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0ancy · 4 years

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Woody in Jville seeks tenant

Johnsonville, 1 bedroom

$295 per week

◼️◼️◼️◼️◼️, Johnsonville, Wellington, New Zealand

Details

Attribute Value Bedrooms 1 bedroom Bathrooms 1 bathroom Available ◼️◼◼ May 2020 Furnishings 2 desks, a desk chair, single bed, fridge, stove, washing machine, heat-pump In the area walking distance to central Johnsonville, train and bus Parking off street parking Ideal Tenants reliable people with one or no cars Maximum Tenants Suitable for up to 2 tenants. Pets and Smokers Pets negotiable, no smokers. Smoke alarm Yes

Broadband

Fibre, ADSL, Cable, VDSL, Wireless

Description

This basement flat has 2 large wood-panelled rooms, one with a kitchen attached and one with a bathroom.

There are many inbuilt cupboards, 2 desks, one of them inbuilt. There is a single bed and a heat pump.

There are 80 steps down from the road.

no dogs

0ancy Reviews

First Impressions

First of all, this is very woody. Very, very woody. 70s-theme fondu-party woody. Enid Blyton's "The Faraway Tree" levels of interior wood. It's a basement too, which is always nice, in a pondering-the-life-choices-that-got-you-here kind of way.

We can't confirm this, but this strikes us as a property where the landlord lives upstairs. Such a treat! Especially when you hear them, their family and all their visitors through your ceiling, knowing, with certainty, this is your life now.

But don't you worry about it being dark, because there are fluorescent strip lights! They sure do brighten up a place, and that gentle buzz, well, that's just soothing. And, as the following photos illustrate, this woody interior, it's shiny, so very shiny.

From the Details

1 Bedroom, quite so, and some delightful curtains to help you pretend that this isn't a studio apartment. We don't hate studio apartments, but we do hate cognitive dissonance, and the solution to the dissonance? Antipsychotic medication: to make the agitation go away.

A bit of furniture thrown in for good measure, and I don't know an adult human (of any gender) who doesn't love a nice single bed to snuggle into in the evening. Total selling point right there. Two desks, one desk chair, is an interesting decision on their part. But not as interesting as their capital-letters and punctuation-optional listing details. It is a sad reality that those who become landlords often do so through good luck, rather than good brains.

Suitable for up to two tenants, which is when that dividing curtain will really shine, I'm sure it will cut down noise.

Pet's negotiable, but no dogs. So once assumes that only attractive people should apply? Who can blame the landlord? No once wants to look out the back window to see the ugly dogs cavorting in the shared garden.

From the Photos

I don't know about you, but a crooked and out of focus photo really helps focus my mind on the decision to apply for a property. Noting, the brighter than the sun, but lacking in the warmth, fluorescent strip lighting. Will it be your responsibility to replace them should they fail? Where does one obtain a fluorescent strip bulb? Maybe there are some in the stationary cupboard at work. (Not that 0ancy encourages theft mind).

That's the heat pump. We don't know what the significance of the blue strip is on the housing. Perhaps it indicates that the unit is rated for operations in the Russian tundra during the long winter. Although they don't say it, it seems likely that the windows are all single glazed and the whole place is drafty. It's nothing that a little increase in your antidepressant prescription wont fix!

This delightful vignette is of the kitchen. Is that a breakfast nook? No, it's the entire preparation area. The commitment to wood is breathtaking. One assumes that coat hook is standing in for a towel rail, who no one has seen since last winter, when it told the sliding cupboards it was stepping out to buy smokes.

Behold! The wood! The shine! The lack of focus!

In Conclusion

Rent as percentage of net weekly wage in Wellington

35%

Additional medication required:

Antidepressants: 💊

Antipsychotics: 💊

Why wait! Get in touch now, opportunities like this don't come along every day.

#renters #tenancy #rentals #review #satire

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7-wonders · 5 years

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As Above, So Below

Summary: Your average, mundane life as a college student is flipped upside down when the man you thought you knew as your next-door neighbor turns out to be the God of the dead. When Michael lures you down to Hell, everything that you thought you knew about the world is proven wrong.

Word Count: 2234

A/N: I’m so excited to publish my first multi-chapter story! This is a Michael Langdon AU based off of the Hades/Persephone myth. Feedback is always appreciated, and I’d love to hear your thoughts on this first chapter. Enjoy!

The Prince of Hell has a secret.

To be fair, Michael Langdon, the Lord of the Underworld, has many secrets. Those are secrets that he’d be proud to share, ones that would have creatures across all realms cowering at his feet in fear, awe, and envy. If this particular secret was to get out, he would be the laughing-stock of Hell.

Michael Langdon has feelings for a human. He wants to shudder at the mere acknowledgement of that; he’s not supposed to have feelings of happiness, joy, or love. The only happiness he ever feels is when he’s watching the tormented souls of the damned burn in pits. But now, whenever he lays eyes upon this woman, this mortal, he can almost feel his heart start to beat.

It’s ironic, to him, that one of the purest beings he’s ever seen lives next to a Hellmouth. Those who reside on the mortal coil know this particular portal as the Murder House, a structure in which his demons love playing. The house on one side is occupied by dust and rats, the old tenants having moved out when they saw the red skies and flocks of crows. On the other side, a house has been converted to a boarding house occupied by college students. College students are some of the best souls to take as they can be easily persuaded into dangerous situations, which has made for an enjoyable two years for some of his soul collectors working in this area. As far as the neighbors are aware, the so-called “Murder House” is undergoing a very, very long string of renovations.

In all of Michael’s centuries of ruling Hell, he’s seen the Earth change immensely. Civilizations have rose and fallen, wars have been fought, people have been born and people have died. But never has Michael been as captivated by someone as he is by you.

He often wonders what it is that draws him towards you. Is it the bright smile you always seem to have for him and everyone you pass? Could it be your choice of fashion, the pinks and blues and greens that adorn your body, so much different than his usual red and black attire? Your body itself is a whole different story for Michael. He’s seen some of the most beautiful women to ever walk the Earth, and yet they don’t hold a candle towards you.

Michael Langdon can list a million reasons why he thinks that he loves you, which is why he’s hoping that you won’t come to hate him for what he’s about to do. Although the events soon to transpire have long since been prophesied, the idea of prophecies are a very difficult thing for mortals to understand. He stands in front of the ornate mirror, watching as two servants finish dressing him. They’ve decided on his finest cloak for this occasion, beautiful silver fastenings keeping it up around his neck. A simple black suit with a red tie accompanies a swipe of red powder on the inner corners of his eyelids.

“Sire, are you sure that there’s no easier way to go about this?” Hecate, or Madison, as she preferred to go by nowadays, asks from the doorway. Michael glances at his most trusted advisor and longtime friend, shooing the servants away.

“Trust me, I’ve been trying to think of other ways. I just can’t see her believing that I’m the God of the dead without thinking I’m a crazy person. I need to show her.” Madison rolls her eyes, stalking over to Michael to redo his crooked tie.

“Just promise me that you won’t immediately resort to kidnapping a human woman and dragging her down here?” Michael shoots the woman a playful glare, batting her hands off of his tie.

“Contrary to popular belief, I’m not a mean person.” Madison snorts at this, giving him one last glance before deeming him ready.

“Alright, Mr. Nice-Guy, you’re ready.” Michael’s palms break into a sweat, which he didn’t even know was possible until now. Letting out two sharp whistles, he waits for the sound of paws bounding down the hall. Cerberus, the three-headed hellhound, tramples into the room and immediately sits, tail wagging behind him.

“You wanna go up above, buddy?” Michael rewards the dog with a pet on each of its’ heads when he starts joyfully barking.

“Ugh, you’re taking the mutt? That’ll impress her.” Madison scoffs, watching as Michael puts a glamour on the dog. Suddenly, the once-huge beast is now the size of a normal labrador, complete with one head instead of three.

“(Y/N) likes dogs, and she’s met Cerberus multiple times.” When Michael turns his back, he hears what sounds like Madison coughing the word ‘whipped.’ He stiffens, but doesn’t turn around to take the bait. “You’re lucky I’m going to need you, or else I’d throw you in the ninth circle.” It’s an empty threat and they both know it. He and Cerberus make their way to the front of the palace, where there’s already a realm guard waiting to take the king to Earth.

“Good luck. You’re gonna need it with those looks!” Madison takes one last shot. Right before Michael’s form disappears, he flips off the delighted goddess.

You’re sitting under the shade of the large oak tree in the front yard, humming softly and working on some homework, when barking makes you look up. A grin crosses your face when a large dog comes bounding out of the house next door, chasing a red bouncy ball. When the dog sees you, he immediately abandons his toy and charges towards you. Homework is suddenly forgotten when a giant mass of fur and slobber lands on top of you.

“Well, hello there Cerberus!” The dog sits next to you, nudging his head against your chin in an attempt to get petted. “Oh I know, it must be so rough being such a cute dog.” You oblige, gladly scratching behind his ear.

“At least I don’t ever have to worry about him going too far when you’re out here.” You look up to see the man whose beauty rivals the sun. Michael, from what you’ve deduced, owns the house next door and is often over there performing renovations himself. You smile shyly, taking his outstretched hand and allowing him to pull you to your feet.

“Be careful or else I might not let him leave next time.” You joke. You can’t help but to take note of his runway-like attire, putting your plain blue jeans and pink blouse to shame. “How do you renovate a house in a cloak, exactly?” Michael looks down, as if noticing for the first time how overdressed he is.

“I’m actually on my way to some business meetings. I had just stopped by to check on the new paint samples.”

“You seem to be making good progress on the house. Just last week it was new floors, right?” Michael nods, glancing from your face to the house.

“Would you like to take a look around? There’s been a lot of changes since the last time you snooped around inside.” Your face goes red at this. It had been a week after you first moved in with your new roommates. As a lover of the paranormal, it was basically impossible for you to not visit the infamous Murder House. When you had met Michael the following day, he mentioned that it was a delight to watch you ghost hunt through the security cameras, causing you to try and avoid him as much as possible until the embarrassment died down.

“I thought the house was abandoned!” You make your case, taking Michael’s outstretched arm. “You’re always so proper, y’know?”

“How so?”

“I’ve never met a guy who wears cloaks and escorts women like he’s going to a gala, that’s all.”

“I haven’t noticed that. I was just raised in a different time, I suppose.” You laugh.

“‘Raised in a different time?’ Michael, you can’t be more than five years older than me.” He raises an eyebrow, almost challenging you.

“Five years is quite a difference.” He jokes. Grabbing the key from one of his pockets, he unlocks the door and swings it open with a flourish. “Have a look.”

The house really has changed since the last time you were here. Gone are the creepy murals with people dying, the mosaic windows and the wooden panelling straight out of the ‘70s. Now, the interior is clean, with wide windows, a stone fireplace and dark wood floors.

“Oh, it’s beautiful.” You say in awe, taking in every inch of the beautiful house. “Think you’ll finally be able to sell it?”

“I’ve actually become rather attached to this house.” Michael admits from the living room, where he’s glancing over some paperwork. Cerberus has settled on a rug, deciding now’s a good time for a nap. “I kind of want to keep it.”

“I don’t blame you.” An impish grin spreads on your face. “The ghosts haven’t scared you off?” Michael groans, playfully rolling his eyes.

“I should have known you would ask about the supposed ghosts that haunt these halls.”

