Wow, it's been a while (again), although this past weekend was super productive around here. One project that's been on our plate for a little while has been to add shelves above the new desk we built in the study. Between waffling on where we wanted the shelves to be hung and either being out of town or having visitors, building the shelves got put off for a little while, but it was at the very top of the to-do list this weekend. We ended up going with two shelves above the main surface of the desk, both 15" deep and built from 3/4" birch plywood with 1x2 pine tacked and glued across the face. I originally wanted to hang them the same way the desk is hung -- with ledger boards on the three walls supporting their weight -- but we ended up using shelf brackets instead since the sides would have rested on ledgers that weren't tacked into joists in the front (given that the joists are 16" apart, and the shelves are 15" deep). We want to be able to put some serious weight on these shelves (medical reference books, magazine archives, that sort of thing), so the idea of using drywall anchors made me just nervous enough to go with brackets for support.

One related interlude: we started out with the idea that using low-profile brackets like these might work out OK, sacrificing what felt like just a little bit of load-bearing capacity for the benefit of a bracket that didn't create as much of an obstacle underneath it. Thus, we hung the first shelf with these brackets, and immediately realized that the weight of the shelf itself was enough to start bowing the supports -- and that's when we both got the mental picture of what would happen when we started loading the shelves, and then immediately took the brackets down. We ended up with these, which are very slender and yet feel like they could support me up on the shelves. If we end up hating how they look or function, I can always try the drywall anchor approach, or add a backer board between the joists and then anchor a ledger into that.

A few things we did to make the results that much nicer (to us, at least!): I routed a rounded edge onto the front of the shelves using a 3/8" roundover bit, and we added a few under-cabinet lights to the bottom shelf so that we could get rid of our desk lamp and still have great light on the work surface.

After installing the quarter-round molding across the back of the surface and then touching everything up with a final bit of paint, the new desk is installed, and I'm pretty damn happy with how it came out.

The back surface of the desk is 20 inches deep, and we opted to put the PC there since it's the computer that we use the most in the office. Since the office is pretty narrow, we went with the return being only 15 inches deep, giving us more work surface without sacrificing breathing room. I doubt that we'll stick with that lamp, we have a little bit of cable management work to do, and I'm almost certain that I won't be allowed to keep the Iron Giant on the desk. (I have been promised a little bit of a shelf for him, though!)

In the end, there are a few silly little things I'd do differently were I to do this again, but nothing that comes close to me feeling like this wasn't a home run for us being able to use the study. I can't wait to get the shelves planned and installed... our inclination is to put them on the short wall above the main desk surface so that the room doesn't start to feel even more narrow, but we've bandied about the idea of partial-length shelves on the long wall. We'll see which way that debate settles out, and we'll enjoy the hell out of the room in the mean time!

One of the things that really attracted Shannon and I to this house is that it has a small "extra" room upstairs, too small to be a regular bedroom but definitely workable as a study (or perhaps someday a nursery!). Since we moved in, we tried our hardest to make the furniture we already own work in the room, but it's been a struggle -- the desk, file cabinet, and drawers I had in my luxuriously-large study back in Brookline made this room really tight, and Shannon and I realized about a month ago that it was the one space in the house that made us both annoyed whenever we had to spend more than a few minutes in it. That's not so good, so I decided to see what I could do to improve it, and came to the conclusion that a built-in desk would make a world of difference.

(An explanation of why a built-in desk was such an epiphany starts with the knowledge that the functional workspace of the study is just under 37 square feet, specifically 53 inches by about 100 inches. So every inch really matters -- and eating into that are baseboards that stick out slightly more than two inches from each wall. All of our existing furniture sat against that baseboard and hurt us by wasting the space behind it; realizing this led me to the built-in idea, and then embarrassingly, an episode of Toolbelt Diva that Shannon saw sold us.)

