I've been trying to figure out since how we could put a screen door on our own house without ruining the aesthetic appeal of our fabulous "Pasadena."

We had found a number of companies which make awesome reproductions of the oldies and goodies:

Moonshine Shades offers the standard scrolls with the ever popular heron and palm tree silhouettes.

La-Ti-Da Retro has herons with cattails as well as other old Florida retro ditties like the sailboat and ducks.

Hansen Aluminum has a large variety of old school inserts including the heron, flamingo and manatee, but also carries more geometric designs, and they do a limited amount of custom work, too.

But none of these compares to Austin's own Susan Wallace. Check out the "Grover" with the "Red Ganesh!" Her custom pieces are amazingly affordable, and we're working with her to do some Crestview Doors-inspired designs for some of our clients too. Very exciting!

All of this just confirms what we already knew: a fabulous modern front door deserves a spiffy retro screen door! A match made in heaven, just in time for Valentine's Day.

Whatever you pick, I'm thinking it needs to go with these kick-ass wall sconces! No offense to the ones that David made, but these things are the boss.

Although David and I agreed with the intent of the rule (to prevent house flippers and other developers from outrageously maxing out the buildable square footage of a small urban lot), we were very disappointed with the lack of due process.

A couple of days ago, a former Austin resident left us this comment:

"The question that doesn't seem to get discussed much around this issue is how big does a house really have to be for a modest family? In the U.S., I think our first answer is always "as big as I want it and can afford!" . . . [H]ow is it that 40 years ago, many of the same houses being demolished in Crestview to make a 3 story, 2800 sq' mod box for 4 people probably were used to raise families of 6 or more?"

I ask myself the same question ALL the time. We're raising a family of five (plus a dog and a cat) in 2100sf. It feels exactly right, sometimes even a bit generous. We probably could do without 200 of those square feet, but we've also talked about expanding the family at some point... Why did it seem so impossibly to raise our five-person family in 830 square feet?

I have talked to people who grew up in our neighborhood, families of four, five or six in 800 square feet, adults in one bedroom and all of the children in the other, all of them squeezed around a tiny kitchen table to eat breakfast or dinner. Where did they put all their stuff?

My mother-in-law and others I know have explained that they didn't have a lot of stuff growing up. They had two outfits, one for school/church, and one for play. Their clothes were washed in the sink daily. They didn't have many toys, and they ate many of the same meals over and over again, mothers shopping for fresh food at the market daily rather than stockpiling in the cabinets.

Call me shallow: this all sounds very spartan, like something I half admire and half fear. The people I've talked to don't look back on these times fondly. They remember feeling poor and being constantly hungry. They resented the lack of privacy. My mother-in-law explained that they didn't really choose to live in a small house, they had to. They weren't trying to be environmentally conscious, most people simply couldn't afford a larger home. And many parents who had grown up during the depression were afraid to purchase a larger home, one they might not be able to afford were the market to suddenly crash again.

We started with a drawing for a 3,600sf home and whittled it down to 2,100, partly because we realized that we had originally drawn a bedroom the size of an airplane hangar (things look smaller on paper, I swear!) and partly because we simply couldn't afford to build that big.

What is too big? What is not big enough? Are today's standards gluttonous, or were yesterday's homes too tight?

Over the years, I have slowly been upgrading my arsenal of cooking tools. It started with the array of colorful silicone spatulas (don't laugh at me, but aren't they fun?!). Then it moved on to plain-jane restaurant grade serving bowls. The black plates from Salvation Army are still around, on the other hand.

When we moved into Erwin House, I desperately needed a great dutch oven. I'd been eyeing the La Crueset line at Whole Foods for years, but I didn't feel ready to shell out the $100+ for one of their cast iron pots, so I picked up the $60 version at IKEA. That still felt like a HUGE chunk of pocket change, but it has produced some fine meals, let me tell you what.

