Salvage rummaging and repurposing

Salvage yards make me feel all warm and fuzzy. I simply love the idea of saving perfectly good and often historically significant and irreplaceable architectural bits from permanent demise. And, when rummaging through a salvage yard, you never know what you'll find at any given time because, obviously, their sources are always changing. So, it's always an adventure of search and surprises.

We have a great salvage warehouse in Boston called Restoration Resources. It's on Thayer Street, which actually no longer exists (the street, that is), although that's the address.

Let me back up. Thayer Street did exist, but then it got turned into a kind of mini pedestrian plaza with no street sign or any indication that it is (or was) Thayer Street. So, if you try to find it and the map says it's there but all you see is a pedestrian plaza, well, that's it. So, park your car, get out and follow the red brick "road" until you see the storefront.

What can you find at a salvage yard? Just about anything architectural if you visit often enough. I love antique tiles and they are not an infrequent find. I've also been into old grates lately and, on my recent visit to Restoration Resources, just scored a beautiful one, a relic of an old estate in Brookline (a suburb of Boston). [See photo at the top of this post.]

There's also lots of mammoth stuff, such as the enormous $10,000 hand carved wood chandelier from the same estate as my grate. Also on hand this time around was a huge stained glass window, statues, pedestals and pews from a closed Catholic Church, of which there are (sadly for many people) a growing number in Boston. Still, there is something comforting, for me anyway, in seeing these beautiful works of art and devotion waiting to be reclaimed and used anew rather than headed for landfill.

And there's the tiny stuff. Antique doorknobs, hardware and so on.

Lots and lots of doors, the real, solid, decorative kind--not hollow core plywood. Corbels of all shapes and sizes can be found, as well as all kinds of lighting. Wrought iron fencing, wood paneling (not the 70's stuff; I'm talking elite gentlemen's club variety), large and small chests and cupboards, curious and quality desks and dressers, mantels galore (marble, carved wood, etc.) and many many things that I cannot even tell you what they are because I have no idea.

What can you do with this stuff besides the obvious, e.g., getting a door to use as a door? So much of this stuff is just crying for creative repurposing and with all the character they bring in their own right, well, you can essentially have a stunning piece of stand-alone art by reclaiming an old newel post (the substantial part of a railing).

Here's another example. One of my design heroes is Matt James, a British gardener who takes the tiniest, most barren English city backyards and turns them into oasises. The guy is brilliant and a true artist. If I watch nothing else all week on HGTV, I watch his show, The City Gardener, at 11:00 PM Boston time on Saturday nights. Anyway, he's another salvage yard junk-ie (LOL) and on last week's show, he found a pigs' feeding trough and turned it into a water feature (a rill) in the postage stamp sized garden he was creating. It was a stunningly creative example of salvage yard repurposing.

If you haven't already explored a salvage yard, try it! No doubt you'll find something, even if you don't know what it is, that you can turn into something beautiful and interesting!

Resources:

Restoration Resources, Inc.
31 Thayer Street
Boston, Massachusetts 02118
617-542-3033

Extending your living space without adding on

Whether you live in a tiny apartment or a multi-winged mansion, there's something liberating and inspiring about being able to cast your eyes beyond your four walls and out into the world beyond. It's both restful and invigorating and will cure cabin fever in the dreariest weather. And if you can walk out into that space, you can enjoy first hand what it means to have an "outdoor" room.

But you don't have to "own" the surrounding property to "borrow" the surrounding views and make them part of your own living space. Is there a beautiful tree or building court yard or church steeple outside your window? If so, use window treatments (or lack thereof) that allow you to make the most of your borrowed view.

Finally, if your through the window views are, well, less than appealing--the brick building two feet away, for example--then you can create a "window" with a faux paint treatment or stencil or wallpaper mural or even a landscape painting that will bring that sense of freshness and expanse to even the tiniest of spaces. As somebody (Hannibal maybe?!) said, "If you can't find it, make it." There really are so many ways to extend your living space without adding on.

