Abstract floors

Bored with symmetry? Abstract pattern floors are time-consuming but deeply satisfying once they're done.

To make one, find a source for scrap, broken or discontinued tile and stone. All the marble and granite in this floor was salvaged from the trash pile at a stone distributor/fabricator. Tile distributors also sell returns and discontinued styles at a discount. Collect pieces that are all roughly the same thickness.

If you have the mental discipline to work out a pattern first, draw it on the floor and then fit the stone to it. However, it's more interesting to just pick a corner and start laying out pieces, fitting them together as you would a jigsaw puzzle. Cut pieces as needed with a wet-cutting tile saw, fitting the tiles together so the grout lines are roughly 1/2" wide or less. After 10 - 20 s.f., carefully move several square feet of the pattern to the side, spread mortar in that area and then set the stone back in place permanently.

A variation of this floor using ceramic tile is shown below. This design started with a circle and few long lines sketched on the floor as starting points, but everything after that was improvised.



If a complete floor is too intimidating, use standard tile for most of the floor, then fill small areas at doors or corners with different colors and shapes - as in these examples.

Tile and trim details

The spaces in Joyce's new addition are falling into place.

The threshold around the wood burning stove is 1/8" steel. The floor tiles are slate, with quartz, sandstone, glass, marble and granite on the walls. The trim around the glass block is white oak, and the paneling on the left is some odd-looking cherry from a lumberyard that sells rejected and discontinued materials.

The base under the cherry panel is purpleheart. The flower detail is made from purpleheart, bloodwood, a broken marble, part of a copper rain chain and a yellowish wood I no longer remember the name of. There's also quartersawn sycamore under the small slate tiles.



Most of this came out of my garage. My working method is to see what I have lying around, then try to make it work. The beauty of using lots of materials and colors is that eventually, somehow, it does.

Little friends underfoot - creating and preserving invertebrate habitat in your home

One of the long-accepted axioms of home ownership is that bugs simply do not belong in them. Every hardware store and home center has shelves full of lethal chemical weapons designed to annihilate anything that suffers the twin misfortunes of being born very small and wanting a nice place to live. It’s deeply engrained in our culture, an attitude learned almost as soon as we learn to walk. Somehow it just seems so natural to stomp on little things.

Thoughtful homeowners are starting to question this industry-encouraged campaign of extermination that we wage on our tiny fellow creatures. Some are even asking the question, “Why can’t people and bugs learn to coexist? Isn’t there room for everyone?”

Centipedes, spiders, ants, termites, cockroaches, beetles, silverfish, houseflies, mites - there’s a world full of fascinating insects anxious to share your home; a world packed with drama, with armies on the march, skillful predators and elusive prey, grazing herds, solitary dreamers, lightning fast runners and ace dive bombers - even loyal friends.

Consider the cockroach. Traditionally despised, squashed and poisoned at every opportunity, they are in fact easy-going and quite intelligent, with their own distinctive personalities, and not at all difficult to train. Because of their long history of conflict with humans, they tend to scatter when the light comes on, but once you show them that your intentions are friendly and that you have some tasty food to share they’ll actually come out from their hiding places when you call them. They’re happy in any warm, dark place, and they genuinely seem to like people’s company. With very little encouragement they will give back as much as they take.

Another favorite in our home are spiders. No special preparations are needed to attract them, although they appreciate a bit of a draft, and of course a steady supply of food. We leave our screens open in the warm months to attract tasty tidbits inside. Then, if our little arachnids become too abundant, we just close the screens.

There are ways to share your home with little creatures without feeling overrun. As with any animal, you need to be very clear about setting limits and boundaries. The who and what of mealtimes has to be firmly established. For instance, unless their appetites are properly channeled, termites and carpenter ants can cause quite a bit of inconvenience for owners of wood houses. One successful strategy for enjoying the company of these captivating social insects without losing your house entirely is to construct a floor level viewing chamber full of standard 2 x 4s, but lined on all sides with heavy gauge sheet metal and capped with thick plate glass for easy viewing. Set the plate glass in a tightly fitting steel channel welded to the sheet metal with an arc welder (welders can be rented, if you don’t have one on hand). Install a water source to keep the wood moist - a must for carpenter ants (although termites aren’t so fussy). I use lengths of 1/2” rigid PVC tubing with a 1/16” hole drilled into it about every foot, capped at one end, with a shutoff and a connection to the house water supply at the other end. Once a day I’ll briefly open the shutoff -just enough to dampen the wood. If you get the moisture just right, you’ll get some gorgeous fungi as an added bonus. You can also hook up a timer and servomechanism to the shutoff, so that the whole operation could be done automatically - consult a commercial greenhouse supplier for parts. A small, tightly sealed hatch is also a good idea for termites, so you can feed them fresh lumber when the original supply is gone.

