Slow Home Case Study progress report

There isn't much to report, yet, since we're still settling into our 'Slow Home Case Study' (I really must find a more personable name for our place) and unpacking room by room. Work in progress everywhere means iPhone photos, for now:

(still need to tack the cord management thing to the wall and paint it)

Moving in all the furniture, books, and art that were being used to stage the old house has made a big difference to the feeling of the new house. I'm still figuring out the final floorplan, moving things around, and unpacking boxes. Yesterday I unpacked two giant boxes of things for the dining room and found the cooling rack and coffee grinder we had been missing. It's nice to have my fancy things on display again.

I scored this fantastic 1920s-30s fumed quarter-sawn oak tea trolley for $60 off Kijiji. It needs some minor work where the finish has been damaged, but so much potential for use as a bar cart / server for during house parties and a sewing machine station or mobile office cart the rest of the time. I love the industrial-looking rubber casters. And check out the label from the underside of the top shelf: it tells us it's from northern England, and with a little research in period business directories might help confirm how old it is.

A budget- and family-friendly Ikea Manstad corner sofa-bed in beige has made it into the family room, so movie nights no longer involve camping out on the carpet, and we'll be able to better accommodate overnight guests. (Yay!) Eventually, when the kids wreck the current one, I'll get a replacement slipcover from Bemz or Comfort Works - right now I am loving the idea of linen.

My wonderful husband has installed the central vacuum system, including a clever kickplate in the kitchen meant for sweeping up crumbs.

I'll be spending the Labour Day long weekend painting the front porch, and planting black tulips and purple irises so that our new front door colour (Benjamin Moore's Peerage) is repeated in the landscaping. We've already added furniture and a bin for sidewalk toys on the deck, and while I'm painting the kids will play (DS has a bigger bike to get used to) and have a little lemonade stand.

Sustainable Staging

Now that our old house has sold (hooray!), I thought I'd share some 'before' and 'after' photos of our staged property (which was listed here and here) and talk about my strategies for staging on a tight budget.

A photo from curbside when the mockorange and peonies were in bloom a couple of weeks ago.
We repainted the front porch, replaced the carpet on the steps, and cut down the birch tree (sigh).
The planters and baskets were filled with white violas and Wave petunias.

There are a few good articles that cover basic staging tips: declutter, depersonalize, and so on. I'm also fortunate to have staging training, so I know a few trade secrets that HGTV won't teach you.


Seeing a gap in the information that was available, I wrote an article in 2008 on sustainable staging practices (PDF) that applied what I know about sustainable residential interior design to real estate staging. While the market has changed quite a bit since that time, I think the information in my sustainable staging article is still helpful, and I followed the checklist when I staged my own home. 


(The advice from our realtor was that specifically marketing a property as green actually limits the number of prospective buyers in our city, so I didn't stage the house to highlight the property's sustainable features as advised by these three articles - but I have prepared a list for the buyers of those features plus green upgrades they should consider making as part of any renovations they do when they move in.)

Here's how I did sustainable staging on a tight budget:

- The whole house needed repainting, and I wasn't willing to sacrifice painting with 0-VOC paint, since it dries quickly and has less smell in addition to its environmental attributes. We bought new paint in areas where we needed to match existing paint, but we were able to stretch our paint budget by visiting our local eco-station, where we found mostly-unused cans of premium-brand paint for free, and by grabbing deeply discounted 'oops' cans and on-sale-for-Earth-Day untinted cans from the hardware store. Some of the free paint turned out to be a dud (if it has the texture of chunky guacamole instead of yogourt, you really cannot use it), and some of it was a bargain for a reason - the colour was too dark, or too blue, or too yellow. However, fortune favours the brave. By combining cans, I was able to create a custom-blended greige for the walls of the downstairs family room, and a too-yellow brown became the perfect dark taupe for the laundry room when doctored with a tube of lamp black. You'll see those in the photos below. We also stretched our budget by doing all the painting ourselves instead of hiring someone. (The tradeoff in doing that was that it took more time for the house to be ready to list.)

- I mostly used furniture and accessories that we already owned - which meant, since we were moving into our new house before listing our old one for sale, that I had to have my furniture plan sussed out and mark the pieces of furniture that needed to stay prior to the movers coming. Where new accessories, towels, bedding, or furniture were needed, I either bought things second-hand, or bought simple classics with an eye to using them in my new home's decor after the old house sells. Knowing that I was buying something to use forever allowed me to apply a slow-home filter to the purchase, and also spend a bit more on accessories. Nothing super-aspirational or expensive, mind you, but enough of an upgrade to help the whole house read as more desirable.

