@BrooklynRowHouse

What will $11 mil get me in Brooklyn?

Steve — Fri, 03 May 2013 18:18:28 +0000

It's a question that probably doesn't get asked very often, but here's an answer ready for it: the locally revered landmark "Gingerbread House" at 8820 Narrows Avenue in Bay Ridge, about a mile south of Brooklyn Row House. Not for nothing but this is a bargain compared to the unanswered 2009 asking price of $12 million. But it's quite a bit more than the "under $1 milliion" that the current owners paid for it in 1985.

http://www.nydailynews.com/life-style/real-estate/piece-brooklyn-storybo...

The house was built in 1917, reportedly originally as a companion home to a much larger house across the street, which was razed years ago. It sites on 10 acres... unheard of for a single family Brooklyn home these days... has six bedrooms and 3.5 baths spread across its 5,743 square feet of interior space. It has its own bowling alley and a two-car garage. You enter the garage through a rough-hewn rock archway and the garage contains a turntable for the cars. Not too shabby.

The house's style is officially termed "Arts and Crafts" but I'd call it Black Forest Fairy Tale.

I'm not saying this is a great deal because I can think of lots better things I'd spend $11 million on, especially as its estimated market value was "only" $5 million back in 2007. You could buy a much larger and more garishly-appointed modern McMansion for $11 million but you won't get intricate, hand-carved detail like this.

House:

Guess what I found hibernating under my kitchen extension?

Steve — Sun, 03 Feb 2013 17:28:16 +0000

I've posted a few articles about Brooklyn wildlife here over the years. Now I apparently have one of them as a roomate.

Last week I broke a tile on my bathroom vanity and decided that today was a good day to fix it. I keep my spare tiles in a barely heated shed under my kitchen extension.

As soon as I opened the door to the shed and the gamey smell hit my nose I knew that something wild was living in there. I assumed it was a feral cat or two until I saw a bunch of straw nesting material falling out of a large bag of potting soil. Cats don't do that so I picked up a lawn torch, gentley opened the bag and look what I found. Petey Possum!

I wasn't all that surprised by this because I see possums late at night at least once a week. The dogs have become so accustomed to them that I can tell from their reaction when they've picked up the scent a hundred feet away. They're fairly, uh, aromatic animals.

Not sure what to do here. On the one hand, I'm not going to do what one of my neighbors did and kill him. Any wild animal that manages to survive on the streets of Brooklyn has my profound respect. My concern with the nesting material however is that this is really Penelope Possum and that she's about to bring more of these critters into the world. Whatever, I need to replace the missing brick in the side of the extension in the spring.

Local lore says that opossums took a foothold in Brooklyn about seven years ago when some genius at one of the Brooklyn community boards thought they would be an excellent solution to keeping the rat population in check. They're very versatile animals and aren't shy about killing prey, including rats. Problem is, that same versatility means that they're happy to live on the same garbage as rats. So the rats survived, the possums survived and here we are.

Possums are fearsome looking animals but they're actually pretty passive towards larger animals, hence the "playing possum" thing. I rummaged around in the extension for about five minutes looking for my tile and its only reaction was an occasional hiss.

House:

BrooklynRowHouse updated

Steve — Tue, 25 Dec 2012 17:07:26 +0000

While there have been no home improvements to talk about lately at BrooklynRowHouse, mostly due to a terrific trip to Europe this summer followed by a broken ankle I suffered in a motorcycle accident in early fall, the site has undergone a major upgrade to Drupal 7. While the site looks substantially the same as the old one, it's an entirely new theme/templating system (Omega) which it is claimed degrades better on pads and smartphones.

As a result of the upgrade however, most of the old comments are gone. So if you see yours missing, no offense. Mine went with them.

The broken ankle has reprioritized what needs to be done next here, the first of which is to add a !#%@ railing to the basement stairs. I didn't do this before to make it easier to haul cabinets and so forth upstairs from the basement shop. However, as anyone who's been on crutches knows, a sturdy stair railing isn't just a safety item. It's essential for gimps like me to use them with crutches. Because I didn't have one, the only way for me to get to the basement was to leave my house and access it via the garage.

