Everything New Is Old Again.

 Seattle has a long love affair with brick. After the city-leveling fire of 1889 consumed 30 acres of downtown, the mayor, along with local businessmen, passed an ordinance that all reconstructed buildings and sidewalks in Seattle be built of fireproof materials. In 1900,  Daniel Houlahan, a bricklayer from California, founded the Builders Brick Company (the predecessor to today's Mutual Materials, still doing business in 2013). Naturally, I began to think that installing brick walls in our 1909 church might be the way to gracefully age some of the wall boarded add-on interior rooms in our unit at The Sanctuary.

Our 3,000 sq ft townhome is one of 12 units, carved out of the shell of the former First Church Christ Scientist. Shortly before the church was sold to developers, the open interior became the set for the film "The Spy and the Sparrow" in 2007. You can still sense the grandeur of the space in this stripped down location shoot photo from the Seattle PI.  

"The Spy and the Sparrow"  2007

Light, or the lack of it, is a never-ending issue for anyone choosing to live inside a structure with an almost three-foot concrete wall exterior. The developers of The Sanctuary were able to get a city variance to knock holes for new windows into some alley-facing walls. In our townhome, the darkest room--with no outside light-- is our media room. This room backs up against the very bottom center of the building--the garage, beneath the Grand Atrium--with no exterior access at all.

We wished to use this space as both a media room and an occasional guest room. Our second design challenge, after the lack of light,  was the very contemporary style of the cream-colored walls and overhead can lighting. There are no original design elements from the church in this basement room. My goal was to make the media room look as if it had been a former private space for a pastor of the original church in the 1900s.

I began with a search of local brick masons in Seattle. I wanted to use a reclaimed brick for consistency. There are original exposed brick walls in our master bath and kitchen.  Some bricks are crumbling and all have wood shims in the brick. In the 1900s, wooden shims were used in some of the mortar joints between the bricks to allow the nailing of pictures or trim to the brick wall as well as to hold the bricks in position until set.

So, in order to age our modern day media room addition, I was looking to find a way to apply a tumbled or reclaimed brick veneer to at least one wall. Mutual Materials offered reclaimed brick in thin veneers for installation (Mutual Materials Slimbrick™) but my much over-scheduled husband felt this might be a fun home improvement project that we could tackle together. He was right. You can do this as well.

In the end, we bricked one wall ourselves, using a product purchased on Amazon.com called Brick Web Thin Brick in Castle Gate.  The brick is thin--about 1/4"-- and 12 slices are attached to a web backer, then hung similar to wallpaper. There are YouTube videos on the product to help you get started.

My advice would be to install the Brick Web using a good construction glue rather than tile mastic. The weight of the brick causes the sheet to slide down the wall until it's dry and so for the first few tries we tapped in some finishing nails to keep the brick in place until adhesion. We began by prepping the room. Our newly installed hardwood floors were covered in plastic. We added cardboard sheets and plywood under the mortar buckets for more protection. Each web of brick was slotted into the next using Liquid Gold construction glue. The grouting process is very wet and very messy. 

It took about a day to hang the Think Brick product on the wall.We were on our way! To our absolute surprise, it took almost 30 hours to finish the grout. I've tiled before and mistakenly thought this part would be a snap.  Schedule a massage as a reward once you're finished.


But did we ever love the final results! We used a brick mortar for grout along with an aged-and-tumbled brick. While the color-match isn't the exactly the same as the existing brick in the kitchen and bath, you'd never see the walls side-by-side. The result is a brand-new brick wall that looks like it was part of the original 100-year old building. Our messy, novice application technique only added to the charm of the wall. Since baseboards cover the edge of uneven wallboard, we didn't need them here. We bricked right down to the floor. We could have used metal outlet boxes mounted onto the veneer for authenticity, but we chose to brick around our existing outlets as the furniture will hide these anyway. The brick veneer cuts easily with a special blade for masonry and a grinder tool. Next up-- the installation of a custom Murphy bed for guests, designed to match the golden-oaked end pew that the developers installed in the room as a stair rail.

And for fun, here are the lyrics to Everything Old is New Again by Peter Allen. In our church townhome, we did the opposite.