Our dining room, before repainting. As much as I loved this hand-stenciled brocade with a colour wash to make it look like hand-blocked wallpaper, and as long as it took my mum and I to paint, it was (ahem) very specific to my taste, and needed to be repainted. We kept the moldings, which add architecture to the open plan space, and painted the green out using the same colour as the existing offwhite, CIL's Swiss Coffee (50YY 83/057). The main goal of staging is to help potential buyers imagine themselves living in a space from the moment they walk through the door, so brave colour choices and personal items need to be changed as part of the staging process. That doesn't mean the end result has to be bland! It just needs to have broad appeal.  

Our dining room, after staging. Since we needed our dining set at the new house, we showed this room as a sitting room where you could curl up with a good book for some alone time. We've had the leather chair for years, a dead ringer for Restoration Hardware's Churchill chair (which is on our shopping list so we can have a matched pair). The glass and chrome table was a $25 Kijiji find. My purple faux-silk drapes got packed, and their neutral replacements were $15 a panel at Value Village - a steal even with dry cleaning quadrupling that cost. The magnetic floating curtain tie-backs are by Umbra. I dressed the chair with a knitted pillow and throw from Brian Gluckstein's collection for HBC, and the table with a silver-leafed tray with a little jade plant, a couple of books, and a bowl of chocolate-covered almonds. Staging is about selling light and space, so open curtains and transparent furnishings are widely used by pro stagers. Accessories help both to bring a space bang-up-to-date and to aid potential buyers in imagining themselves living in the space.

Our eating nook had its decrepit curtains replaced with second-hand sheers (more light!), and I added a classic linen tablecloth (GlucksteinHome again) to the existing pedestal table and lucite-and-chrome Ikea chairs. The vintage nautical prints in the stairwell were produced by artist Lloyd G. Nowlan for the Nova Scotia tourist trade, and I found them years ago at a flea market. The cherry-stained red oak floor had been a bit scratched up after 12 years of living, but I found that Minwax had an exact match. Two afternoons of careful application of gel stain with a rag and my fingertips, followed by a polyurethane treatment to bring back the shine, had the hardwood floor looking almost good as new. Repair is both greener and more cost effective than renovation!

Cherry-stained oak cabinetry by KitchenCraft in the kitchen with white porcelain knobs and a white Daltile subway tile backsplash. The island's countertop is quartz (Silestone) with a high recycled content. The near-twin stools were found at antique fairs a decade apart from each other. Kitchens need to be sparkling clean and uncluttered, so naturally, the milk glass collection I used to keep on top of the cabinets got packed away. In addition to deep cleaning everything (with eco cleaners, naturally) and treating any wear on the wood floor as described above, I used Method's products for cleaning and polishing wood to make the cabinets look amazing.

I dressed the island with the realtor's flyers describing the property and a Sophie Conran porcelain bowl full of mandarin oranges. I love citrus fruit for staging or styling a space, because the colours are great for drawing the eye to a feature of the home that you want to highlight, they last much longer than floral arrangements, and when the skins start to look wrinkly: fruit salad!

A glass container with dried apricots and a tea towel from Anthro (not shown) subtly repeated the orange colour. This vignette also has one of the porcelain berry bowls from Anthropologie and a no-name cannister from Home Outfitters that echoed the throwing marks on the Sophie Conran bowl.

The loft used to have an enormous heavy mahogany office desk in it, which we let the professionals move for us - so I could use this petite antique Mission-style desk in its place. (Remember, you are selling space, so furniture that's smaller in scale can be used to your advantage!) The floor-to-ceiling built-in bookshelves could have been shown more empty than they are here; I did significantly declutter and style them. If we were going to be showing the house for much longer I think I'd redo these with a lot less stuff on them...

... although I am pretty happy with how my Poole and McCoy Pottery collections look in vignettes on the shelves. (Using what you have is a great green staging tactic.) That's Benjamin Moore paint, Mascarpone for the solid wood shelves, Inspired for the back wall.

Of course the lovingly painted starry nighttime ceiling and walls in the former nursery had to go, too. This was such fun to do in the last week of my first pregnancy - I used a mixture of metallic and pearlescent paints and a range of star shaped stamps, then added a couple of rockets, UFOs, and satellites freehand for a bit of whimsy. The flat ceilings in this house are so great for projects like this. We added the glow-in-the-dark solar system orbiting the central light fixture later on.

This is the same bedroom after repainting with Benjamin Moore's Horizon, a lovely grey with a touch of blue that would be too cool in some spaces but perfect in this sunny west-facing space. We needed the mattress from this room at the new house, so the bunk bed got an inflatable mattress (classic staging trick) dressed with gender-neutral vintage sheets (from Value Village) referencing the hot fur trade blanket trend.

