Monday, January 26, 2015

SEEKING SALVATION Part One of Two Parts

Suppose there was a place you could buy high quality building products at fire sale prices, and do it in the greenest possible manner to boot? Well, there is such a place--it’s your local architectural salvage yard. If you can live with a few little nicks and scratches, you may be amazed at the bargains you come across. 

A good architectural salvage yard
will have doors like this aplenty, at
prices well below new.
What? Build your esteemed project with someone else’s castoffs? Well, yes. And there are three good reasons to do so. 

First, the quality of older building materials is often superior to what you’ll find at modern home improvement stores. 

Second, salvaged items typically sell at discounts of fifty to ninety percent off new prices (some items are in fact brand new products misordered by contractors, rejected by customers, or discontinued by their manufacturers--occasionally, they’re still in their original shipping containers). Lastly, salvaged items are infinitely greener than new, so-called “green” products, since they already exist and consume no additional resources. 

But be forewarned: Buying from an architectural salvage yard isn’t for everyone. Unlike shopping at your local building emporium, you can’t just grab all the generic, Made-In-China goodies you need and be on your way. You need patience. It can takes months, in fact, to find just the right items for your project. 

On a good day, you might even find
brand-new high-end doors like these,
perhaps still crated for delivery.
You also have to remain flexible and willing to change your mind. For example, you may be looking for a pair of double entrance doors, but come across an absolutely beautiful single door with sidelights that works just as well--perhaps better. Far from being a drawback, having to keep your design options open will often elicit more interesting, less off-the-shelf solutions.  

Now, some salvaged items that can be especially good values:

• Front entrances are one of the most commonly replaced items in home improvement, so salvage yards are usually well stocked with them. Often, these are very fine old doors that have been changed out merely to keep up with some new design fad. If you’re willing to live with the patina that accompanies a previous life, you can get  a high quality front entrance for dimes on the dollar. Your best bet is to look for units complete with the original jamb and hinges, since fitting a new door into an existing opening can be very labor intensive. 

One of our local architectural salvage yards—
Urban Ore Ecopark in Berkeley, California
• Interior doors can also be a good buy, as long as you know exactly what to look for. Again, if you’re building from scratch (rather than just replacing an existing door), it’s better to buy the doors complete with jambs and hinges--”prehung”, in building parlance. Make sure each door has the  proper “hand”--the direction it swings--because it’s not cost effective to rehinge a door later. Avoid doors that are glopped with multiple layers of old paint, which is usually more trouble to remove than the door is worth. 

• If you’re restoring an older home, the salvage yard is also a good source of hard-to-find vintage hardware items such as lock sets, brass switch cover plates, ornamental heat registers, and the like. They may require some TLC to be put back in use, but their quality is generally superior to that of new reproductions--often including the stuff available from those ostensible “restoration” catalog houses.

Next time, some more salvage yard bargains, along with a few items to approach with caution.

Monday, January 12, 2015

FAD KITCHENS: All Show and No Go

The typical "dream kitchen" of the
design magazine crowd is usually one like this—
big, busy, and slathered in stainless. 

“CHEF’S KITCHEN”. That rather pretentious term tells you a lot about what’s wrong with many of today’s kitchen designs. Dressed up in yards of stainless steel, and sporting appliances that mimic the commercial variety, they masquerade as restaurant kitchens, as if looking functional is the same thing as being functional. But no matter what fashionistas may tell you, a restaurant kitchen is hardly the best model for practical family cooking. 

To begin with, professional kitchens are designed on the presumption of having a full-time staff to operate and maintain them (which also explains why commercial cooking appliances can afford to have so many hard-to-clean cracks and crevices). Professional kitchens also have the luxury of sprawling over large amounts of floor space. Neither of these attributes apply to the average home kitchen. 

There’s a lot more to functional design than simply adopting the usual stainless steel, faux-restaurant kitchen garb. A true chef’s kitchen--that is, yours--demands less concern with how things look, and more concern with the way you cook. 

To design a kitchen specifically tailored to your cooking style, first measure the space you have available and draw up a simple plan. Then try out  a few different tentative layouts as a test bed for your ideas. All the old chestnuts of kitchen design still apply: There should be a compact work triangle formed by the three basic cooking areas--sink, stove, and refrigerator--ideally uninterrupted by traffic passing through it. The sum of the triangle’s sides should be no less than thirteen feet nor more than twenty-one feet. It should only take a few steps to get from one work center to another--a test, incidentally, that most of those sprawling “chef’s kitchens” fail miserably. 

Some kitchens are barely recognizable
as kitchens at all.
Once you have one or more basic layouts, mentally run through your usual daily cooking rituals in each of them to look for shortcomings. For instance, imagine cooking breakfast in each version, paying careful attention to small details such as where you store the cereal, silverware, coffee mugs, and so on. Is the microwave in a convenient spot? Where will the coffeemaker go? The coffee? The bread? The toaster? Minor as these things seem, they can spell the difference between a kitchen that’s a pleasure to work in, and one that’s a daily pain. Run through the same mental exercise for all your other regular mealtimes, as well as any special kitchen uses, such as baking, craft work, or holiday gatherings. 

By the time you’re finished testing out several virtual kitchens designs in your head, you should know exactly where to find Mr. Clean, Mrs. Butterworth, the Swiss Miss, and Captain Crunch, as well as how many steps you'll need to take between each of them. Going through these mental dry runs will also allow you to adjust any shortcomings that come to light. When this happens, the real design work is done--you can be sure the kitchen will suit the way you cook, because you've already cooked in it in your mind. All that remains now is the sexy design-mag fun of choosing appliances, finishes and hardware. 

And by the way--while you might like to fancy yourself whipping up fresh strawberry crepes for the kids each morning, there’s also no dishonor in tossing a couple of frozen Eggos in the toaster. After all, it’s not Wolfgang Puck’s kitchen. It’s yours.