When trumpets were mellow
And every gal only had one fellow
No need to remember when
'Cause everything old is new again

Dancin' at church, Long Island, jazzy parties
Waiter bring us some more Baccardi
We'll order now, what they ordered then
'Cause everything old is new again

Get out your white suit, your tap shoes and tails
Let's go backwards when forward fails
And movie stars you thought were alone then
Now are framed beside your bed

Don't throw the past away
You might need it some rainy day
Dreams can come true again
When everything old is new again

Get out your white suit, your tap shoes and tails
Put it on backwards when forward fails
Better leave Greta Garbo alone
Be a movie star on your own

And don't throw the past away
You might need it some other rainy day
Dreams can come true again
When everything old is new again

When everything old is new again

I might fall in love with you again

Who Are the People in Your Neighborhood?

I have found a new favorite blog, all about Capitol Hill. I'm just now learning about my neighborhood that surrounds the Sanctuary and how it's changing--from the early days when it was an upscale residential neighborhood for rich Capitol Hill families in the 1920s, the 1950s artisans, designers and GLBT community, and its modern-day diverse hipster and activist resident population.

Wooden box sewers, Pioneer Square mid-1800s

In the early 1900s, Seattle was the home of large immigrant populations, plus loggers and sailors, and its neighborhoods developed mostly to the north and south to avoid the steep land grades that moved east out of the city. The upper class, mostly the new rich, commanded an upper perch from their homes on Capitol Hill. If you ever get a chance (especially fun for out-of-town visitors), take the Seattle Underground Tour from Pioneer Square and get an idea of how, prior to the great fire of 1889,  the early downtown residents lived-- with wooden box sewers above their heads.  If you had any money, or any sense of smell, you'd at least spend your summers on the higher ground of Capitol Hill. 

In 1901, James Moore, the Capitol Hill neighborhood's chief developer, gave the area its name. Up until then, it had been called Broadway Hill. Today, Broadway is still one of its most popular streets today, with a new light-rail link scheduled to connect Capitol Hill, downtown and the University District by 2016. Its an ever-changing, trying-to-gentrify neighborhood with the Sanctuary town homes in the middle of it all on 16th avenue, just off the 15th street corridor of cafes and small business. 

So, Who are the People in Your Neighborhood?(with a fond nod to the "Bob" and the 1970s Sesame Street tune) The Capitol Hill Seattle Blog follows neighborhood happenings, and its June posting linked to a recent study about the changing demographics (Primary Market Denographics, PMA) of the area. Turns out, we shouldn't worry all that much about a City Target moving in. There's no available land and the income level, street parking and residential support just isn't there.

The study commissioned by the Capitol Hill Chamber of Commerce and compiled by consultants at Kidder Mathews concludes with a series of ten recommendations for making near-term improvement in the business environment along Broadway between Union and Roy.

Recommendations

1. Encourage the redevelopment of underutilized properties with a marketing effort
2. Facilitate better communication between the agencies and developers responsible for the projects and Corridor businesses
3. Advocate for an aggressive panhandling law
4. Advocate for additional police dedicated to the Corridor and stricter enforcement of public drunkenness, drug use, and shoplifting
5. Advocate for shifting the metered parking hours from 8pm to 6pm
6. Work with the City of Seattle and the business community to direct additional resources toward street/sidewalk cleaning, and tree trimming
7. Encourage retail businesses to remain open during non-peak hours for the benefit of the Corridor as a whole
8. Events: target attendees that align with Corridor retailer’s target customers and promote exploration of the corridor
9. Create a storefront improvement program
10. Chamber should more aggressively communicate its accomplishments

"The three most commonly cited challenges to operating a business within the Corridor were dealing with street people (40%), the lack of convenient affordable parking (35%), and effects of construction (15%). Other commonly cited challenges included the lack of law enforcement, increasing rental rates, general crime, declining business diversity, and insufficient street scape maintenance." details the report. 

I do love this neighborhood and yet, I echo some of those challenges. I've highlighted the two about panhandling and public drunkenness. While it's an infinitely more tolerable living here than downtown, I've still occasionally had to scold working-class men who enjoy the afternoon in Seven Hill park next door with a few beers--and then urinate in the entry to the Sanctuary garage. If you see this guy around the Hill, please ask him to cut-it-out! 

While early 1800s residents may have had to deal with their sewage overhead, I just can't see any reason, in 2013, to live with it underfoot.

