Posts from the “Seen” Category

Rescue!

Posted on 13 February 2014

Unless something goes terribly wrong,* carpentry is not usually not about adrenaline rush. Firefighters burst into burning buildings to save puppies, while we shave another few thousands off a piece of crown miolding to make a perfectly coped joint. Slow and steady tends to suit my constitution, but a bit of urgency now and then can be nice, too. So I was excited to get the call from Lex, a repeat client of ours: “There’s an oak library in a house in JP, and they’re about to gut the building. We can have it if we can pull it out tomorrow; otherwise, it’s landfill-bound.” We jumped into action, though our shop is not equipped with any slidey fire-poles. The house was substantial…

Categories: History, Seen, victorian, vintage

Tagged: Jamaica Plain, library, oak, salvage, victorian

Luc on beam

Posted on 17 January 2014

We were at Longleaf Lumber in Cambridge this afternoon picking up some engineered cork flooring for a project. Longleaf’s primary business is finding, milling, and selling old-growth wood of the sort that can no longer be harvested in the wild (though they also sell new cork and bamboo flooring). They typically find material in old barns or mill buildings that are being torn down, but they are open to any and all sources of old, interesting wood. I’ve seen live oak timbers in their yard salvaged from the maintenance facility of the Constitution. Most of the old wood they salvage gets milled into flooring, like the pumpkin pine we used a recent project. But one of the great joys of visiting their yard is seeing the weird, random stuff they bring in. Today’s discovery was a pair of giant pine beams (with full-grown border collie for scale) from an mill they were involved in dismantling.

Border collie sitting on large old-growth heart-pine beam

Categories: Seen, vintage

Tagged: border collie, heart pine, Longleaf Lumber, longleaf pine, Luc, old-growth lumber, reclaimed lumber, southern yellow pine

On the flow properties of roof snow

Posted on 4 January 2014

When we arrived at our job site last week, we found this roof snow impersonating a sheet of over-warm plastic. The temperature was a touch above freezing, and the overhang didn’t last very long.

Categories: Seen

Tagged: flow, plastic deformation, roof snow

Luc in box truck

Posted on 23 October 2013

Border collie in driver's seat of Isuzu box truck

Categories: Seen

Tagged: box truck, Luc

Moving in

Posted on 3 September 2013

It’s always gratifying to know that our clients are getting use out of the things we build them. In this case, Esther the cat took up residence on the mantel within five minutes of our finishing the installation.

Cat sitting on newly-installed fireplace mantel

Categories: Seen, Shop work

Tagged: bookcase, cat, fireplace, mantel

Annals of Forensic Carpentry, Vol.2 No.2: Why the stripes?

Posted on 20 August 2013

In the good old days, when fuel was cheap and carpenters were simple, no one cared a whit about insulation and — God forbid! — energy performance. But now that we’re out of Eden, we need to concern ourselves with more than roof framing and perfectly coped crown. Thermal performance, rain screens, and indoor air quality are now firmly in the carpenter’s bailiwick, but can be much more abstract than a tight-fitting miter joint. That’s why I’m always looking for instances where building science reveals itself in glorious, explicit detail. On a recent morning, I noticed this stripey pattern in the dew on my roof. (Ignore the leaning chimney — it’s an experiment in non-Euclidean masonry) Years ago I might have though,…

Categories: Annals of Forensic Carpentry, Building science, Seen

Tagged: building science, closed-cell foam, insulation, roof, Thermal bridging

Evan’s carpet soffits

Posted on 6 August 2013

One of the joys of buying an old fixer-upper is discovering all the wacky things that previous owners have done. Humility of course tempers the pleasure, as a boy can’t help but wonder which of his design decisions will turn out to be the avocado fridge of 2013. Sometimes, though, the universe is generous, delivering a detail so outrageous as to preclude introspection.

My colleague Evan recently bought a fantastic little Cape in Watertown, MA. It’s a solid house in a great neighborhood, and just the right size to be manageable. And it gave us all the gift of carpeted soffits.

But maybe the best detail was evidence of a previous layer of carpet.

Categories: Found, Seen, vintage

Tagged: 1950s, carpet, kitchen, soffit

How hot is it?

Posted on 18 July 2013

We work with wood for a living, but I think we should all qualify for dual degrees in carpentry and meteorology. This week in particular, thoughts of structure and fine joinery have been pushed aside by more pressing concerns: How to avoid heat stroke. We watch the thermometer and try to chase the shade around the house and speak derisively of people who spend their days in air conditioning; doesn’t help much. It can be curiously comforting, though, to get an objective confirmation that it’s really bloody hot outside, and that we’re not making it all up. In this light, I was delighted to see that the tar patches on the road around Peters Hill in the Arnold Arboretum were starting to bubble.

Of course, I had to poke my finger in to see if there was a liquid center.

I should add that I spend much of my time driving from job to job these days, and the guys on the crew take the brunt of the weather, hot and cold.

Categories: Seen

Tagged: Arnold Arboretum, Hot, Peters Hill, tar bubble, weather

Burl theft

Posted on 12 July 2013

Yesterday at lunchtime I stopped by Houghton’s Pond in the Blue Hills Reservation outside Boston to let Musti and Luc stretch their legs and pee on trees for a few minutes. As we were walking, I saw an oddly damaged white oak tree. As we got closer, I realized that someone had gone at it with a chainsaw, attempting to cut off a large burl from the base of the trunk. Late last year, a number of stories in the local media suggested that the illicit removal of burls from public trees was becoming an epidemic. The Boston Globe described a chainsaw-wielding thief cutting burls off trees in the Fenway Victory Gardens, and another story described similar vandalism in Mount Auburn Cemetery. In this case,…

Categories: Seen

Tagged: Blue Hills, Boston, burl, burl theft, Houghton's Pond, vandalism, white oak

On the source of the historical enmity between plumbers and carpenters

Posted on 21 June 2013

Cast iron waste line in bath floor with cut floor joists

We are accustomed to seeing framing notched, drilled, and otherwise modified by plumbers trying to fit their pipes into houses built before indoor plumbing was de rigueur. This bathroom floor is a bit extreme, though, as the floor joists are almost entirely cut away, and the cast iron waste pipes seem to be providing the only remaining structure. And the cast iron wasn’t in great shape either:

By some miracle of gravity and hydrodynamics, the space below the hole was not filled with sewage.

I should add that our plumber, Leo Tuccinardi, of Pipe Connections in Watertown, MA, has the utmost respect for wood framing and its role in keeping buildings upright.

Categories: Seen

Tagged: cast iron, cut framing, joists, Plumbing, structure