Mr. G. H. of Abilene, Texas writes me about an interesting ant training experiment he’s been working on for the last five years. Every evening before bed he spreads refined sugar over his stomach, being careful to leave a thin trail of it from his bed to a known ant colony behind his baseboard. At first the ants were shy, but now when Mr. G. H. comes into his bedroom the workers rush out excitedly, aware that their snack is on it’s way. They have lost any fear of climbing up on him, and a bold few will even pluck small crumbs from his beard. The colony has grown quite large, and early this summer sent out a flight of queens inside the house - a sure sign of trust.

As we say in our house: Think before you thwack.

CD shelf with frog

I had difficulty getting this design right. Somehow the frog pulled it all together.

The wood at the base is walnut with a section of bark. The upper left door is sycamore and the lower doors are white oak. Other woods are elm, paduak, maple, bloodwood, purpleheart, coco bolo, willow and poplar. I also used stones, marbles, copper and brass rods, aluminum, some beads, a piece of beach glass and an old NYC subway token.

I gave it to my parents as a Christmas present in 2003, but I didn't actually finish it until the summer of 2005.

Dragonfly project

My daughter Iris and I make a dragonfly from copper and beads. Full article in Backyard Living Magazine, July/August 2006, p. 20. You can't see them, but 5 people are standing around telling us what to do and making funny jokes - jollying Iris and I up so the shot will have a happy, upbeat look. In reality I had bad gas but was trying to act normal, and Iris was annoyed with me for imposing my bead choices on her.

Still, the project turned out well, so kudos to all!
[Photo by Mike Krivit]

Vertical Garden Project for the magazine

The original idea was to create a section of garden, but tipped on end, with a bird feeder, bird house and flowering plants and vines - both annuals and perennials. This is a typical beginning prototype for articles I do. I get an idea, spend a few hours at Home Depot gathering materials, then put it all together - like a painter transferring the vision in his head onto canvas.

My editor's response when he saw it was - "that sucks". Except he used polite words. Crushed, I immediately called Joyce. She had seen it the day before as I was putting the finishing touches on. She told me again that she loved it and that I was really talented. She was very supportive.

End table with inlaid knots and rocks

I collect knots and rocks.

How to replace a toilet

A toilet that does not flush well can turn what should be pleasant personal time into a shaming, stressful experience. A plunger at the ready by the side of the toilet is of course a thoughtful touch in any bathroom, but all too often it’s an indication of deeper problems. Fortunately, replacing an old toilet is a straightforward procedure, and with common sense and a few basic hand tools almost anyone can do it.

The first step is to select a new toilet. Make a checklist of features you like, then ask friends and neighbors for recommendations. Check out consumer guides, and start paying attention to what’s out there (or, more accurately, under you). All too often thrifty homeowners buy budget-brand toilets and end up right back where they started - prisoners of their plunger, struggling to flush even modest movements.

With the new toilet purchased and ready to go, turn the water off, flush ‘old unreliable’ one last time, then sponge out any water left in the tank and bowl. Cram the sponge deeply down into the bowl to get all the water out. This may seem unpleasant but giving in to queasiness now will inevitably lead to disabling feelings of revulsion later, so plunge ahead.

Disconnect the water supply line from the underside of the toilet and look inside the tank. Two large bolts with rubber gaskets hold the tank to the back of the bowl, and to undo them you need to reach in the tank with a screwdriver and hold the bolts in place while loosening the corroded nuts under the water tank. This may sound hard, and in fact it is. Also, in many tanks the ballcock and flushing mechanism get in the way of the screwdriver, and you may need to carefully remove these pieces with a hammer.

