Andrew C., a reader from Crofton, Md., needs our advice on whether to add a bathroom to some extra space on his ground floor, or to enlarge his cramped laundry room. (See the miserable laundry room here and here.)
A little background: Andrew bought his three-story townhouse a year ago and plans to live there another five years. The second story has an eat-in kitchen, living room, dining room and half bath. The top floor has the master bedroom, two more bedrooms and two full baths. So far, so good.
But Andrew feels the space on the ground floor could be better used. There are two rooms down there that Andrew uses as a media room and an office. There is also a utility room with the washer and dryer and all the home’s mechanicals, and an adjacent storage room. Both spaces together are 6 feet by 12 feet.
Andrew wants a larger laundry room, but he also would like a bathroom on that floor. He considered a half bath, but it would require a walk through the laundry room to get to it. And he wonders: Is that too weird? A real estate agent told him that a full bath would bring most resale value in case the two existing rooms are used as bedrooms.
But it makes me sick to think of Andrew doing his laundry in that pitiful space for the next five years. That can't be right. I wonder if there is some compromise or another idea we're not considering.
Isn't this a lovely garden room? The owner calls it a teahouse and may not visit for months on end because of a busy schedule.
The garden was designed by Dan Bifano, who has also designed gardens for such high-profile clients as Barbra Streisand. The garden is filled with roses, wisteria, hydrangeas and plants like that. In fact, this little building was at first destined to be a flower-cutting space. But the owner decided it needed to be a sitting room.
"I chose the color of the grout," the owner is quoted saying in a magazine, "and I chose the particular kind of gravel that was right for the rose garden, and another kind for the pathways. Grout color and gravel size would drive most people nuts. But it's all part of the process for me."
Hint: Does this sound like a control freak to you?
Take your best guess then click here for the answer.
Did I not watch "Sex and the City" reruns for the past four years?
Did I not come to feel in some TV-induced mania that I knew Carrie, Miranda, Samantha and Charlotte? Did I not notice who they were and how they would decorate their homes?
So how in the world did attorney Miranda Hobbes' home come to look like this in the new movie? Miranda is tightly wound, a control freak and quite sophisticated. How could she live in a place like this?
An article in the San Francisco Chronicle says this decor is a window into Miranda's personality, a personality which, I suppose, is really confused.
However, the Miranda I "know" would use her decor to hide such a personality, or to influence her personality toward a more put-together state of mind.
What do you think? Does this room look like the Miranda you know?
The nice thing about remodeling an older home in a neighborhood of such homes is that you need simply walk around the area with your eyes open to find ideas for exterior architectural details.
That's what Aaron Raymond did when he remodeled his 1942 French Normandy home in the Windsor Hills area of Los Angeles. While previous owners had taken off the decorative corbels on the front porch, Aaron noticed them on other homes in the neighborhood that had similar architecture. So he asked his carpenters to re-create them.
He used a similar tactic when thinking about his second-story addition. In other homes of likewise vintage, he noticed the second story hung over the first by several feet, with decorative corbels visually tying the two together. See that here.
We're not all lucky enough to live in neighborhoods with older homes, but if we are so fortunate, the homes themselves can be a great inspiration.
Hadn't realized what I was missing until I saw it -- a website showing an art-glass pendant lamp both lighted and unlighted. Think about it: While most lamps look best lighted, half the time, in daylight hours, the lamp will not be switched on, unless you're selling your house and showing it to potential buyers, in which case, of course, all lights are blaring! Other than that, though, what will an unlighted lamp look like? Who's to know until you get it home?
So it was with a teeny jolt that I came across the Red Oak Glass website, out of Oregon, and found that the pendant lamps made of arty glass are shown both lighted and unlighted. And you can click to see it both ways, which gives you a little of that energy-saving, money-saving, carbon-reducing, turn-off-that-darned-light satisfaction. Check it out.
Here's an unusual design in a Los Feliz kitchen. Instead of a massive stainless-steel or stucco-looking stove hood over the gigantic range and built-in grill, these homeowners opted for a fan hidden behind faux cabinets. Plus, there are some pot hangers tucked in there as well.
I'm not sure I would do this, but I can see the logic. The home is a 1920s Spanish Revival, just half a block from Griffith Park, and perhaps it was thought that a great big hood would look out of sync? Or maybe someone had bad memories of hitting his or her head on a big stove hood and thus wanted to prevent that from happening again?
