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The Winter Garden: Hedge Your Bets

GARDENING | CARE | SEASONAL | TREES & BUSHES

Courtesy of Midwestgardentips.com

“Don’t stop gardening just because it’s winter,” says Cindy Baker, Manager of Grounds at the Chicago Botanic Garden. Most plants, at least those hardy to your climate, can handle 90% of winters, but why not hedge your bets a little so that come spring, you have no sad discoveries (whether due to animals, frost, or dehydration)?

Once the ground freezes completely, there’s not much to be done for annuals, but you can extend the season a little longer until then. When you are aware that there will be an early cold snap or hard frost, lay down a bed sheet on the protected plants. “The sheet holds in enough heat to get them through the night,” says Cindy. Lift it off in the morning once the sun hits. You can also get creative and try protecting individual plants with items like dog food bags or milk jugs. Just don’t use plastic sheets—they don’t allow for enough air exchange. Glass or clay cloches make for perhaps the prettiest option, but also the priciest.

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Broken Roof Tiles: An Easy Fix?

ROOFING | REPAIR

Broken Roof Tiles

It’s a complete mystery to me how this could have happened to my roof in Florida. There are no palm trees around to drop a coconut and nobody’s been up on the roof, but somehow two tiles are broken.

No use pondering the cause. The good news is that when we re-roofed the house we kept about 50 left-over tiles for just this type of eventuality. (Something I highly recommend whether you choose asphalt shingles, wood shakes, or tiles.) By code, all of these flat cement tiles are “fastened mechanically” which means they’re screwed down into the plywood roof sheathing. This is to prevent them from flying off in a hurricane.

The repair is simple enough but requires the type of ladder that few homeowners keep around. Sliding the new tile into place and securing with construction adhesive and a couple of screws is easy—the hard part is getting up there.  

For more on roofing, check out these articles, slideshows and videos: 

Asphalt Shingles: A Showcase of Roofing Styles, Colors and Options

Metal Roofs on the Rise

Building a Storm-Ready Roof

  • Kitchen >
  • Restored to Life: The 12-Year Kitchen

Restored to Life: The 12-Year Kitchen

KITCHEN | REMODELING
Seed germinated after three weeks

Three weeks after the landscaper worked his magic, we have a nice thick lawn and colorful plantings to finish off our remodeling project.

A landscaper once lamented to me that homeowners rarely budget enough for their exteriors when they plan a remodeling project. “They spend all their money on the inside work,” he said, “then they have nothing left when it’s time for sprucing up the outside.”

The grass and plantings around our little 40×100 lot hardly even justify the word “landscaping,” but what was there had been soundly trashed by the excavation and demolition that started our project, followed by months of deliveries that compacted what was left of that section of the lawn. The fine layer of cement left behind by the patio crew sealed the whole area into a rock-hard moonscape.

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Macy’s Day Parade: A Little Perspective

HOLIDAYS
Newyorkcitytourist.com Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade

Photo: newyorkcitytourist.com

You don’t have to be from New York—or even have visited the city—to know that Thanksgiving and the Big Apple mean just one thing: the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. This year marks the 85th year that the historic event will travel its two-mile route, from 77th Street and Central Park West to 34th Street and 7th Avenue, to the delight of more than 30 million people lining the streets and an additional 50 million enjoying the festivities from the comfort of their own homes.

The parade, which originated in 1924 as the Macy’s Christmas Parade, began as a promotional stunt to get the department store noticed.  Employees and professional entertainers dressed up in costumes and, together with animals from the Central Park Zoo, paraded from 125th Street in Harlem to the Macy’s store at Herald Square. The event was so successful that Macy’s decided to repeat it annually. At the end of that first parade, Santa Claus made his appearance at Herald Square, officially kicking off the holiday shopping season, a tradition that has concluded the parade ever since.

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Grouting Tile (Trouble Free)

TILE | INSTALLATION

Last week in the Just Ask Bob section of our community forums, a site user asked an interesting question: “I haven’t grouted yet, what trouble will I have when I do?” What I found most interesting about the question was the phrasing. It wasn’t “what trouble might I encounter”—this DIYer had already resigned himself/herself to the fact that grouting was going to be a problem, regardless.

Through the years, I’ve watched capable home improvement aficionados shy away from one task or another, based on either preconceived notions or bad first-time experiences. But there are tips to help you out in every project, and grouting is no exception.

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  • Major Systems >
  • Nest Learning Thermostat: Digital-Age Home Temperature Control

Nest Learning Thermostat: Digital-Age Home Temperature Control

HVAC | HEATING
Nest Learning Thermostat

Nest Learning Thermostat

The Nest Learning Thermostat is, I’m betting, the first HVAC device to excite so much chatter in the blogosphere. An improbable mingling of tech, design, and shelter sites have voiced praised for the new digital thermostat’s sleek design and user-friendly interface—not to mention the environmental contribution it stands to make, which almost seems like a tacked-on bonus given how much fun it is to play with, reviewers say.