The master bedroom was painted in Benjamin Moore's Pashmina and furnished with our guest bed (a discontinued tubular steel style from Ikea), new side tables and crystal lamps from HomeSense, embroidered lampshades from Anthro, prints by my mum that usually hang above our fireplace, and crisp new white and navy bedding. New paint, bedding & accessories = appealing & on-trend.

Fresh white paint and fresh white towels in the upstairs bathroom send a signal that everything is clean and move-in ready. The sealant on the white grout for the ceramic tile floors had worn off, and the grout was starting to look kind of dingy...

...see? This is before cleaning. It turns out peroxide in a spray bottle and a bathtub scrub brush work brilliantly to lift dirt and re-whiten grout. Spray an area, leave it for a couple of minutes, then scrub with the brush (for this retro tile pattern, I did a circular motion followed by vertically and horizontally). Then wipe it dry with a rag. I only needed to repeat the treatment on a couple of stubborn spots. It didn't fix spots the kids had stained by spilling coloured shampoo, but it left everything else looking brand new. If I had known it was that easy to get the grout white again I would have done it a lot sooner! (Sorry for not having an after photo, the photos I took weren't in focus. I really do need to learn my new camera.)

The upstairs bathroom also has built-in storage shelves behind the door. I dressed them with just enough stuff that they don't look bare, and nothing to make a potential buyer think about other people using the room for its intended purpose. 

The downstairs family room used to be painted a greyed blue, with an acrylic faux 'Venetian Plaster' finish above the fireplace. It was repainted my custom greige, which I dubbed Irish Cream: 3 cans of untinted white + 1 can of Ben Moore's Horizon (blued grey) + 1 can of very peachy beige + 1/2 can of CIL's 50YY43/103 was the formula in the end. Lack of furniture and our tight budget meant we opted to show the house with this room and the third bedroom empty.

In the laundry room / mudroom, the pine beadboard wainscot was painted taupe (the oops can of yellowish brown similar to Bryant Gold, with a tube of lamp black mixed in), and the rest of the wall painted our custom Irish Cream. Both shades are found in the ceramic tile flooring. A couple of years ago, we replaced the solid door with a french door to let natural  light from the back door through into the adjoining family room.

Here is a 'before' pic of the third bedroom, as it was when we redecorated it a few years back for my daughter. The pink is Pink Hawaiian Coral, the blue is Serenata, and she loved it. We let her choose the colours, can you tell?  

Same room, repainted with Benjamin Moore's Storm (one of the freebie cans). It's possibly a smidgen dark for the room, but covered the bright pink brilliantly. Grey is on-trend, works beautifully with the existing carpet, and using a mid-tone instead of a pale paint colour sends a psychological signal that the home is solidly built. I love this paint colour enough that I'm planning to use it again (in a room with more natural light).

The downstairs bathroom with a shower stall next-door to the large third bedroom makes it a perfect house for having long-term guests, for families with a teenager craving privacy, or for a multigenerational family. Again, I used fresh white paint and new white towels, along with green towels that match the carpet in the room nextdoor.


Not shown in the photos is the unfinished basement and half-story crawl space, which we showed as empty as possible, with only a workbench and a couple of utility shelves of paint still in the space.


Here's the back yard, with the detached garage, Trex deck with cedar pergola, and garden:

Unfortunately, I had to take these photos after several days of rain including a severe hailstorm that none of the blooms survived. We found that weed cloth and pea gravel make an affordable and attractive cover for an unplanted vegetable garden, and a propane torch works better than any chemicals for clearing weeds from brick paths. 


As you can see, staging your house for sale while keeping sustainability in mind does not have to be expensive or have a crunchy-granola look. 


PS: if you are the lucky new owner of our old home: Congratulations! 
It's a wonderful house with terrific neighbors in a great neighborhood. 
We hope you will be as happy in it as we were.

The Suburban Slow Home Case Study

Exactly a year ago tomorrow, I wrote a long post about living slowly and sustainably in the suburbs that I'd like to revisit. (Go reread it and meet me back here, mmmkay?)

The approximate floorplan of our new home, not to scale.

As I've been showing friends our new home, I've noticed that I'm a bit embarrassed by it. It's bigger than I feel like we need. It's one street over from million-dollar mansions with ravine access, whose property values we might be lowering by parking our dinged-up 12-year-old Toyota in our driveway. The master bedroom and ensuite all by themselves have more square footage than my first apartment. Almost every surface finish is some variant of builder beige.