About a month ago, David finally tossed our nasty little fry pan, Teflon flakes and all, into the garbage. We bought a Le Creuset 10-1/4" iron-handled skillet. This thing gets used daily to fry eggs, brown chicken, and for Saurday's dinner, it seasoned and softened fresh corn tortillas for David's favorite: enchiladas. (I would have posted a picture, but our camera was stolen.)

I can't say I yet see a difference in the quality of the materials between the La Creuset and IKEA products. I've been trying to figure out what the socially responsible thing to do is. Are the IKEA products being made in sweatshops? Is the enamel hazardous to my health? How come it was half the price--is it just the branding?

One thing I learned the hard way when we were remodeling: you get what you pay for. I can't tell you how many times I wished we had bought up and swallowed the cost. Certainly I feel that way about the doors we make. I'm trying to figure out how to drive our prices down, but the fact is that our doors aren't made in China by 12-year-old boys, the pieces and parts are made in Florida, in San Antonio, in Houston, and even right here locally in Austin. I want to feel as good about buying stuff as I do about what we make, but sometimes it all feels very overwhelming. If nothing else, at least the fresh produce we eat is local!

I will tell you one thing, though, I support well-made stuff. The fact is that we live in a disposable world and it's killing us. The La Crueset skillet will probably be around longer than I will.

In the previous installment, I talked a bit about purchasing our IKEA kitchen cabinetry, and in the first installment, I had discussed designing the kitchen using IKEA's products. When all is said and purchased, most of the dirty work is obviously still not done. I don't consider David or myself to be do-it-yourselfers. We needed to pinch some pennies, however, and assembly didn't seem like it should be too hard.

Our experience installing our kitchen cabinets from IKEA in many ways wasn't your typical experience. We had gone through pain-staking steps to make sure that the items we ordered were all accounted for. This can be difficult to do when you take one look at your receipt and realize that all of the pieces and parts are in a foreign language. Our sales rep advised us to spend time organizing the parts upon arrival.

First things first, make sure that you have the room to set about organizing and assembling the cabinets. For those of you who are living in your remodel, be prepared to give up your dining or living room as well as your kitchen as you do the pre-installation prep. As you can see, the cabinets before organization took up most of our living room.

Again, I need to emphasize the importance of checking and double-checking the inventory list with a sales rep before you leave the IKEA showroom. It is easy to leave without a cabinet door or two on the list, and because the wait time for receiving your product can be weeks or even months depending on the popularity of your choice, it is worth those ten minutes of anal retentiveness.

We were very lucky to have chatted a wee bit with Caro about her experience. She and her husband also did a self-install of their cabinets and had also learned the hard way about pre-organizing. As a result, when the cabinets arrived on a big palatte, David knew to put everything in piles according to the numbers on the receipt (on which the sales rep had handwritten notes for us in english regarding what was what). After organizing, things were much more manageable.

David had scheduled to take a week off of work to do the install figuring that organzing and measuring would take the most amount of time, and that the installation would then move along smoothly. I think this would have been the natural order of things, except that our house was broken into the night before he was ready to start installing. David's piles remained when he arrived the next morning, but the receipt, instructions and warranty had been stolen leaving him completely clueless as to what to do with all of the pieces and parts.

Again, we were lucky to have Caro in town. She offered to let us borrow her instructions. IKEA was able to send us a copy of our receipt a few days later, but the handwritten notes our sales rep had made were not on it, leaving David to decipher the Swedish code.

By this time, David's week was half over. In a fit of desperation, we started looking for a professional to help us with the install. We installation how-to video over at IKEAfans.com to brush up. When my bio-dad came to visit after the birth of our youngest daughter, he and David set to work. Amazingly, they had the entire thing finished in two 12-hour days.

See the progress here.

Our Flickr photos tagged with "ikeakitchen".

In the last installment, I'll talk a little more about living with an IKEA kitchen: thumbs up or down?

See also:

Kitchens, Part 1: Purchasing Your IKEA Kitchen

IKEA Kitchens, Part 2: Purchasing Your IKEA Kitchen

Why do I love this chair?