“You’re telling me that with all of the knocking down walls and changing the floorplan of this place that you haven’t disturbed one of the souls that died here?” Michael has always been adamant that this is a perfectly normal house, albeit with a sordid history. “Just money-hungry people making up stories to get their fifteen minutes of fame,” he’s always responded to your questions.

“I don’t believe in ghosts, (Y/N). Maybe they just don’t believe in me, either.” He deadpans.

“Wow, you ever thought about motivational speaking?” You say sarcastically. “Did the city ever come to take away those weird jars with the body parts that Dr. Montgomery left here?” Dr. Montgomery, the ‘doctor to the stars’ in the ‘30s, ran a secret basement abortion clinic, where he also supposedly experimented with reanimation. It was gross, morbid, and a subject you were totally interested in.

“They did. We actually just started on the basement. I’m pretty sure we got all of the creepy stuff removed, but if you want you can help me sort through the items previous owners have left here.” Your eyes light up at this. Getting to look through antiques that each had their own story is extremely enticing. Michael, having already seen the gleam in your eyes, makes his way to the basement steps with his usual hands-behind-his-back gait.

The walk down to the basement is decidedly more creepy than the rest of the house. You’re not sure if it’s the general spookiness of basements or all of the illegal abortions performed down here, but you can feel a dark aura in the cavernous room. There’s an old claw-foot bathtub under one window, a couple of empty shelves, and a rocking chair that you swear is moving on its own.

“Oh jeez.” You whisper.

“Too scary for you?” A voice says in your ear. You jump, spinning and hitting Michael on the shoulder.

“You asshole! You’re lucky I didn’t punch you in the nose.” He looks entirely unimpressed at this, but you pretend to cock a fist anyways.

“Hmm, maybe next time. Most of the good stuff I’ve found is in this room.” Michael takes your shoulders and steers you towards a closed door at the opposite end of the basement. You’re not sure why, but a sense of dread fills you the closer you get to the door.

“Michael, I think I need to get going.” You say quietly, the dread increasing. You try to maneuver out of his grasp, but his grip on you only tightens.

“Just a little look, and then you can go.” Without anyone touching it, the door opens. Wind whips around you, a smell of- is that brimstone?- fills the air, and you can hear screaming from miles down. A cavernous pit stares back at you, its mouth wide and welcoming. You shriek and elbow Michael in the stomach.

He doubles over in pain, allowing you your chance. You sprint for the stairs, tripping over Cerberus, who’s not sure why you’re yelling. You yelp when your palms scrape across the rough wood, ripping open the top layer of skin. There’s no time to waste, so you haul yourself back up and try to remember the way to the front door.

“Help, he’s going to kill me!” You scream, hoping that one of your roommates will hear your calls and save you. The open front door slams shut when you’re mere feet away, startling you. A pair of strong arms wraps around you, picking you up like you weigh nothing and hauling you back downstairs. Michael ignores your screams completely, even trying to hush you.

“Michael, please don’t kill me. Just let me leave and I won’t tell anyone.” You mutter, twisting in his arms to look at his face. He smiles softly down at you, wiping the tears away from your face.

“I’m not going to kill you, (Y/N). I’m sorry it had to happen this way, but I promise I’ll explain everything when we get home.” The wind is howling, your hair getting caught in Michael’s face. You don’t have time to question what he’s saying before he takes a graceful step over the edge of the pit, both of you falling down below.

#michael langdon #michael langdon imagine #michael langdon imagines #michael langdon x reader #Michael Langdon x you #ahs #ahs apocalypse #ahs imagine #american horror story #american horror story imagine #American horror story apocalypse #Michael Langdon au

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wanderingthroughwickford · 7 years

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11 Questions Meme

Borrowing this meme from @Aximili because I thought it looked interesting and the questions are really unique!

1. What’s your favourite poem if you have one? why is it your favourite?

That’s a hard one, because I don’t read a lot of poetry. It took a while to think of an answer, and what I finally settled on is so nerdy and not very cultured, but I’m going to have to go with the tapestry poem (“Listen, my child, to this story of dreams” and so on) from Nancy Drew: Message in a Haunted Mansion. It’s very nostalgic to me and I loved unravelling what all the symbolism in it means/how it pertains to the mystery. Maybe a bit of a lame answer, but it’s what I’m putting.

On the other end of the spectrum I also considered the Aeneid but 1) I’ve only read about half of it, 2) I’m not entirely sure it counts as a poem? And 3) sounds way too pretentious

2. If you could spend a lot of money on one thing right now - and its not something practical like paying off debts, or a house or car - what would it be? something purely for enjoyment.

Okay so assuming we’re not allowed to say “charity” or “spend it on a friend” or w/e and can spend the money on something entirely unnecessary/selfish, I actually have a ready-prepared answer. I’ve been looking forwards for a long time to the Agents of Shield Season 4 Declassified Guide Book coming out (which it did on Tuesday) and yesterday I went to the Chapters here to see if they had it and turns out they don’t. No store in the city has it or even in Toronto, so it most likely hasn’t been shipped to the province (or even the country) yet. So I would use the money to order it to the store (which you can do but the price is not something I want to spend when I’m on a student budget #Firstworldproblems). Anyway I’ll probably just end up ordering it on Amazon or asking for it for Christmas or something.

3. Favourite plant and why?

That’s a really hard one but atm I’m thinking wisteria. I saw a ton of it in England and I love how it grows up buildings and drapes all over everything. It looks so old-timey and wonderful. The flowers are also the perfect colour.

4. When you’ve had a really long day and you’re super hungry, what do you crave?

Ohhhh gosh. I guess this really depends on the day? But cheese popcorn is always a safe answer.

5. A memorable dream you’ve had lately?

Well uh. I had a very memorable but questionable dream trilogy the past 3 nights all involving cast members from Agents of Shield. In the first dream, my favorite actress from that show sent me a postcard saying that she was writing a story on Google Docs and was going to share it with me. In the second dream, that actress and a bunch of others from the show were invited over to our house by my Dad for a dinner party and I was going to get to interview her. And in the third … another actor I really like was hit by a car and killed? It felt super real and I actually had to look him up online when I woke up to make sure he was okay.

6. What does your dream home look like? what type of building/size/location/what’s in it?

Okay, so notwithstanding cost and practicality and upkeep, I’d really really love to live in a heritage home, like say circa 1890 to 1915ish. Something late Victorian/Edwardian/Arts and Crafts style. Queen Anne style with a little turret would be THE BEST but that’s a little ambitious even for my dreams lol. I’d like it to be along one of those sleepy streets in a neighborhood that’s clearly been there for a long time so the trees are very tall and the branches arch over the road. Like you’re in a green tunnel with sunlight filtering down. And it’d have a little backyard and frontyard and two stories + a basement but not be too big. Like 1 or 2 bedrooms, living room, kitchen, bathroom, basement, that’s all I need. I imagine it either being made out of red brick, or wood painted some sort of pastel colour (white, light pink/blue/green, etc.)

I know it’s really tempting to be like “I would live in A CASTLE with 10 secret passageways and a hidden treasure!” but it’d honestly be so big and kind of creepy to be alone in it. But I wouldn’t say no to a small secret passageway in my imaginary house … like just a sliding panel or a boarded-off maid’s staircase or something. That’d be awesome.

The furnishings would be like, high-late Victorian or Edwardian. I really like them both, and while the Victorian appeals more to me aesthetically, the Edwardian would be easier to manage and clean. But it would have electricity, TV, computer, all those modern conveniences.

Something like the Painted Ladies in San Francisco would be ideal but to see some more feasible/local examples you can check out these pages here (which I helped set up a few summers ago *shameless self-plug*)

7. a household chore you actually enjoy?

That’s actually a fairly easy answer. I like doing the dishes, as in just loading/unloading the dishwasher. I find it kind of relaxing and therapeutic. Not saying I’d be jumping up and down to do them after I’ve had a long busy day and want to spend time doing something fun, but I don’t mind it. I also like sweeping. It feels kind of cathartic to gather up a whole bunch of dust and dirt into a pile and then throw it away.

8. who’s your favourite lesser-known music artist? which song and why?

This one’s pretty hard because a lot of what I listen to is fairly well-known pop (Taylor Swift, Kelly Clarkson, etc.) but I guess I’d go with Stan Rogers? He was a Canadian folk singer from the 70s /early 80s who unfortunately died in a plane crash. He sang a lot of songs relating to maritime life and Canadian history. My Mom introduced me to his work when I was in high school and I really like it. Some of my favorite songs of his are Mary Ellen Carter, Northwest Passage, Macdonnell on the Heights, Witch of the Westmoreland, and Barrett’s Privateers. I have Barrett’s Privateers pretty much memorized and sometimes sing it to annoy my sister, since it’s a pretty repetitive song. :P

9. what was ur favourite toy as a kid?

OH definitely my (creatively-named) killer whale. Just a typical plastic animal toy that came with a set of 5 or so others, but for whatever reason 3-4 y/o me really latched on to him, I guess because I love killer whales so much. I would sleep with him the same way most kids sleep with teddy bears or other soft stuffed animals. I remember my parents telling me he would chase my nightmares away. When I was 16 or so one of my dogs got into my room and chewed up his fins up a bit, but luckily I rescued him in time. I actually brought him with me to Uni, both now and when I went to Exeter, and he’s sitting on a pile of my books on my shelf right now.

10. your ideal conditions for falling asleep?

Really dark and quiet. Not too hot or too cold. Comfy blankets. Nothing troubling my mind, preferably some sort of fictional scenario to run over in my head (like involving characters or ships or something), and I’m tired enough that I can fall asleep quickly.

11. something nice you did for someone else recently!

Mmmm I hate saying things like this because it feels like bragging. So I’m just going to go with some small things. I took the trash and recycling out for my roommate even though it wasn’t my week to do so, because the girl who was supposed to do it had left for the weekend. I also checked up on a friend from my class on Facebook because I hadn’t heard from her in a long time and wanted to make sure she was doing okay.

Questions for anyone who wants to do them:

What’s the hardest video game you’ve ever beaten?

What’s the furthest east, south, west, and north you’ve been?

What’s the coolest animal you’ve seen in the wild?

What book/movie/show did you watch/read as a kid that was wayyy too old for you?

When you get a new favorite character, do you instantly know they’re going to be the one, or do they grow on you slowly?

Do you like extra content in fandom (DLCs, guide books, stuff revealed by creators in an interview) or would you rather stick to the books/movies/whatever themselves?

Have you ever gone to summer camp, and did you like it?

Skiing, snowboarding, or neither?

Favorite Halloween memory? (If you celebrate it; if not, favorite holiday memory of your choice!)

What superpower/superhuman ability would you LEAST want to have?

Something new and interesting you’ve learned this week.

#ask meme

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stevedonnellyfaith-blog · 5 years

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The Storage Locker (Post 89) 5-20-15

I popped the door open, looked at the inside space and my heart sank. The storage room looked way too small for the lion share of my earthly possessions and I really had no backup plan. It was Sunday morning and the moving van was due to arrive in twenty minutes of so. A serial procrastinator, I had waited until Saturday morning to finally procure a self-storage location for the shipment that Nick and Abby had served into my court from California on Monday and Tuesday.