So far, not so slow, right? But that's actually part of the plan. We wanted a house with great bones, good solar orientation, and a big enough lot for a large garden, in or near the new-urbanist neighborhood where we were already living, where we can live for the next couple of decades. We got all of those things with this house, plus a great location that's well-connected to recreational walking paths and the bike trail network, and good proximity to amenities (a yoga studio two blocks away! close enough to school and groceries that we can theoretically live car-light!). Unfortunately, there aren't many houses available in our neighborhood that meet our criteria, so we compromised on getting a bigger house than we were looking for in order to get a bigger yard; our other choice to get a bigger yard involved moving neighborhoods and living through a stressful renovation of an older home. Our new home will be a case study in gradually customizing a fairly typical builder-basic suburban move-up house to make it a slow home. I hope documenting it here will be helpful, given that about half of North Americans live in suburbs. All those houses and the infrastructure that serves them are already built, so discussing ways to slow them down and make them more sustainable is worthwhile. You'll be able to follow our progress on this blog using the tag 'slow home case study'.


Here's our to-do list, in no particular order:


- When we took possession, we did a little painting and moved in, then held off unpacking all the boxes while we worked on repainting and staging our old house for sale (watch for a post about that soon!).

- Now that our old house has sold, we will move our remaining furniture, then gradually invest in a mix of antique and new furniture to fill the obvious gaps in the new house. Right now I know those gaps include a sofa bed for the 'bonus room' to allow family movie nights and accommodate visitors, and book storage to replace the built-ins we left behind.

- The next step in personalizing our home will be to add architectural moldings, paint walls, hang artwork and family photos, and unpack the rest of our things (and purging more things we don't need or use as we unpack).

- Obviously, since this is a slow home makeover, I'll be looking to incorporate ideas from Slow Home Studio's courses and Slow Your Home's bootcamp as I fine-tune our floorplan and work out what else we need to do. I'll also be following my own advice and bringing local materials, the work of local artisans, a sense of place, and a timeless design aesthetic to the decorating scheme.

- A big goal for this summer is to get the kitchen organized for efficiency, to allow home baking and canning to happen, and make it easy for us to make more of our own food from scratch. (My daughter has asked me to start teaching her how to cook. I am so excited about this! Especially since the disruption of moving is the perfect time to incorporate healthier eating and exercise habits into our daily lives, and switching from processed to homemade will help us accomplish that. Slow food FTW!) We also will consider adding cold cellar storage and/or extra pantry space in the basement. 

- We also need to get the garden in the back yard properly set up with a play area for the kids, raised beds for planting veg next year (so the dog doesn't play on top of the seedlings, like she's prone to doing now), and the perennials (divided from the mature garden at the old house) and fruit trees (including a seedling Evans Cherry transplanted from the old garden) planted; this will include removal of a fungus-infected hawthorne tree and replacement with another fruit tree. Oh, and we should arrange outdoor furniture on the back deck for eating al fresco and entertaining, and add a shade structure since it's currently only useable in the evening. Someday I'd like to have hens, too, but since (a) they're not legal in my city yet and (b) sharing a yard with our bird-dog might be stressful for them, that will have to wait.

- Meanwhile in the front yard, the door and porch need paint, and we need a pair of chairs and the existing minimal landscaping (and dead tree) replanted to make the front of our home more inviting. Right away, we will set up a bin or two of outdoor toys and bubbles and chalk so our children play with other neighborhood kids on the sidewalk, and I'd eventually like the sod pulled up and the area relandscaped as a Japanese garden with a small kid-friendly bamboo fountain, some boulders the kids can play around, and a stepping-stone path through the plantings - so it would double as a decorative space and a place neighbors would actually enjoy hanging out and building community. I need to think about whether the front garden would be xeriscaped with a high proportion of native plants, or whether my concerns about urban food security will mean I choose edible landscaping - both approaches have merit. I also need to consider the neighborhood rules with respect to landscaping (which are mostly written to prevent people from creating no-maintenance gravel 'gardens', W00T).

- Bikes are already taking over the garage, so we need to get a compact bicycle storage arrangement in place. My youngest won't tolerate riding in a rear seat instead of pedaling for much longer, so we also need a bicycle setup that allows easy bike rides for me and the kids to school and grocery stores to minimize our car use (although the kids can also take the yellow bus starting in autumn). I already have a pretty sweet vintage 3-speed roadster with front and rear baskets that I use for shopping trips.

- Obviously we will also want to do an energy audit (probably through new local nonprofit eco-retrofit specialists C Returns) and start making improvements to our home's energy and water efficiency - this process will definitely get a separate post or five. The house already is relatively efficient, being only four years old, so I predict that the energy audit will suggest a lot of little things that can add up to make a difference, like repairing gaps in insulation and adding caulk. Our budget won't allow us to strive for net zero any time soon, but I also think replacement toilets (TOTO dual-flush) and a solar installation (possibly via Enmax's new Generate Choice program) will be happening at some point, and I'd love to install a sun tunnel into the windowless laundry room.


- An easy and obvious green project will be to set up an air drying area in the laundry room, and install an unobtrusive (retractable?) clothesline in the back yard.