Updating brand new floors

The Sanctuary Atrium Lobby

Early last summer I walked into the open house for The Sanctuary, immediately captivated by it's voluminous atrium, with a stained glass, ocular dome window above and an epoxy, polished concrete floor below. The floors were cool and grey, so reflective and clean. The interior design firm, Robin Chell Design, had also carried the same polished concrete floors into the unit we would go on to purchase. It was a modern sparkle in a century-old structure. A light, shiny lobby floor, along with milky buttercup walls and high ceilings, brought light into what started out as a very dim interior space. In the living and dining room of our unit, just off the lobby, the floors looked just as beautiful.

Living Room Concrete Floor

Fast forward to the first Seattle winter in our home. I'll borrow some data from a resident's comment posted the City Data website; 

"Misty rain - when it rains this is what we typically get. drizzle, mist, drip drip. . . ". 

 I'd add to that description; "Squish, squish, squish". 

The grassy easement just outside my front door has some poor drainage (I'll work on this later with the HOA). I have two pugs. Enough said. That same beautiful polished concrete began to look like a mud-print patterned basement floor down one level. And, it was cold! This Miami girl took to wearing fuzzy slippers at all times. I doubled our electric bill January and February using space heaters for me and the pugs before bed. I gated off any room with brand-new light carpeting. I talked it over with the husband and we decided to install hardwood flooring in the loft area and the street level, over the polished concrete and the cream shag carpet. 

So what to install? We looked at all types of reclaimed hardwood, wanting to keep the permanent features of the home more in line with the period of the church, the early 1900s. I also wanted to add a tile inlay directly at the street level double doors. The church has some beautiful features, tucked just out of sight. Above our door is a very high stained glass window, about 2' x 6'. When the morning sun shines through the glass the colors pop as the light moves. I asked my floor contractors, Regan & German, to work with me to design a modern interpretation for the tile area below the stained glass. 

BEFORE: Street Entry Front Door and Stained Glass above door

Tile samples

The exterior of The Sanctuary was built of Bedford limestone, also used in the Empire State Building and the Pentagon. Regan found a pale cream limestone called Honed Moonlight with Azul Dot and an Iridescent Metalli 1/4" x 3" insert that might be substituted for some of the blue stones in order to create a pattern. I searched online for other color samples and ordered golds and reds. After the installer laid out the octagon limestone, I used my insert selections to create a simplified reflection of the stained glass above, and he installed it. 

Reclaimed Hardwood samples

For hardwood we chose a hand-scraped engineered hickory, which uses a thin piece of reclaimed wood over a 3/8" plywood to allow installation without having to shave down any of the doors. We looked at shades that were light, medium and dark and made the choice to avoid matching either the existing oak exterior doors (medium) or maple interior doors (light) and selected a dark, contemporary color.

AFTER: Street Entry Front Door and Tile Inlay

The installation took four days and the resulting floors feel as though they might be original from 1909. Guests stop and remark as they step over the threshold, when the light catches the iridescent tiles. Take a look at the AFTER photo and judge our solution for yourself.

 

Mix and Match

An unknown painter and school teacher, Georgia O'Keefe, met an established photographer, Alfred Stieglitz, when she was 28. Their relationship started with the two as acquaintances with an appreciation for each other's work, then mentor and pupil, then lovers, and finally married in 1924. Alfred was enamored with photography as an art form, but also, its technical boundaries. His aesthetic preference was to capture the observed moment, using weather or lighting to define a mood rather than a soft-focus lens. He was schooled as an engineer.

Georgia pursued abstraction over the representational art of her contemporaries. By 1916 her "self-expressions" used a full complement of colors to paint recognizable forms and landscapes in a new, distorted, yet elegant way.

Red Hills with Flowers by Georgia O'Keefe in 1937

Photograph of O'Keeffe by Alfred Stieglitz in 1918

My daydream takes me to an imaginary home they might have shared in the 1920s (in reality they spent summers at a family home in Lake George). How would they blend their very different styles? Her love of color, his stark German realism. They both share an appreciation of form. Is there a common design aesthetic that melds the tastes of an engineer with an illustrator's? 

When I married an IT VP, an engineer-type, a tinkerer-- he came with a love of not just tech, but all things technology-related. The crisp polish of modern stainless steel. The faded patina and chipped amber keys of a 1918 Burrough's adding machine. Our ever-expanding storage room includes first generation Kindles, a Commodore PET computer and some very, very cool antique typewriters.