Whatever the reason, the next owner could change it. With a price tag of just under $3.4 million, this featured Home of the Week in today's Real Estate section will surely be bought by people with a lot of options in life.
After the flooring is laid, the walls are painted and the furniture is repositioned at the end of a remodel, what's left? Accessorizing.
For those of us with original artwork taste but poster budgets, here's an idea: fragments of larger works, printed, numbered and signed by the artist, costing $63 each plus $9 shipping, from a gallery in Ireland.
The fragments, like the one shown above right, are typically 8 by 10 inches or 9 by 11 inches, and are printed on archival paper. (The larger piece, on the left, is 11 by 19 inches and costs $900.)
The creator of these particular pieces, Susan Kaprov, lives in New York City. Her works are in the permanent collections of such museums as the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum Boijmans-van Beuningen in Rotterdam, the Yale University Art Gallery and the Corcoran Gallery of Art, among others.
Kaprov and other artists have taken part in this unique initiative by the Haydn Shaughnessy Gallery in Cork.
According to Shaughnessy, "It's a great way to start a collection, to remodel or redecorate the home or to give to younger people to help them start a collection and enrich their appreciation of art."
And, Shaughnessy adds: "We are adding work all the time, two or three pieces a week."
If you want to stretch your design vocabulary, you might consider attending the Dwell on Design conference this week at the Los Angeles Convention Center.
Put on by the San Francisco-based Dwell magazine folks, the seminar descriptions include sentences like this:
"Not all designers set out to achieve the Platonic ideal in a concept for a chair, but few would argue that the promise of synonymy with a beloved design object does not motivate their process."
Go ahead. Look up "Platonic ideal" and "synonymy." I did, and I learned a lot.
You can also see a panel on prefabs that includes prefab guru Michelle Kauffmann. See her speak about her own delicious home:
Interview with Los Angeles City Council President Eric Garcetti Los Angeles LEEDs the way? Nature meets the metropolis L.A. grows up: dealing with density The face of gardens in a densifying city Design developers The inventive spirit Single-family dwellings: green within reason (R)evolution in light, form and materials
Immortality through product Evolving modes of practice Home and away: lessons from the leisure zone Systems building and prefab Sustainable interiors
Plus, the exhibition floor, with 200 exhibitors and a "neighborhood" of prefab homes, is open Thursday through Sunday, and you can get in on the weekend for $50 at the door (though the full conference costs $349, or $149 for students). There are also home tours Saturday and Sunday, but Saturday's tour of Westside single-family homes is sold out. Sunday's tour, of private downtown homes (cost: $85), still has space.
Question: My daughter, who lives in Westchester, has a house with coved ceilings and wants to paint the rooms but is wondering if there is a crown molding that breaks up the ceiling and accommodates the rounded ceiling and corners? — Greg
Answer: From Reseda licensed general contractor and author Gary M. Katz:
There isn't a manufactured crown profile that fits a cove ceiling. However, there are still two ways of doing it.
First, you could install a crown molding with a small shelf above. I've done this before and have seen the detail in historic homes,too, though I'm not always thrilled with the design. The shelf doesn't really hold much, because of the coved ceiling, so it becomes a dust shelf.
Another choice is to cut a new top "shoulder" on a standard crown molding, so that the crown will fit against the ceiling, but often the cove is too large a radius and a small shelf is still needed.
Probably the best alternative is to skip the crown and install a picture rail molding. Picture rail is the architecturally authentic way to terminate a cove ceiling; it provides a termination line for the ceiling color.
You can mount the picture rail at the beginning of the cove or even a few inches lower.
Gary M. Katz is the author of many carpentry books and DVDs. His newest DVD, with Jed Dixon, is on wainscoting and paneling and is the sixth in a series called "Mastering Finish Carpentry."
(Photos: From top: HGTV, HGTV, Kathy Price-Robinson)
Kathy Price-Robinson has written about remodeling for 17 years, focusing both on the process of home improvement, as well as the product. She writes for both consumer and contractor magazines, and her award-winning series, Pardon Our Dust, has appeared in the print edition of the Real Estate section of The Times since 1997. This blog is a spin-off of that column. Kathy lives in a house with good bones and a lot of potential, and shares her life with one husband, one dog, two horses and three quite exceptional stepdaughters.
