by Peter Corbett - Mar. 1, 2012 12:20 PM The Republic | azcentral.com

A crosswalk linking Scottsdale Quarter to Kierland Commons has been popular with shoppers since it opened last fall.

Now one of Kierland's stores, Restoration Hardware, is crossing the road for a new three-story space at Scottsdale Quarter on the corner formerly occupied by the short-lived Oakville Grocery, which was torn down last week.

Restoration Hardware plans to move by next year into a new, three-story building on the northeastern corner of Scottsdale Road and Butherus Drive.

"I would describe (the building) as an eclectic Italian-villa look," said Scottsdale architect David Ortega, vice chairman of the city's Development Review Board. "I think it works well with their corporate image."

The board approved the building, designed by George Melara and Gwen Jarick of Nelsen Partners Inc., at its Feb. 16 meeting.

Ortega said it is unusual for a 2-year-old building like Oakville Grocery to be razed and replaced.

"It tells you how valuable things are," he said. "It's a prominent corner that's a gateway for the whole Scottsdale Quarter."

The new 22,405-square-foot building will have two main levels with a mezzanine and rooftop terrace. It will be just under 54 feet high.

Restoration Hardware, which features reproduction, vintage designs of home furnishings, is the latest of eight new tenants for Scottsdale Quarter.

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Restoration Hardware to relocate to grocery's site

MANCHESTER

For the past several days, a crew has been stripping plaster and lath inside the John Olds house, revealing oak and chestnut framing and the enduring art of 18th-century craftsmen.

With its fluted pilasters, varying cornices and elegant fireplace mantels, the house is a statement and an investment by a citizen of the new Republic.

"You walk in there and you're impressed," says Steven Bielitz, an old-home restoration specialist overseeing deconstruction of the Tolland Turnpike house. "It was well-thought-out."

Bielitz, owner of The Glastonbury Restoration Co., has a permit to dismantle the home, which sits on property of TGM Associates, owner of the adjacent Waterford Commons apartment complex. TGM has wanted the vacant house gone for several years, to be replaced with a small park for apartment residents. Local preservationists and town leaders have delayed demolition, but their efforts to save the home in place have come to naught.

"We regret the fact that there was nobody in town, or the town itself was not interested in preserving this important historic house in Manchester," historical society President John Dormer said Wednesday.

Revolutionary War veteran John Olds built the house in the late 18th century, possibly in 1776, but Bielitz says more likely in the 1780s. The Yankee farmer is known as the father of Manchester for leading the movement to separate what was then known as Orford Parish from the town of East Hartford. He and other settlers succeeded, and Manchester was founded in 1823.

TGM Associates bought the property in June 2008 and announced plans later that year to tear down the farmhouse. Town leaders scrambled to save it, but rejected TGM's offer to sell the property for $500,000.

Bielitz said he has started advertising the house and hopes to get $120,000 for it. He and his crew are labeling each post and beam, mantel and moulding. The pieces will be loaded on trailers and carted away.

Bieliz said Wednesday that he hopes to finish the job by May 1. He said he would like to find a buyer in Connecticut, better yet in Hartford County. Dormer said he still hopes the home can be reconstructed somewhere in Manchester.

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Old Manchester House Coming Down, Piece By Piece

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The springs used to be full of mermaids and vibrant pigs, but now is just fish and plant life in their natural habitat. The area is home to eight federally-listed endangered or threatened species.

Now the area is called Aquarena Center, and is currently undergoing a $5 million restoration. Andrew Sansom with the River Systems Institute says the venue will be converted to a nature and aquatic study area.

Back in the 1960s, up to 250 people would fit into a submarine and plunge below the waters surface to watch a show.

Now that the show is over, the biggest challenge is bringing up two submarine theaters.

"We had the sub hooked up to a 500 ton crane and a 400 ton crane, and it still wasn't enough to pick it up," Sansom said. "We may have to cut it into pieces and pick it up a piece at a time."

The River System Institute says the project will be complete in June.

Spectators can still take Glass Bottom boat tours while the construction is underway. Click here for more information.

The rest is here:
Aquarena amusements nixed for natural restoration

This is a guest post by Suzanne Clemenz, who writes for Insure.com. Suzanne designed her passive solar home and remodeled two others. She worked with architects and contractors on floor plans, electrical work, painting, windows, flooring installations, flood prevention walls and stonework, major drainage issues, an irrigation system, and landscaping.