A few weeks ago, I stopped into Room Service Vintage and spotted a knock-off of this fabulous design by Charles and Ray Eames. Celebrating its 50th anniversary last year, this set is still considered to be the penultimate lounging experience by mid-century modern enthusiasts. In fact, there is such a persistent buzz about this chair that it has its own biography: The Eames Lounge Chair: An Icon of Modern Design. And, as though that were not enough, you can even buy an Eames Stamp Kit to graphically inform the world of your Eames chair fetish.

I have never sat in the real thing, but the knock off was almost worth the $250.00 price tag. The fake-cherry veneer had worn slightly. There were cracks in the leather upholstry. Nonetheless, I could understand why there is a proliferation of these chairs nowadays with retro purists spending thousands to place this chair in front of their picture windows.

More Eames fun on the web:

• Eames Group on Flickr (purists only)
  
• Eames Lounge Chair Wikipedia entry
  
• The television introduction of the Eames Plywood Lounge Chair (NBC) on YouTube
  

It is, for these reasons, the perfect item to kick off the culmination of this blog: a place for me to catalog the mid-century and retro design I come across daily in my desire to learn more and find out what is still available.

Eames Lounge Chair and Ottoman: Worth it or worthless?

BEFORE

DURING

AFTER

What a HUGE difference it made! I suppose it had to wait. We were told by a few contractors that you have to let cedar age a little or it won't take the paint (and its natural resin might even bleed through). It looks so good now, I don't know what to do with myself.

I have great plans for landscaping, but first we have a project that requires some planning. As you can probably see, our deck doesn't actually provide any cover for the area underneath... including our front door. Heavy rains drip directly through the deck beams and form a lake right in front of the picture window. We are going to have to build some kind of under-cover, provide a gutter to redirect the runoff, and then grade the soil so that the water won't collect in one spot. Only then can we finish the concrete screen fence under the deck and landscape that area.

I've been saying that Erwin House was completed in August of 2006, but I suppose a house is never really done, eh? ;-)

Our lot is a strange triangle with the acute angle in the back. We quickly realized after moving in that most of the yard is in the front whether we saved the backyard or not. And the front yard lines a busy street. If we were going to enjoy soccer scrimmages and frisbee tosses, we were going to have to build a barrier between the people who regularly ignore the speed limit and us.

Hence, the hunt for the perfect fence material.

David and I had long admired the Modern Phoenix homes.

We so admire the creative and often elegant use of concrete screen blocks to privatize or decorate the home and landscaping. But we also appreciated the iconic nature of the screen block. The varying types of screen blocks used throughout the 50's and 60's symbolized a new age of mass production that could manipulate materials decoratively and affordably in ways not previously possible.

Unfortunately, decorative concrete screen block is as difficult to find as a retro front door. We searched and searched, finally asking Amy's Ice Cream to tell us where they had procured the blocks for their concrete wall at the Burnet Road location. They pointed us to Featherlite, a concrete company with a location just north of Austin in Round Rock.

My first phone call to Featherlite was a bust. They told me flat out that they didn't make these blocks anymore--Amy's had special ordered them from El Paso. So, I began to try to hunt down another distributor.

We caught a blurb in the summer issue of Atomic Ranch. The Editor mentioned that many people were looking for similar decorative concrete bricks and she welcomed all readers to submit their info. We surfed our way to Orco, a California company, that still manufactures a variety of vintage concrete blocks... but they don't ship outside of California. The freight would be staggering, warned the sales rep. We told Atomic Ranch about Orco, but they already had the scoop.

I tried Lowe's; one of their commercial sales reps was very kind but couldn't find anyone to help. We called every landscaping company in the county, but again no luck.

I called Featherlite again. This time I spoke in more detail with a sales guy, asking him if he could check if there were any leftover blocks from the Amy's job. Lo and behold, he said they had a few left onsite and we could come take a look and grab what was left.

David and I made a trip up to their McNeil lot on Friday. They didn't bring us the Amy's block... they brought us the mother of all atomic-age designs. And we instantly bought 68 of them to fill in the gaps in the cedar fence David had been working on all summer.