- To add character and useful features to the house, we'd like to add built-in bookshelves and window seats, and add trim to make the interior architecture more authentic to the period it's attempting to reproduce. I suspect that the Not So Big House book series will be consulted alongside the Arts-and-Crafts/Craftsman/Mission/Prairie reference images for ideas.

- A practical way I can make a difference will be to make a point of riding my bike to shop at neighborhood businesses (especially the mom-and-pops) and the local farmers' market, and requesting bicycle parking where racks haven't been installed yet by developers. Both the Mary Poppins Effect of seeing a mom running errands in street clothes on an upright bike and the presence of more bike racks should encourage other people to use their bicycles (and I can vouch that there are plenty of families riding for fun and errands in the more mature New Urbanist neighborhood next door where our old house is).

- We are aiming to do nightly rides and walks with my family to explore all the local paths, to increase our familiarity with the neighborhood and get more exercise - and, when we are in the ravine proper, to get the kids exploring nature and seeing the animals and birds that live down there. My husband is actually using the GPS features of his phone to map all the unmarked trails through the sanctuary while he is walking our dog, which he then plans to annotate and add photos to before making it public on GoogleMaps. I'll let you know when that project is posted.

- We will also eventually finish the basement to make the house useable as a multigenerational family home, so that the square footage per person ratio becomes more appropriate. For now it will just stay unfinished playroom and crafting space, but there is room for another large bedroom, living area, and plumbing roughed-in for a bathroom, so adding a kitchenette to make it an in-law suite would be a relatively simple proposition. If we will be doing this, we'll need to also apply aging-in-place criteria to our design decisions throughout the house, such as ensuring that doors and hallways are wide enough, lighting is bright enough, flooring has enough cushion (cork?), and larger rooms have enough soft furnishings to prevent echoes (although we can't do much about the multi-level floor plan).

- Setting up the room closest to the front entry as a studio and home office appropriate for client meetings will facilitate both a home-based business and a telecommuting work arrangement - and will be crucial for supporting my goals of finishing rewriting my business plan and relaunching my career once both the kids are in school full-time.

- Since the choices made for a slow home should last forever, we will also need to keep the likely long-term effects of global economic crises, disruptive technologies, and climate change in mind as we make each decision - and we will need to do all this frugally (so we can pay down our debts as quickly as possible). This will involve a lot of time, research, creativity, and willingness to make things ourselves.

Any other ideas for things I should add to our to-do list for the Suburban Slow Home case study?

Three Things I've Learnt This Month

Six days 'til possession, and I have moving on my mind.

1. A great decluttering strategy. Anything you'd rather pile in the backyard and burn, than pack and move a few measly blocks? Donate it to charity, or throw it out. Be utterly ruthless. (Unfortunately this strategy cannot be applied to your young childrens' mountain of stuff without tears.) We're renting a dumpster from a local company who will take care of making sure anything that can be recycled does get recycled, and I've made a ridiculous number of trips to drop off bags of donations.

2. Green moving strategy: we're going to rent sturdy plastic moving boxes for a couple of weeks. FrogBox is the local option for this, they have franchises in many other North American cities, and their rates are very reasonable (as in, actually cheaper than buying cardboard we'd have to recycle after the move). We also have purchased a number of clear plastic bins that I'm labelling and using for longer-term storage.

3. Moving house would be much, much easier if I were a minimalist - but I'm not sure it would be any less stressful. When the experts say it's as big of an emotional upheaval as a divorce or a job loss, they really aren't kidding.

There's also some great advice in this post on moving from GOOD. We did, in the end, decide to hire movers instead of going the full DIY route, although we plan to use and reuse our rented boxes to move most of the little things before the movers arrive.

BTW, there will not be a monthly news summary for April - there will be an extra-big one in May instead. Meanwhile, as always, you can watch my Twitter feed for interesting tidbits from the vanguard of the slow movement.

Dream Decorating: Kitchen - Dining - Family Room

It's about two weeks before we take possession of our new home, and I'm procrastinating about the much-dreaded packing-and-purging by planning the decor. (Is it normal to want to set fire to all your stuff instead of packing it at this stage? Please say yes.) Let me tease you with some product shots of what I'm planning to use in the kitchen, dining room, and living room, which are open to each other.

Here are a couple of before shots I took during the home inspection.

via Benjamin Moore Colors on Flikr

Eternity in eggshell on the wall in a blog post by Urban Domesticity

The first thing that will happen is that the builder beige will be painted out. We will also play with adding moldings to the existing trim to make the house feel vintage-Craftsman instead of faux-Craftsman. Much as we'd love to paint while the house is still empty, the seller is still in another country and not responding to our request for permission to take painters in so they can give us quotes. Sigh.