Also promoted way up the list is a grab rail for the shower. I was bathing with baby wipes for weeks because I lacked one.

Anyway, here's a pic which I call "The Two Dogs".

House:

technology

Extreme Renovations

Steve — Sat, 15 Dec 2012 17:43:11 +0000

If you're one of those homeowners who looks disapprovingly at renovations which destroy the period character of the building, you're gonna need a defebrilator after reading this story.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/18th-century-french-chateau-razed-by-mistake/2012/12/05/7765e3de-3ed9-11e2-8a5c-473797be602c_story.html

18th-century French chateau razed ‘by mistake’ by builders while owner was away

PARIS — Residents of a sleepy French village in Bordeaux have been left dumbfounded after discovering their local 18th-century chateau was completely bulldozed “by mistake.”

The mayor’s office in Yvrac said Wednesday that workers who were hired to renovate the grand 13,000-square-meter (140,000-square-foot) manor and raze a small building on the same estate in southwest France mixed them up.

“The Chateau de Bellevue was Yvrac’s pride and joy,” said former owner Juliette Marmie. “The whole village is in shock. How can this construction firm make such a mistake?”

Local media reported that the construction company misunderstood the renovation plans of the current owner, Russian businessman Dmitry Stroskin, to clean up the manor and restore it to its former baroque glory.

Stroskin was away when the calamity occurred and returned home to discover his chateau, a local treasure boasting a grand hall that could host some 200 people, as well as a sweeping stone staircase — was nothing but rubble.

“I’m in shock ...I understand the turmoil of the community,” local media quoted Stroskin as saying. He told them he plans to build an exact replica of lost manor on the site.

Another story here: http://rt.com/art-and-culture/news/chateau-bellevue-accidentally-destroyed-076/

House:

demolition

home improvement

Hacker's Guide to Wireless Audio

Steve — Thu, 12 Apr 2012 20:58:52 +0000

Okay, it's not really a guide because it's peculiar to my hardware and I don't completely comprehend why it's working and I took a lot of wrong turns to get here. But it works!

Here's some background: I work from home and I like to have music playing in the background downstairs, not in my office. For some reason, it takes the edge off the cabin fever having music playing in another room rather than blasting in my face. At first I did this by tuning in an FM radio station on my receiver in the living room. Later, I switched to using one of DirecTV's music channels because they're commercial-free and genre-focused so I don't have to listen to a crappy Josh Groban song to hear a nice Derek Trucks Band track.

Last year, I discovered Spotify's streaming music service and became a huge fan -- so much so that when I was asked to install a music system in a friend's wine bar in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn I went with Spotify and a wireless-enabled laptop, which also let me program his music playlists remotely.

What I really wanted however was a way to play Spotify on my great-sounding living room home entertainment center and to be able to control it remotely from my office upstairs. If I could do this then not only could I indulge my fickle musical tastes by choosing what's being played but I could also mute the background music during business calls (yes, I play it loud). My HE center also plays music in the back yard, so bonus.

But even though I'm a musician, a computer geek and I built my own commercial recording studio back in the analog days, this new-fangled digital stuff eludes me, especially the stew of transmission protocols and middleware tools out there. As I started diving into it it left me with more questions than answers which served mostly to broaden my selection of blind alleys.

What set me straight was my old Denon receiver suddenly expiring. It was an expensive, state-of-the-art appliance when I bought it in 2002 and I probably could have had it fixed. But the programming and user interface on it was ridiculously byzantine -- so confusing that when I dropped the remote on the floor and it killed the speakers in the dining room it took days to program it back. But I like the Denon's sound so I replaced my dead Denon with another, cheaper one -- an AVR-1912, one with positive reviews for its softer learning curve.

After rewiring my multimedia cabinet with HDMI cables (thankfully, at least one thing that got simpler if more expensive), I discovered a new protocol living inside the new receiver: AirPlay.

