• East Bay (California) homes for sale

  • 3 easy-to-install green insulation options

    GreenHomeGuide, one of the best general information sites for folks trying to maintain, restore or remodel their home in an environmentally conscious way, has a great article on three safe and renewable insulation products.

    If you’ve ever struggled with huge, unwieldy bats of fiberglass
    insulation or forced your way through a crawlspace, wrestling with a
    hose and trying to blow fluffy white fibers into every corner — all the
    while wondering what those toxic chemicals and shards of fiberglass are
    doing to your body — you’ll be relieved to know that there are green
    alternatives.
    Here are three of our favorites for do-it-yourselfers.

  • Urban Archaeology: architectural salvage in New York City

    Urban Archaeology, with showrooms in Manhattan, Bridgehampton, Boston and Chicago, has been in the business of saving urban architectural treasures since they opened their Manhattan store in 1978.

    In addition to a large stock of salvaged materials, they have also developed their own line of lighting, bath accessories, washstands and medicine cabinets based on popular historic designs.

    As far as salvage goes, though, this is no scrapyard, but rather the highest end of the collectible architectural antique sellers.

  • for sale: restored Horseheads NY home, $199,500

    From Martha Horton’s recent article in the Star-Gazette‘s Twin Tiers Homes section:

    John
    Stevens, a Horseheads native, studied architecture at Cornell
    University, and his wife Rosemary, originally from Owego, is a Cornell
    graduate, but the two did not cross paths on campus. They met later,
    when Rosemary was employed with Corning Inc. and John, an independent
    electrician, was doing work there.

    John
    had purchased a Craftsman-style house in the Village of Horseheads in
    1993 from the Shappee estate. The original owner, who built the house
    in 1920, was James Shappee, a prominent citizen and foundry owner. His
    caricature by famed cartoonist Zim hangs in the Zim Center in
    Horseheads. James’ wife Febe was a Horseheads school principal.

    When
    Rosemary, an interior designer, first saw the house, she recognized its
    "good bones," and thought it was well worth preserving and updating. So
    the couple went to work on it, doing most of the labor themselves. "We
    worked on the house every day after work," Rosemary recalls, "and every
    weekend." They are still working on it.

    John
    did extensive rewiring and updated the heating system. Rosemary, who
    now operates her own interior design firm under the name of "Designs by
    Rody," masterminded the aesthetics. "I wanted to keep the house in
    character and bring it forward as it would have evolved through the
    years," she explains. "Houses talk to you," Rosemary adds.

    The 3+ bedroom, 4 full bath, almost 4000 square foot house is listed by Kristen Dininny, a real estate agent with Signature Properties. There’s a map here.

    Of course, where I live, a house like this would sell for well over $450,000, even with the market falling a bit in the past year. It’s almost tempting to move to New York and try to make a living doing freelance work or by beefing up this site and trying to make some money from the advertising … the $200,000 cash I’d walk away with from the sale of my own smaller home would cover expenses for several years.

  • off-topic: the new Google Maps and how to REALLY improve them

    I posted this over at Urban Cartography, but thought some people here might be interested too, especially since my test use of this new technology will be to make a map showing the locations and some background data on all still-existing Greene & Greene properties here in California.

    I was all excited to learn that Google is now allowing user-created
    data in custom maps. This is great! However, when I went to go play
    with it, I learned the current implementation – which in most ways is
    an alpha release – is missing 90% of what could make it useful. Such as:

    • the ability to import, not just export, addresses. I want to
      make a canonical map of all currently existing properties by the late
      great architects Greene & Greene; this is not very easy by
      hand-entering every single one. However, if I could import
      tab-delimited text, I could have the full list of 200 up in a few
      minutes!
    • the ability to display multiple maps at once – on top of each other
      (i.e., LAYERS). this would make google maps a useful tool for data
      analysis: you could display maps of different data layers at once, but
      what would make this feature REALLY shine would be…
    • the ability to pipe in data from online databases. if you combined
      #1 with the ability to bring data in from online databases, not just
      uploaded text files, you could use this with the ability to see
      different layers at once to see real causality – that is, you could see
      how income, for example, and property values, tax base, parks, etc. all
      interact. It would be a really democratic tool – the ability, for
      example, to see if public works projects actually happen in poor
      neighborhoods as they do in rich, or to see what zipcodes public
      university admissions come from (if that data were available), or to
      see what area codes had the most telemarketer calls originating, etc.
      In fact, this would turn Google Maps into the ultimate social
      researcher’s dream tool – the killer app that sociologists, activists,
      criminologists and others have been waiting for.

    Just a few (big) suggestions for the Google Maps folks to think about…

  • how to live within history – not on top of it

    This is one of the most delightful things I’ve read in a newspaper since long before the current war began, and it’s almost enough to distract me for a few minutes from Kurt Vonnegut’s death, the rising toll of wounded and killed overseas and the idiocracy we seem to have saddled ourselves with in Washington.