So, we'll have to paint after the move, and meanwhile I've been pre-testing samples of grey paint, using the similar light in my current home. I think pulling out the grey and playing down the yellow-beige in the stone fireplace surround, granite counters, and ceramic tile backsplash with a grey wall is the way to go. However, greys are tricky - they look perfect as a colour chip, and then you get it onto your wall and the undertones emerge, or the character switches from cool to warm because it's a bit too brown. After looking at the range of greys from multiple manufacturers, I've decided to try Benjamin Moore's Natura 0-VOC paint in Eternity for the walls, and Steam (an off-white) for the ceiling and trim - I'll know for sure once I get to test it in the space. Eternity is a true grey with the smallest hint of blue. A paler true grey for spaces that don't get as much natural light might be Horizon.

(I had really wanted to use uber-eco Mythic Paint, but our local dealer here in the wilderness of Canada doesn't have the ability to accurately create smaller testers with equipment calibrated for full-size cans, so that will have to wait for another room where we won't need to test the colours. Dear Mythic: please make your tester pots available through your Canadian vendors. One cannot specify colour using only a tiny chip on a fan deck. Ever. Seriously, get on it.)

Our dining table is pine with a walnut stain in a shape very much inspired by French farmhouse tables like this one, the genuine c1860 article from Uniquities Architectural Antiques in Calgary (via Houzz). It came with Parsons chairs and a matching bench upholstered in sensible espresso faux-leather. When the kids are a little older, I'll have them reupholstered in something fabulous.

Here's an old photo (of my daughter's third birthday party) from our current home's dining room. The vintage English walnut china cabinet will also make the move to the new house, and I'm hoping we'll be able to bring our pendant lamp with us as well, since it would suit the neo-Craftsman architecture much better than the current one does.

We have a hard-wearing, kid-friendly roll-arm brown leather sofa from Lane (the Wakefield) that my kids are doing their best to patinate for me. Fabulous cushions and a great throw will help to make it less of a yawn.

Since the kids will have another space that acts as their playroom, I want a tempered-glass coffee table, and originally I was thinking of a waterfall table or this 'Osaka' coffee table from Urban Barn - it's very similar to one available from US retailer West Elm. I've since scored a round one with a chromed base off Kijiji for a song, which will do nicely as a placeholder, and will be perfect for staging our old house. Unfortunately I don't have a photo of it yet. Inside my head, I'm rounding this out with Brent Comber's alder drum table and one of Jasper Morrison's cork stools, but I have a feeling our budget won't stretch that far, so I'm on the hunt for some sweet vintage end tables to add to the mix. There's an Aalto-esque tripod stool and a Mission-style octagonal table at the antique mall that might make the cut.

With all that stone, wood, and leather, the space will need an injection of femininity and softness. I've ordered FLOR's Reoriented recycled-nylon carpet tiles in Lavender; there are also touches of cream, grey, beige, sky blue, and indigo blue in the pattern, as you can see in the detail shot. With the glass coffee table you'll be able to really see the rug so it needed to be fantastic, and this pattern is a great riff on the overdyed-oriental trend. I already have faux-silk curtains similar to these, in aubergine, which I'll hang over the existing wooden blinds.

mid-1920s Poole Pottery Traditional majolicaware, via Rob's Poole Pottery Collection

1940s Poole Pottery's Traditional majolicaware, via Poole Pottery Replacements

I have a small collection of Poole Pottery that I'll be displaying in the room (It reminds me of my paternal grandmother, who used to have a huge collection of it.). Notice that the lavender is picked up in Poole's glaze palette. I might also pull out this vintage hooked mat from storage to hang as part of the art wall. (The long wall that's continuous with the stairwells is begging to be used as a gallery.)

Let's see, what's missing? Stools for the breakfast bar - I just scored a perfect match to the old farm stool I already had, so I'll be using those, at least until I can work some Emeco Navy bar chairs into the budget. A big leafy plant or two. Books, naturally. Our antique mirror and the mantle clock handed down from my husband's family for over the fireplace. A great floor lamp or two, and improvements to the ceiling fixtures (all of which I dislike). And a way to deal with the television my darling husband is insisting we put in there... any suggestions?

Slow Home: Do You Know Your Home's History?

One of the central goals of the slow movement is to foster a sense of community and connection, and researching the history of your home is a great way do that. Here's a case study on how to go about it, using the house my husband and I just bought. I thought it would be fun to show that even a relatively new home can have a history worth looking into!

If you live in an older house, you may find the tips and resources in the "Be your own House Detective" articles in the October 2010 and November 2010 issues of UK genealogy magazine Family History Monthly very useful. There are also great resources at the UK's National Archives and Bricks and Brass, and at Active History (for Canada) and the cities of Edmonton and Calgary - try adding your municipality to the search terms 'researching history of house' to find relevant resources for your area.