Take, for example, any window in your place. Look out the window. What do you see? If you own the surrounding property, is there a way you can work your garden to "frame out" a vista that can be viewed from the window? In my own house, since moving here 6 years ago, I've been progressively working to create pleasing 4 season vignettes through as many windows as possible. And where it's not possible, I play with window treatments and plants indoors to create pleasing indoor vignettes that play on the incoming light but keep the focal point indoors. In other parts of the house, I've created the illusion of windows where there aren't any by using drapes that appear to be covering a window but actually there's only a wall behind them. But the mind thinks "window" and it somehow opens up the space, even though the drapes are "closed."

The photo at the top of this post is the view outside my dining room window. Even though it's early Spring here in Boston, you can see that there is still a sense of a room outside, a view outside the window, which changes throughout the seasons. Plants and "hardscaping" (stone, brick, fencing, bench, etc.) were selected so that would be the case. The second photo is of a small heather garden bordering a ground-level deck, viewable from a stairwell window.

But because I have a small Boston lot, my views can only go so far. So, I "borrow" from neighbors' scenery whenever I can. For example, one neighbor has a rustic brown garage. This fits in with the more woodsy backyard garden I'm in the process of developing. So why try to hide it? It works perfectly. The neighbors in back, however, just have the back of their house staring us in the face and so I'm nurturing a tall mixed hedge of calocedrus decurrens (California incense cedar), an old rhododendron I had moved when the kitchen/mudroom renovation was happening and chamaecyparis that I hope will offer some needed privacy while still being airy, not overly dense.

Decks and balconies also can be made into outdoor "rooms," and window sills and window boxes can go a long way to enhance a window view, even if what's beyond is less than remarkable.

And when all other options are precluded, there's still faux windows and stencil or wall paper murals, even paintings, as mentioned above. For example, Jan Dressler has some amazing stencil and wallpaper murals that can achieve this end, even if you don't consider yourself "artistic." Jan does the work for you. Simply follow her instructions and use her stencils or wallpaper murals. The stencil above uses one of her kits to create a doorway and view to a garden and hills beyond. Check out Jan's website for inspiration, instructions and materials: www.dresslerstencils.com

Home improvement clinics: Home Depot and Lowe's

Many of us have seen the commercials but have you ever wondered what those free home improvement clinics are like? You know, the ones that places like Home Depot and Lowe's regularly hold? I wondered, so I decided to check them out.

If you haven't been to Lowe's clinics, don't worry. You're not likely to learn all that much more than you could using a good book or watching a demonstration on TV, because they're not hands-on; they're demonstrations. Also, you have to listen to a lot of product promotion in the process. The benefit over books and TV is that you get to ask questions.

Home Depot's clinics, on the other hand (at least the one I went to), actually lets you try stuff out, which always makes a difference to me.

You can watch somebody else do something, think it's easy, and then when you try it, well, it may or may not be as easy as it looks--usually the latter. Trying something yourself, even if for a minute or two, can help you get the "feel" for whatever it is you're trying to do. Then, like anything else, you can refine your technique with practice.

Backing up a bit, what I thought might be interesting is to attend a how-to clinic on the same topic at both Home Depot and Lowe's, as a comparison study--and to learn as much as I could about the subject. I opted for installing tile. Straightforward tiling is well within the reach of a DIYer, everyone seems to agree on that. So, this seemed like a good one to take on. Although I love and collect antique tiles, a full scale tile installation job is not something I'd taken on before. One reason is that, until fairly recently, I didn't know it was a "can do." Now I know, so off I went to each clinic.

As a business woman myself, I place a lot of importance on customer service and being able to deliver on your promises--whether I'm on the giving or receiving end of the deal. So, when I arrived at Lowe's and the Customer Service desk wasn't really sure there was a tiling clinic and then pointed me in the direction of where they "thought" it would be, they lost points. Ditto for Home Depot, by the way. In the case of Lowe's, I was sent to the correct location. In the case of Home Depot, I was not and missed the very beginning of the clinic while I tried to find someone who had any clue of where the clinic was being held. To his credit, and the credit of other attendees who were in agreement, the person giving the clinic reviewed the little bit I missed.

