sill when we ruined the day of this dragonfly. It was identified by an entomologist friend (everyone needs one!) as an Autumn Meadowhawk, Sympetrum vicinum.

Categories: entomology

Tagged: Ashmont Hill, Autumn meadowhawk, Dorchester, dragonfly, epoxy, Sympetrum vicinum, victorian, West System, windowsill

Don’t need no stinkin’ OSHA

Posted on 7 October 2012

Who knew!

(Just to be clear, this is not one of our jobsites…)

Categories: trade secrets

Tagged: ladder safety, Roslindale

Winston banished

Posted on 21 September 2012

We try to balance the needs of woodworking and metal fabrication in our shop, but sometimes the metal worker gets sent out to the porch in front of the shop.

Categories: Shop work

Tagged: metal working, shop, Winston Braman

Annals of Forensic Carpentry, Vol. 2, No. 1

Posted on 18 September 2012

Winston, my co-worker, arrived at the job site a few minutes before me, and called because he thought he was in the wrong place. “I thought we were looking at a rotten porch. The place I’m looking at is new construction.” The triple-decker condo building in Jamaica Plain was completed in late 2005, but one of the owners called me recently to look at problems with the rear decks. The first sign of problems was the brown staining on the white ceiling — visible if you look closely at the second floor ceiling above. Then the client showed me some of the failing deck boards. and up close: In one location, they had replaced some of the decking, but the…

Categories: Annals of Forensic Carpentry

Tagged: ACQ, CCA, deck building, galvanic corrosion, Musti, pressure-treated lumber

19 years of iteration…

Posted on 14 September 2012

19 years worth of my phones

and conversations are still garbled. I got my first mobile phone, a Nokia 101, in 1993 and tried not to use it at all, as the minutes were very dear. I gave up on it after a while, and didn’t get on the carousel again until the oughts. Twelve phones in the last twelve years, and I still wish I didn’t need one, though I spend an inordinate amount of time with the current one.

I documented the group as #s 2-12 were headed off to the recycler.

Categories: History

Tagged: cell phone, communication, Nokia

Interview with a kindred soul

Posted on 10 September 2012

I’ve wondered for a long time about the economics of doing skilled hand-work. Adam Davidson of Planet Money does a nice job addressing this question in one contemporary context in his recent story on NPR. I suspect that the story generalizes; it certainly resonates with our experience. Has it always been this way? I’m curious about the social and economic standing of cabinetmakers and joiners working 200 years ago in Massachusetts, for example. Were they roughly in the same social class as their customers? And could they afford their own work?

Categories: History

Tagged: bespoke tailor, economics, NPR, Planet Money

Found in the attic

Posted on 6 September 2012

One of the perquisites of my work is getting to poke around in the attics and basements of old buildings. Along with mummified squirrels and decades of dust, weird and elegant things occasionally pop up. Last weekend I was helping my friends Anne and Paul evaluate the wisdom of buying a particular 2-family house in Arlington, MA. The house was unremarkable, but the attic had a couple of treasures: These two wooden toilet tanks served the first and second floor bathrooms. They were reportedly located in the attic to ensure that there was enough pressure to clear the un-optimized bowls of 1913. The house also had the most elegant retraction mechanism for an attic stair I’ve ever seen. There were a…

Categories: History

Tagged: Arlington, attic, attic stair, toilet tank, wooden plumbing