The semi had crossed the continent at an inexorable pace throughout the week like the white blipping ball in a game of 70’s electronic pong. I knew I would have to deal with the rolling truckload eventually but the sand in the hour-glass sifted slowly enough that I kidded myself that I had more time … until it nearly ran out. During Thursday lunch I web searched for storage locations; most of them were clustered around Kent, Ohio for summer use by vacationing university students. On Friday, finally, I called the first one on my list of four and hit pay dirt immediately.

A helpful woman named Tina could rent me two large lockers that would give me extra space to organize and stage my stuff in the future when I finally go to move into the house that I have yet to identify, make an offer on, get under contract, etcetera. I arranged to meet Tina on Saturday morning still well ahead of the glacial progress of my household goods which might have then been crawling through Nebraska or Iowa.

Next day, I left the house bright and early on Saturday morning, well actually at least bright but more towards 11 AM as I am a late riser on the weekend. In route I dropped Natalie off at a friend’s house to organize a lemonade stand project that they were completing as part of a school activity. From there I proceeded down a state road and arrived at the locked door of the office of the aptly named Storage Company. The locked door was unexpected so I broke into a cold sweat at this seeming roadblock to my first recent concrete participation in the family cross country migration from California back to the land of snowy slush, smoldering rivers, and appallingly bad professional football.

Luckily, Tina answered the door as the lock was an apparent security measure necessitated by some unsavory clientele called college students. Her office reminded me of a pawn shop without merchandise or the television repair shop that my father used to patronize back in the days of cathode ray tubes. The room was dressed with faux wood paneling, dingy vinyl floors and only lacked a Budweiser clock to complete the décor of a finished basement circa the dawn of the Age of Disco. Maybe my marathon sessions of Zillow surfing is beginning to jade my latent real-estate sensibilities.

Anyway, Tina let me in and I began to process my paperwork. Things proceeded slowly as she was multi-tasking. Tina was also helping a heavily accented young Asian coed from the university who had discovered that the small sized locker purveyed to her did not match the large load in the U-Haul van that she had also rented from the same location. I kibitzed with a representative from my insurance company while Tina strolled out to do a walk-thru of my prospective lockers and to try to engineer a resolution to the student’s problem.

That’s when the steady slope of my progress did a loop-d-loop. Tina returned to the office cave and announced that there was an issue: both of my units were flooded from some previously unidentified roof damage. My lockers would not be my lockers as neither room could be repaired in the near term and my traveling effects did not consist of a load of swimming pool noodles and rubber inner tubes. Other than those two lockers that had inadvertently been equipped with spa facilities, the site had no other units available that might suit my needs. I have no idea how things turned out for the young lady and her predicament, but my haphazardly laid plans had definitely placed their foot squarely on a greasy black banana peel.

A resourceful customer service professional, Tina soon resolved my dilemma with a price match at a sister facility that was headquartered within a couple miles of where I had dropped off Natalie. The single locker that I finally rented was in a third site located conveniently at the nexus of the three towns that I am targeting for my house search. The only issue was that I would be renting a single unit unseen until the morning of the arrival of all my stuff. The whole business seemed of an angelic Candid Camera prank staged in retribution for my agreeing to delivery on the morning of the Lord’s Day. Obviously, Sunday AM delivery also meant that the rental office would be closed; there would be no safety net for the operation. Hauling an appliance that didn’t fit to my parent’s house with a Chevy Aveo is not a viable contingency plan.

So I was pretty apprehensive as I promenaded my Aveo on a 5MPH circuit through the facility ostensibly to make room for the moving van, but also surreptitiously casing the locked hasps of the other lockers in hopes of spying an unlocked unit where I could squirrel an odd dozen boxes for a couple of hours if the unload went badly. Finally, I opened the roll-up door for a second time to unveil my quaint cubby to Matt, the polite semi-driver from Allied Van Lines. My household goods needed to fit there, but I waited nervously hoping for a positive diagnosis from my friendly shipping professional. Matt and his crew were surprisingly unastonished by the small size of my rental unit. They said they could fit everything in with no problem.

The news was a great relief, but also simultaneously deflating. The stress of being at the potential epicenter of a colossal screw-up was immediately calmed. I’m sure my blood-pressure plummeted by ten psi quicker than a Patriot’s football, but I was also disheartened in a way that end result of my fifty-year secular endeavor in collecting cool stuff had reaped such a meager bounty. After inspecting the minuscule sanctum that would house the remaining cache of a half-century of acquisitions, Matt and his crew were confident that my stuff would slide right inside. In a way I felt like I had failed as an American male.

And I will say to my soul, "Soul, you have many goods laid up for many years to come; take your ease, eat, drink and be merry."' "But God said to him, 'You fool! This very night your soul is required of you; and now who will own what you have prepared?' "So is the man who stores up treasure for himself, and is not rich toward God." [Luke 12:18-20]

I understand that while men judge each other based on the amount and quality of acquisitions, in actuality, Jesus will critique my earthly sojourn based on my actions, inactions, thoughts and emotions, the evidence of my loving demonstration that I desire life with Him and am of His flock. My energy and concern ought to be towards the needs of my neighbor and not towards my toy box, which still holds an unfortunate spiritual power over me that webs my soul to the little-used air hockey table that Pam sold before we emigrated from Fort Wayne to California. I understand that Jesus is helping me be free from the material world in stages as each season change of life seems to begin with a garage sale or trip to the dump, but jettisoning junk does not come easy to me.

I don’t know whether my journey through this life will end in a car crash, as Natalie once dreamed. If her nightmare proves prophetic, I will still probably be in possession of too many items of no import, but I am hopeful that their value to me will, in the future, be at a commensurate level to their eternal worth. God may, instead, choose to continue to empty my ditty bag of material possessions in stages as He has throughout the last decade – an air hockey table here, an extra well-used and dated couch there while my accommodations shrink from 3000 SQFT to 1500 on down to 1200 until I just possess a disposable toothbrush and the current hospital gown that I will own only until my next sponge bath and linen rotation. Whichever way I go, I understand that it will be to my benefit as part of my preparation for eternal life.

So I sit here writing in a my muggy Aveo, mercifully ignorant of whatever the vacuum noise is on the obscured business side of the moving truck where a crew of three wrestles my gear into a mini confined space – at least there is no sound of a buzz saw. I am sure that there is steady progress being made on shoving the collections of my life into that small spider hole that Matt, the mover, approved. The weather is oscillating annoying as it does in Ohio between quick drizzle and sunshine with the result being that I have to keep adjusting my car windows.

Anyway, the only packed possessions I really care about that will be stored are pictures, letters, family videos and a wedding album that is mostly uploaded to Facebook already anyway. My memories won’t need props once I get into the after-life, I’m sure. In the short term, if a Mid-Western tornado launches my rented portion of this facility and peppers Portage County with the contents my locker, there is nothing in there that I haven’t done without for two months already. The long-ago discarded, one-time cherished hockey game is adorning somebody else’s basement somewhere in Indiana.

#God #Jesus #The Holy Spirit #The Virgin Mary #Time #Luke 12 #Materialism #Grace #hope #faith #love #The Storage Locker

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toldnews-blog · 5 years

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New Post has been published on https://toldnews.com/travel/art-review-at-frieze-new-york-islands-of-daring/

Art Review: At Frieze New York, Islands of Daring

Getting into this year’s Frieze Art Fair on Randalls Island will cost you $57, plus the round trip on the ferry. But that’s nothing compared to what it cost nearly 200 galleries to exhibit there. And so dealers have made the reasonable decision to bring a little of everything that sells — which may account for the conservative vibe. That said, there are many islands of daring, including special sections focused on solo presentations, small galleries, the influential gallery JAM and virtual reality. We sampled them all — along with the mainland fairs that are part of Frieze Week. Our art critics Martha Schwendener and Will Heinrich pick a handful of the best booths under Frieze New York’s big tent.

Booth C2

Bridget Donahue and LC Queisser

One of the strongest single-artist booths is a joint presentation by Bridget Donahue Gallery and LC Queisser, who represent the artist Lisa Alvarado in New York and the Republic of Georgia, respectively. Ms. Alvarado made her acrylic-on-canvas pieces, each painted with a thrilling zigzag pattern, as backdrops for performances by the Natural Information Society, in which she plays the harmonium. If the fair’s not too loud, you’ll be able to hear the band’s hypnotic music, too. WILL HEINRICH

Two exceptional but very different displays are on view in the fair’s midsection. At Casey Kaplan gallery, Matthew Ronay’s carved wooden sculptures, pieced together into abstract, evocative organic configurations in various coral hues, are placed on plinths and feel like an oasis amid the fair’s chaos. (Mr. Ronay also has an exhibition on view at Kaplan’s Chelsea location.) Martine Gutierrez continues her rampage as the Indigenous Woman, a transgender alternative-fashionista at Ryan Lee. In photographs and faux-fashion spreads, Ms. Gutierrez combines traditional Mayan and Guatemalan garments and fabrics with fantastic and futuristic accessories and makeup to conjure new, fluid forms of being. MARTHA SCHWENDENER

Booths F6, F12 and F14

Company, Bank and Very Small Fires

The Frame section of Frieze, devoted to galleries 10 years or younger, is particularly good this year. Befitting the ethos of the emerging artists they represent, the booths are platforms for performance or installations, with linoleum or AstroTurf covering the floors. The New York gallery Company is hung with paintings by Jonathan Lyndon Chase that feature roughly drawn figures or graffiti, as well as crude sculptures of a toilet seat or a dollar sign. Yanyan Huang treats the booth at Bank, a Shanghai gallery, as an “immersive portal” (according to a handout) in which traditional ink drawings merge with digital applications. Nearby, Diedrick Brackens’s colorful tapestries at the Los Angeles gallery Various Small Fires join traditional materials with references to figures like African-American cowboys. SCHWENDENER

The Tehran gallery Dastan (appearing here as Dastan’s Basement) has hung more than 50 portraits by the artist and architect Bijan Saffari. A member of the royal family who left Iran for Paris after his country’s 1979 revolution, Mr. Saffari was also gay, which made his position doubly precarious. The portraits are rather simple and conservative, drawn in graphite and colored pencil. And yet they are sensitive and closely observed, and they gain by their group presentation, appearing like a narrative of his circle of friends in the ’70s and ’80s. There is an elegiac tone to these drawings; the artist died days before the current edition of Frieze opened. SCHWENDENER

Booths B36 and F9

David Lewis and Antoine Ertaskiran

In a fair dominated by painting, David Lewis of the Lower East Side and Montreal’s Galerie Antoine Ertaskiran, making its Frieze debut, stand out with presentations that could pass for gallery shows. Four cool acrylics by New York painter Charles Mayton, at Lewis, feature schematic eyes and hands in jazzy mash-ups of shelves, bars and circles. Jane Corrigan’s large wet-on-wet paintings of women on the go, at Ertaskiran, are exquisite brown and yellow collisions of impatience and poise. HEINRICH

Booths A11, B32, C7 and D1

Foxy Production, Simone Subal, Rachel Uffner and Galerie Lelong

Several New York galleries have mounted outstanding painting displays in which artists bend the medium in a variety of ways. At Foxy Production, Srijon Chowdhury, Gina Beavers and Sascha Braunig offer reinventions of Gothic romanticism, surrealism, Op or Pop Art. Simone Subal is showing the work of Emily Mae Smith, whose paintings are slick and whip-smart updates and appropriations of posters from the ’70s and ’80s. Maryam Hoseini works both on and off the wall at Rachel Uffner, but combines abstracted Persian imagery or techniques with contemporary painting. Sarah Cain’s take on painting at Galerie Lelong offers candy colors, cutouts and a floor flooded and stained with pigment. They remind you of paintings’ origins — in childhood — and suggest a kind of joyful, delirious regression. SCHWENDENER