Next on my list of importances is timeliness. The Lowe's clinic started twenty minutes late. They were not prepared and had to scrounge for materials (e.g., a board to apply the tile to) at the last minute. Also, the person giving the demonstration didn't start gathering his materials (tile, adhesive, grout, trowel, etc.) until well after the clinic "should" have started. The Home Depot clinic started right on time.

Then it was down to business. The person giving the Lowe's demonstration, though very young, clearly was well trained and actually had done a lot of tiling. His "technique" was very precise and effortless and the result was very fine. He willingly answered questions and his answers were clear but not complete because it was obvious they weren't going to teach what I call the "hard stuff," such as cutting the tile. His suggestion was to bring in marked tile for them to cut at the store, for "such and such" price per cut. Hmmmm. Well, that is one option but I was looking to know how to do that whole thing.

By the way, I was the only one in attendance, except for a male shopper who happened by mid-stream and stopped to check things out. This was a bit weird but offered an opportunity for personalized attention--or could have. It actually was pretty rote, and remote.

I left the Lowe's clinic feeling I knew a bit more than when I started, but not "empowered." I didn't get to try anything, even sticking a piece of tile in some goop, and I knew nothing more about cutting tile than what I'd picked up by peeking through doorways when my bathroom and kitchen were tiled. I really wanted to know more, about cutting especially.

The guy doing the demonstration at Home Depot was clearly much more into working with people and making them feel, like Home Depot's slogan says, "You can do it; we can help." Sounds corny, but it turned out to be true in this case. He too was young, but not as refined in his "technique." But you know what? It still looked great when he was done and that I did find "empowering," because I learned you don't have to be a master to get a good result, if the job is not too complex. Also empowering was his encouragement to us to try it ourselves. It is doable, and kind of fun, at least in a small area!

Then came my questions about making cuts. The Home Depot guy also suggested the "bring your marked tile in and we'll cut it" solution, but when I pressed about doing it myself, he didn't hedge. He showed us all kinds of hand tools for cutting AND the ominous "wet saw," which turned out was not so ominous afterall. It was beyond the scope of this clinic to use saws and I didn't expect to get into that hands-on (imagining the liability nightmare alone). But his whole way and style with it, as with the rest of the clinic, came with such ease, accessibility and encouragement, I believed him when he said the sawing was doable too. He even let me feel the turned-off saw blade so I could feel for myself that these blades are not as sharp as, say, a circular saw blade is. He didn't make me feel stupid or overly paranoid for asking about this equipment. He treated it like a natural and reasonable question.

The Home Depot clinic also was not as pushing of the products as the Lowe's clinic was. The Home Depot guy did show us all kinds of stuff, pertinent to our questions and the demonstration, but it never felt like that was the purpose of the clinic, even if it probably was. In the case of the Lowe's clinic, it was very clear that selling was THE motive for doing it.

So, can I say I learned something from these clinics? Yes, but the Home Depot clinic won by a long shot on almost every measure except for the store's directing me in the right location for the event, a measure on which Lowe's did better but seemingly as a matter of luck vs. truly knowing. Was this representative of all Home Depot and Lowe's clinics? I have no idea but it was an interesting "random" sampling. Also interesting, Lowe's asks you to sign up for their clinics ahead of time. Home Depot does not. Given Lowe's has foreknowledge of people's signing up, you'd think they could be prepared and on time, even if, I suspect, they get a lot of "no shows." Home Depot had no such requirement, had no idea who, if anyone, would show up, and the dude was on time--with bells on!

Learning "in the field" on a real job site or a close approximation (e.g., personal "tutoring" from a skilled tradesperson) has always served me best. More on that another time. But it's not always possible to learn that way. So, if you don't have that option, you can learn things from these clinics--more from some than others. Would I try one again? Maybe, even if only for an opportunity to ask questions.

In the end, I think whatever gives you the confidence to find out you can do more than you think you can is worth the time invested. And hey, whatever their shortcomings, these clinics are free afterall!