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Wed, Feb 11 2009 Looking for my blog? It's been moved. To get caught up on my latest entries, click here. Thu, Nov 27 2008 Last weekend I finally got around to installing receptacles, switches, and light fixtures in the bedroom and the office alcove. All told there were two cable TV jacks, three switches, four light fixtures, and 15 receptacles. Not a big deal, really, but enough for me to kill a day and a half. Of course, that included a long hike with the dogs, two trips to the hardware store, one trip to the medicine cabinet (for a Band-Aid), and one major whoops on the very last receptacle.
After wiring 14 receptacles, I was feeling pretty cocky about how quickly I could do the job (never a good sign). I knew just how much Romex to leave sticking out of the box, how much insulation to strip, which way to bend the wires so that they were pulled under the screws as I tightened them. I had it down to a science. Or maybe an art. Or maybe just to the point where I wouldn’t get fired if I were working for a competent electrician, but I was definitely working faster at the end than I was when I started.
The hardest part of the job, for me at least, is removing the outer sheathing from the Romex, or cable. I use a cable ripper, which is made for the job, but it only splits the sheathing lengthwise. You then have to separate the conductors from the sheathing, reach into the box, and cut off the sheathing. I use a pair of diags (pronounced “dikes” and short for diagonal cutting pliers). On the very last receptacle, I reached in, cut the sheathing to within 1 in. of the back of the box, as per code, and when I pulled out the sheathing, the ground wire came out with it. “Oh, [expletive deleted]!”
I got up and walked away, which is almost always the best thing to do when you make a mistake. You have to clear your head and think your way through the problem. My first thought was that maybe I hadn’t stapled the cable within 6 in. of the box like you’re supposed to. I went back and yanked on the wires. Nothing. Of course, I stapled it within 6 in. of the box. I’m the editor of Fine Homebuilding; I probably measured to make sure it was 6 in.
Eventually I realized that I had a little over 1 in. of ground wire entering the box and that I could probably attach a pigtail to it, which is what I did. It wasn’t easy, but I eventually managed to twist the wires together and even got a crimp connector on them.
Next time I’ll try not to get cocky.
Sat, Nov 22 2008 Like a lot of people these days, the editorial staff at Fine Homebuilding has been debating how best to survive these tough economic times. We’ve been meeting regularly to ask how we can improve the magazine, make it more compelling for our current readers or more accessible to new readers. That sort of thing.
As part of this process (which, by the way, is what had us wondering about a tagline), we’ve been looking at other magazines to see what we might learn from them. Wired and Outside got a lot of attention, especially from the younger guys. Esquire still stands out for its great writing. The musicians among us are impressed by The Fretboard Journal.
I spent some time with a magazine called Good, a two-year-old publication that’s been winning a lot of industry awards. Its tagline is “For people who give a damn,” which I like but doesn’t tell me much. The one online is a little better. It says, “An entertaining magazine about things that matter.”
I was reading the October issue and found something that I can’t stop thinking about. It was a two-page spread with a huge photo and only 130 words of text. The photo shows a big freighter out on the open ocean, with a parachutelike sail deployed at end of a long line. The SkySail, as it’s called, is the invention of a German engineer named Stephan Wrage, and using it can trim a freighter’s fuel costs by as much as 35%. That’s amazing to me, so much so that I keep telling people about it and showing them the photo in the magazine.
But here’s the thing: The story of the SkySail is of absolutely no practical use to me (unless you count fodder for cocktail-party small talk). That information won’t help me remodel a house or edit a magazine. Nonetheless, as a reader, I am utterly delighted by it. And as an editor, I’m trying to calculate its value.
You see, the editors of Good devoted two whole pages to the story. We would never have done that in Fine Homebuilding. I don’t mean that we would never have run a story about freighters using sails to conserve fuel. Obviously, we wouldn’t do such a thing in a magazine about building houses. What I mean is that whatever the equivalent home-building story might be, we would never have devoted so much space to it.
I, for one, would have argued that something of no practical use to any reader was therefore not valuable to any reader. If we ran the story at all, I would have said to give it one quarter of a page and surround it with four practical things. Fine Homebuilding is an expensive magazine, and I think people buy it because it is of use to them. I’ve always believed that people renew their subscriptions because the magazine helps them to earn a living or to save money by working on their own homes. And in tough economic times, I have thought it was even more important that we publish as much useful information as possible.
Suddenly, though, I am not so sure. I keep thinking about how that giant photo got my attention and how that brief story has resonated with me. And I keep wondering about value of delight.
Fri, Nov 14 2008 My wife and I argued about the space at the top of the stairs. We don’t have an attic in this tiny Cape, so I wanted to wall off the area and create a storage closet. Cynthia wanted to put the closet elsewhere and use the space under the roofline as a little home office, with a computer desk. I was holding my own until she suggested that we get Chuck Miller’s opinion.
Around the office, I’ve taken to calling Chuck The Oracle because he knows a lot, remembers everything, and has great ideas. Sometimes we’ll make a pretense of trying to think up a good headline for an article instead of just going into Chuck’s office and asking him to tell us the perfect headline, which is what eventually happens. It’s like racking your brain to remember the actor who played Murray on The Mary Tyler Moore Show instead of just using Google.
I was surprised that Cynthia would submit to arbitration with Chuck. She usually begs me not to ask his opinion because while his ideas are great (skylights, built-ins, cove lighting) and have improved our home in innumerable ways, his ideas have also been know to increase the cost and slow the progress of our renovation.
Well, it wasn’t even close. Chuck thought tucking a desk under the sloping roofline, where a seated person would not be bothered by the limited headroom, was a good use of the space. He said an office nook would feel protected and cozy, but not isolated. And he liked that it would create an open feeling at the top of stairs. I didn’t have a chance after that.
When I turned my attention to designing the home office, I considered extending the balustrade to enclose the space, but I didn’t like the idea that the view through the balusters would be the tangled mess of wires and papers that our home office would inevitably become. I also figured we could use the extra storage, so I built a half-wall for the handrail to die into, with paneling on one side (Chuck’s idea) and bookshelves on the other.
 
The half-wall is just a big box, made of birch plywood with pine nosing. I applied a framework of pine rails and stiles to create the paneled look. The 1x pieces are joined with pocket screws, a trick I learned from Gary Striegler’s article on wainscoting. I wasn’t sure if I should run baseboard around the whole thing, but I’m glad I did. I capped the unit with a piece of walnut.
Now if I would just repair the drywall I damaged in the process and hook up the electrical, we could actually use the space.
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