Booths S4, S10 and S11

Galerist, Galeri Nev and Pi Artworks

The fair’s outstanding Spotlight section, curated by Laura Hoptman of the Drawing Center, is dedicated to ��significant work by overlooked figures.” They include Yüksel Arslan, a Turkish painter born in 1933 who moved to Paris at the invitation of André Breton and died in 2017. His “Arture 439, Sans Titre, l’Homme,” from 1992, in a joint presentation by Turkish galleries Galerist and Galeri Nev, is a gloriously strange gallimaufry of interspecies sex acts and quotations from the artist’s scientific reading, drawn with homemade colors. Susan Hefuna makes ink drawings inspired by the intricate wooden screens of her Cairo childhood. The examples presented by Pi Artworks of London and Istanbul are done on overlapping sheets of tracing paper fastened with rice glue. The multitude of tones and textures create a fascinating tension between clarity and ambiguity — the drawings are like letters of a foreign language glimpsed in a dream. HEINRICH

The Diálogos section of Frieze includes solo presentations of Latin American art, organized by Patrick Charpenel and Susanna V. Temkin of New York’s El Museo del Barrio. I was particularly taken with Mariela Scafati’s hybrids of paintings and sculpture at the Buenos Aires gallery Isla Flotante. Ms. Scafati takes wooden bars where canvas is stretched and treats them like bones, joining the parts together in puppetlike configurations, sometimes bound or “wearing” a jacket or a pair of pants. SCHWENDENER

Booths B9, B10 and B20

lokal_30, Koenig & Clinton and Kate Werble

A vibrant knot of color and form awaits you at the intersection of New York’s Koenig & Clinton and Kate Werble galleries and Warsaw’s lokal_30. From Poland come three painters exemplifying postwar and contemporary Surrealism, among them the young Ewa Juszkiewicz, who repaints classic portraits of women, but hides their faces with cloth, ears of corn or a backward French braid. They evoke feminism, dream logic and implicit violence. Tony Marsh’s over-the-top ceramic vessels, encrusted in what look like shards of glaze, meet the eye-bending optical paintings of Anoka Faruqee & David Driscoll at Koenig & Clinton. Marilyn Lerner makes delicately complicated oil-on-wood abstractions at Kate Werble; don’t miss the unlabeled low tables by Christopher Chiappa, also in Werble’s booth. HEINRICH

There’s something magical about William T. Williams’s early 1970s “Diamond in a Box” paintings, hard-edged geometric patterns in blazing colors. The subtle misdirection of those patterns, and the complicated rhythm of the colors, mean you could look at them forever. Michael Rosenfeld presents a dozen never-before-shown acrylic-on-paper works from the same period. In these, a wiggly meander snakes in and out of concentric circles filled with vibrant brush strokes — they’re like Bauhaus takes on the Aztec calendar. HEINRICH

Booth F18

PM8

Spanish gallery PM8 presents 80 black-and-white photographs by the Lithuanian photographer Gintautas Trimakas, shot in the mid-90s and hung in three long rows. The piece shows 80 women with their heads and legs cropped out. Though the backgrounds range from white to nearly black, and the clothing and body types are all over the map, the typological presentation wears away these differences and leaves the figures all looking more or less interchangeable. It’s a deeply cynical take on both the consumerist Western freedoms available to Lithuanians after their 1990 independence and on the fate of all human bodies — the women aren’t so much living people as corpses in waiting. HEINRICH

V.I.P.s have access to the Deutsche Bank Wealth Management Lounge at Frieze New York. But nearly everyone can benefit from PPOW’s display of paintings by Steve Keene, which are on sale for $15 to $50. Mr. Keene was heavily influenced by indie rock bands in the early 1990s — his friends in Pavement, Silver Jews and the Dave Matthews Band — and the idea of selling quick, sketchily rendered paintings like cassette tapes. Using a stage in PPOW’s booth as a pop-up studio, he will produce hundreds of paintings on thin plywood panels — they are part endurance performance, part public art stunt. The vibe feels like one in a record store during an album release party. SCHWENDENER

Frieze New York

Through May 5 at Randalls Island Park; frieze.com. Tickets are limited and only available online.

#n i travel news #travel news a47 #travel news leicester #travel news london #travel news m55 #travel news uae

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jodybouchard9 · 5 years

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Finishing Your Basement? Avoid These 7 Common Blunders to Take Your Space to the Next Level

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The idea of finishing a basement can inspire the greatest of possibilities: Extra space for that pool table you’ve always wanted! Rooms (galore) for the kids to play! A place to host the ultimate Super Bowl bash that won’t leave your living room in shambles!

And then, of course, there’s the added resale value. It’s a costly project, indeed; in 2017, the average cost to remodel a basement was over $70,000—but homeowners also reported a 70% return on investment, according to Remodeling Magazine’s annual Cost vs. Value report.

That’s perhaps why finished basements have become one of the most popular remodeling jobs over the past 20 years, according to the National Association of Home Builders, with nearly a quarter of contractors surveyed reporting requests for such a renovation in 2017.

But if you’re going to sink that kind of money into a home renovation, you sure as heck want to do it right. These are the most common finished basement blunders—and they’re all easily avoidable.

1. Ignoring that musty odor

Jonathan Faccone has seen a lot of houses. As a professional home buyer for Halo Home Buyers, a flipping company in New Jersey, he’s encountered the best of finished basements—and the worst.

“The worst finished basement I’ve ever seen was covered with black mold from top to bottom,” recalls Faccone.

If only the owners had taken a deep breath—literally—before breaking ground on their basement remodel.

“If the space smells and feels wet, spending the money to finish it may be wasted,” he says.

At best, that damp smell will linger and be a turnoff in a space you just spent thousands to renovate. At worst, a musty odor could indicate bigger problems—like mold or even foundation issues.

2. Skimping on lighting

In my time house hunting, the worst basement I ever saw was in a midcentury ranch home. The wood-paneled walls weren’t inspiring, but the lighting was even worse. The homeowners had elected for track lighting; and instead of even, all-over light, this created three bright spotlights pointing to different corners of the room—and dark shadows everywhere else.

It was perfect, for a serial killer.

The basement is “an already scary area,” says Landon Eskew, a contractor in North Dakota. “Utilize can [recessed] lighting everywhere, and control it by putting your room on a dimmer switch. That way, you can set the lighting perfectly.”

3. Forgetting that the basement is still part of your home

On a related note: “The biggest mistake people make in a basement is not treating it like the rest of the home, and not giving it the same amount of attention as the upstairs,” says Leslie Bowman, the founder and design director of Chicago interior design studio The Design Bar. “Elevate the space to avoid that traditionally ‘scary’ ambiance.”

To make the basement welcoming, Bowman recommends creating separate spaces—like a crafting nook, a TV corner, and a cozy office to make the floor plan feel “more purposeful,” she says.

And you don’t have to put up walls to divide the basement: open bookshelves or folding room dividers allow light to flood the space.

And because basements inherently are “very yin energy—damp, dark, and cold,” says feng shui expert Maureen Calamia, you want to counteract those vibes.

“‘Yang’ up” your basement with vivid, cheerful décor, she adds. Choose brightly colored throw pillows, light furniture, and natural fibers and fabrics. And do anything you can to improve the windows.

“Most basement windows are small and high up,” Calamia says. “Light and views of nature are key to a feeling of well-being. Installing egress windows into each room will bring in much more light.”

Granted, this project can be expensive—a single egress window runs around $2,000—so consider perking up one room first.

———

Watch: Big Screen, Small Budget: How to Build a Home Theater on the Cheap

———

4. Not waterproofing

Your basement is at higher risk of flooding, so make sure you’ve protected the bones. Before finishing, install a waterproofing system, including a concrete vapor barrier, back-up sump pump, and French drains, which are efficient at leading water away from your house.

“Investing the money on a waterproofing system from a reputable company can be the difference between enjoying a finished space for years to come or dealing with a constant headache,” Faccone says, like installing new carpet after every rainy spring.

5. Putting down carpet

In fact, consider nixing the idea of carpeting altogether. Yes, digging your toes into soft, fluffy carpeting is so much better than walking on cold concrete. So we won’t blame you if you elect for fluff. But Eskew calls carpets a “no-no in older houses”—after all, carpet is the worst kind of flooring to salvage after a flood.

“Stick to a vinyl locking tile that can be fully removed if it were ever to get wet,” he says. “You’ll hope to never have to tear it back up, but you’ll be prepared to do so.”

6. Clinging to the wet bar

When you think of a classic tricked-out basement, chances are you’re imagining a sweet wet bar with a built-in Kegerator, plenty of shelving for all the liquor you plan to stock up on, and bar stools galore.

“While very popular, every basement does not need a built-out bar,” Bowman says.

Here’s how to know if your basement is one of the few: Will you entertain guests at your fancy wet bar often, or once in a blue moon? If it’s the latter, consider alternate entertaining areas.

Bowman recommends arranging chairs and sofas around a bar cart or cabinet.

“This is a much more comfortable than sitting at a bar on hard stools,” she says.

7. Sticking with low ceilings

You shouldn’t have to hunch to enjoy your extra space. If you have the cash for a serious renovation, consider digging out the basement.

“An additional 12 inches of height will make the basement feel more spacious,” Calamia says.

Plus, the extra room does a lot to eliminate the frightening cavernous effect so common in dark basements.

But if your budget is tight, there are plenty of ways to make small, low-ceiling rooms feel bigger. Aim lights upward, and use light, movable furniture to expand a tiny space—and create a cozy basement worthy of lazy Saturday afternoons.

The post Finishing Your Basement? Avoid These 7 Common Blunders to Take Your Space to the Next Level appeared first on Real Estate News & Insights | realtor.com®.

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fhtess · 6 years

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We’re returning to The Old Homestead this week for our 52 Ancestors challenge. Though mine was a very suburban house! My parents bought it the year before I was born, in the then far west end of Ottawa, in a new community built next to the Ottawa River. Built by Minto, Crystal Beach featured a variety of house styles. Ours was a Viking.

In doing some research, I discovered a realtor who’s writing about Ottawa neighbourhoods and the houses that populate them. Apparently (and I had no idea), my childhood home is considered an example of Mid-Century Modern architecture. Who knew? Anyway, the house featured at the top of his post about Crystal Beach, is a Viking model (aka Belmont and Berkeley) and looks much like ours did when my parents first bought it. Over the years they did many renovations. He also includes a neighbourhood plan, which is super-cool, and an ad for the Viking, as well as a more detailed floor-plan. I even have a photo of the kitchen before my parents renovated the house in the late 70s, likely taken in the 60s:

When my parents first bought the house, the hardwood floors were left bare, and they used area rugs, as Ottawa is cold in the winter. You can just see it, past the rug, behind me in this photo from September 1967 (taken by and used with the permission of my uncle, David Spong):

Other wonderful features of the house included wood panelling and built-in bookshelves that framed the fire-place, as well as wood beams. You can see the first two in these two photos, one from 1966 and the other from c. 1973:

Though my dad was busy with work and then school (he went back to earn his Ph.D. in the late 60s/early 70s), he took time to finish the basement, dividing it between a utility room/laundry room, and a rec room, featuring an enclosed wooden bar and a black and white check-patterned floor. It was as cozy as a basement can be and served the family well for many years. He also installed a swingset for us, however, unlike those of some of our friends, ours was cemented into the ground, so worried was he that we would tip it over. We used it for years and years. As a teenager, I removed the screws and one of the swings and used it to practise gymnastics. I’m not quite sure why I’m doing what I’m doing in the photo!