So, after a bit of design-by-Adobe-Illustrator, I came up with a desk idea that incorporates a 20-inch-deep main surface spanning the narrowest part of the room and a 15-inch-deep return that runs the length of the long wall, all supported by ledger boards and a few diagonal struts. The goal was to move the work surface to the most logical spot in the room and optimize the amount of floor real estate by avoiding desk-to-floor supports; that way, we can put drawers on the floor underneath the desk unimpeded by legs or supports, and we can turn in our desk chair without banging our own legs or being restricted in any way. Likewise, we wanted to see whether we liked the new layout, and thenfree up even more storage by hanging some shelves along the narrow part of the room above the desk.

The dimensions of the desk were just large enough to prevent the whole thing being able to be cut as a single piece of a 4x8 sheet of finished plywood, so I had Home Depot cut us two pieces, one for the main surface and one for the return. Using a router, I notched both pieces so they'd come together across a secure joint, and then mitered some screen molding to tack onto the facing edge. While Shannon was priming all that, I cut the ledger boards and tested them out on the walls, and just before bed last night we got the ledgers on the walls and the first coat of paint on the desk surface and supports.

This morning, Shannon started the second coat of paint while I mitered some quarter round molding to run along the back edge of the desk (thus hiding the seam where it meets the wall). We primed and painted that, and after the Eagles game this afternoon, I installed the desk on the ledger boards. As we speak, the wood filler is drying in the screw holes holding the desk onto the ledgers and supports, and later tonight I'll throw a third coat of paint on the whole setup. Tomorrow will likely bring the final step, attaching the molding to the back edge, and we should be all done! It's already clear how big a change this will be; that room will go from barely tolerable to one of my favorite in the house, and I'm sure Shannon and I will start to quibble over who gets to be sitting and working in there. We can only hope!

(Note that I put up a Flickr photo set with pictures of the whole process; the set includes the pictures from this post, but has a few more as well.)

Since I was out of town all weekend (and crushingly, haven't been able to play with my new saw yet!), let's take a swing around the web and see what the last week has brought.

• From the Chicago Tribune comes a few tips: hanging an extra layer of drywall on either side of an existing wall will make a room a lot quieter, and working with glass blocks is much easier if you use a new system that trades mortar for plastic channels and silicone caulk. There's also an autumn checklist for projects that'll help make sure you're insulated for the coming cold.
• Do you have cracks running down your walls? According to the Boston Globe's handyman on call, those cracks might only be in the paint layer and not the wall itself; fixing them might only take a light sanding and a final thin coat of paint. The folks behind the San Francisco Chronicle's Sweat Equity column address cracks that are run a bit deeper and appear at sheetrock joints, explaining why they happen and recommending how you go about repairing them so they look as good as new.
• Do you wake up in the middle of the night to the sound of your toilet's water supply coming on and refilling the tank even though nobody's used it? The Ask the Expert column in the Seattle Times recommends dropping a bit of food dye into the tank to help pinpoint where the leak might be.
• Finally, the Philadelphia Inquirer takes a look at "manspaces", from redone subterranean basements to backyard writing sheds, and likes what it sees.

From today's New York Times comes a pretty sweet article about homes designed with hidden rooms. I'll admit the same thing that one of the people profiled in the article does: this has always been a fantasy of mine, having a small space tucked away behind a bookcase or false wall; it has precious little to do with privacy and a tremendous amount to do with sheer dorkiness. Heck, after reading about Maggie and Jason's discovery of a hidden room in their house during a renovation, I'm pretty sure I had a dream or two that Shannon and I found one in ours. Nevermind that our lot is all of 15 feet wide, and we can account for every square inch of our home without even breaking a sweat... I can't imagine where I'd tuck a hidden room. But a man can dream!

The Washington Post had a good article two weeks ago that offered up an interesting perspective on the relationship between homeowners and the contractors they hire. From the woman who hired a friend (and regretted it nearly instantly) to the man who held a barbeque for his contractor and crew, the article boiled down to three succinct points: do your homework (check documents and references), use the word-of-mouth network as fully as possible, and find someone who fits your own style and expectations.