You should have seen the look on their faces when we started plotzing over the blocks. They thought we were out of our minds. We told them about Atomic Ranch magazine and how lots of people were looking for these blocks and we had been searching forever and would even consider buying all 934 of the blocks left in their inventory. The sales rep handed me his card and told us to spread the Featherlite gospel far and wide. They have to make 500 at a time, he explained, and there simply hadn't been enough demand to keep them in stock.

So, house renovators, mid-century advocates, and modern houselovers, we ask thee to go forth and prosper with the new knowledge you have of concrete screen blocks. Don't let iconic architecture die with the end of the 20th century. Demand retro and contemporary designs to be fabricated regularly and abundantly. Block-heads unite!

Many blog about their work in order to share progress with family and friends. Reading others' blogs, meanwhile, helps renovators share ideas, find inspiration and support -- and sometimes just be entertained.

Our story wasn't in the print version of the WSJ, but was mentioned in a sidebar to this story. I had never thought of having a home renovation party, thought it was a great idea on first review, and then started to read in horror:

One reveler near Chicago hung a sheet of drywall backwards, while a partygoer in Seattle messed up the host's bathroom floor by installing the tiles crooked. During her recent "Martini Bash" renovation event in Toronto, Debora Beam wandered upstairs to find one of her friends halfway through sledgehammering out the wrong wall. . . . Contractors say these parties have become a marketing opportunity. Orange County, Calif., handyman Paul Maceyka says a couple in their 30s recently paid his company almost $4,000 to undo a mess their inexperienced friends had made with a paint sprayer.

If I had thought of having a masonry party to finish our concrete screening wall, I am now of the mindset that the broken toes aren't worth it. It sure does make for entertaining blog posts, though ;-)

Tragically, this solution was custom-made for Steve's own home by his own two crafty little hands and is therefore not something I can click and order. Wah. I suppose then that I am out of luck until Wal-Mart decides to jump on the MCM bandwagon and make them for 35 cents using slave labor from Bangladesh? Thanks, but no thanks. Until Steve opens up his own shop, a girl will just have to dream.

This is the dilemma I've been trying to solve for five years!

We're not big tv watchers. We love to rent movies, but even then we only watch one a week or so. The television is currently stored in a tv cabinet from Target which threatens to fall to pieces every time we open and close the doors (and isn't really mid-century anyway).

I have looked everywhere for a tv cabinet that is even slightly mid-century. We have found some modernist cabinets that would fit a flat panel, but we have a 26-in regular old tv and don't plan to spend money on an upgrade any time soon. We also have rabbit ears since we don't subscribe to cable :)

I've thought about getting a vintage sideboard and just setting the tv on top, but I don't want it to be the focus of the room, KWIM? Any help? Help!

Thanks in advance.

I've gotten a few responses, but not quite what I'm looking for. The ideal situation would be a sideboard that was deep enough for our current tv set. I've thought about having a custom piece of furniture made (maybe we could trade a door for one?), but I'm not sure that I want to spend money on something like, you know, teevee.

Ping 'em if you've got 'em! ;-)

Atomic Ranch just keeps getting better and better. On the one hand, I have a hard time putting it down. When I call it "house porn," I am not kidding. I get a little thrill from peeking inside others' homes and seeing their incredibly flawless restorations. On the other hand, I have never felt so insecure about our own home. I follow reading Atomic Ranch by thumbing through IKEA and Rejuvenation catalogs and trying to figure out how we will ever afford small luxuries like, oh, say, new furniture and fixtures throughout ;-)

Dwellisn't rubbing me the right way these days. I appreciate their commitment to writing about green architecture, but the case studies have turned decidedly modern and the advertisements are often off my radar. They have started talking about modern design in general with articles about typesets and textiles. I personally find these subjects interesting, but it isn't what I paid six bucks for, know what I mean?

I couldn't help it. I also picked up a stack of books and other magazines on architecture. I decided that this was all research for the business and therefore worth the expense. I don't have time to give you a review of all of the books, but I have to say that the one that I found the most drool-worthy was Houses, an Aussie mag that included luscious photo after photo (and floorplans!) for lots of modern, green housing.