The next step, once you have somehow unscrewed the bolts and disposed of the tank, is to remove the nuts holding the toilet bowl to the floor. This is not difficult, unless the heads of the bolts are rusted or worn and simply spin around in the toilet flange when you turn the nuts, in which case it can be very difficult indeed.

But that doesn’t happen often, so crank the nuts off, give the bowl a tug and lift it off the floor. Underneath you’ll see a round flange partially covered by thick globs of evil-looking wax with a dark hole in the center. Quickly stuff a rag into this hole. This is the portal to the waste line, and it will smell.

Get down on your knees and scrape up the old wax ring - the gummy gasket of wax used to seal the joint between the bowl and the toilet flange in the floor. Wax rings are the last line of defense in the waste removal system, preventing flushage and odors from exploding out onto the bathroom floor. Scientists estimate that the average American family uses their toilet 30 to 40 times a day, and after all those years of hard use one could easily believe that the gooey wax smeared on the floor under the old toilet was actually the foul residue of all those thousands of flushes. But that’s not true.

Memory and imagination can be an amateur plumber’s worst enemies.

Frankly though, it’s the next step that rarely goes well for me. But I’m sure it will for you, and I don’t want to scare you away from the job by talking about every little problem that might occur. You’ll figure it out, and at this point it’s too late to turn back.

However, if the floor and the surrounding joists under the toilet do turn out to be rotted from years of leaking - to take one common for-instance - simply remove all weakened subflooring and the finished tile floor resting on it (in some cases also the bathtub and vanity), install temporary support walls in the basement under the rotted joists, cut out the damaged sections, reroute any wiring, plumbing and heating running through the joists (bringing them up to code if necessary), jack up the floor with a hydraulic jack to correct any settling, splice on new joists, lay down new subflooring, retile and grout the floor, then reinstall the fixtures.

Presumably the main waste line running through the house and out to the street is in good shape, with no leaks or cracks of the kind that secretly cause thousands of dollars in damages, but of course it’s difficult to know for sure.

Finally, clean up the mess and unpack the new toilet. You’re almost done!

The rest of the installation is simple enough, and needs little explanation. Just repeat what you did to remove the old one, except in reverse. Consult the manufacturer’s directions if you become confused.

Incidentally, the first flush after you fill the tank may seem sluggish, but this just means you forgot to remove the rag that you stuffed into the waste line. Have a good laugh - then drain and remove the new toilet, pull the soggy rag out and reinstall everything.

Remember, though, to put a fresh wax ring on the bottom of the toilet every time you pull it up and reinstall it. Without a perfectly sealed wax ring toxic sewer gas can vent out and silently fill your entire house while you sleep. And unfortunately under certain circumstances this can kill you.

Before and after

This was one of my bigger projects during the years I worked as a contractor. I bought this house for $18,000 - about the value of the lot. It was overrun with cockroaches - the first time I'd seen them in Minnesota. My crew and I completely gutted the interior, filling up two large dumpsters, and by the time we were done all the cockroaches had disappeared. Which was fortunate, because I was marketing the house to an upscale clientle.

I’m a millionaire!

No doubt friends and family will be astonished by this claim, as I’ve long been pegged as one of those people who is always ‘a day late and a dollar short’ - but nonetheless it’s true. Nor am I the only one. That brass ring is dangling from the post for any number of us, and as long as we don’t try to grab it, it’s ours. And it’s all perfectly legal.

Now, although I’m almost always late with credit card payments, and rarely pay more than the minimum (if that) I receive at least ten totally preapproved offers of credit every week - about 75% for unsecured credit cards, the rest for home equity loans, preapproved auto loans, and miscellaneous. In the past twelve months the sum of all these offers has totaled $1,405,100. Initially I was keeping track just to cheer myself up after going through bankruptcy, but when the money started to get serious I bought a big file cabinet and started to catalog the offers, not really sure where I was going with it, but sensing some deeper meaning that I might tease out of it in time. It was a surprising amount of money to be offered just months out of bankruptcy - although my lawyer pointed out that the recently bankrupted are actually very desirable to finance companies because they have no debt, and thus have lots of disposable income all of a sudden.