You can read the Wiki article about AirPlay but the short answer is that it's a proprietary Apple protocol that enables wireless streaming of multimedia between compatible devices over your local area network (LAN). Originally Apple-only and branded as AirTunes, Apple wisely decided to license it to third-party companies like Denon under its current name. My Mac Pro is my main office computer so it looked like I had both ends covered. The issue was that on a stock Mac Airplay is bound to iTunes. To make matters worse, many people run into a variety of technical issues with firewalls, routers and other security barriers to get AirPlay working. It takes a patient and somewhat nerdy person to get it right. I spent an evening cursing at the wall before learning that I had to enable multicast filtering on my Linksys E3000 router, drop a firewall rule and find an elusive and not very intuitive icon on the application (see below) to enable it. Then you have to reboot everything, including iTunes. And ignore about 95% of all the well-intended but completely wrong advice on the web. For instance, someone on Apple's site said that the secret was not to click the "Done" button on the Home Sharing screen. Isn't anyone at Apple reading this stuff?

One source of cognitive dissonance is that Apple talks about Home Sharing and Airplay as if they're two different things. They're mostly the same. Home Sharing is just what Apple chooses to call its iTunes content sharing over Airplay. In fact, AirPlay can broadcast more than just iTunes over your LAN. And to further muddy the waters, iTunes has a legacy protocol called "Sharing", which is different from "Home Sharing", which lets other iTunes instances on your LAN share your music content. AirPlay has nothing to do with iTunes Sharing. If you use AirPlay, turn that off under Preferences -> Sharing.

The problem was that I wanted to Lancast the music in Spotify, not iTunes. The final bridge to realizing my goal was a third-party piece of middleware called AirFoil. It was completely painless to install, worked immediately and it's cheap: $25. Up popped Spotify, a list of destination Airplay devices and on that was my AVR-1912. I clicked "play" on my Mac's Spotify and almost blew the dog off the sofa downstairs. The Denon was even smart enough to automatically switch its input to AirPlay when it picked up the wireless feed.

But that's not the end of the magic. There's an Android phone app for the Denon called AVR-Remote which automatically recognizes AirPlay and lets you control not only the amp but the AirPlay server as well. There's a companion iPad app that will do the same, Reemote. The latter also has a feature that will show a bio of the current artist playing.

The next mission is to get Spotify broadcasting AirPlay from my iPad rather than the Mac Pro.

Just be aware that you don't need AppleTV or an Apple Airport for AirPlay to work if you have an AirPlay compatible device like the AVR-1912. The various how-tos I read on the net imply that you do.

House:

audio

home entertainment

multimedia

From the Brooklyn Row House mail sack...

Steve — Thu, 15 Mar 2012 17:01:25 +0000

I received an email today from a producer of a new home show looking for volunteers with a troublesome room in their house that they want renovated... for free! A prerequisite is that you must own your place and be within 35 miles of NYC. You can read the rest in the boilerplate below:

Do you (or someone you know) have a bland or boring room? Does it not reflect 
your personality or style? Does it fill you with shame? We're looking for 
unique and interesting homeowners, who have a boring room they'd like to see 
transformed.

Right now a national network is casting an exciting new home makeover show in 
New York City and the surrounding area. We need fun and energetic  
homeowners. And in exchange for letting us into your home to film, we’ll 
bring in our professional designer and team of craftsmen to give it a 
complete overhaul. In the end you’ll have a room that you’ll love to show 
off, and it won’t cost you a dime.

Send us a video (or at least an email with photos) and tell us about yourself 
and your family. Tell us a little about about your interests and style, and 
why it’s time for a change. Don’t forget to take us on a  quick tour of 
your home and neighborhood. Email us at uglyroomcasting@gmail.com

Thanks and we look forward to hearing from you!

I've been the bridesmaid (but never the bride) in a few of these reality shows so I know that you'll have a better chance of a positive response if you send a full description of your project, with video and photos, an interesting back story and a picture of yourself too as you'll probably be on camera.