In the end, we decided to advertise in Atomic Ranch (look for us inside the front cover this winter!) and the upcoming Los Angeles edition of Luxe. We went ahead and subscribed to Atomic Ranch, LUXE and Dwell, but I'm positive that the subscriptions won't end there. You can also see us listed as one of the "fabulous finds" in the latest edition of Austin Monthly Home. Cheers!

First of all, I want to emphasize that I am in no way affiliated with IKEA as a company. This series represents my attempt as a regular consumer to relate to you our unique experience with designing, purchasing and installing our IKEA kitchen cabinets. That said, we had a pretty good experience, and I feel like the devil was certainly in the details. Hopefully, these details will help you out if you decide to go this route and save you some of the small pains we experienced. And many of the details were in the purchasing.

In the previous installment of this series, I talked about designing our kitchen. We had originally handed the design decisions over to our contractor to bid on. If I remember correctly, his bid included granite countertops and custom oak cabinetry. He was definitely going to create a beautiful kitchen for us... to the tune of around $25K.

The more David and I talked about where to cut corners, the more the kitchen came into play. We figured we could afford the kitchen or the dining room, but not both. Did we really need granite countertops?

At the time we were designing, I was headed in two different directions. On the one hand, I loved the kitschy 50's diner look: chrome-trimmed counters with Formica's beloved boomerangs and a Marmoleum floor sounded like soda-shoppe heaven to me. On the other hand, we thought about selecting a space-age Apollo theme with gold, red, white and black mosaic tile for the backsplash and black silestone counters with inlay gold flecks.

Our contractor wasn't familiar with IKEA cabinets and didn't know how to begin spec'ing them for our project, so we agreed that he would do the kitchen finish out, but we would figure out how to do cabinet and countertop installation ourselves. Enter the IKEA kitchen planning tool and our own experience with Photoshop.

Although we eventually decided against boomerangs or Apollo themes, we still wanted those classic Akrum cabinet faces. We decided we could make almost any countertop and backsplash work with their features, and we had heard that installation was a do-it-yourself kind of job, so we set about placing our order.

Make no mistake, ordering an IKEA kitchen is half the work of installing it. It isn't possible to order the kitchen on the website. You've really got two choices: you can either fax in your order for pickup, or you can go and get it.

I strongly recommend the go-and-get-it route. In fact, I even more strongly recommend that you plan two trips.

The first trip to IKEA needs to be the trip where you simply go and see all their wares in person. Touch the cabinet faces. Pull on the knobs. Run your fingers over the seams of their showroom countertops. Make sure you open and then SLAM the showroom cabinet doors, especially the sliding pantry (which we found to be too unstable for our desire). Whether you plan to make your IKEA kitchen last or use it as a temporary solution while you save for your dream kitchen, you want to make sure you are getting your money's worth.

The truth is that IKEA's cabinets are inexpensive and, yes, they are cheaply manufactured. These are not custom oak cabinets with commercial ball bearing hinges. These are plywood and melamine, and they will wear with time. It is a good idea to walk around the showroom and familiarize yourself with the mismatched seams and slightly uneven corners. For some, the imperfections of an IKEA kitchen are part of its charm. For others, the more expensive kitchen is worth it. And, trust me, you are going to earn your cheap kitchen.

Your second trip to IKEA is to order and pay for your materials. We went armed with our IKEA kitchen planning tool mockups, our Photoshopped mockups, our price list, and a general list of notes we had made from looking at the IKEA catalog and website. We went to the kitchens department where the attendant was overwhelmed with customers. Another warning: IKEA takes a long time, so don't plan to use your 45 minutes of Smaland without strategically planning it around your discussion with the kitchens specialist.

Our attendant was very sweet--I'd pass on her name if I could--and helped us avoid major mishaps later by giving us two pieces of advice. First of all, she told us not to use our print outs. She asked us to recreate our drawings on the in-store computer. She came to the console to double-check everything when we were done, and then she made some minor adjustments according to her own experience. This was invaluable. Even though the folks at IKEAfans.com have had some great experiences with faxing in their order, I found the face-to-face experience to be invaluable.