In 1973, my aunt, Jadwiga, died, and this event preciptated the first major renovation as my babcia, Maria, came to live with us the following spring. In order to give her some extra room, my parents decided to convert the garage into living quarters, using half to extend the small bedroom on the entrance level and half to create a painting room, as Maria had taken up painting later in life. It also allowed some degree of separation for everyone.

By the late 70s, however, my sister was getting a little big for the small room alotted to her and my mother, I imagine, wanted a bigger kitchen, as well as a change in the main bathroom. So they hired a family friend, who was also a contractor, to build an addition and renovate the bathroom. Though the project (predictably) took longer than anticipated, the end result was worth it. For those six months, my sister and I shared a room, an experiment that ended up working quite well. I remember missing her the first few nights I was in my new room.

As the lot was a big one, they were able to more than double the size of the kitchen, and add a bedroom with an ensuite off the small room that had been my sister’s. I moved into what had been the Master Bedroom, and my sister took over the room that had been mine. Christmas that year was a challenge for my mum, as the kitchen was divided off by plastic sheeting that didn’t quite keep the chill out, but as always, she produced wonderful meals throughout the holiday season.

I also believe it was at this point that they decided to expand the driveway, so both cars could fit side-by-side. This meant taking out the steps beside the front door that led up to the lawn. Our cat was not amused, as he used to lie on those steps in the heat of the summer, soaking up the sun. However, he adjusted, and I’m sure my parents found it much easier in the morning not having to juggle cars, depending on who was leaving first.

Jane and me eating ice cream on my dad’s car… c. 1973

The only major changes in the 80s involved changing out the wood-burning fire place for a gas one and installing air-conditioning. My sister and I noted that this didn’t happen till we had almost ready to leave home! Eastern Ontario summers are hot and humid, often with weeks of stifling temperatures. I remember many nights leaving my oven-like bedroom (which got the late-day sun) for the couch in the living room, just to be able to sleep, lulled by the sound of the dehumidifier chugging away in the basement. (I can’t quite remember when they had the bay window installed, but I think that might have been the early 80s.)

The neighbourhood itself was a child’s paradise, with a park (that had a skating rink in the winter), a public pool (pool passes were $12 for the season), a corner store (Smiley’s), and by the mid-70s, a Dairy Queen. We wandered at will, along with our friends, roaming from place to place as we pleased. Originally the area near the river was rocky and forbidding, though at some point I recall clambering down to skate close to shore on the bumpy ice. However, in the 70s, that started to change as the city developed it, building what came to be known as Waterfront (and later Andrew Haydon) Park.

We could walk or ride our bikes there, as an underpass had been part of the plan, so we didn’t have to cross the busy road. My friends and I spent many happy hours there, wandering and talking. On Victoria Day, fireworks were de rigueur, so it was a big thing to go early and see who we’d meet as we mingled with the crowd. As well as the park, not too much further along was Bayshore Shopping Centre (). It started as a strip mall in the early 70s, with a Steinberg’s grocery store. I remember shopping there with my mum on Friday evenings. However, it grew and grew and by the time I was a teenager, it was our winter hang-out on cold Saturdays (when we weren’t skiing or skating).

Even better, at that point, OC Transpo offered a wonderful service called TeleTranspo. A bus left Bells Corners and Bayshore, going in opposite directions, every hour. Depending on where you wanted to go, you would call the TT line and give your address, then go wait outside for the bus to come to your door. Yep, you read that right. So for teenagers, going to the mall was only a phone-call away. This service also proved a boon to Maria, as the drivers were always kind enough to help her on and off the bus during the winter months.

My sister and I both married in 1990, but I lived within a 10 minute drive up the road in Bells Corners for the next decade, so I still spent a lot of time at the house. Generally Sean and I went for dinner with my parents every Sunday, and would spend most holidays there as well. Even when we moved a little further West (Kanata) we continued our tradition. At some point Smiley’s had been closed and replaced by Carola Pizza. Sadly, Carola too closed in the 2000s.

For me the house changed after the death of my father in 2001. Though I felt his spirit there, it still didn’t hold the same level of comfort it had up till that time. My mum had more renovations done, updating the front entrance, the lower powder room and the kitchen. We also cleaned out my babcia’s closet, something my dad had never been able to bring himself to do after her death in the late 80s. It was there I found her personal collection of letters, photos, and documents that spurred me to continue with my family history research.

My husband and I left Ottawa in 2006, moving across the country to British Columbia. The last two nights we spent in Ottawa were in my childhood home, staying with my mum. It was bittersweet. Despite the fact I’d not felt as comfortable in the house since 2001, I knew it was the last time I’d likely spend much time there. Driving away that Sunday morning felt very strange indeed. Except for the years I’d spent at university, and that, only two hours away, I’d never been more than ten minutes from that house. And now I was moving a three day drive (minimum) away.

My mum stayed in the house for another eight years, but in 2014, she decided to move closer to my sister, who has lived on the prairies for almost twenty years. After five decades, the move was a huge wrench for everyone. Knowing how much work it was to pack up a house and move, we decided to travel back to Ottawa for her final weekend there, and then drive her car out West. Walking in, it felt both strange and yet, so familiar to be back inside those walls.

The time passed quickly, divided between packing and visiting people and places I hadn’t seen in for what seemed like too much time. Before I knew it, we were pulling out of that driveway again, only now, it was most definitely the last time. Unlike in 2006, I took a few photos before we left. As you can see, my mum is an accomplished gardener. The back garden was a virtual oasis, however, I didn’t snap any photos and now regret that.

Below are a few more photos: my cousin and me in 1967 (taken by and used with permission from David Spong), my sister and me, and then my dad and me, the latter from the mid-80s. I hope you enjoyed reading about and seeing my Old Homestead as much as I had fun writing about it.

52 Ancestors...The Old Homestead... #52Ancestors #childhoodhome #familyhistory #familyhome #childhoodmemories #familyhistorywriting We're returning to The Old Homestead this week for our 52 Ancestors challenge. Though mine was a very suburban house!

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anomalagous · 7 years

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lc’s ongoing long-ass list of what the fuck, teen wolf, and other sundry E606:Ghosted edition.

scott getting a little tiny bit snarly at the sheriff for not believing~~ in stiles gives me life

this old-ass map not only puts beacon hills on top of a real life place called scotty place which still makes me laugh, but also substantially more north and eastward than i originally estimated.

why the fuck didnt naziwolf just get the fuck outta bh?

why did he choose to stay and teach high school of all things?

california requires an 18 month accreditation course and a certain GPA of teachers who do not have an education degree, i know this from direct experience. its been three months since naziwolf busted out of his bacta tank, so what the fuck

if he forged his credentials, how

when

when did he actually learn all of the post WW2 physics and electromagnetics things he clearly genuinely knows and has a genuine interest in?

did the dread doctors read him bedtime stories from their science journals?

if so, what the fuck

i guess if youre an alpha werewolf you can sleep in the backseat with no seatbelt and its not a big deal if you crash

good job on malia being the driver and not crashing them im proud of her

reading the date of the canaan abduction in the standard american way it was april 8th, 1987, which cant be a coincidence given that’s stiles birthday (albeit pre-stiles)

if canaan has been abandoned for 30 years, who has been cutting these obviously not overgrown lawns and trimming these obviously not overgrown accent shubberies

why isnt that flag beat up or torn in any way?

kudos on giving that convertible the old 80s style california plates but why arent any of the windows on any of the cars busted out? no flat tires? no rust or missing doors?

also that shot of the ‘town’ where there was more substantial damage looked fake as hell and the crosswalk was proceeding at the wrong angle and i cant unsee it.

why is there still power running to these street lamps?

for that matter who has their street lamps scheduled to turn on in the middle of the day?

was that block party banner over the street lettered on both sides? it reads properly no matter what side youre looking at, which seems weird.

why is there blood on the carousel? was that explained? we’ve never seen the ghost riders’ gun draw blood that i can recall

im not even sure we’ve really seen their whips draw blood per se and certainly it wouldn’t have caused that kind of blood stain

also why is the blood still wet and red 30 years later? why wasn’t that newspaper rotted out? either time impacted this town to make it shitty as hell or it didn’t, pick one, you cannot have both. it still rains enough in california to totally disintegrate a newspaper in thirty years.

how the fuck did that carousel function even that tiny bit after 30 years in the elements?

why did melissa have to sneak chris argent around, couldnt he have just declined the operation against medical advice?

also good to see scott got his utter inability to lie from his mom

even if malia isnt wearing 100% stiles’ void-hoodie how could the costume department have thought for a minute we wouldnt have thought that was the void hoodie?

malia having a hallucination of theo in the same episode he comes back in for real seemed both rushed and entirely unnecessary.

in fact these hallucinations seemed wholesale unnecessary and neither scott nor malia deserved that nonsense

were all of these dead leaves already on location or did some poor asshole have to ship them in and then ship them out again

come to think of it, at first i was really excited to see coral/eucalyptus trees as they are actually trees that are in california (as opposed to the type of oak the nemeton is, which is distinctly Not a type of tree in california) but then i realized those are Southern California Trees and if beacon hills (and canaan) are that far north and close to the oregon border, the trees should be way more pines and evergreens and not coral or eucalyptus or ... any deserty tree, really.

seriously were these hallucinations just to show malia can feel sad too?

malia was wearing really subtle gold eyeshadow earlier. now it’s dark shadowing up to her browbone. does being a werecoyote also mean being able to shift your makeup at will? cause thats cool

do little girls seriously still play with baby dolls while hitting their first strides of puberty? im beginning to think i was never actually a little girl.

how much younger than malia was kylie supposed to be? bc she looks like 12 here but malia was like... 10 when the desert wolf murdered her family, right? was SHE the younger sister??

teen wolf shamelessly reusing shots with new filters on them like never before. this ain’t even the fifth time i’ve caught them doing this, this season, and i’ve literally never seen them do it in any of the other seasons.

im not sure anybody told kylie’s actress she wasnt gonna get to make out with shelley

how do werecreatures get piercings? or were her ears pierced first before the change?

why does anyone let liam make any decisions, ever?

i do not get why everyone finds naziwolf so hot

seriously i have a little tree-bush exactly like this right outside my door/garage and that shit is wild and untamed in just a month of no trimming in 30 years it would not have that nice slender shape anymore

also trees being choked to death by kudzu or whatever all these vines are dont look that healthy

is there even kudzu in california??? ive never seen so many vines in all my 10 years of living here.

the first house scott goes in theres like no tv in the living room but there is one chair (with no dining table) all alone in the dining room area, which just looks sad.

oh sorry two chairs set up in what was clearly the worlds most melancholy staring contest.

my dentist used to have that exact sailboat wallpaper trim around the top of his exam rooms.

scotts bullying a door.