It's alarming to be awakened by the distant, mysterious sound of running water. But on Sunday, November 6, 2011, that's what happened to me.

Two steps out of bed my toes sank into cold, soggy carpet. I quickly discovered that my laundry room, kitchen, and about one-third of the living area were an inch deep in expanding water.

The recessed hose bibs behind the clothes washer were dry. So was the hot water tank. A river ran from the laundry room to the garage door and driveway. The drainage swale that crosses my front and side yards was spilling water into my backyard's natural arroyo.

Dressing hastily, I turned off the outside whole-house water supply. Then, knowing most people wouldn't respond until Monday, I did the following:

I spent two more hours vacuuming water - 22 gallons total. My kitchen counter tops were stacked high with belongings, so at 2 p.m. I headed for a nearby cafe, keeping my receipt for insurance reimbursement since my kitchen was not usable.

The contractor called late in the afternoon with the comforting words I'll be there in the morning. He said to keep the house at 70 degrees and set up fans aimed at the master bedroom and closet carpet. I moved survival gear to my guest bedroom and bathroom. The only livable places were my home office and guest bedroom.

Flood remediation The contractor and crew arrived early Monday and moved heavy furniture to unaffected areas. Some of the equipment they used included the following:

All the machinery howled like a pack of wolves 24/7 for the next five days, after which only one small area needed more drying.

In my dry Arizona climate it takes five to eight days for mold to form if not immediately mitigated. In humid climates there's only a day or two. But the seams of the laminate flooring were buckling. There was concern that mold could form under the floating vinyl floor in the kitchen and laundry room. The adjuster said, New floors. No question. Eight days after the flood I had a check from State Farm Insurance covering the contractor's remediation services.

Originally posted here:
Home Insurance and Pipes that Go 'Pop' in the Night

Johnny Cash's friends and family returned to his birthplace, Dyess, on Sunday to take part in a celebration of what would be his 80th birthday and share their memories of the "The Man in Black."

Johnny Cash's daughter, Rosanne, opened the celebration by thanking Ruth Hawkins, director of the ASU Arkansas Heritage Sites, for the organization's work to honor her father.

Rosanne Cash explained how the family moved to the Dyess Colony in 1935 as part of the New Deal program under President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The purpose of the New Deal was to give 500 families each 40 acres of land, one mule and a house.

Cash said she could remember her grandmother telling that when they walked into the house there were five empty paint buckets sitting on the floor and that the house smelled of fresh paint.

Cash recalled her grandmother said it was wonderful to have this new home and that it was more than her grandparents could have imagined.

Johnny Cash's brother and sister, Tommy and Joanne, spoke to the crowd about their many memories of growing up in Dyess. They thanked ASU for restoring the family home and said that soon the old adage "you can't go back home" will be dispelled.

When the restoration is complete, the Cashes noted that they will get to go back to their home just as they knew it, where Cash's mother's piano will sit in the same room where she played for them.

Joanne Cash grew very emotional as she said she could not wait to go back home.

John Carter Cash, son of Johnny Cash, expressed his gratitude to ASU for the work that had been done and the work yet to come to finish the restoration process. He said it would be an exciting year as they watched the progress.

Dyess Mayor Larry Sims said he was proud of all the hard work that had gone into this special day and it could not have been done without ASU and Hawkins.

See the article here:
Tribute begins Cash home restoration project

On what would have been Johnny Cash's 80th birthday, dozens of family members joined hundreds of fans and residents in the east Arkansas town of Dyess Sunday to formally mark the beginning of work to restore his boyhood home.

"This project has been in the making for several years and I never thought that it would actually come to fruition," said daughter Rosanne Cash, who led the ceremony at the Dyess Community Center. "We never foresaw that it would take on this kind of life."

Ray and Carrie Cash moved with their children to the community in 1935. It was created as part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Depression-era New Deal program.

They labored over 40 acres of land, which provided the inspiration for many of Johnny Cash's classic songs.

During a 1969 concert at New York's Madison Square Garden, Cash told the crowd "after I got into the music field and started writing and recording and singing songs about the things I knew, I wrote a lot of songs about life as I knew it back when I was a little, bitty boy."

He then sang "Five Feet High and Rising," which tells the story of the Mississippi River flooding his community.Afterward Cash said, "I was four years old at the time and I can't remember a lot about it, but daddy said that we got back home the house was full of mud, chickens and pigs and dogs and nine bullfrogs.Mama cleaned the house out that winter and the next spring daddy and my older brother Roy cleared a lot more cotton land and the cotton grew tall in 1938."

