Other stories by Jon Vara

• Massachusetts Masonry Contractor Completes Repairs on a Priceless Sculpture

  The art of using a diamond saw, coring bit, and tension rod to stabilize a 2,000-year-old marble statue.

• Big Stairs Made From A Douglas Fir Trunk

  Big stairs

• Re-roofing a Church Dome with Cedar Shingles

  Reshingling an Indiana landmark designed by Philip Johnson.

• The Music of the Spheres

  Spherical buildings present some obvious practical challenges. But because a sphere provides the largest possible interior volume per unit of surface area, the form has long fascinated designers and architects, and quite a few reasonably successful spherical structures have actually been built. 

• Heavy Equipment Simulators

  Until about five years ago, the only way to practice operating an excavator or bulldozer was to climb aboard and start moving dirt, ideally in an area without too many buried power lines and gas mains.

• Using Shrink-Wrap To Keep Out Rain When Roof Is Under Construction

  Keeping dry with shrink wrap

• Simple Math for a Slow Economy

  Earlier this year, timber-framer Paul Freeman, owner of Brooks Post & Beam in Lyndeborough, N.H., realized he had a problem.

• A History of Eel-Grass Insulation

  A remodeler encountering a layer of Cabot's Quilt inside an old building might mistake it for the tattered remnants of a Hawaiian grass skirt -- hastily stuffed into a wall, perhaps, during a police raid of some Prohibition-era costume party.

• Hillside Elevators

  Waterfront property never goes out of style, and everyone likes a spectacular building site perched on high ground.

• Weatherization Skills Competition

  Weatherizing older homes is hard, isolating, and often thankless work.