{Step 1: Write down what you know about your home's previous owners, builder, architect (if any), location, and prior land uses.}

Our new house was built in neo-Craftsman style in 2008 by Alberta-based builder Homes By Avi, as a  spec home using their "McCullough A2" plans (according to the builder's records; the MLS listing had it as a former showhome). The subdivision in which it was built is new enough that when we moved to our current home in an adjacent subdivision in 2001, the land was farmland used for growing canola and wheat, and deer and the occasional moose were routinely seen grazing along the road. It is still an active construction zone with only about a third to a half of the lots completed. The land is adjacent to a ravine that has been designated a wildlife refuge, called MacTaggart Sanctuary. A lovely unpaved walking path winds through the Sanctuary along Whitemud Creek's wooded banks past an active beaver colony, and the path connects to paths through our city's river valley and comprises part of a huge hiking trail network called the Waskahegan Trail. 

I snapped this photo from the edge of a beaver dam in MacTaggart Sanctuary last October.
Nearby there was a trail of flattened grass on the bank, where the beavers like to slide into the creek.

{Step 2: Look for documentation and clues to the house's former life outside and inside the home.}

We don't yet have possession of the home, but I took lots of photos and measurements during the house inspection, and we will take another look once we are in. We don't expect to find much, since the property was built so recently - but in an older home, the architectural style and changes to the layout as the home has grown additions or suffered renovations can give important information about its date and past. So, taking measurements and drawing up your house's floorplan can yield clues. When we compare our home to the current version of the floorplan linked above, we see a number of changes: the entire second floor is different (with 3 larger bedrooms and a media room, instead of the four bedrooms shown in the PDF), and a hallway was closed off and space stolen from the front room to add a shower stall to the powder room and a closet to a home office suitable for seeing clients. Those changes and the slightly worn builder-beige paint throughout this house are consistent with the information from the MLS listing that it was a showhome before it was lived in.

A quick, rough sketch of the house's actual floor plan, not-to-scale.
Modified from the current version of the McCullough marketing materials on the Homes By Avi website.

{Step 3: Look for further information that is part of the public record. Start with online searches, then check with the local archives for your city, county, and province (or state). Don't forget to look at the websites of community organizations and local newspapers, as well as local histories, maps, surveys, and census records for heritage homes.}

Here is what I found out:

- By searching on the street address, I found the website of a business that was run from the home office of the house, and the name of a previous owner.

- By searching on the name of the subdivision, I found the marketing materials for this subdivision and the one next-door, information about adjacent model-green-community subdivisions, the city's neighborhood profile and Neighborhood Area Structure Plan (PDFs), and an article for the local community league's newsletter about the history of the subdivision (on page 18 of the PDF). The city's plans call for this to become a highly walkable mixed-density neighborhood.

- From the Neighborhood Area Structure Plan, I learnt that there once were coal mines on the north bank of the creek, and as a result a larger buffer zone than would usually be needed is required around the ravine. This makes for nicer park areas on the upper edge of the ravine. Googling told me that the development on the other side of the ravine (Twin Brooks) is on the site of a former mining village, traces of which can still be found in the subdivision. So I'm guessing that the miners who dug the mine shafts in the ravine lived there.

- From the newsletter article, I learnt that the farm and ravine had belonged to Walter Street, who had retired to a one-room cabin overlooking the ravine, and that Maclab Enterprise's Sandy Mactaggart bought the land from him (after years of conversation) with the promise that he could continue to live there, and that the ravine would become a nature reserve. Mr. MacTaggart made good his promise and arranged for the land, along with adjoining land owned by the Province, to be donated to the University of Alberta as a nature reserve.

- I also learnt a fair bit about the colourful, community-spirited Mr. MacTaggart who bought Mr. Street's farm and ravine from him. Anyone who lives in Edmonton is likely familiar with the development corporation that Mr. MacTaggart was a partner in, but the many new residents of our rapidly-growing city might not be aware of the large role he and his wife played in both building Edmonton's inner-ring suburbs and cultural community (I've lived here going on eighteen years and had not been aware of his work and legacy). I do think it's fitting that the nature reserve and the new neighborhood on its edge are named for MacTaggart.

- A sign (in the photos above) at one of the entrances to the MacTaggart Sanctuary from the new neighborhood of MacTaggart confirmed the newsletter story, and added a few crucial clues to Walter Street's identity: that he lived 1878 - 1969, that he fought in World War One, and that before his retirement to farm the land beside Whitemud Creek Ravine, he had managed the stable at the Edmonton Ice Company.