It's that connection that has prompted so many to be interested in preserving the small, dilapidated home, which was lived in by various people outside of the Cash family until being bought recently by Arkansas State University.

In recent weeks the house has been lifted onto the back of a truck and moved to the back of the lot so that work can begin to lay a new foundation. "Anybody who's ever been in Dyess, Arkansas, knows that this is gumbo soil up here and it moves and it's very difficult to keep a house level," said Dr. Ruth Hawkins, director of ASU's Arkansas Heritage Sites. "We're going to be hauling out all of that gumbo soil and putting in good, solid packed soil and a new foundation, then we'll set the house back on that."

After taking part in Sunday's ceremony, Johnny Cash's brother, Tommy Cash, said, "My parents would really be proud that we're being honored in this way.I couldn't help but think about them all day today and how much they would enjoy being here. My sister Joanne and I are the last two of the siblings, and we're just overjoyed about what's going on. The restoration of our old home place is a very exciting thing for all of us."

Organizers are working with the family to prepare to decorate the home as it looked in the 1930s.

Original post:
The restoration of Johnny Cash's boyhood home

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Karen Dalton-Beninato: Rosanne Cash on Johnny Cash Boyhood Home Restoration Project

HARFORD, Pa. — For more than a decade, Bronson Pinchot has spent much of his downtime in the picture-book Pennsylvania hamlet where he found a dream home far from the stressful clamor of New York or L.A.

Pinchot likely remains best known as the endearingly naive, quasi-Mediterranean immigrant Balki Bartokomous from the TV sitcom “Perfect Strangers.” But unlike Balki, Pinchot is by his own admission “fiercely private” and an “introvert that does a pretty convincing performance as an extrovert.”

Still, he has decided to open his doors to America via “The Bronson Pinchot Project,” which premiered Feb. 11 on the DIY Network. In all, eight episodes were shot over 13 weeks at the end of last year in Harford, a village founded in 1790 and nestled in the Endless Mountains of Susquehanna County near the New York state line.

His filmography includes 1980s hits like “Risky Business” and “Beverly Hills Cop,” but since “Perfect Strangers” ended in 1993 after eight seasons, Pinchot has performed on and off-Broadway, appeared in touring theatrical productions and done voiceovers and audiobooks.

His new show, though, is altogether different.

First, the designs are his own. “I get a kick out of it because I sit there with a sketchbook and say, ‘This is what it should look like when it’s done’ and in the end it either looks like that or it’s better,’ ” he said. “My theater training helps; in theater, it doesn’t matter where you’re at with your performance, opening night is opening night.”

Home base is Pinchot’s circa 1840 mansion in the center of Harford, a town of about 1,300 people. It was the home of state Sen. Edward Jones in the early 1900s and had more recently served as office space. Pinchot bought the place in 2000.

“I wanted a Greek Revival house within five driving hours of New York City,” Pinchot said. When he first walked in, he said, he knew he would buy it.

When he arrived, the scene couldn’t have been better staged by a Hollywood set designer: The house smelled of cinnamon toast, the air outside smelled of fresh manure, a woman pushing a baby carriage paused to admire a neighbor’s fuchsia roses across the street.

“I was already sold, but that was like God was hitting me over the head with a sledgehammer,” he said. “OK, I get it, I get it!”

He now owns six historic properties in Harford, including what was a burned-out vacant home also from around 1840 and a sweet blue-shingled building that houses the town’s post office. Eventually, he hopes many of the properties will be places for visiting friends to stay.

The first season’s architectural stars are his Ionic-columned mansion and Decker House, a smaller home rehabbed with salvaged wood from demolished old buildings, windows from an abandoned farmhouse and floors from a property formerly part of late heiress Doris Duke’s estate.

Not only is “The Bronson Pinchot Project” a show about historic restoration, it’s a love letter to his adopted hometown.

“Harford is to be seen through my lens, which is that it’s heaven on earth,” he said. “None of this ‘big fish in a little pond.’ No. We’re not doing ‘Green Acres.’ ”

Pinchot, 52, an antiques collector and enthusiast of classical art and architecture since childhood, is a hands-on renovator who employs local carpenters and craftspeople; many are slated to appear in the show.

Years of trial and error have culminated into the current style viewers will see taking shape — a blend of English regency and American high country along with 19th-century plaster casts of ancient Greek sculpture and architectural flourishes. The goal is for rooms to look like they’ve taken shape over many decades, he said.