Once we were ready to hand over our credit card, she checked things one last time and then, right in front of us, began to make notes on our invoice. Yes, they can do that. They can modify the layout of your invoice. And it is a good thing, too, because she modified it such that all of the parts for each separate cabinet were grouped by cabinet instead of grouped haphazardly the way her computer wanted it to be. Then she made notes on the printed out invoice to indicate which cabinets were which because, as some of you know, the printed out invoice does not have much English on it. She explained that later on, when the cabinets were delivered to us, they would all be on one huge shrink-wrapped palette. We would want to have the invoice handy so that we could organize everything in piles before installing. And the items each only have their parts number printed on the packaging--not the product name.

We chose to have the delivery sent to our construction address. We contemplated picking up the shipment, but this would have meant renting a Ryder truck and driving to Houston and back to Austin during IKEA's business hours. This seemed like an unnecessary waste of time, money and gas, so we elected to have the kitchen dropped off.

I have heard that many people purchase their kitchens and take them home on the spot. Huzzah! We had the option of taking some of our pieces with us that day, but again the specialist discouraged this. She explained that it was best to have everything together. This way it would be easier if something was missing or damaged and needed to be returned or exchanged. She was right.

Our IKEA kitchen was delivered four weeks after we ordered, much earlier than we actually needed it to be delivered for our purposes, but it sure was nice to have it ready and waiting. My last piece of advice is to plan ahead. Expect IKEA to be out of stock on MANY of your desired items--and expect the out of stock items to be strangely random.

In the third installment of this series, I will talk a little more about what to do with that big palette o' cabinetry. Install it yourself or hire a pro? This is the trickiest part of making that kitchen happen. The third article will include a handy-dandy checklist to help you determine the best solution for you and your home. Until next time...

See also:

Kitchens, Part 1: Purchasing Your IKEA Kitchen

IKEA Kitchens, Part 3: Installing Your IKEA Kitchen

See architect Ben Ledbetter's visionary "Blue Winged House" on Flickr.

When we originally planned the house, we knew we wanted the driveway to extend into the backyard. We planned to build a 50's style carport (check out the I Dream of Carport post for more details) which would extend to cover the back entry to the home, and we figured this would become the main entry and exit point.

It took us six months after moving in to get the new driveway, and we still don't have a carport. Instead, we have a boat and two unsheltered entrances, and we usually park in the front and enter and exit through the front door.

There are so many problems with this setup that I have trouble keeping them all straight. For one thing, we don't really have any landscaping between the front driveway and the front door, so we find ourselves walking through mud during wet weather (and we've had a LOT of wet weather over the last few months). The front door doesn't have a covering either since the deck is still somewhat unfinished, so we drag the mud and the wetness inside when we enter. There isn't a lot of room inside the front door for loitering or unloading what with the stairs directly inside. And there is no organization other than the shoe bucket... and it is overflowing with shoes the kids have outgrown. Backpacks, purses, keys, mail, all end up haphazardly piled inside the front entrance and on the stairs. I don't suppose guests feel very welcome when they arrive.

This brings me to the point of this entry which is a plea for help! With winter fast approaching, the need for a new solution is imminent. It seems to me like we need to accomplish four major goals:

1. Use the back of the driveway for parking cars (this means we need to move the boat and install a remote-controlled gate opener).

2. Stop tracking mud and wetness into the house (we will need a carport, too).

3. Create an organized space for the coats, shoes, bags, keys, phones, and mail (this means organizing the nook next to the back door).

4. Use the front entry for its intended purpose (and landscape in a friendly way so that no one has to walk through mud or pools of water or stand under a dripping deck while unlocking the front door).

These are enormous tasks. Have you been through any of this? Advice? I was having fun checking out Better Homes and Gardens article on "Do-It-All Entryways" and thinking about our stuff and what to do with it. I need the solutions to be (1) fast, (2) easy, and (3) inexpensive. Isn't that how it always is?