    For today’s Los Angeles Times, William Deverell, a history professor at USC, has written a quiet and beautifully moving paean to his home, his neighborhood and how he has learned to "live amid history:"

    Houses and neighborhoods seduce us. They always have. What
    starts with limitations — cost and location — often blossoms into
    habits of living and cherished memories. Our love affair began in
    Pasadena eight years ago.

    It was the fall of 1999. We knew we
    wanted to be close to Caltech, where I was teaching at the time, and
    near the Huntington Library, where my wife, Jenny, works. So we drew an
    imaginary rectangle on a map of Pasadena, hoping that somewhere inside
    this space we would find our perfect home and our perfect neighborhood.

    When we first saw it, the house hid behind 20 years of benign neglect.
    It was a Mission Revival with old wooden awnings sagging atop wrought
    iron braces. In the yard, worn-out grass fought a losing battle with
    brown spots and weeds. Here and there, a few succulents hung on.

    Built
    in 1923, the house was tired. The bathrooms needed work — a lot of
    work. Every window had heavy iron bars on it. An apartment attached to
    the garage was decrepit, and a freestanding building out back, with an
    incinerator plunked down in a corner, was a mess.

    The owner
    had been in the leather business in downtown Los Angeles. He had
    retired years earlier and brought his inventory home with him. Bolts of
    leather stood stacked in rooms and corners of the house: raw leather,
    finished leather and leather in some stage in-between. A couple of
    rooms were off-limits because we couldn’t open the doors; leather was
    in the way.

    Our real estate agent apologized to us on the sidewalk as we left.

    "I really like it," Jenny whispered to me.

  • old homes make way for strip malls in Lubbock TX (and everywhere)

    Lubbock’s North Overton neighborhood – once sparsely populated with sprawling ranch-era Craftsman bungalows – is slowly being reseeded with strip malls, tract developments and other signs of the coming apocalypse. One such home is being picked up and moved to make way for that harbinger of class, culture and the real building block of a modern neighborhood, the strip mall.

    "This
    was called a craftsman-bungalow house, it was built in 1911. It’s one
    of the oldest houses in Lubbock, it’s also one of the most historic
    because of the people lived here the first 75 years," said former
    resident, Frank Potts.

    In 1924 A.B. Davis moved to Lubbock.
    Soon after moving into the home. A.B. served as the manager of the
    Chamber of Commerce and later as Lubbock’s City Manager. His family
    called 1724 Main their home for 60 years.

    Frank Potts is A.B.’s grandson, he
    said, "lots of memories here, there really are. As a child it was a big
    world out there, World War II was going on when I first moved here and
    I just remember everything just seemed, the house seemed like a huge
    mansion and I was just a little bitty guy and wondering what happens
    next."

    The original plans for the home show a 4,500 square
    foot house with wide overhanging eaves, deep porches with large square
    brick posts and beautiful wood paneling, all adding to the charm of
    this old home. With the vision and financial help of Lubbock attorney
    Ted Hogan, this old house will be able to stand for another hundred
    years. He said, "a lot of heavy lifting (will go into moving the
    house)! and quite frankly the fellas that the credit goes to are the
    movers because they’re the guys that have the technical knowledge."

    With
    the development in the North Overton area, this old houses days were
    numbered as a strip mall is slated to go here. But in 5 weeks, 1724
    Main will get a new address on the corner of 16th and Avenue R after
    it’s moved, piece by piece, down Avenue R.

    Hogan said, "we
    have about 5 weeks to get it done, we have a May 1st deadline. There’s
    new development coming in here. If the weather permits and if it
    doesn’t rain, we should be good to go at the end of April." Giving this
    old Lubbock home a new lease on life.

    It should be noted that Lubbock’s Overton Park project is currently the largest private residential development in the state. Questions regarding the number of homes destroyed or moved directed to the McDougal Company, the firm tasked with making rubble of old homes in the way and clearing it, were not answered

  • Hewn & Hammered on Flickr

    We have had lots and lots of additions to our photo pool on Flickr; if you want to see pictures of A&C neighborhoods all over the country, interior and exterior remodels, new homes and all sorts of other bits and pieces, please come on over and visit. Flickr accounts are free, too, so feel free to make your own and share your photos with us!

  • Redfin: find, buy & sell homes online

    Redfin is a real estate listing service with an integrated blog, which gathers neighborhood information, maps, photos and other information on a particular for-sale property all into a nice neat package. They bill themselves as "the industry’s first online real estate brokerage," and brings the whole web 2.0 package to MLS listings. And unlike customer-hostile realtors and newspapers who hide MLS listings behind layers of logins, security measures and other barriers to a halfway decent customer experience, Redfin puts the listings themselves right there in front of you, to browse and bookmark and share as you see fit.

    A recent listing in their San Francisco Bay Area section shows a small, attractive, and – as usual – ridiculously overpriced bungalow in one of my favorite Berkeley neighborhoods. Unlike other real estate tools, though, Redfin is much more upfront and honest about pricing, forgoing hype for honesty; they point out that $602 per square foot is just short of criminal, and present alternatives like this more expensive overall but only $396 per square foot home with a beautiful view just up the hill.