Okay, so I’ve been offered $1,405,100. Well, you say, who hasn’t? That’s no reason to feel I’m special. Obviously that amount includes many limited-time offers that have since expired, or would have evaporated once someone actually looked at my credit rating, which unfortunately is not good due to a lackadaisical payment history, some IRS problems, and that bankruptcy. Also, I think somebody may have stolen my identity, although apparently it’s been given back.

But bear with me. The real basis for my claim is more complex, but quite solid and backed up by hard science. I’ll try to explain it without resorting to equations, but if you’re familiar with Dirac, Schrodinger, Heisenburg, and that crowd, it’ll help you follow along.

I think the best way to begin is with Schrodinger’s cat - a wonderful illustration of some of the basic concepts of quantum mechanics. In case you’re unfamiliar with that unfortunate animal (an imaginary one, don’t worry), here’s the story. An ordinary cat is sealed into a soundproof box with a device that may or may not instantly kill the cat at any point in the next half million years. Without opening the box an observer has no way of knowing the cat’s actual state. Thus, the cat can be described as being both dead and alive at the same time. The cat exists in both states simultaneously, and remains so until an attempt at observation defines the actual reality. This story is often used to convey a sense of the bizarre wave/particle duality underlying quantum physics.

But to get back to my original point about being a millionaire. I haven’t followed up on any of the offers of credit I received, and I don’t know if I ever will. However, the fact remains that a large sum of money is being offered to me, at repayment terms that would with clever juggling allow me to keep most of the money for the remainder of my life by paying minimum balances with credit from other lenders. These are sophisticated financial institutions, no doubt fully aware that I’m being offered thousands of dollars every day by other sources. They don’t care. They are similar enough in their business and their approach to me that I think we can lump them all into one set. We’ll call it A, and define it as the set of all consumer credit sources in the United States. We’ll call myself Set B, defined as the sum of all possible states currently existing in time and space at point x,y (the GPS coordinates of my chair). Thus, we can say:

1. During the course of a given year, Set A is willing to provide more than $1,000,000 to Set B.
2. This statement remains true until such time as an outside observer - defined as C, the set of all credit rating agencies in the U.S. - attempts to observe Set B, at which time Set B will become either a millionaire or not a millionaire. Exactly like Schrodinger’s cat, and by extension like basic particles that can be either a wave or a particle until the instant they are observed.
3. If B refuses to accept or decline the offer from Set A - refuses to be observed by C - then statement 1. is always true.
4. Thus, since B can be all possible potential states until such time as he is observed, B is at this moment, in a mathematically real way, a millionaire.
5. Unlike elementary particles, B has free will and can refuse to be observed, and therefore can continue in the state defined in statement 4 forever.

Interestingly, the more coy I am about accepting this money, the more insistent the financial institutions are about giving it to me - a variable that has a huge impact on the underlying equations that prove all this.

Stir in a little Heisenburg, who made it clear that nothing can ever be known with 100% certainty, and a little Dirac, who helped show that a particle could suddenly pop into existence out of thin air, and the possibilities get even weirder. If virtual particles are real, why can't virtual millionaires be also? A millionaire is just a bigger clump of particles. Certainly it seems unlikely, but much of our modern flesh and blood technology is built on the slippery assertions of quantum physics. They may seem unreal, but they have very real consequences - it’s not science fiction.

I’ve written this all up - with full mathematical proofs - and taken it to the bank as collateral for a $500 personal loan, but they’ve got some quibbles about the value I’ve assigned to z - my future level of employment - so it may turn out in the end that I’m just too far ahead of my time.

Tile work with scrap marble and granite pieces

This is the floor of a 4-season porch. The floor is made from 3/4" thick marble and granite scraps that I salvaged from the dumpster at a distributor/fabricator's shop. The walls are paneled with butternut and windows are triple-glazed. The floor has radiant heating.

Carpenters

The call came in at 9:30 at night from the police detective, asking if I knew a [mispronounced name], who had said he worked for me. The detective was just doing a followup investigation on a domestic disturbance, and wanted to ask a few questions. Fine, I said. No problem, I said, thinking of the big job we were in the middle of and how much I was depending on that carpenter.