I bagan collecting the works of other artists in 1991 when I shared a studio space with my sister at the Art Center South Florida. I was the illegal graphic design firm operating in the back room of her art photography and gallery space. I love bright colors. I love pop art. I love happy. I want a painting to grab me with emotion and pull. me. in. I made a habit of trading the artists three thousand of their own, personalized, full-color business cards for a piece of their art. In a time when knowing someone who worked on a Mac was rare, I could, and did, combine commercial print runs with freebees--tacking a 2x3 business card with an art photo to the trimmed-off edge of full-color radio station promo folder or a POP (point of purchase) table card. It cost me nothing, and I amassed a collection of early South Florida artists that I cherish and would never have been able to afford.

I've moved this bubble-wrapped collection from place to place for twenty years, waiting for a time I'd have the kind of soaring ceiling height the art deserves. And so, with my husband's collection of technology, and my collection of paintings, I set out to create a Georgia O'Keefe/Alfred Steiglitz-inspired symmetry to shape the experience in the home we now share. 

Our Sanctuary living room

Coffee table with inset overhead photo of accessories 

Our living room walls are cream and soothing, colorful with abstract paintings that brighten up the grey Seattle light. Our industrial design-inspired furniture-- an acid-washed coffee table and metal aviator chairs-- display a lead-type collection and the adding machine from the 1900s. An antique typewriter rests on a tall pedestal near the replica Archo floor lamp. It all lives quietly within the original church architecture of Corinthian columns and geometric-patterned stained glass. The space reflects our own unique background and styles, and yet somehow I imagine that Georgia and Alfred would have been happy living here too.

Easter reconsidered

The Sanctuary overlooking Seven Hills Park

We've lived at the Sanctuary for six months now. Last December I hadn't thought much about the idea of the Christmas holiday in our home, once a church. Christmas can have such a non-denominational feel to it, and our home became a place for celebrating with family and friends, not for religious worship. Even when I sat quietly, the solitary connection that I sometimes felt in nature--or in church--was never present. However, Easter felt the opposite.

Spring came early to Seattle. In a matter of days it seemed like every flower had bloomed. A daffodil planted outside my door blossomed so quickly that I suspect it was relocated from the hospital room across the street rather than thrown in the trash. The road out-front is lined with cherry trees, the tissue-paper pink flowers floating on the breeze like snow.

Someone knocked on my front door last week to inquire about services, wanting to look around the church. I'm surprised that that still happens. Our building is starting to look like a residence as spring temperatures in the 60s lead to BBQs at Seven Hills Park next door. A Key Lime umbrella tops off my neighbor's roof patio on the southeast corner of the church. The community garden below can barely contain the frenzy of activity as the winter hay is removed and the heirloom tomato stakes go up. Families spread blankets and scattered colored eggs in the park for local kids to collect. My pugs and I sat quietly and took it all in (OK, you're right. Pugs don't ever sit quietly unless they're asleep-- but they dozed off and on in the sun with me).

My studio loft

And, I was filled with the mood that Easter brings, the Easter of my Catholic childhood, the Easter promises of life and hope. The idea of a new start, in a new place, and that little jump your heart makes when its happy and at peace. I find that peace inside our home now, mostly when I'm working or painting in our loft space. The thirty-foot ceiling overhead, and the indirect light from the stained glass window, lends a serenity to the space and makes me feel creative. I've been working on a painting that captures the feeling of spring, if just a little. Both the church space and my personal space seem to belong here, together.

The Christening

What kind of housewarming party is appropriate when you move into a church? The church's groundbreaking began in 1909 and, according to a 2012 article on church conversions in TheSeattle Times, it needed three services to celebrate the completion of its sanctuary on June 7, 1914. The Seattle Times reported, "Following the unostentatious custom of the Scientists, there will be no joy-making." There would, however, be music from the church's new organ, but it would not, the Times assured, be "blaring music" nor would there be any "speechmaking."

We closed on our townhome in early August of 2012. God bless our moving company because they’d stuck with me as the closing date shifted three times. One of the movers paused in our main living room and remarked to me how odd it felt to be back in the very church he had attended as a child. His parents had been members of First Church, Christ Scientist. He mentioned he liked it better as a home than a church. I’m sure there’s a story behind that.

Our home’s christening needed to be much more lively than the original 1914 snoozer, which was said to have featured two readings, a Biblical passage, along with a scientific passage written by the church’s founder, Mary Baker Eddy. So then, what better to honor the era of enlightenment, from the 1900s to the 1920s, than a Speakeasy Housewarming!

