Vinegar. Sweet Pickins Furniture
Faux Barn Wood. House of Smiths
Burnt Wood. (Don’t do this at home) Urban-Now
Hammer and Stain. Young House Love
Reuse. Rehabilitate. Restore. Architectural salvage and repurposed pieces for the home.
Vinegar. Sweet Pickins Furniture
Faux Barn Wood. House of Smiths
Burnt Wood. (Don’t do this at home) Urban-Now
Hammer and Stain. Young House Love
The first time I went to check out The Rockaways and look at houses was during the winter. It was a gray, rainy weekday. Miserable. I was totally uninspired and that’s when I started looking upstate.
Well, over the weekend I saw a Rockaway listing that could work for what I want to do and I visited again. This time it was a sunny weekend and people were out. With dogs! And bikes! And frisbees! I walked along the beach and thought….yeah, I could deal with this.
It would mean I can commute from home while I’m working on the house. If I do upstate, I’m up there on my own for the better part of the week.
It would mean I’m not strictly in a second home area (Yeah, I know, people live upstate full time). Buyers who move there can take the A train to work. Granted, it would take them just as long as driving from upstate, but it’s a $2.50 subway ride.
It would mean less taxes.
It would mean I’m not paying thousands for gas to drive up and back while working on the house.
Drawbacks? Well, The Rockaways are still very rundown. The part I can afford, anyway. FYI, I’ll tell you that this is between Beach 86 and 100 Street. It’s totally risky.
Do I like taking risks? Yeah. Kind of.
If you know of any reason I shouldn’t do this, speak up now!!
Adam Yauch has passed from cancer at the young age of 47. This celebrity death hits way too close to home for me. I’ll always remember Adam as that guy in the punk band back in high school. He was a year older than me, one of those hip brownstone neighborhood kids who went to Murrow.
Thanks for the music and activism, Adam.

The Kings County public real estate auction is coming up this month. To be clear, there are auctions every Thursday but the annual one is a bit less risky, IMHO. The opening bid prices are listed on the government site and you can preview the properties prior to the auction. Download the flyer from their site for pictures and more info on each home.
163A Halsey is up for auction again. It sold for $400k last year with a starting bid of $325k. Obviously, there were multiple bidders. Wonder what happened?
Sean Casey Animal Rescue acquired a 5000 square foot space in Sunset Park over a year ago and it’s finally ready to house homeless pets. The grand opening should be announced in June.
Sean Casey is the go-to guy for pet adoption in central Brooklyn. Check out the hundreds of dogs in Prospect Park during off leash hours on a weekend and ask where these people got their dogs from. Sean Casey is Da Man.
The original Kensington storefront will remain open for adoptions and the Sunset location will shelter pets as they come in off the street or from kill shelters. The space can comfortably house up to 42 dogs and 50 cats with state of the art kennel cleaning facilities that I wish I had in my own house.
Casey would like to open a shelter like this in every borough and I have no doubt that he’ll make it happen.
Check out the video below. Timmy is up for adoption. TIMMMMAAYYYY!!!!!!!
Not being too familiar with Sullivan County, I contacted buyer’s agent Joe Addeo at The Rural Connection to show me around yesterday. What a luxury not having to set up appointments, navigate and drive from house to house!
We saw a bunch of homes that were in pretty decent shape. None of them would have worked for my flip purposes, but it’s definitely a buyer’s market over there. That part of Sullivan County near the Delaware River is beautiful but quiet. Don’t go expecting a scene, man.
Anyway, on to the houses! Find info on all of them here.
The farmhouse pictured above is a steal at $175k. Great piece of property on 5 acres with a pond near Jeffersonville. The house doesn’t need much work at all, which is why it didn’t suit my own purposes. One can just move in and enjoy. I saw some unfinished molding. That was about the extent of the work IMHO.
This lovely cape was in decent shape also. It’s very close to Jeffersonville and the Villa Roma Resort, which is like an Italian version of a Borscht Belt resort. A sausage belt resort, if you will. The house could use some updating or you can overlook the drop ceilings and dated kitchen and just enjoy your summer. Not bad for $139k.
This Cochecton house was pretty sweet for $89k and would have worked for me had the neighboring house not been so close (close by country standards). On the plus side, the neighbors have horses. Unfortunately, that’s a negative when you have dogs. Anyhoo, great bones, good location. Price is unbeatable!
Oh, this was a good one too! Another not-much-to-do house. The exterior looks worse than the interior. I remember that this one had a great kitchen with aluminum cabinets and an old drainboard/sink and the floors were in perfect shape. $139k in Cochecton.
The city girl in me appreciated this one simply because it was within walking distance to civilization. The village of Kauneonga Lake isn’t very big but has 4-5 good restaurants that overlook the lake. This is the perfect retreat for lake lovers, even though the public access is some ways from the house. There’s a hot tub in the back. Who doesn’t like a weekend place with a hot tub? $109,900.
Finally, this lovely Cochecton farm house belongs to my buddy Sal, an antiques dealer in Callicoon. The house is about to hit the market at under $200k. When it does, I’ll let you know all about it…as well as the cool vintage trailers he’s selling. But for now, consider this your head’s up.
Look, in the early days of the modern, multimedia WWW (we’re talking about just a decade into the past) Web designers had to do everything. Creating sites from scratch meant that a business, even a small business or an individual, had to hire a person to do that job.

There’s no human tragedy in the fact that eventually those design services could be handled by software instead. That’s just the way high-technology is moving. Obedient software solutions sometimes can be even easier to deal with than those artsy designer types!
Web designers have newer functions, which include creating templates or managing existing websites or dreaming up new forms of ‘creative’ , that is, their artistic ideas for clients. We see this shift as an advantage for everybody.
When you use a software system to create your design, you actually are leveraging the good sense and artistic wisdom of the designers who put together and contributed to that software’s features. You’re not alone, even without a personal designer, you see.
In fact, an online program like Webbyt works so smoothly, and gives so many easy-to-use options, you’re getting the silent input of a small army of designers! And then you have the customer support staff (real humans), who are there to watch your back and answer your unsurprising questions as new users.
You, in fact, gain the experience of a little design activity for yourself, on your own behalf, with results that are somewhat fool-proof (if you don’t mind us saying that!). Such an experience can only help your business, because you get much more intimate with your own creative. Truth be told, when you use our system it feels like you are playing a design-oriented video game!
Don’t knock online games! They’re very powerful and advanced, as any youngster will tell you eagerly. The same principles of computing and screen-interaction go into producing award-winning Web-design systems.
In fact, playing a game (whether online or offline) is one of the best new ways to learn something. The entire WWW can be seen as a huge interactive gaming experience, with vital tools like Google search and wikis serving the role of referee or moderator.
But don’t be mislead: the results that you get from Webbyt can be better than some designers (perhaps less experienced ones). This is serious business. Your design results are vital to staying in touch with the times and communicating your ideas to the public effectively.
We’re not just inventing these arguments, you know. You can look to almost any industry or type of business for examples of websites that look hand-made, yet were made with the help of co-creative online agents (software) instead of the labour-intensive workflows of humans.
One super example of something so complex that one or more humans could not possible manage it alone (and because of the human factor, they shouldn’t!) is online gaming that involves real cash.
Casino entertainment powered and delivered by the Web is something that Brits already know and love. You can learn a lot from classycasinos.co.uk about just how successful online marketing driven by co-creational services — rather than saying ‘automated tools’ — can achieve.