Forum Archive: Posts by: donatella

I have hardwood floors in my kitchen, which is located on ground floor in the back of the house facing the backyard. The ground floor is lower than the backyard in the typical Italianate style. During two violent rainstorms over the past few years, I have had two incidents where inadequate drainage in the backyard resulted in water coming onto my wood kitchen floors. I am getting a French drain installed to remedy the drainage issue but I am left with a section of kitchen flooring near the door which has been water damaged.

Where many of the boards meet, there are black lines where the water completely penetrated the finish, seeping into the wood and leaving lined black stains at the end of the floor boards. I am wondering if any of you brownstoners have any experience with removing these stains. I read that it was possible to remove the finish, apply a solution of oxalic acid and hot water and that would remove the stains. Floors would have to then be resanded and finished but that stains can be removed.

Does anyone have experience with doing this? I would hate to have to completely remove the boards and replace. The wood is red oak, a nice select grade. They USED to be beautiful.

I bought a nice Baldwin brass handset three years ago for my double front doors from Simons Hardware in Midtown. They are now looking a little shabby, i.e. getting spotted and tarnished. The warrantee covered this for a year and both the store and the manufacturer really didn’t provide much help or information on how to make these things look good again. (Baldwin said get a local metal working company to remove the tarnish). It is a satin finish and I understand that a thin layer of lacquer is originally applied to the metal to prevent corrosion and that the gradual erosion of this protection allowed for the tarnish. I am ok with applying a little elbow grease with some Brasso if that is what it takes , but I think that it may need to cleaned and an application of that protective layer of lacquer to prevent this in the future.

Does anyone have any experience with this or any advice?

Thanks, Brownstoners

Last week, I posted on Millad (718-669-8305), who redid my stoop. I make a photo album of the work, so if you are interested, please take a look.

Dear Brownstoners, Please bear with this longish story about my stoop repair.
Any comments and/or recommendations would be highly appreciated.

I have a brownstone stoop, which is a two sets of stairs connected by a 6X6 landing.
There were a number of cracks in the landing, on the side of the landing and the bottom stairs which got worse this winter. I hired a guy who had done some repairs to other stoops in the neighborhood.. He did this as a sideline to a construction job he is part of on my block. The work he did on those stoops seemed OK – he was charging a few hundred dollars and I thought that would solve my immediate problem of not making the stoop worse over the winter, though I did not want to rebuild the stoop. Well, he chipped away at the cracks as part of the repair process and it turns out this is a pretty big job now and there are tunnels and grooves all over the landing and its side, as well as on the bottom steps.. The guy himself seems to have no clue on how to match the colors (though we picked out a color and some tinted sand). Now I have a stoop with deep tunnels and grooves chipped into it where the cement was cracked or crumbly.

The longer term good solution is to redo the stoop (and redo the surface of the brownstone as well) but my near term goal is to repair the stoop and match the color of
the brownstone roughly. The top set of stairs is fine; it is the landing and the last few steps which are in rough (now rougher shape).

I am feeling very annoyed at myself for going with this “pickup” worker, and not bidding out the job and learning beforehand what was going on with the stoop.. This guy seems to have experience with masonry repairs and cement but is not a “brownstoning” pro and I am quite frankly pretty nervous now that it appears that the stoop is in rough shape.

I was speaking with Sal this am (an owner of Pintchik) about this problem which began yesterday and he was discussing a great brownstone masonry company owner when the guy walked into the store. He came to see the job and said that a patch job was inadequate for the longer term, and gave me a price of 1800 for doing the repairs
alone (the first guy chipped away A LOT of the landing). He recommended the use of a pre-mixed cement (he had a sample which matched perfectly) which he told me he could give me details on where to get it for my worker if I decided to do that. Another bid was 4,000 dollars for the repair alone (total flim flam jerk also working in the neighborhood).

Any feedback on how to solve this problem from a structural and aesthetic perspective without totally breaking the bank would be appreciated. Recommendations on companies or repair people would be appreciated. I will completely rebuild the steps as part of a total brownstone job at some point, but not now.

Thanks for your kind help.

The ant invasion began a while ago in my kitchen, where I dealt with it my spraying. However, it’s not really eliminating them and I got a sense why over the weekend. My backyard is overrun with ants. I have a paver brick patio (over a bed of sand) and it seems that I have armies of ants coming through the cracks in the bricks making lovely little sand mounds from the sand under the patio. I never saw so many and don’t know the reason why or the best way to get rid of them. I wound up dousing all the hills with an indoor bug spray but don’t know if that will solve my problem. I could call an exterminator and spend a few hundred bucks but wondering if brownstoners can share their advice. Thank you very much.

This is a follow up to our funny/cranky/serious posting yesterday on gentrification. I was carrying on about how few services there have been to date on Fulton Street in Clinton/Washington vicinity. But things are getting better — they really are — and I am so happy and grateful to have some services now which seem basic but were non-existant for the first 5 years I lived here. I do a little dance every time I see a wreck transformed with a store window. But the best development for me of late has been Rolando, who owns Imperial Cleaners on Fulton near Clinton. He came here 6 months ago from Washington Heights where there are tons of dry cleaners and took over the former Bubbleworks store site. Simply put, Rolando does beautiful, fast, professional work at great prices. He’ll rush for you, do repairs, even suffer your bad Spanish if you so choose to assault him. One thing that I love is that he does women’s cotton/blend blouses for 3 dollars — beautifully sized and hung up. Because we had nothing before — Bubbleworks was a bad joke, an expensive, pre-paid bad joke, where the fumes coming off your clothes would make you pass out and where they stuffed your clothes with so much tissue paper, your suits could stand on their own and you got stuff back with cigarette holes in them…. I used to go to Brooklyn Heights to my old place to do dry cleaning. Anyway, Rolando is the best and if you haven’t used him yet, please go there.