Of course, saving energy is the Nest thermostat’s raison d’etre. Studies indicate that heating and cooling make up for roughly half of residential energy consumption, while turning the heat or air conditioning down a single degree results in a five percent energy saving. The wasted energy and cumulative expense at stake is the whole point of programmable thermostats in the first place.

But until now, homeowners have mostly avoided, or been incapable of, learning to actually program their programmable thermostats. Research in 2008 found that homes with programmable models actually used more energy than comparable homes with standard thermostats. Subsequently, Energy Star lifted its certification from the entire category of products. The Nest’s intuitive, easy-as-an-iPod controls may change all that.

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  • Green >
  • Fighting Hunger—Can by Can

Fighting Hunger—Can by Can

SUSTAINABILITY | REPURPOSING

At the 19th Annual Canstruction Design/Build Competition—an art show and food drive benefiting City Harvest—some of New York City’s finest architects, designers, and engineers create whimsical sculptures made entirely from canned goods!

Canstruction "Loaded Dice" Gensler-WSP-Flack + Kurtz

"Loaded Dice" by Gensler and WSP-Flack+Kurtz. Photo: Annabel Willis

Last Thursday night, 25 teams of volunteer architects, designers, and engineers gathered at the World Financial Center to kick off Canstruction, an annual building competition and food drive sponsored by the Society of Design Administration and the American Institute of Architects (AIA). Instead of bricks and mortar, the design wizards worked into the wee hours of the night creating giant, self-supporting structures using canned goods ranging from green beans and Spam to pineapple rings and black olives.

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  • Bathroom >
  • Fresh Powder (Room): The 12-Year Kitchen

Fresh Powder (Room): The 12-Year Kitchen

KITCHEN | REMODELING
St. Thomas pedestal lav

With the completion of the powder room, we now have facilities on the ground floor. The scaled-down pedestal sink is the perfect size for this small space.

We can tell a lot about how previous generations lived by looking at the houses they built. For example, they clearly didn’t have as much “stuff” as we do, as evidenced by the lack of closet space. Our Dutch Colonial had exactly five tiny closets—a matching set of three-foot-wide closets in the master bedroom, one each in the two smaller bedrooms, and one hall closet for coats in the entry. That’s it. We have too much “stuff” these days for such limited closet space!

Our grandparents must also have spent a lot less time on daily ablutions, since they had large families but built a lot of houses with only one bathroom. Maybe it’s because, having only recently upgraded from outhouses, they considered even one indoor bath a luxury!

The previous owners of our house raised five children in it. They didn’t live there at the turn of the century—their tenure lasted from the 1950s to the 1990s—so I’m guessing they never used outhouses. But they lived with one bathroom, and they weren’t unusual. I myself grew up in an older house with two parents and five kids, also with one bathroom (not counting the creepy basement stall my dad used when the line was too long upstairs).

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Concrete Blocks: Foundations to Art

PEOPLE & PLACES
CKSinfo Concrete Block

Photo: CKSinfo

I know what you’re thinking—a concrete block. Big deal. But take a look at it. Solidly built. Produced with hollow centers to reduce weight, improve insulation, and, when filled, enhance stability. Made in various sizes and configurations to conform to specific construction requirements. When you consider its many different applications, you can begin to appreciate the appeal that this humble, inexpensive building block holds for builders, contractors, and DIYers the world over.

Strip away the bricks or stones covering your chimney and often you’ll discover concrete blocks. Move the earth away from your home’s foundation and, depending on when your house was built and whether or not it has a crawl space or basement, you are likely to find the same stalwart workhorse.

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Transporting Eames

ARCHITECTURAL HISTORY
Eames House Living Room LACMA Exhibit

The recreation of the Eames House living room, with 1800 original objects, is on view at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art till June 3, 2012.

Bobbye Tigerman, assistant Curator of Decorative Arts & Design at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), is on a post-installation high. The last five years of her career, along with head curator Wendy Kaplan, have been spent visiting libraries, museums, and octogenarian and nonagenarian California designers in order to piece together the most comprehensive retrospective of California mid-century design to date. “California Design 1930-1965: Living in a Modern Way” features 350 objects spanning categories of home décor, fashion, sports, advertising, and architecture. Paramount to the exhibit is the faithful recreation of Charles and Ray Eames’s twenty foot-high living room from the iconic 1949 Pacific Palisades home also known as “Case Study House 8.”

Flickr-Dystopoe Eames House Exterior

The colorful exterior of the steel-framed Eames House

The house was built as part of Art & Architecture Magazine’s post-war Case Study Program, which sought to build low cost, high quality, mass-producible homes with readily available industrial components. Though largely glass and steel, Lucia Dewey Atwood, the Eames’s granddaughter, notes that the living room had a “wonderful loving warmth,” a vibe attributed not only to the characters who dwelt within, but to the use of off-the-shelf components in thoughtful and beautiful ways, the connection of the interior space to the outdoors, and to the more than 1800 handmade objects and folk art accumulated over 39 years.

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