House:

home improvement

new york city

brooklyn

Bay Ridge to get our own Jersey Shore reality show. Lucky us.

Steve — Sun, 04 Mar 2012 22:41:14 +0000

If you ask anyone on the streets of Bay Ridge about Oxygen Network's upcoming Brooklyn 11223 reality show you'll get a blank stare. Nobody's heard of it. While it's been filming around Bay Ridge since last September, there have been a lot of Hollywood crews around here lately, from the TV shows Pan Am, Blue Bloods and Law & Order SVU to feature films like White Irish Drinkers and Cop Out. It was easy for it to get lost in the crowd of bigger budget productions.

But when you tell those folks what the show is about, guess what? Same blank stare. Nobody really cares, except for the politicians and community leaders that is. For them, this show is an affront to Bay Ridge and what The Sopranos was to Italian-Americans. I can't believe the backlash against it, which has even reached the pages of Huffington Post. I haven't seen outrage like this since William Friedkin's gay serial killer movie, Cruising, back in the 1980s. Local bloggers are swinging at shadows, protests have been organized by community groups, advertiser boycotts have been threatened... all of which, of course, serve only to increase the buzz for a low-budget show on a lightly-watched network. To my knowledge, nobody has actually seen the show.

Premiering on Oxygen on Monday, March 26 at 11PM ET/PT, Brooklyn 11223 is supposed be a "voyeuristic look" into the lives of a group of vapid twentysomething girls whose once rock-solid friendships have been torn apart by betrayal. From the early PR sheet, it "follows the story of two groups of girls fighting a turf war to rule Bay Ridge. Who will win is uncertain, but the stakes have never been higher." Priceless.

The promo, below, pretty much sums it up: Snooki Meets Salty Dog, which frankly doesn't over-dramatize Bay Ridge's club strip on most weekend evenings. This show can't be any more shocking than the two glue-haired, tight-skirted cumares I saw punching the crap out of each other in the middle 3rd Avenue in the pouring rain last month while their boyfriends laughed and egged them on.

I watched one of the shoots last fall while walking the dogs, back when the show was tentatively titled "Brooklyn Crew". It was a scene with one of the girls talking to some manscaped, quasi-goombah throwback from Saturday Night Fever (another Bay Ridge treasure). It looked completely scripted to me; nothing "reality" about it, not that I was surprised by that. Technically, the shoot appeared only slightly more sophisticated than an NYU film school field project, which is probably why it's escaped everybody's notice until lately. They didn't even have the PAs to stop me from walking into the middle of their shot.

There's no moral high ground with this stuff. If you don't like it, don't watch it. But I have to say that I'm a little surprised to see this kind of program on Oxygen, a network which promotes itself as empowering women, not trafficking in stereotypes.

House:

neighborhood

brooklyn

bay ridge

Calling All DIY House Bloggers

Steve — Sat, 25 Feb 2012 18:45:35 +0000

I think it's safe to say that our beloved Houseblogs.net is down for the ten count.

For those who don't remember Houseblogs, it was an online community of house bloggers like us. Besides aggregating our RSS feeds in one place and offering Vanilla-based forums for novice DIYers to ask questions of battle-hardened home renovation tyromaniacs, Jeannie and Aaron went above/beyond to create a congenial, positive environment with contests and features to keep us coming back. Even though most of my renovation battles are behind me, I really miss the hang. I'd like to see if we could get it back.

A couple of years ago I created HomeOwnersLike.Us as a test jig for an RSS aggregation module I was writing for a client based on the Drupal CMS software. Houseblogs.net was the inspiration for it but I wanted to fix some of my peeves with it, like RSS feeds which spammed the queue with multiple posts per day, driving other, usually more interesting feeds off the front page. I also wanted to create a robust "home page" under the bloggers' control so they could introduce their feeds, respond to comments about it and maintan a list of their most recent posts so people could read their blogs in chronological context. Houseblogs' performance also tended to grind so I wanted snappier performance. I think that's been achieved.