Kevin Kelly's Cool Tools site has another awesome equipment tip today that I feel the need to pass on: DemoBags. Made of tightly-woven plastic fiber, the bags are supposed to hold anything you throw at 'em, and withstand the abuse that's typical of demolition and renovation waste disposal -- which makes them perfect for the 400 to 500 pounds of broken-up concrete that I need to clear out from beneath our backyard deck. I ordered a batch of them from Absolute Home, and I'll let y'all know how they work out!

As I've said before, venting our dryer is a project that's been on my to-do list since the day we walked through this house with our real estate agent. Thinking the project through, there were two major undertakings that were clearly part of the job: I was going to have to drill and chisel a hole for the dryer vent through the three-brick-thick wall that surrounds our house, and most of the venting ductwork would have to be run through the dark, debris-filled crawlspace that runs beneath our kitchen. Both of these led to a major bout of procrastination on my part, and it wasn't until I was in the crawlspace tracking wires a week or two ago that I learned some good news -- a prior owner had already punched a vent through the brickwork, more or less in the exact spot that I had figured would be the best option. As I lay there on a pile of bricks in the crawlspace, I wondered why I had never seen the vent from the outside before, so I hopped out and went around to the back. That's when the reason became clear: more recently, someone had seen fit to plug the vent with concrete. The whole thing gave me something to think about for a bit, and this weekend, I decided to tackle the project once and for all.

Saturday, I went to our local hardware store and bought a four-pound handheld sledge hammer and a dryer vent attached to a segment of four-inch-diameter rigid aluminum vent. Three strong whacks later, the concrete plug was in pieces on the ground, and it became clear either that I'd have to figure out a way to attach a new vent to the duct that had been plugged, or I'd have to yank that duct out and replace it with the one that I had bought. Being more a demolition man than a nuance man, I went with the latter, and three or four minutes of work with a vise grip later, I had the old duct sitting on the ground next to me. The new duct snugly slid into the spot, and I was off and running... to the hardware store again, to get the remainder of the rigid ductwork I'd need for the run from the dryer to the vent.

Returning with 13 two-foot sections of rigid aluminum vent tubing, four elbow joints, a roll of aluminum tape, and a roll of galvanized steel strapping, I pulled the washer and dryer out from the wall and got to work. Getting the elbow and tubing attached to the dryer turned out to be harder than I thought it'd be, mostly because I wanted to make sure that it stayed securely attached after the dryer was back against the wall. I then needed to cut a hole through the drywall that separates our basement from the crawlspace, and run the duct all the way up to the joists forming the roof of the space. After estimating the right angle that the duct's path would have to take to get to the vent in the wall, I ran and attached everything up against the joists, and then spent about five minutes of trial-and-error before getting the elbows right in the connection between the duct and the vent. I finished everything off by taping all the joints (with the aluminum tape I had forgetfully left back in the basement), and then tested it all out. It was incredibly satisfying to turn on the dryer and feel the rush of air coming out of the vent -- after all the time I spent on my belly and back in the crawlspace, I'm not sure I could have taken it if there had been a problem somewhere!

Jonesing after that effort, I spent another half-hour cleaning all the organic debris out of our crawlspace (including three cardboard boxes, a half-dozen empty soda bottles, a bunch of cut two-by-fours, and an inordinate amount of other bits of wood, sheetrock, and whatnot), and then cleaned up all the dust that I had kicked into the basement. I polished the whole project off by hanging our iron and handheld vacuum on the brick wall next to the washer and dryer, and then took a very long shower. It felt good to get that project done, and it felt even better to see that the basement stayed nice, cool, and dry when Shannon started a few loads of laundry today.

During the househunting process, one of the very few things that Shannon and I didn't like about what has now become our home is that it pretty much has not a single usable clothes closet. The house is over a century old, and the two upstairs closets are between 13 and 15 inches deep -- not even close to deep enough for a clothes hanger. So we stressed and fretted about how we'd solve it in the weeks before we moved in, and ended up with a series of solutions that we're really happy with.