A red carpet lined the main steps up to the double doors of The Sanctuary. We hired a 1920s-style jazz band and a couple of dance instructors to teach our guests the Lindy Hop and Charleston. Roaming characters (Amelia Earhart and a gangster with his moll) mingled with our costumed friends. We played silent movies in the media room on a loop and set up a 1920s Paper Moon photo backdrop.

I’m including the steps to build the same backdrop below. Early in my career I worked in the promotions department of a South Florida television station. Back when career path meant less to me than having fun on the job, I was lucky enough to occasionally build fake movie sets on a dime (Styrofoam headstones for Horror Week and a little city for Godzilla Theater).

On a whim, one evening when my husband and I were awake at 3am from jetlag, we decided we should build the 1920s Paper Moon photo backdrop. For an IT VP, he is a surprisingly gifted carpenter! Here are the steps and some photos:

1.     Measure your space. (We used the entrance hall downstairs and draped the room in black cloth)

2.     Create the art. Find a paper moon sketch on the Internet (line art works best). Use any drawing program to add the outline of the face. Google for some 1920 postcards to use as a reference art.

3.     Copy line art outline to plywood. We used a projector, but you might also sketch a grid a recreate the design on the larger board. We lined up two plywood boards that were about 6’ x 10’ and traced the moon outline onto them- we’d connect them later. Working with the moon image projected on its side, the majority of the moon shape was cut out, with the tips cut from the second sheet of plywood. We then attached the ends and braced the moon together on the reverse side.

4.     Inset any bracing screws and putty over them.

5.     Paint the moon a pale yellow.

6.     Paint the darker brown shadows for the face, eyes nose and mouth  (it may help to know someone artistic for this part).

7.     Paint the details of the face. Add highlights to lips and eyes

8.     Purchase a large black photo backdrop—ours was 10’ x 20’ for the wall and a second 6’x10’ for the bench

9.     Add stars and clouds using an ivory paint and sponges. I used one shaped like a star and added the clouds by blotting the sponge, heavily loaded with paint.

10. Build the bench. We used some 2 x 4s to build a seat. Spray paint the bench black.

11. Drape the smaller black backdrop (unpainted) over the bench and attach it (with screws) to the moon. You’ll need to add some cross braces to the back to hold the moon upright. Putty over any visible screws and touch up the front side of the moon.

12.  Set up a camera with a self-timer and let the fun begin! Post the photos online so your guests can download after the party.

Don't know much about history: The story of the pew

The Pew & the Pug

“Don't know much about history”, but I've always loved the song ((What A) Wonderful World--the version by Art Garfunkel with James Taylor and Paul Simon). It pops into my mind whenever I spy an unusual architectural element in our restored church townhome.

There's a “BELIEVETH” sign, high above the reclaimed oak stairs that lead out of our common lobby to the streets of the Capitol Hill neighborhood. Underneath that same staircase is what I like to call the 'door-to-nowhere'. It's the original interior door for the classical revival style architecture of the First Church, Christ Scientist-- back in the days when our home was still a church. For the Sanctuary Townhome project, the main lobby entrance stairs were built from the church pews, with open risers, so it's possible to look through those stairs to what lies beyond. And, what lies beyond, is an ornately carved wood door, but no way to access it. Just a blocked off space, kind of cool, kind of creepy, and a big collector of dust bunnies.

I pretty sure that what is actually behind the door-to-nowhere is actually a somewhere-- our media room. But, I'll have to find the original architectural drawings to be sure. Inside our media room you'd find the most interesting element for me, the end cap of one of the original church pews. The most costly part of the pew is the end cap and side panel. Our builders re-used this portion of golden-stained oak to create a divider at the top of a small set of stairs leading into our media room.

Sadly, it is also a favorite spot for my rescue pug, Flynn. To mark, that is. Both the pew, and the pee-u, has a history that I often wonder about. We adopted Flynn from Seattle Pug Rescue about a year-and-a-half back. He seemed friendly, if shy. And, he comes with some very odd behavior, mostly involving spinning and barking. I hired a trainer to help, and she did, a little. She says that you never know the history of rescues. You get what you get. We got a barker and a marker.

But sometimes I let my mind wander, to wonder about where the pug lived for his first eight years, and what he experienced.  I have similar thoughts when I run my fingers over the scrolls of the pew end cap. Who else might have done the same? What were they thinking, or praying, or hoping, in the early 1900s; in a church emphasizing divine healing over modern medicine. The pug has eight years and the pew has one hundred. And, I wonder a great many things about them both.