have melissa and chris argent actually told the pack about the head-biting yet bc i feel like they should know

i think more people have asked scott if he’s okay in this episode than in the last three seasons, which is sad bc it’s basically just lydia and malia that do it.

that one house has some brutal earthquake damage in its exterior wall.

poseys microexpressions are so woefully underrated, he really is brilliant.

i have more grey hair than jr bourne and that makes me really angry

i like that they’re doing alchemy with druidic compounds/hedgemagic/whatever you want to call it more than i could possibly express.

why is there a porch loveseat on the step up to this one house but that FLAG IS ENTIRELY INTACT?

how convenient that all three of them were looking at that window when lenore decided to fuck with the drapery.

that said scott’s resultant HOLY SHIT?!?? face is amazing

how has lenore been surviving in this town, does she not need water, electric, heat, groceries? where did the lemons for the lemonade come from?

all this wood paneling is the most 70s thing i have ever seen in my life

i appreciate the little cast iron redwood decoration with the ‘m’ on the bottom of it.

everything!! in!! this!! house!! is!! brown!!

that piano as a busted af bass key there.

i feel like i’ve seen that other metal flower/leaf decor before. the new version of the stilinski house, maybe?

lenore has an intimidatingly large smile and i feel like that as an intentional casting choice

how come malia and scott couldnt hear her heartbeat after scott explicitly called out that there were no heartbeats? or for that matter not hear that caleb also didn’t have one? (presumably.)

im not 100% sure but i think malia is holding scott’s hand when they enter the dining room area of lenore’s house, which is adorable so i accept no other reality now.

i honestly feel really bad for lenore.

i would say the fisheye lens is s6′s slo mo but the slo mo didnt go anywhere

i dont know if its supposed to be fancy or artisinal or whatever you called that in the 80s but dont put green shit in your lemonade, green shit does not belong in your lemonade. lemons. sugar. water. it isn’t hard.

malia like chugs a good half of her glass at once, but when she sets it back down it is more full than any of the other glasses. i prefer to think she just faked drinking it to try and gain lenore’s trust than it’s a continuity error from the props department.

when lenore starts using her banshee powers to shake the house, it also magically converts the lemonade into water.

lenore has a pair of decorative ducks on her wall but they appear to be two male mallard ducks, so. gay duck decor.

so when does lydia get to have telekinesis?

i dont think im a very big fan of how angela harvey handles scott.

malia did NOT make a fist like she was really committing to trying to punch out that window.

seriously scotts the alpha he doesnt need lydia to give him permission to do things scott thinks need to be done

that being said scott going into the basement with a creepy kid when youre obviously in some kind of horror movie trope was stupid

the cameras they used for the senior pack team were super blurry anytime anyone moved even the littlest bit, its so annoying.

scott barely being tall enough to reach this tiny-ass basement window is endearing to me

there is no way a vhs tape that wet would run. i remember vhs tapes. they were not sturdy.

i feel like we used to have the same VCR in my parents’ room tho

also what the hell camcorder did they record this on that put it straight on VCR, camcorders in the 80s had weird little small VCR tapes you had to put in a converter. that was just a standard VCR tape.

also why are there jumpcuts in the home video? did somebody cut the original footage and THEN put it on a standard VCR tape? how much fucking work was THAT??

caleb goes from 0 to 100 on the creepy poltergeist scale real quick

well okay maybe from like 40 to 100

banshee duel yessssss

literally why would noshiko do this after she saw what happened with the nogitsune

not that i necessarily think theo is as dangerous as the nogitsune but he is well bad enough

look at this worthless white boy doing this shit against all the advice of the woc around him

why does the sword do this, i thought the power was in kira and not the sword

if the power is in the sword why couldnt noshiko fix her own damn blade

look at this other worthless white boy even more worthless than the first

that looks like melissa is putting like grout on chris’ injury that does not look comfortable

oh look hes screaming imma guess it was not in fact comfortable

gratuitous jr bourne fanservice

awwww theyre holding haaaaands again

how did this kid get on the stairs the last time we saw him he was by the tv, why did scott and malia let him herd him like this

i appreciate malia’s willingness to beat up a kid poltergeist immensely

of the pictures on caleb’s walls, many are pictures of insects. one is a blue crab. one says ‘guten’ on it, which somehow entertains me a lot.

this is the second time this episode has tried to make me scared of carousel horses

the vhs footage loops while no one is attending to it which is not how vhs tapes work

malia is such a treasure

that being said having nearly drowned twice in my childhood this whole drowning-on-dry-land conceit is not super great for me

screencapping this is so gross

i love lydia’s fierce banshee scream face

so the blood was on the carousel before the wild hunt attack, as we see in lydia’s vision. SO WHY IS IT THERE??

THERE ARE KIDS RIDING ON THIS CAROUSEL WHILE SOME OF THE HORSES ARE BLOODY

poor skateboard bro couldnt even take his skateboard like rude wild hunt

i feel like there’s a lot more ghost riders here than there are in beacon hills. maybe the ghost riders just come for particular towns and the ones in bh are actually like... cora isaac and danny.

its amazing how much younger a good foundation can maybe somebody look

did liam SERIOUSLY just tell theo he can kill whoever he wants? did i hear that right? bc that is a TERRIBLE thing to tell theo, who has ALREADY KILLED A LOT OF PEOPLE, even if what you meant was ‘dont kill us you need us’.

i cant believe we got this cheap knockoff as an excuse to not have kira and then they didnt even let him have the powers he needed to do the job

otoh watching his ass get blasted back into the tunnels was satisfying

literally nobody cares if youre okay theo you murderous fuck

i wonder how many times scott had someone steadying him telling HIM he has to breathe like hes doing for malia right here

i should really keep a tally of how many times scott does stiles’ lizard tongue thing while stiles is gone

this is gross of me to think while the character is basically drowning but hey now i know what scott looks like with his bottom lip all wet and covered in somewhat translucent stretchy goo--jizz. okay. it looks like jizz.

scott mccall nearly drowns on dry land after a lifetime of severe asthma and the first thing he does after is ask if malia is ok

luckily THIS time she asks if HES okay to but jeez

he looks so shocked and confused to be asked extra jeez

more scolia handholding, this time while fleeing danger

i was literally three in 1987 and i still have more grey hair than lenore who was demonstrably an adult in 1987 I AM VERY ANGRY

that being said i realized why caleb here’s clothing was bothering me so much. nobody had shorts that long in the 80s. everybody wore short as hell shorts in the 80s. it was thighs everywhere.

these stupid motherfuckers taking theo to scott’s HOME and putting him in scott’s SAFE SPACE without even WARNING HIM oh my GOD

those better not also be scott’s CLOTHES

ok but WHY are the wild hunt trapped? did they BRING the northern lights or is the northern lights related to what’s trapping them?

excuse me but WHEN did lydia see anything related to what happens to people after the wild hunt takes them and why didnt we get to see it too?

seriously its like if scott is thinking of stiles then lizard blep

im so mad at liam for bringing theo back and putting him in scotts house i cant even see straight

and i just know that this anger that scott is being allowed will be it

and in a week or two itll be working with theo like nothing ever happened

im honestly shocked he even got this much

he even got undercut there by malias (also justified) rage

cool that the morrigan got a namedrop but i dont trust them with that story eitherrrrr

man let me tell you if this was martin and not scott and somehow he had been murdered and resurrected and was then confronted with his murderer in his pack house that murderer would not fucking leave alive

im still kind of mad that this season brought claudia back to life just to make her so sketch and make me kind of hate her, i didnt want to hate her

oh okay its a different weird leaf decor piece than the other one

oh yeah noah OKAY NOW youre starting to believe BUDDY you have faith issues

#long post for ts #like this is so long #so so so long #just my train of thought tho #no episode of teen wolf is without sin #read at your own risk #this is unfiltered #and idk what tags its gonna end up in #but my biased opinions are Obvious.

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architectnews · 4 years

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28 Social Housing Units in Courbevoie, Paris

28 Social Housing Units, Parisian Apartment Homes, French Real Estate Development Photos

28 Social Housing Units in Courbevoie

Courbevoie Residential Architecture Development in Paris design by Koz architectes, France

19 Aug 2020

28 Social Housing Units, Courbevoie

Architects: Koz architectes

Location: Courbevoie, Paris, France

28 Social Housing Units

In 2007, Groupe 3F and the Courbevoie Town Council launched a competition for a social housing project on the last remaining plot in the urban development zone of Les Fauvelles. The instructions given to the teams were as follows: « the project must present new approaches for social housing in densely occupied urban settings». The proposal was selected over those offered by SOA Architectes and LAN Architecture.

The right response to the right question From the start, the exercise involved defining the intrinsic qualities of individual housing, with a view to adapting them to collective living. Four such qualities seemed to us to be essential:

Quality of use Flexibility is the key strength of individual housing: you do as you please in a house, and you feel fully “at home”. You can change how you use bedrooms and living areas as your family grows, and depending on the lifestyle and hobbies of each family member: the spare room becomes a nursery when a new child is born, a small bedroom is converted into an office.

Altenratively, a growing teenager moves into the bedroom next to the living room because he prefers to be separate from the sleeping area used by the rest of the family, a wall is knocked down to make an open-plan kitchen, you can put a green house in the garden or play music in the garage.

You can walk around it Being able to walk around the outside of a house gives people a particular sense of belonging. But circumnavigability also involves the presence of various kinds of external features: front lawns, courtyards, gardens, terraces, etc.

A house is supposed to be unique It looks different from the others; you can recognize it when you look down the street; you can point it out. It is individual, and it also has an individualizing effect that strengthens one’s sense of belonging

In a house, you have neighbours Your neighbours remain for a long time, and with them you gradually form bonds: you chat over the hedge, you do each other favours, your children play together. Neighbours build a relationship of mutual trust.

Once this initial exercise had been carried out, our aim was now to apply these 4 cardinal virtues of the individual house to a collective housing project. The building forms part of the urban development zone called Les Fauvelles in Courbevoie, a stone’s throw from the skyscrapers and frenzied activity of the La Défense business district. All around, the 12-storey residential buildings in the Faubourg de l’Arche development zone form both a skyline and an urban clearing. Behind it stands a building belonging to a French car manufacturer.

The project consists of two units with rather undefined outlines, further blurred by the criss-crossed green strengthening rods that have been used as sculptural guardrails for the various walkways and loggias. Opting for two buildings instead of one enabled us to increase the surface area of the façades, to give an enhanced feeling of transparency, to ensure a variety of orientations and views, and also to get closer to the more intimate qualities of use and scale characteristic of individual houses. Both units are built on a sculpted base and stand out against the sky like a pair of funny giants reaching out to each other.

Quality of use The key feature is that flats with at least 4 rooms have a white cantilevered cube affixed apparently at random to the façade. This contains a room “plugged into” the living room whose use can change according to the desires and changing size of the family unit. Its partition wall is not load-bearing and can be removed with the agreement of the owner (and who knows, maybe in 50 years the tenants will have become the owners). This extra room gives the living space flexibility and elasticity.

All the flats have a triple aspect and living rooms all have two aspects; most are corner rooms. All rooms including bathrooms have natural light. Underfloor heating has been used, and the wood and aluminum window surrounds are fully watertight.

Every flat has its own loggia, an outside space that has a ready-made screen (reminiscent of the reed screens often used on balconies in France) for added privacy: the space can be used as a greenhouse, a conservatory, a DIY workshop, a fitness area, etc. This freely usable space can be used in a similar way to a basement, an attic or a courtyard: features that are generally characteristic of individual houses.