In terms of the clothes storage problem, we shopped around quite a bit for a closet system that would work in the space we had available in the master bedroom. One idea that I really wanted to work was EasyClosets, a company that provides you with the ability to design wall units online, and then ships you the materials for self-installation. Unfortunately, the place we wanted to put the closets was on an old plaster wall that wasn't exactly plumb and has a door right in the middle of it; after talking to a rep, it turns out that the EasyClosets system requires an uninterrupted back wall on which to mount the main hanging equipment, and it's not easily adaptable to weird situations like ours. We played around with a bunch of other ideas, but found our solution at (of all places!) Ikea, their modular PAX system. Using their 93 inch-tall frames, we ended up with three different levels of hanging space along with shelving and drawers galore, enough space to replicate both of the closets we had back in Brookline and then some. The whole unit sits perfectly against the back wall of the master bedroom, and took about five or six hours in total for Shannon's father and me to build.

Of course, that left us with another dilemma -- what to do with the two pre-existing closets! As shallow as they are, it wasn't hard to decide; we ended up getting 3/4-inch plywood cut down to size as shelves, and I spent the last few days hanging them up. We now have a great space in the bedroom for off-season and decorating storage, and a great linen closet in the hallway, and all it took was a bit of wood, a little circular saw and sander work, some paint, and some screws and anchors. And with one of the remnant bits of wood, I was even able to put a mini-shelf into Shannon's basement knitting area! All in all, we went from closet panic to closet and shelving nirvana, and all it took was patience.

I know that this doesn't come close to being a do-it-yourself project, but how cool is this: a Manhattan family has added a bona-fide porch and garden to the rooftop of their sixth-floor apartment. Complete with a screen door, the whole setup includes a newly-sealed roof, a layer of soil (leveled with chopsticks!), 2,200 plants, and a porch swing, with a view that looks out to the Empire State Building. The whole thing is incredible, and worth a look.

Talk about a DIY project! The Coopers are a couple who, through their participation in Maryland's Resident-Curatorship Program, have taken over the restoration and maintenance of an 18th-century Prince George County mansion in return for the right to live there rent-free. From the sounds of it, they assume any costs of the restoration and provide the labor, and get the chance to live in the Hazelwood mansion (and on its surrounding 11-acre land) as a result; Pam Cooper has gone so far as attending masonry conferences in order to restore the home to perfection. It's clearly not the answer for a handy person who's looking for a cheap place to live -- I'd imagine the costs of a restoration of that size are pretty hefty -- but it's a neat idea, and for the right people I bet it's fun as all hell.

We decided to wait to change the locks on our DC house until after all the contractors were done, so after the window guys finished up last week, I figured I'd take care of that. All the exterior doors on the new house have standard single- or double-cylinder deadbolts and keyed doorknobs, but oddly I've never worked with these before; all of my experience changing out lock cylinders prior to this has been with mortise cylinders, which are more or less the standard in the steel security doors that grace most New York City apartments. (Embarrassingly, we actually never got around to changing the locks on our Brookline apartment!)

I spoke with our local DC hardware store (actually more of a locksmith that also sells basic tools and whatnot), and they said that they could re-key the cylinders from the deadbolts and doorknobs for $10 each, way cheaper than buying new equipment. Happily, getting at the cylinders in these kinds of deadbolts is totally simple, at least in my Schlage ones; it involves removing the outer and inner assemblies from the door, and then removing a single screw on the back of each assembly which holds the cylinders in. It was easy enough that I figured I could take the cylinders out of the keyed doorknobs as well, but quickly learned that that wasn't quite as simple. (If you look at the picture, all those pins and springs shouldn't be liberated from the mechanism!) Oops. I decided to just take all the other doorknobs to the locksmith intact. After a few hours, I had ten newly-rekeyed cylinders to install back into my doors.

The nice thing about changing all the locks is that we moved from two different keys (one for the front of the house, another for the back) to one key for everything. Now, I just need to install a new deadbolt on one of the exterior doors and replace two inside-door locks to which we weren't given keys by the seller, and we'll be all done.

