New house in an old neighbourhood of Wroclaw, Poland, in the NYT today. Spruce on the outside, particle board on the inside, and the whole thing cost US$80,000 to build. It will fade to grey. This seems equivalent to laneway housing in Vancouver – and memo to Vancouver: modern mixes well with traditional architecture. Take a chance! I just hope they used non-formaldehyde particle board in the interior, because if not that’s a lot of off-gassing. Photos: Olo Rutkowski. See more current Polish architecture here.

As a kid I knew Arlo Guthrie’s Alice’s Restaurant off by heart, including the monologue (long story), but I never intended to actually end up living in a church myself. In 2002 I was looking for a cheap fixer-upper in Vancouver’s somewhat sketchy downtown eastside, back when prices were really low here, and suddenly a rundown little wooden church came on the market. On a lark I made an appointment to see it, and two days later I ended up owning it, something I’ve regretted more than once. Everyone who sees it tells me he/she has always wanted to live in a church, and while I obviously understand that fantasy, I must say that the job of making a church livable is not for everyone. Even without changing the basic structure, footprint, roofline or even any of the rooms/doors/walls, it’s more work than your average house renovation. For one thing, houses are built upwards for a reason – smaller foundation, smaller roof, and heat travels up. For another, they contain storage! Cupboards! A little church, on the other hand, has none of those things because it’s effectively a barn. The place is livable now, but the decor is entirely haphazard still –  you think decorating in a small space is hard? Try having all your stuff in one big room! It’s a bit premature to publicly post photos of the place, but I’m doing it anyway because I need to get a head start on renting the space out during the 3 weeks of Vancouver’s 2010 Winter Olympics, as a way of paying off some of the restoration. Apologies for using this blog as craigslist – there will be a better post later, when things are more complete. Above is the church when I moved in, when the star and cross were still on the roof, nailed straight into the shingles and creating serious leaks. Jesus may have been a carpenter, but the church volunteers sure weren’t.

I took the above photo during the realtor’s open house, the first day I saw the place, and this is pretty much how I inherited it, including pool table and some 1970s green pews. Notice the wainscotting the whole way down the room, and the jade trim.

Above is the same room in 2006, a few weeks after the floors were finished. In 2007 the altar area became a fireplace alcove with a super-efficient Danish wood stove, below:

The giant timber bamboo in the altar area, above, was brought inside as a party decoration when it was still green. A heavy snowfall had snapped the stems in the garden outside. After a month or two it turned this blond colour and somehow I never took it back outside, because without it the altar is too austere.

Photos above and below show the front area, inside what was the tiny original church. That church was perpendicular to the main part of the later church, and even though it’s now all one room, you can tell that they were once at right angles because the ceiling trusses and floorboards run in a different direction. You can see this in the photo below, the one with the ceiling fans. The older part of the church, above, houses the front entrance, office (you can see a temporary desk set up while a wall-mounted desk is being made), and to the right are the master bedroom and bathroom. Above, the front doors are obscured by a hanging room divider made from British army snow camouflage netting. This will be replaced by a tall white rolling wardrobe that will double as a privacy pony wall, an item that becomes necessary when your front doors are at street level. There’s more info on each photo in the Flickr page – click on image. Below, you can see one of the only two original pews remaining from the earliest days of the church – they’re made out of the same Douglas fir as the building and have crosses carved into the each side. There were other pews from the 60s but they were cheap and had no redeeming features, so l I broke them up so that the heavy, old-growth Douglas fir could be re-used, including for an indoor swing.

Above is a view into the bedroom. The bed is inside the church’s original altar, a 5-sided cupola. The bed platform is a reconstruction of the original altar stage, which had been removed by a previous owner, and conveniently it fits a king size bed. And no, it doesn’t feel funny to sleep in the altar. After wondering if the place had been deconsecrated, I did some research and found that there is, in fact, no such thing as deconsecration. Deconsecration would essentially be the removal of a blessing, and apparently the removal of a blessing is the rough equivalent of a curse. It is heartening that Christian churches don’t remove blessings, not because I believe in blessings, but because the idea of removing them seems fishy. When a church sells one of its churches and its altar paraphernalia has been removed, the building automatically becomes a civilian, non-religious structure. There’s actually a long tradition of ex-churches being used for other purposes going back many centuries. Neighbourhood kids always ask if the place is haunted, but if it is, I’ve never noticed it. If it’s haunted, it’s haunted by the ghosts of the many cats and birds and rodents who died in the crawlspace, and whose skeletal remains, uncounted numbers of them, I had to remove. And a raccoon. I have photos of all of this in a file called “church horrors” but I will spare you.