- I found Walter Street listed in the 1950 Henderson Directory for Edmonton, occupation "stableman Arctic Ice Company" (who bought out Edmonton Ice Company), living at a Rossdale address near (or perhaps in) the Arctic Ice building at 100 Street and 97 Avenue; by 1952 he had moved and is no longer listed (although a carpenter of the same name is).

- A search on Walter Street, Edmonton, Alberta on Ancestry.ca led me to census records of two possible individuals, one of whom was married (and seems to be the carpenter I just mentioned) - and the other of whom is too young to be the correct individual, if the signage placed in the community is correct, but who otherwise seems to fit the facts. I'm now corresponding with one of the people researching that Walter Street's family tree, and have promised him I'll make enquiries at the local archives to see what else we can learn. Using the dates from the signage instead of a location in Edmonton has suggested a few other possible individuals, so I will need to find more information in order to narrow down the origins of the Walter Street who farmed the land my house now sits on, regardless. My next step will be to visit the archives, in person.

Walter Street's name ought to be more widely known, since his foresight and generosity ensured that his land on Whitemud Creek was preserved in as unspoiled a state as possible for us all to enjoy. I hope he would approve of the beautiful wildlife sanctuary and the neighborhood being built on its banks.

Introducing our new Slow Home

So, we bought a house!

exterior - yes, we just had a snowstorm

living room natural-gas fireplace with stone facing

detail of rail at top of stairs in bonus room

kitchen granite counter and backsplash

one of the small square windows, to show the neo-Craftsman millwork

ensuite tub, showing the maple cabinets and tile used throughout the house

oak floors with a nice dark stain

I took a few photos during the home inspection today. I've tried not to show the current furnishings, out of respect for the prior owner. (I'll share more photos once our stuff has been moved in. Promise.) The house has a bad case of builder beige, but good bones, don't you think?

As you can see, the exterior and interior trim is suggestive of Arts-and-Crafts style, as is the case in several of the new subdivisions being built around Edmonton - and in many other cities, based on what I am seeing online. As a Prairie city that had its first real growth between the World Wars, Edmonton's most coveted central neighborhoods are streetcar suburbs filled with Craftsman bungalows and Four-Squares - many of which were mail-order houses. I once read a reprint of a 1930s Sears kit home catalogue, and it was amazing just how many of the illustrated exteriors were instantly recognizable as homes in Glenora and Strathcona. It makes sense that they'd be mimicked by builders looking to trade on the style's cachet, for buyers who want the look in a larger, newer, less expensive home in the outer-ring suburbs.

So, we'll work with that style, and add Craftsman-style interior trim, built-ins, and hardware (and fix the existing trim, which is a bit too simple and looks clumsy as a result). That will help to add architectural interest and a sense of history to the interior. At the same time as we do that, we'll try to slow down the design of the house, which we score (generously) at 14/20 on the Slow Home Test. Making the home more environmentally friendly, adding better lighting and more built-in storage, creating a proper garden, and giving the neighborhood time to mature and develop more nearby amenities (which are still under construction) will all help to improve that score. It'll never be a 20/20, given its suburban location and total lack of attention to the sun's path and the prevailing winds, but it's "somewhat slow" and it meets all the criteria that I laid out in a recent post.

I'm pleased that the home is faux-Craftsman instead of one of the other styles that are currently en vogue. The Craftsman aesthetic is very in tune with modern Slow Design sensibilities, with an emphasis on honest use of natural materials, connection to nature, artisan workmanship, and human scale that was originally borne of protest against industrialization and mass manufacture. In practice, the kit houses and the furniture and wallpapers and tiles used to decorate them were mass-produced in one of the first examples of democratization of design, and they were marketed by the kit-sellers as modern, luxurious, efficient, hygienic, and convenient. Craftsman bungalows borrowed from traditional Shaker, Japanese, and Bengalese architecture, and featured rooms that were open to one another, an abundance of natural light and natural wood, and the use of art tiles and art glass as durable decorative flourishes. Thoughtfully-designed built-in furniture was used to increase the apparent size of the rooms and to keep the rooms easy to clean. An emphasis on long horizontal lines, square motifs, and simplicity of form makes the architecture read as fairly masculine, which is usually balanced by adding rounded forms in the furniture and lighting, and adding decor showing Art Deco and Art Nouveau influences. (Here's a detailed article discussing Arts-and-Crafts architecture and interior decoration in Nebraska - most of what the author says is also true in Edmonton.)

There are lots of great resources out there for families who are restoring their Craftsman homes, and if I really wanted I could pull out all the stops and make this house as authentic as I wished using those resources. I will not be going with a slavish reproduction of Craftsman style in our new home, but I will let its aesthetic inform the architectural millwork and hardware choices we make. I've started by creating a pinboard of Craftsman reference images (naturally). We take possession at the end of April, so I have about two months to pack and plan things before the move. This should be fun!