Bortell/Stroud Associates

Thin is In With Tile

bortellstroud — Thu, 16 Dec 2010 19:24:19 +0000

When renovating a floor with tile in a bathroom, kitchen, or other area of your home, making seamless transitions between rooms and thresholds can create a very clean look that you aren’t going to trip over. But the problem is floor height or wall thickness! And that doesn’t include the mess, and cost of demolition for your old floor.

Here’s an example of what I mean. On a current project, we had an issue with a dishwasher. This European dishwasher was previously installed under a kitchen counter that was lower than the usual 36″ height. There are few dishwasher products that would meet our needs, so we needed a floor product that wouldn’t raise the floor height more than a 1/4 inch.

The existing flooring was cork, which is 1/8 inch thick and easily removed. So, with tile mastic (glue) and tile, we could only be 1/4 inch thick. You can imagine the challenge! Well, the Italians have done it! There is a new tile product on the market called Kerlite Plus. This tile is only 3.5 mm thick, which is about an 1/8″! It has a fiberglass backing which adds to it’s strength. This stuff is actually a bit flexible unlike thicker tile, but it can withstand a steel ball dropping 80cm vs. an unreinforced tile, which can only take a 5cm drop! Kerlite Plus can be applied directly over existing tiles. This will eliminate the cost of demolition, speed things up, and prevent a lot of dust and mess.

We’re installing this new tile today in our client’s kitchen, in place of the cork. Everyone is very excited to see the result! It sure looks promising, though!

Here is a video describing Kerlite Plus, and a website with more info.

Skill, Determination, and Gold Leaf

bortellstroud — Sat, 20 Nov 2010 13:53:25 +0000

Sometimes there is no substitute for a little genuine old-world craftsmanship! When our customers, Marjory & Carl Wunsch, found two valances in their attic, Marjory and Interior Designer, Karin Weller suggested that re-using these valances would make for a great finish in restoring their home to its original period luster.

The house was built in 1874 and had the original moldings in many parts of the house, which the previous owner hadn’t touched. The moldings found in the attic were the original pair of curtain valances that had been in the Living Room but had been removed and stored during a much earlier remodel. Unfortunately, one end of each of the two valances was missing. After searching high and low, we had no luck finding these pieces.

Karin knew that our renowned woodworking artisan, Peter Ivanovic, could replicate the missing valance pieces. She’s a historical buff and didn’t want to make new moldings. Restoring the original moldings was the only option for her, to which Marjory agreed.

The original moldings had been in the attic for years. After cleaning, it was apparent that this antique woodworking was even more spectacular than we originally thought. The molding was gel coated with gold leaf and more than a hundred years old!

Everyone was very enthusiastic about the prospect of restoring this valance. But not only were two ends missing, but the pieces had been damaged from the long years in storage. But Peter was up for the challenge!

The pieces were cleaned as best as possible and sent to Peter at Bortell/Stroud’s woodworking shop. As with the existing old pieces, we used Mahogany to make the new pieces to the exact same profile as the originals on our shaper. After the new end pieces were made, Peter prepped them for the final processes.

In order to recreate this old world craftsmanship, the first step is the gel coat. If the gel coat isn’t applied perfectly, when the pieces are put together, the line between new and old becomes noticeable. Our goal is always to blend the new and old, and to never be able to tell which is which. Peter took his time, carefully applying and smoothing the gel coat. Then the new surfaces were prepped for the application of the gold leafing. The trick is to antique the whole piece, both old and new, to make them match perfectly and eliminate any evidence of restoration. This is a time consuming process and requires steady hands and lots of care. Peter’s years of experience and vast knowledge of these processes were needed to create the new pieces, as well as restore the old valance.

In the end, everyone was staring at the restored pieces, and no one could tell which ends were restored, no one could tell where the repairs occurred, and no one tell that it had been stored in the attic for all those years. And now the Living Room looks great with it’s original elegance restored!

Mid-Century Modern on the Mystic Lakes

bortellstroud — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 03:28:03 +0000

Back in the late 1940s, the shoreline of the Mystic Lakes in Arlington was the playground of post-war suburbanites building simple ranches and colonials set back from the water up a steep slope. One such home was purchased in the mid-1990s by a couple with both the vision and will to turn a tired, two-story mid-century house into a showplace with expansive lake views and an eclectic, open plan design. When I first met Rich and Kate Sands, they had been in their new home for a little over a year, and had hired a talented, unassuming architect to help them realize their dream home. The house itself was cut up into a number of small rooms with low ceilings, a kitchen straight from the Donna Reed show, and bathrooms and finishes that screamed "early 60s". Their architect had come up with a plan to gut the 2000 sq. ft. main floor to the studs, remove the ceiling and attic to create an open, cathedral-ceiling space encompassing the living room, dining room, kitchen and sun porch, combine two bedrooms and bathrooms into a single master suite, and add a small foyer and powder room addition to the front of the house. We got off to a rocky start - the architect had made a mistake in his drawings for the new foyer, and the roof didn't line up with the foundation. Oops! An honest mistake, and one both of us probably should have caught, but the concrete was poured before either of us noticed. The architect was mortified and offered to absorb any cost of rework. I knew that with just a little extra wood I could cantilever the new addition's roof. This is the kind of problem that happens in any project. I just handled it, no extra charges. The benefits in good will and building trust outweighed the small extra cost many times over - we were all a team working together to solve problems and create something special!

When you remove the ceiling joists from a house, the walls lose one of their critical supporting components, and the downward force of the roof no longer can be borne by the exterior walls. We needed to transfer the weight of the whole roof from the outer walls to the center load-bearing wall somehow. But the center of the roof was 16 inches offset from that load-bearing wall! After careful engineering assessment and planning by my engineering subcontractor, we raised a 10-inch thick laminated wood beam up to the peak of the ceiling, attached the roof to that beam, and then rested the beam on a pair of "shear walls" - rigid columns built from diagonal layered studs and thick plywood sheets that transferred the weight down and 16 inches west, to rest on the center load-bearing wall. With the roof supported, we could cut out the ceiling joists, transforming this lowly little mid-century raised ranch into a dramatic contemporary home. It is amazing what a really talented architect, clients with vision and taste, and a committed contractor can do in transforming an old home with good bones into something extraordinary!

Since that first renovation, I've been back to their home many times to continue the transformation. I poured a massive reinforced concrete retaining wall behind the house to hold it on the slope, support their sun room, and allow the owners to transform their landscape without worrying about the structural integrity of their home. I renovated the entire lower floor, raising the ceilings and moving walls and utilities to make a cramped basement into a spacious, modern family room. In a second wave of renovation to their master suite, I turned their existing Grange french country armoire into a dramatic hunter green and tiger maple wall unit perfectly matching their bedroom furniture, and including a clothes chute that drops their laundry directly into their downstairs laundry room! We added a unique "belt course" trim band made of Azek plastic around the whole exterior, and a dramatic

angled, cantilevered deck high up over the Mystic Lake engineered from a combination of structural steel, framing timbers, and Ipe decking laid using a hidden biscuit fastener system. Through it all, my clients and I have forged a long-lasting professional relationship and friendship whose basis is trust.

When I say that once you're a Bortell/Stroud customer, you're a customer for life - this is what I mean!

(Click the last picture for a slide show of this project)