Tag: Building Materials
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Leftovers as Ingredients
Last night, I enjoyed Christmas dinner, the sequel. No, not the movie. The leftovers. Leftover turkey, mashed potatoes, gravy, green beans, roasted, butternut squash, all smothered under her blanket of gravy. And for dessert, pumpkin pie, and pecan pie. And, as you may have predicted, it was delicious. Perhaps even more delicious than the first…
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Mixed Species Flooring Experiment
Experimenting with mixed species flooring (beech and jatoba)… But why?!?!
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Phoenix Rising
Hroth sent me the photograph above so that we could troubleshoot some subtle details for the old/new icehouse entrance and the relationship between the door and the still-to-come exterior landing. I think we’re 99% in sync, but we’ll hash out the details tomorrow so that we’re 100% in sync. In the meantime, I’m enchanted with…
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Old House, New Home
I’ve lived much, perhaps even *most* of my life in old houses. With the exception of late middle and high school, 3/4 of college, briefly in Santa Fe (1996-9), and briefly in Paris and Rome, my homes have been within old houses. And, come to think of it, some of my boarding school years were…
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Upcycling Decking Debris
Adaptive reuse has become an increasingly important principle for me in recent years. And one of the most ambitious (yet most critical) objectives for the icehouse rehabilitation project is repurposing surplus building materials and existing architectural salvage from previous projects; upcycling decking debris and other deconstruction byproducts from sixteen years of remodels and rehabs; and miscellaneous…
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Icehouse Rehab 01: The Ice Hook
Our first full workweek is in the rearview mirror, so Rosslyn’s icehouse rehabilitation is officially underway. No gold plated spade plunged into the earth, no glossy speeches, and no hoopla aside from a collective sigh of relief, some well earned rest today, and an antique ice hook. A what?!?! More about the ice hook in…
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Clearing Out Historic Icehouse
Sixteen years after plunging into renovating Rosslyn we are… finally tackling the looong postponed icehouse rehabilitation. Sweet sixteen. (Source: Redacting Rosslyn v2.0 – Rosslyn Redux) In the image above you can see a notable improvement from previous images of the interior of Rosslyn’s historic icehouse. This underutilized outbuilding had become a storage space in the…
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Icehouse v2.0
At long last it’s time to move forward with Rosslyn’s icehouse v2.0 which I’ve been alluding to for a couple of months (including in the July 2 Instagram photo of icehouse interior above.) If this is your first sneak peek inside the icehouse, rest assured that the project is still percolating. When the sweet siren songs…
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What is Green Building?
The term “green building” is moving steadily from fringe to mainstream, but its meaning is getting blurrier in the process. Sounds good on a brochure, but is it accurate? What does “green building” even mean? Green building is the practice of increasing the efficiency with which buildings use resources — energy, water, and materials —…