Circumnavigability Private walkways run round the apartments and are directly accessible from all rooms, including the bedrooms and kitchen. This means you can walk round your ‘house’, take strategic shortcuts, play hide-and-seek, and play tricks on people. Access to each apartment is via a wide suspended open-air landing that affords views of the entire volume of the living space. This means that the building has a number of different exterior spaces (loggias, balconies, and landings), which increase the usable surface area and give residents the impression of living in the open air, with uninterrupted vistas of western Paris.

Individualisation Each flat is instantly recognizable from outside; the buildings have different outlines, volumes appear loosely structured, and the stepped, irregular shapes have an almost random feel.

Neighbourliness Behind the design of these residential units lies a firm belief in sociability. Each landing serves two units (except on the first floor, which is given over to small flats) hoping that they will extend their social life on the concrete boardwalk that gives access to the staircases and hosts a flower shop and a small scale kindergarten ; landings are very large (10 sq m, three times the usual size) and thus can easily be used in a variety of ways. Because they are set well back, any items placed on the landings will not affect the integrity of the la facade or the building’s overall appearance.

28 Social Housing Units, Paris – Building Information

Architects: KOZ architectes project manager: Elsa Junod

Client: Groupe 3F Chef de Projet: Stéphanie Demeure dit Latte

Structure: EVP Ingénierie fluides: Cferm Economist: Cabinet Ripeau Acoustic: Peutz Sustainability: Bio-concept

Location: Zac des Fauvelles, 75-83 avenue de l’Arche ilot B 23 92 400 Courbevoie – France

Entreprises Gros oeuvre: KILIC Ravts: Fernandes Facade: Fernandes Frame: Bourgogne couverture Etanchéité: SAS Windows opening: S.T.B.A C.M.B. Walls: FARIA Floor / paintings: DE SOUSA Metal work: Atelier De Pierre Services: A.C.P.C Electricity: Paternoster Lift: OTIS

Schedule Concours: mai 2007 Construction time: 20 month Completion: septembre 2010

Project 28 housing units

Surfaces Floor area housing: 2 378,00 m2 Floor area retail: 440 m2 28 housings: 8 F2, 10 F3, 7 F4, 3F5 28 parking places

Cost 4 356 734,66 € HT housing: 3 806734,66 € retail: 550 000,00 € No demolitions

Key points The complex comprises 28 apartments, a shop, a business premises and a basement for parking. Reinforced concrete structural system. Coloured high-density laminated panels. Rain-water collection, planted roof, heated flooring, external wood/aluminium joinery, loggia and private walkways for all apartments.

Environmental quality THPE RT2005: 70 kwh/m2/year; systematic exterior insulation, including parapet; thermal bridge breakers; heated flooring; natural lighting of all rooms and stairwells; double or even triple orientation, corner living room; maximization of glazed surfaces; air permeability tested in accordance with Effinergie requirements.

About KOZ: KOZ architectes was founded in 1999 by Christophe Ouhayoun and Nicolas Ziesel, both of whom: – graduated from the Paris-Belleville School of Architecture ; – lived in the USA when they were children; – are well-versed in 3D imagery and urban cultures; – and are completely at home in the debate about managing climate change priorities in the urban environment.

KOZ is a founding member of the PLAN01 Architects Collective, created in 2001 with the Atelier du Pont, Bocabeille-Prégo Architectures and Philéas agencies. With PLAN01 they founded PLAN02, an in-house eco-design engineering office providing real time feedback and orientations for social and environmental responsibility in their projects.

KOZ creates non-typical, friendly and sensitive buildings that redefine public spaces and emphasize the diversity of their uses. KOZ champions architecture that is aware of context and creates surprise and “added value” in terms of function, by making use of residual areas that are easily adapted to stimulate the imagination of local residents, users and visitors.

KOZ regularly carries out wide ranging assignments, including project management, site management, auditing, signage, and furniture Work is organised in accordance with the tenets of precision and autonomy, placing value on skill and creativity. The team is made up of 8 to 12 persons – architects, computer graphics designers, liaison officer and manager. Everyone is involved in information coordination and participation in decision-making throughout the project.

KOZ makes good use of the synergy and experience of the PLAN01 agencies in a 600 sq m workspace on the Paris Right Bank.

Photographer © Guillaume Grasset and Jean-Baptiste Pellerin

28 Social Housing Units in Courbevoie, Paris images / information received from Koz architectes

Location: Paris, France

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AME-LOT Student Housing Architect: Stephane Malka photo : Laurent Clément / Tristan Spella / MALKA ARCHITECTURE 2011 AME-LOT Housing

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improvenet · 5 years

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Most basements are blank canvases that beg to be finished, remodeled and most of all utilized. Basements have a lot of potential, but as with any large home project, considering the pros and cons of finishing your basement are very important.

However, deciding how to best utilize the space can be a risk. It's an investment of time and money. Here are a few facts and tips about basement remodeling to help with this big decision.

If you've been considering a basement remodel, you've come to the right place. Not only can ImproveNet provide you with tips and inspiration for your project, but we can help you connect with pros in your area for free! Connect with basement contractors today.

Finished Basement ROI

Because finishing a basement can be costly in time, money, and energy. The first thing you need to know is whether or not it is a good return on investment. Of course, not everything comes down to time and money; there has to be some consideration for quality of life. While studies show that upon resale you will only recoup about 70% of what you spend on finishing the basement, there are other returns that rank just as high. Finishing all that valuable space in your home can improve your lifestyle when your family has more room to stretch out, a fun place to entertain, expanded space for the kids to play, or more room to have friends and family visit. Another great reason according to the National Association Of Realtors is that 81% of homeowners said they enjoy their home more and have a greater desire to be home after completing their basement project.

Weighing The Cons Of Finishing Your Basement

Finishing your basement will most likely increase your home’s value, but there are some negatives that should be considered before finishing your basement. Obviously, the biggest con is the expense of a basement. Get a ballpark figure by using ImproveNet’s cost estimator. Check into the appraisal value of your home and the value of the homes around you. Make sure that you’re not putting so much money into your home that you can’t at the very least recoup 70%. Of course, if this is your forever home, it is probably worth it, regardless of ROI.

Another downside to finishing your basement is that you are going to have to pay higher taxes on your home because your usable square footage has increased. Also, with more lights, more heat and a/c, and more livable space, your utilities are going to rise. You may also want to consider that you may be limiting the amounts of storage you have available in your basement when you turn that space into living area. While this may not be a dealbreaker for some, it should certainly be considered when determining if a basement remodel is right for you.

Basement Trends

You aren’t alone in thinking about finishing or remodeling your basement. There are a lot of cool ideas and designs out there that other homeowners have created to inspire you and will quite possibly have you falling in love with your home all over again. Consider including a home theater, a full-scale gym, a girl cave with a lovely wine bar, a sports room, or how about a whole guest suite that could second as an AirBnB space. Truly, the possibilities are endless.

Basement Remodeling Steps

Once you’ve made the decision to move forward, there are a number of steps you can and should take in order to ensure that your project is filled with celebrations and not regrets.

Step 1: Get An Appraisal & Inspection

Get an appraisal. An appraiser can you help determine how much money you should put into your basement and still get a good return upon resale. Also, an inspection will help you to determine what kinds of work will need to be done in order to do the job correctly and help you avoid the critical mistakes a number of homeowners make when finishing a basement. An inspection will help you identify whether or not: your foundation needs repairs, there is rotting in the floor joists, there are moisture issues, and whether the windows are in working order or need replacing. Once the problems have been identified, you can also select the proper materials you will need to prevent mold and leaks between the concrete and your new drywall.

Step 2: Layout & Design

Determine what your goals are and where you want things to be. You will have to take any load-bearing walls and beams into consideration when creating your design. Also, you have to consider the height of your ceilings. To adhere to code, your ceilings have to be 7’ to 7’5” depending on where you live. If you don’t have enough room for that height you can consider underpinning which is where the concrete floor is removed and the ground dug out for increased height. Sound daunting? The good news is this step helps to remove and fix any old issues with your foundation. Then you will need to consider: where the walls will go, where the doors will be and which way they will swing, where to put the plumbing-drains and fixtures, and most importantly, where those outlets for the movie projector and sound system will go! There are a number of self-help tools online like HomeByMe.com and RoomSketcher.com where you can design your basement yourself.

Step 3: DIY Or Hire A Contractor

Once you know exactly what you are dealing with in terms of time, budget, material costs, energy, you can decide whether this will be a do-it-yourselfer or you have the money in your budget to leave it to the experts. In larger remodels, there could be some projects you might be able to DIY, but for anything that has to do with electrical, waterproofing or plumbing, I suggest you contact a contractor who can help you get the job done right.

If you are considering using a contractor, let ImproveNet help you find top-ranked professionals in your area.

Some basement projects you'll want to consider are:

Waterproofing: Make sure your foundation has all its cracks repaired and problem areas fixed or they will wreak havoc on you brand new drywall. Adding a layer of waterproofing material between the concrete and drywall is important.

Sump Pump: Contact a plumber if you are considering a sump pump to minimize damage in case of flooding.

Insulation: Add insulation to any exposed pipes. This will help with any potential freezing and heat loss during extreme cold and will also lower your energy costs.

Framing: There are a few different methods of framing your walls including DriCore interlocking framing systems or the traditional method of wood studs and insulation.

Electrical: Make sure to plan out where your entertainment areas will go and the number of outlets you will need for all of your sound and video equipment.

Drywall: Try using USG's Sheetrock Brand Mold Tough Gypsum Panels or Georgia-Pacific's nonpaper-faced DensArmor Plus High-Performance Interior Panels because unlike standard drywall, these finishing materials are more water-resistant and when tested received the best scores for mold resistance. The next step with the drywall is tape and texture.

Painting & Finishing Work: This could be baseboards, crown molding, doors. Now is where the fun and your personality comes in. The molding and baseboards can really help a basement feel like a main floor so don’t scrimp here. Consider a crown molding on your kitchenette and pretty trim around the doorways. With paint, you might consider a similar color palette as the one on your main floor to make it feel like an extension. Or, consider colors that brighten up what might be a darker space.

Whether to finish a basement is a difficult decision; the would you’s, should you’s, could you’s are tough calls! But, whatever you do, add quality of life into the equation because the extra space could be quite valuable to your lifestyle!

For complete transparency, please be aware that this blog post contains affiliate links and any purchases made through the links below will result in a small commission for ImproveNet, at no extra cost for you.