To me, part of what makes me happy to DIY is also knowing when it's time to LOPDI (let other people do it). One example of this: the replacement of all of the windows on the front of our new house, something that is clearly beyond my means. So once we closed on the house, we enlisted the help of a local DC window replacement company who set us up with an estimate, measured the seven frames, and ordered replacement Weather Shield wood windows.

The old windows on the front of the house were in pretty bad shape. They were all wood windows (in the Capitol Hill historic district, that's mandatory for homes like ours), but they had suffered the punishment of time -- they had about a thousand layers of paint on them, they were pretty warped in the frames, the decrepit hardware varied from window to window, and a lot of the sash cords and balances just plain didn't work. Add to that the fact that they were all single-pane (and only a few of the panes were the original leaded glass, the rest having been replaced with more modern pressed glass over time), and thoughts of our heating and cooling bills made it pretty easy to justify starting to price out replacement windows. I talked to a few different companies serving the DC metro area, and settled on the folks at American Windows and Siding.

It took about five weeks for the windows to be made and delivered, and the installers came this past Wednesday. They did a great job, working like machines to get the old windows out and put the new ones into the existing frames. The new windows are double-hung and tilt into the room for easier cleaning (and painting!), and they're double-paned, with argon between layers of low-E glass, so that we don't hemorrhage money for heating and cooling. They come primed on the outside, so we now just have to prime the insides and then paint 'em all (more taping off, yay!), and we're entirely done with the major items on our pre-move-in checklist.

One other thing I like about the new windows: the indentations in the wood of the bottom sashes, used to open and close the windows. There's probably an economic motive for Weather Shield to do this rather than provide hardware on the windows themselves, but I quite like the look of the smoothly-rounded indentations. I wonder if they'll get dirty as all sin as we stick our grubby fingers in them; only time will tell!

Today brought a mid-morning trip down to DC so that I could get a permit for our window replacement job (starting tomorrow!). People who've lived in the District put the fear of God into me about how long the whole permit process would take, and how this would be my introduction to the bureaucracy that will rule my life from here on out, but the reality was almost the exact opposite: from start to finish, getting the permit took me about an hour.

Our new house is in the historic district of Capitol Hill, so any work on the front-facing portion of the house requires not just a permit, but also a sign-off by the Historic Preservation Office. So I started off there, info in hand, to present my case for window replacement to the officer assigned to our district. I had to wait about 10 minutes for her to get out of a staff meeting, but once she was available, her involvement in the process took about three minutes. She asked to see pictures of the front of the house and what kind of windows we were using as replacements, and then after explaining that our two-over-two windows might not be historically accurate, she granted the permit. (She actually first asked whether I'd consider putting one-over-one windows into the main bays, but I told her that our contractor had already had the windows made and was ready to install them. She then wondered what I would have done had she not granted the permit, and I reminded her that that's why I had had this entire conversation with her a month ago, via email, and that she had reassured me that two-over-two windows were fine.) That done, I headed over to the main DCRA office for the final sign-off and permit.

I had been told that homeowners could short-cut a lot of the red tape at DCRA by using the Homeowners' Center, so that's where I headed. I discovered a small three-person office next door to the main permit desk, an office in which I was the only person other than the three DCRA staffers. The man who processed my permit application had me run across the hall to get a signature from the Construction Inspection Branch which would prevent problems with the installation of a DirecTV dish (something we decided to add onto the permit for the sake of completeness), then run downstairs to pay the $33 fee, and by the time I came back -- probably about 20 or 25 minutes total -- my permit was waiting for me. It really was a cinch. (It actually was enough of a cinch that I braved the DC Department of Motor Vehicles, and came out with a new DC driver's license about 90 minutes later.)

I'm sure that more complicated construction or renovation plans might take longer to get cleared, but I have to say that this whole process was easy as pie. And with all of our new neighbors telling us how quickly contractors get stop-work orders placed on them without valid permits in Capitol Hill, it was worth every penny to know that our windows will be in by the end of tomorrow.