I had never known much about my helper’s personal life, although we liked each other and considered ourselves friends. I knew there were problems somewhere in the background, but they never came to work with him. He’d take a day off now and then for “some personal shit,” but that was all I ever heard of it, and I didn’t pry. He was young, but quiet and hardworking, and although he mangled grammar and usage and had barely made it out of high school, he was a natural at carpentry. He had an instinctive understanding of building and materials that can’t be taught. I could count on him to figure out tough projects without whining or excessive screwups, and I could count on him to watch my back. He paid attention to the whole job, not just his part of it, and if I made a mistake he’d usually catch it. He had that kind of sweet, steady rhythm to his work that the really good carpenters seem to just be born with. You can see it in the way the hands move.

I tend to hire people I like personally - no indicator of talent, unfortunately, but I have to spend forty hours a week with them. I’ve discovered over the years that I’m drawn to people who have a little bit of darkness in them; people who have peeked over the edge, maybe even gone over it, at some point in their lives. Resumes with this kind of experience are not uncommon in construction, probably because it’s one of the dwindling number of challenging careers that require almost nothing in the way of entry level qualifications except a strong back and a willingness to work hard. For people who’ve been unable to fit into the standard slots set up for them in our economy, people who have not passed the tests, people who have screwed up their lives in some way, construction can be a salvation.

I did a rough tally the next morning while I was sitting in my van trying to decide what to say, if anything, to my carpenter. Among the crowd of carpenters who’ve passed through my life as employees and subs, I’ve worked with two murderers, a convicted felon, and several who’ve spent at least a few days in jail. Four or five had DWI convictions, and a couple had gone through drug rehab. One man - a funny, totally dependable, hardworking roofer with a weakness for boozy bar fights - had to wear a clunky ankle monitor to work for two months. Oops. Many had rocky domestic situations, with spectacular, alcohol-fueled fights ending with clothes thrown out windows, calls to the police, court dates, new phone numbers for a week or two. Some Mondays I could almost hear the sighs of relief to be back at work, away from the complexities of personal lives gone haywire. Hard physical labor with a clear-cut point to it can be a lifesaver.

My own history has also been somewhat irregular, and at times I’ve been a cause of concern for loved ones. I know what failure and shame are like. I went into construction in part because I wasn’t much good at anything else I’d tried. I started at the bottom, doing dirty, menial jobs and not always doing them right; it was hard to shake feelings of humiliation for the first few years, until I began to notice how much I could express just by cutting and pounding wood. A further few years after that, with a good body of competent work under my belt, I finally understood that the ability to imagine and then build structures where nothing had existed before was valuable. Thus my empathy for those troubled souls who wander into my employment, a little lost in the world, seeking some kind of certainty and redemption through acts of construction.

My helper’s difficulties eventually were resolved without further drama. We had one of those awkward talks where two large guys open up to each other for a few moments. Apparently his live-in girlfriend had gone off her meds, and trouble had quickly followed. After a mandatory 72 hour no-contact period everything settled down. Unfortunately, the underlying problems were too big, and the relationship ended soon after.

My bedroom furniture for the last year

No kidding - this is what I see every night when I go upstairs to bed. My mattress is about 15 feet away. It's a huge bedroom - the full attic. Most of it is full of tools, drywall, 2 x 4s and sawdust, along with junk I'm storing for the kids. I never, ever let people see my bedroom.

Kitchen detail

Cabinets are maple, with maple crown made from 1 x 6 with a top piece of bifold trim - a beveled 1 x 2. The detail in the crown is a repeating pattern of square, triangle, round that I cut from walnut, purpleheart, and paduak, though you can't see the colors in this photo. It's tied together with a strip of cherry, and runs around the room. The counter is soapstone. The valence was made from colored glass beads inlaid into holes in a maple 1 x 3, with a strip light behind.

This was a rare job where everything worked well, everybody was happy and I didn't lose money.

Purple bathroom

The top row is some my favorite tile ever. I bought them at a salvage store, and I've never been able to find more.

The tile and marble are arranged in such a way that the viewer looks at them and doesn't notice the ancient, crummy sink and dismal bathroom walls.

First post 3/5/06

I'm creating this blog as a way of sharing my interests in construction and writing.