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Modest 19th-century house lives larger but blends in, thanks to thoughtful ...

06.10.11

Most people who update their homes pauperism them to look bigger, better and newer. But Brita Hansen and Eric Hazen wanted their remodeled Minneapolis household to look like its small, 1880s self.</p><p> "We exceedingly liked the proportions of the original house and the gables," Hansen said.</p><p> They bought the brothel, their first, in 2004. And while they loved their location and didn't want to move, they were fit for something a little roomier, more functional and more refined.</p><p> That posed a quandary: How do you expand a modest house without making it look like a puffed up McMansion in a neighborhood where many of the homes date back to the 19th century?</p><p> The answer wasn't quick or easy, but the end result was worth the chance and toil. Today, the newly remodeled home blends with its neighbors while still giving the join another 750 square feet of living space in besides to the 1,100 they started with.</p><p> In the process, Hansen and Hazen kept the things they regard about their home: its traditional gabled look, the Seward neighborhood and their obscure lot. (Both are avid gardeners, interested in edible landscaping and urban homesteading.) And they've arranged the things they didn't love: not enough bedroom space and a unaccountable staircase that divided the living room.</p><p> The combine did a lot of the work themselves, with help from relatives and friends, including demolition, tilework and national painting. That saved them about $70,000 off the cost of the remodeling, their intriguer estimated. "We like the creative process, singularly working with tile," Hansen said.</p><p> But they knew that calculating an addition and integrating it with the existing house was going to be way beyond their DIY skills, so they turned to Michael Anschel, main part/designer at Otogawa-Anschel.</p><p> "It was one of the most challenging things I've ever designed - resolving the extrinsic so it's in scale and style with its surroundings," he said. "We went through interpretation after version. There was a lot of thinking, digesting and sharing of ideas - a lot of minds coming together."</p><p> The finishing design of the remodeled home was inspired by an offhand advice to build another house next to the original one.</p><p> "That was a honestly good idea," Anschel said. "It ended up solving a lot of issues."</p><p> In place of of one big boxy addition, the addition is recessed in the middle of the ancestry to minimize its visual impact from the street. Inside, in place of of bigger multi-use spaces, the couple has compact cozy rooms more ordinary of the home's original era than of today's open floor plans.</p><p> "We wanted to some degree small, functional spaces," Hansen said. "That was outstanding to us, rather than having large rooms you don't use."</p><p> The remodeled hospice exudes Old World charm but many of the features that contribute to it aren't innovative. When the couple bought the Victorian-era house, it had none of the decorative flourishes associated with that all at once period.</p><p> "It was a workingman's house, undoubtedly a railroad worker," Hansen said.</p><p> "There quite never were a lot of fancy things here to salvage," Hazen added.</p><p> So the span gave their house a charm retrofit. Their antique buffet is an architectural recovery piece, sawed in half to get it through the front door, then refinished and rebuilt in the dining leeway. The gleaming wood floors in the kitchen are made from local elms, salvaged by Wood From the Hood, a reclaimed load company in the Twin Cities. The vintage and vintage-look tiles, mild fixtures and woodwork were salvaged, found on eBay and crafted by usable friends.</p><p> Before the couple picked up their paintbrushes, Anschel developed a Victorian-inspired color palette of peaches and plums, greens and golds.</p><p> "Color is one of our specialties," he said. "We do it as a set, on-site, looking at how the light is moving, how one color works with another as you patrol through the space."</p><p> The historic colors, cozy rooms and mellowed touches seamlessly blend the old and new sections of the house.</p><p> "My favorite commentary is when someone says, 'I can't tell what is original and what is the addition,'" Hazen said. "That, to me, is a enormous compliment."</p><p> The couple uses every stay, as they intended. "There's no wasted space," Hansen said. And they accede to that the remodeling has made their house much more livable. "It's really enjoyable to be in these spaces," Hazen said.</p><p> That's all right, because they plan to live there a very long time.</p><p> "We've put so much of ourselves into this bawdy-house ...," Hazen said.</p><p> "... we're staying here until we're too frail to get up and down the stairs," said Hansen.

Source: Kansas City Star

Brita FilterForGood Music Project Teams Up With Janelle Monae for Fall 2011 ...

04.10.11

OAKLAND, CA, Oct 04, 2011 (MARKETWIRE via COMTEX) -- GRAMMY-nominated artist Janelle Monae is set to headline the seventh biannual Campus Consciousness Ambit (CCT) presented by the Brita FilterForGood Music Project. The college sightsee runs from Oct. 1 to Oct. 22, visiting campuses along the East Seaboard and Midwest with a message of environmental sustainability and ways students can break down their bottled water waste.

"I love the idea of bringing more of an all-embracing experience onto college campuses," says Janelle Monae. "CCT has the advantageously formula by combining music and activism and delivering it in a fun and appealing way to students around the hinterlands. I look forward to being a part of this unique tour."

As the CCT presenting television advertiser, Brita FilterForGood Music Project works with fans and artists to discover concerts more sustainable by encouraging fans to use Brita(R) filtered open-handedly and a reusable bottle instead of bottled water. So far, the repositioning has saved more than 338 million plastic bottles from potentially ending up in landfills.

Source: MarketWatch (press release)