The worst of the projects are now completed, after the sanding of the ceiling, substitution of drywall for plaster, insulation of all walls, ceiling and roof, refinishing of floors, re-roofing, updating of the kitchen and general repair and maintenance. It just needs decor fine-tuning and more storage, which at this point almost amount to the same thing. For more photos of the process, see below or click on photos to go to the Flickr set.

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This blog post by Mr. Skona wins this week’s prize for ingenuity and charm.

My lovely wool socks (please excuse the pills) were starting to get a little threadbare around the heels and the ball of the foot. The rest the sock was fine so I didn’t want to recycle them or resign them to dusting pile just yet. There weren’t any holes, the fluffy wool (fleece? is that the right term?) had just worn off leaving a fine grid of threads (they must be made of a blend). I had this idea that I could weave yarn over and under the grid which would fill in the threadbare area. Little did I know that’s exactly how you darn something.

Martin Margiela is never entirely serious nor entirely flippant, which is part of what makes him an interesting artist. For example his site. This waistcoat how-to was produced by Maison Margiela and is courtesy The Guardian, where you can find many other odd DIY tutorials, like Jade Jagger’s punk bracelet. Above, the final waistcoat; below, step 1.

When I moved into this typical 1930s apartment in Vancouver’s east side in 1999, the first thing I did was paint over the kitchen’s dingy gold linoleum flooring. The linoleum was the worst thing about that apartment. Everyone always says not to paint linoleum – or any surface you walk on, for that matter – but the painted floor turned out to be durable, easy to deal with and gave me no end of pleasure. You would think a white floor would really show the dirt, but it didn’t seem to, and the glossy painted finish was way easier to clean than the scuffed, dirt-attracting lineolum had been. You can see the old linoleum below (along with some fake protest signs made by an artist friend):

It’s ridiculously easy to do. Here’s how: Degrease the floor as much as you can, either with a proper degreasing liquid or just some strong soap, let it fully dry and then sand the linoleum thoroughly. 80 or 100 grit is fine – you can go finer but avoid anything finer than 150 because the grit does tend to clog a bit. Buy a couple of cans of a tough, dedicated floor paint. Most paint companies carry floor paint, but I got mine from Home Depot – I can’t remember the brand but it was water-based, not too smelly, and could be tinted any colour you wanted. I used a semi-gloss pure designer white. Between coats and when recoating, make sure you only walk on it in white socks, and follow the recoat times to the letter. Before moving heavier items back in, wait a week while the paint hardens. I didn’t want to move the fridge, so I just painted around (and under) it.

The result was quite interesting, because the texture of the lineoleum showed through in a pleasing way (see photo with the vacuum cleaner). The white floor made it feel much more mod in there, which was was great because all the pieces of furniture I owned back then were worn antiquey items I ended up with when my grandfather’s house was sold. As an aside, that interesting corner cabinet in the kitchen was a typical old Vancouver cold cellar – these were cooled by a vent to the outside and were meant for storing vegetables and cheese etc. Apartment kitchens from this era also frequently had hot water tanks in plain view, because these were added later. Hence the homemade birch screen below, which is a 5′x5′ sheet of Baltic birch cut in equal thirds, sanded and finished with varathane, and then re-assembled with two long piano hinges. All together, this doesn’t amount to a proper kitchen renovation, but it was a cheap cosmetic fix that made the apartment feel so much nicer. The whole job cost about $200 if you include the birch screen.

Yet another 60s DIY project from the The Practical Encyclopedia of Good Decorating and Home Improvement, Greystone Press, 1970. While the bookshelf directly above is cringe-worthy (almost in the so bad it’s good category, but not quite), it could be very mod if it were updated and re-made properly with more attractive materials. One advantage of pole shelving is that unlike wall-mounted shelving (previous post), you can bring it out from the wall and let it function as a room divider. If you do want to place it against a wall, the fact that it is anchored from floor to ceiling means that you don’t have to screw into the wall, either when you’re not allowed to alter the wall in a rental, or when your plaster wall is disintegrating and too weak to support heavy shelves. See some pole-mounted cado-style shelving here. The trick is to figure out how to anchor your poles – once you’ve done that, suspending the shelves is easy and there are many ways to do it. Some Apartment Therapy tips here and we found a blog called Pole Shelving which shows a number of styles and provides many links to tutorials. Below, from Time Life: aluminum poles used as room divider in New York apartment, has three pole shelves held on by clamps. Taken in December 1953 by photographer Peter Stackpole, the bookshelf cost $142.50 at the time and were made by a company called Polecats Inc. Rakks and ISS are two big current suppliers of these systems. But somehow the 50s example has a bit more style.

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