#Home #improvenet #home deco

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biofunmy · 5 years

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At Frieze New York, Islands of Daring

Booth C2

Bridget Donahue and LC Queisser

Booths F6, F12 and F14

Company, Bank and Very Small Fires

Booths B36 and F9

David Lewis and Antoine Ertaskiran

Booths A11, B32, C7 and D1

Foxy Production, Simone Subal, Rachel Uffner and Galerie Lelong

Booths S4, S10 and S11

Galerist, Galeri Nev and Pi Artworks

The fair’s outstanding Spotlight section, curated by Laura Hoptman of the Drawing Center, is dedicated to “significant work by overlooked figures.” They include Yüksel Arslan, a Turkish painter born in 1933 who moved to Paris at the invitation of André Breton and died in 2017. His “Arture 439, Sans Titre, l’Homme,” from 1992, in a joint presentation by Turkish galleries Galerist and Galeri Nev, is a gloriously strange gallimaufry of interspecies sex acts and quotations from the artist’s scientific reading, drawn with homemade colors. Susan Hefuna makes ink drawings inspired by the intricate wooden screens of her Cairo childhood. The examples presented by Pi Artworks of London and Istanbul are done on overlapping sheets of tracing paper fastened with rice glue. The multitude of tones and textures create a fascinating tension between clarity and ambiguity — the drawings are like letters of a foreign language glimpsed in a dream. HEINRICH

Booths B9, B10 and B20

lokal_30, Koenig & Clinton and Kate Werble

Booth F18

PM8

Frieze New York

Through May 5 at Randalls Island Park; frieze.com. Tickets are limited and only available online.

Sahred From Source link Travel

from WordPress http://bit.ly/2GVjuBf via IFTTT

#IFTTT #WordPress

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davidoespailla · 5 years

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Top 15 Home Features That Will Sell Your Home Fast—and for More Cash

iStock; realtor.com

It’s one of the (many) high-stakes gambles of homeownership: that awesome new feature or design improvement you’ve been wishin’ and hopin’ (and of course savin’ for) to add for your family might ultimately hurt, not help, your place’s resale value. After all, times and tastes change, and eventually most homeowners will become home sellers. So how do you know that today’s sleek, new quartz countertop won’t become tomorrow’s eye-scorching popcorn ceiling on the open market?

Relax, we’re here to help you suss it out. Realtor.com®’s data team searched to find the home features that can help folks sell their home the fastest—and for the best price. We narrowed our list to the items found in homes with the highest list prices that went under contract the fastest. It’s a high-value sweet spot.

There’s plenty on the line here. Homeowners spent more on upgrading their homes in 2017 than in any year since 2006, according to the most recent Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University study—an average $12,361 in discretionary spending. Much of that went into upgrading kitchens and bathrooms, the top room remodels, according to home design website Houzz.

“Anytime a buyer can walk into a house and see it already has the features they want, that’s a huge bonus for the seller,” says Anna Maria Mannarino, who runs her eponymous interior design firm in Holmdel, NJ. “If buyers feel they need to add key features or designs, they’re going to calculate how much it will cost and then lower their bid.”

To figure out the top home features, we dug through more than a million single-family home listings on realtor.com in February. We calculated a median price and days on market for each abode with one or more of the 70 popular features we evaluated for this ranking. Features in homes that took longer than 84 days to sell, the national median, were cut from our list. We also eliminated amenities, such as high ceilings, that are difficult—and expensive—remodels.

So what are the most profitable home features for sellers hoping to close quickly? Here are the big 15:

Chef’s kitchen/gourmet kitchen

Theater room

Home gym

Three-car garage

Solar panels

Quartz counters

Exterior lighting

Tennis court

Home office

In-ground pool

Mudroom

Security system

Fireplace

Smart home features

Walk-in closet

OK, let’s take a closer look at trends that could help you make bank when it comes time to cash in and sell your home.

Kitchen makeovers bring in the dough Kitchen

Tony Frenzel

Once upon a time (say, when you were growing up), most kitchens were drab, unsexy spaces that folks didn’t spend much time in beyond preparing and consuming dinner. But as the open kitchen trend has exploded, they’ve become centerpieces of the home—way more visible, personalized, luxurious, and important to buyers. Homeowners have upgraded to chef’s and gourmet kitchens (No. 1 on our list), making them glamorous showpieces where they can entertain their friends.

These days, trendsetters are choosing dark and moody color palettes, like black and navy, over the more bland white, gray, and neutral shades. They’re opening the rooms to the outdoors by installing walls of windows or double doors that open to the yard. And open shelving (versus the classic kitchen cabinets) is gaining more traction.

“Even if you don’t consider yourself a big foodie or a master chef, higher-end kitchens have a huge appeal,” says Jamie Novak, a Los Angeles–based professional organizer and author of “Keep This Toss That.” She works with homeowners who are planning to stay put as well as those getting ready to list their properties. “When the appliances are pretty and functional, it’s a win-win.”

Homes with chef’s kitchens sell for a median $599,000—more than double the national median of $295,000. Chef’s kitchens generally feature an open layout big enough to accommodate plenty of cooks in the kitchen, a large island, a gas cook range built for larger, hotter flames, a Sub-Zero refrigerator and freezer, and multiple sinks and ovens. Popular brands include Viking ovens and ranges, Bosch appliances, and Kohler and Moen faucets and sinks.

The average kitchen overhaul cost $12,300, while major kitchen overhauls usually cost upward of $40,000, according to the Harvard University study.

“People look at a kitchen, and if they don’t like it—they’ll often pass on the house,” says Lori Wellman, owner of Lincoln Cabinet, a Lincoln, NE–based remodeler.

Quartz counters (No. 6) are also in high demand. The engineered variety (a fancy word for enhanced) doesn’t chip as easily as the natural kind, doesn’t require much upkeep, and is difficult to stain or damage. Plus there are hundreds of colors, patterns, and textures to choose from.

It was the material of choice for home renovators, rising from a 41% market share in 2017 to 48% in 2019, according to Houzz data.

“[Engineered] quartz is a very, very versatile material,” says Nino Sitchinava, the site’s principal economist. “You can control palettes and colors and textures really, really well.”

Specialty rooms: Why go out when you can stay in? Rooms

Tony Frenzel

Properties with dedicated specialty rooms, like theater rooms (No. 2) and home gyms (No. 3), showed up in only a small percentage of listings (1.5% and 1.1% respectively). And while they’re not as popular as they once were, say design experts, homes that come equipped with such rooms sell for about twice as much as the national median of $295,000. They’re fun to enjoy, too!

“At the high end there’s real cachet in having those specialized spaces,” says Jenni Lantz, manager of DesignLens, a design resource for developers, builders, architects, and interior designers. “Of course you need to have the space for them.”

Folks without big bank accounts can also create these spaces on a shoestring, DIY budget. Dark basements can become theater rooms, for example, with the addition of an oversize screen, wireless speakers, and a comfy couch. Popcorn makers are a bonus!

Unlike theater rooms and gyms, mudrooms (No. 11) have been gaining in popularity in recent years, say design experts. These small rooms are where coats and dirty shoes are kept are typically located toward the front of homes, and more homeowners are retrofitting them into their abodes. They’re becoming more stylish with rustic, wood benches to store those muddy boots under and fancy coat racks.

“Mudrooms are a fantastic transition from an outdoor space to your indoor living [space],” says organizer Novak.

They cost an average $12,000 to install, according to Fixr, a company that connects owners to home-related services.

Home offices (No. 9) have also become increasingly sought-after as more people work remotely or go freelance. The key is natural lighting, perhaps a window view for the desk, and doors that can shut out the clamor of the kids playing in other parts of the home.

Outdoor features are in Outdoor features

Tony Frenzel

The trend today may be all about indoor-outdoor living. But it wasn’t beautifully inlaid patios, outdoor kitchens complete with pizza ovens, or trickling fountains that came out on top for outdoor features. That honor went to three-car garages (No. 4).

“Americans love their garages,” says Rick Foster, a managing broker and license partner at Engel & Völkers Annapolis, in Maryland. He’s sold more than 10,000 homes during his career and has seen buyer preferences change with the times.

Buyers aren’t just looking for a place to park their cars. “Having extra storage space is a big benefit,” adds Foster.

Certainly prestige comes into play—for many, bigger is indeed better. But unlike some outdoor features, this one is difficult and costly to add after the fact. Buyers want one already in place.

Other popular outdoor features on our list include solar panels (No. 5), tennis courts (No. 8), and in-ground pools (No. 10).

Solar panels are hot (yes, really) thanks to demand from both climate-conscious buyers and those simply hoping to cut down on their electricity bills. Homes with these features sell the fastest of all of the amenities on our list, at a median 51 days. About 2% more homeowners undergoing remodels have been installing them each year from 2015 to 2017, according to Houzz data.

But be warned: They’re not cheap. Installing a 5-kilowatt system, the standard system of about 20 panels, costs around $25,000 to $35,000, according to https://ift.tt/1VRVXo9.

“Solar is a very regional preference,” says Sitchinava of Houzz. They’re particularly appealing in places that get a lot of sunshine but have high AC bills, such as California, Arizona, and Texas. “The long-term payoff is pretty phenomenal.”

Tennis courts are also appealing, but they can set homeowners back more than $50,000, according to Quality Court Industries, a tennis court construction firm that operates throughout the Southeast.

Even having a shared court open to residents of a community can boost property values. The same goes for in-ground pools, which can be private or shared as well.

Built-in pools are polarizing features in some parts of the country—attracting some buyers while repelling others due to maintenance or liability issues. The cardinal rule for this feature: Install it for your own enjoyment first, resale value second.

“They’re consistently popular,” particularly in warm-weather areas, says design expert Lantz. “People still like to lay out by the pool.”

Smart home features and other electronics can pay off Smart home features

Tony Frenzel

Smart home technology (No. 14) is a catchy umbrella term people use to describe everything from a few interconnected appliances or internet-controlled thermostats to fully wired homes. The expensive, built-in approach has waned a bit, but the more ad hoc approach is booming, thanks to smart devices that can be used as simple control centers, like Amazon Echo and Google Home.

“The convenience is unparalleled, and the technology is getting so easy to use,” says organizer Novak.

Security systems (no. 12), often smart ones integrated with mobile and other devices, are gaining traction as must-have features. Just 10% of homeowners undergoing remodels had a security system installed in 2015, according to Houzz data. By 2017, about 15% did.

Folks used to have to hire a security company to come in, assess the property, and then install a system that could run anywhere from $600 to more than $1,000. And that doesn’t include the monthly monitoring fees. Now, homeowners can pick up a simple, smart home security system from companies like Ring for around $150.

“People really like having an app on your phone and knowing if someone’s at your home and being able to speak to them,” says Craig Grant, CEO of the Real Estate Technology Institute, an online portal where folks can learn about real estate technology.

These classic indoor amenities have lasting appeal—and a new spin Indoor features

Tony Frenzel

Some things never go out of style. Fireplaces remain a highly sought-after amenity, although today’s sleek, electronic models don’t have much in common with the ashy traditional hearths. These newer fireplaces are often installed right into wall.

“No matter where your home might be, fireplaces are always welcome,” says Nancy Fire, the design and trend forecasting expert behind the HGTV HOME brand.

Other timeless features that boost home values are spacious, walk-in closets. Sometimes folks will even tear down an adjacent bedroom to build that massive closet with floor-to-ceiling shoe and accessory walls, a ladder to store and fetch rarely used items, and seating to make it easier for friends and family to share their outfit opinions, says remodeler Wellman.

Walk-in closets, while still popular, aren’t as in-demand as they used to be—and the decluttering movement (and its guru Marie Kondo) can partly be blamed.

“If you’re trying to pare down your clothing, then you don’t want a big walk-in closet to fill,” says Novak, whose clients prefer smaller, sliding-door closets. “It just becomes a big mess.”

Clare Trapasso and Rachel Stults contributed to this report.

The post Top 15 Home Features That Will Sell Your Home Fast—and for More Cash appeared first on Real Estate News & Insights | realtor.com®.

Top 15 Home Features That Will Sell Your Home Fast—and for More Cash

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