If you've got a house blog with an RSS feed, web your way over and set it up. If you have problems doing this, contact me and let me know so I can help you with it, and possibly fix it for others. I'd like HomewnersLike.Us to be more about home renovation/repair/improvement than photos of your kids' soccer game and cookie recipes. But that's okay in moderation too.

I've viewed HomeOwnersLike.Us mostly as a software beta test so I've never publicized it. Nevertheless, it's managed to attract 27 house renovation feeds as of this post. While that's a far cry from the hundreds that lived on Houseblogs it's enough to give me confidence that it's ready to meet the world. As it stands, HomeownersLike.Us is mostly just an application. I would like to make it more of a platform offering multiple points of interest for both remote bloggers and visitors. Forums are, of course, one of the features it needs. What else? And, yes, I know it could use some expert UI and design help too. Any professional site designers out there?

I'm going to let the homeblogging community help me with this. I'm not a marketing person like Aaron and Jeannie so I'm also going to rely on bloggers to promote HomeownersLike.Us too. Tell your house blogging friends about it. Get them to sign on. Blog about it. Send me ideas that you would like to see incorporated here. At least for the time being, I'm not interested in monetizing the site with advertising partners and promotions and giveaways and stuff, at least beyond the usual Google AdSense thing. Let's get our old community back.

House:

blog

My 15ms Of Fame

Steve — Sat, 25 Feb 2012 05:29:00 +0000

At the end of August last year, there were reports of the Google Street Views car being seen around the neighborhood. For the half dozen or so people on the planet who don't know what Street View is, it's a terrific value-added feature that the Google Maps folks created by photographing many if not most of the primary and secondary streets around the world. Using Street View you can not only see a satellite view of your location but actual cached photos.

It's also rather hard to miss the Google car as it's about as subtle as a Oscar Meyer Weinermobile.

Besides a paint job that looks like a cross between a Peter Max-themed commune bus and a parted-out Toyota Prius Hybrid it's got a six foot mast on its roof with a device on top that looks like it came from War of the Worlds. It's actually a high-definition camera with 15 lenses and a Class 1 laser range finding device.

Anyway, I was leaving the Owls Head Park dog run with the pooches one morning when I saw the Google car cruising down 68th St in Brooklyn. I assumed that it would probably hit my street in the next 15 minutes so I hustled home to sit on the stoop and see it close up. I was trying to think of some clever goof I could do for the camera. Over the years, Street View's cameras have captured everything from rennaissance sword fights and naked people to arrests in progress and even dead bodies. It would be hard to top that so I figured I would just bow to it as it passed. Something completely lame like that.

The dogs and I waited on my stoop for 15 minutes before my ADD kicked in and I decided to change the oil in my motorcycle in the garage instead.

As I was warming up the engine, an elderly lady stopped on the sidewalk and extended pleasantries with me. With the motorcycle still idling, I grabbed the leaf blower and started sweeping the sidewalk. With a 700+ pound motorcycle, I like maximum traction with the sidewalk as I pull that monster out of the garage.

And that was the moment that the Google car chose to arrive. I gave it a quick wave, but was a little too late I'm afraid. But she didn't miss it.

"Is that a friend of yours?"

"No, that's the Google camera car."

"What's a Google?"

"Google... Google Maps... the computer search engine..... computers??"

House:

brooklyn

neighborhood

DIY... or with someone else.

Steve — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 16:12:56 +0000

@BrooklynRowHouse

What will $11 mil get me in Brooklyn?

Guess what I found hibernating under my kitchen extension?

BrooklynRowHouse updated

Extreme Renovations

Hacker's Guide to Wireless Audio

From the Brooklyn Row House mail sack...

Bay Ridge to get our own Jersey Shore reality show. Lucky us.

Calling All DIY House Bloggers

My 15ms Of Fame

DIY... or with someone else.

"You can do it. We can help."