His earliest home rehab forays involved getting all the period details and furniture just right. But it felt wrong.

“I looked around and thought, ‘Well now all it’s missing is a docent and a leaflet that says where the cafe is,’ ” he said. “I made a little museum and that’s not what I want.”

Things you won’t see in Bronson world: kitchen appliances. Refrigerators — which Pinchot calls “unacceptably, unforgivably ugly” — ovens, dishwashers and microwaves are cleverly concealed behind salvaged wainscoting, cupboards and cabinets mounted clandestinely on hinges, like a bookcase hiding a castle’s secret passageway.

All of his properties eventually will get the full “Bronsonian” treatment, a process shaped both by the availability of salvage materials and Pinchot’s own improvisational approach to renovating.

“I hope we can do this for 10 seasons!” he said. “We could do an episode on every room.”

Online:

“The Bronson Pinchot Project”: http://bit.ly/xjLyv3

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Balki’s back! Bronson Pinchot has Pa.-based home restoration show

DYESS, AR (KAIT) - The family of Johnny Cash visited Region 8 Sunday afternoon to celebrate the life of the country music icon with his fans on what would have been Cash's 80th birthday.

The family also came to invite Dyess residents to continue the legacy cash left in his small hometown of Dyess, Arkansas. The family is partnering with Arkansas Heritage Sites office at Arkansas State University to restore the home and community where Cash lived with his parents and siblings for 15 years of his life.

"It's just hard to believe that one man could come out of a little town this like and go nation, worldwide," said Charles Tanner.

The Johnny Cash Boyhood Home restoration is part of a master plan to preserve another piece of history the cash family was part of in 1935 during the Great Depression. President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal relocated families to the Dyess Colony, an agricultural settlement. Ray and Carrie Cash moved their four children, Roy, Louise, Jack and J.R. (Johnny Cash) from their home in Kingsland, AR, to a new house, with 40 acres of land, a mule and farming seed.

Cash's parents had three more children, and Cash lived in the home with his family until 1950 when he graduated from Dyess High School and joined the Air Force.

Dyess mayor Larry Sims hopes the double dose of history will revitalize his town of 410 people.

"The census we just had went from 515 down to 410, so we know we're going to have to do something and this I think will start bringing people in."

ASU project coordinators say the project costs $7.4 million and is expected to create 110 tourism-related jobs after it is completed in 2013. Infrastructure restoration and construction will total $3.4 million, and includes the Cash home and outbuildings (barn, smokehouse, chicken coop, outhouse), visitor services, the Dyess Colony Theater, Dyess Colony Administration Building, a walking/biking trail and signage.

Endowment funds included in the restoration project total $4 million for scholarships, educational programs and building preservations.

The Cash family believes the project is a huge honor to the legacy of Cash, as well as his parents Ray and Carrie.  

"My sister Joanne and I are the last two siblings, and we're just overjoyed about what's going on, and the restoration of our old home place is very exciting for all of us," said Tommy Cash.

"My parents would really be proud that we're being honored this way and I couldn't help but think about them all day today and how much they would've enjoyed being here."

For more information about the Johnny Cash Boyhood Home Restoration project, visit the Johnny Cash web site here.

Copyright 2012 KAIT. All rights reserved. 

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Johnny Cash family in Region 8

BAINBRIDGE ISLAND — A fire destroyed a large century-old house Sunday morning on Bainbridge's south end.

A man thought to be in his 40s suffered smoke inhalation and was flown to Harborview Hospital in Seattle shortly after firefighters were called to the scene at 6:15 a.m., according to the Bainbridge Island Fire Department. No other injuries were reported.

Five people were staying overnight at the home's property, which is part of a large gated community at the end of Country Club Road on Restoration Point. The approximately 3,500-square-foot house's two occupants were able to escape. Three people were sleeping in a neighboring guesthouse, which suffered no significant damage.

Bainbridge Fire Chief Hank Teran said the main house is a total loss. It overlooks Seattle from a high bluff.

The smoke was visible across Puget Sound.

"We received a number of calls, including one from a ferry," Teran said.

Kate Jacobson was sleeping in the guesthouse when her dogs woke her.

"The dogs were doing something. I looked out, and I screamed over (at the main house) and ran outside," she said.

Her sister, Nancy Jacobson, was sleeping in the main house with her fiance, Matt Sullivan.

"I heard crackling and screaming," Nancy Jacobson said with tears in her eyes and a blanket around her shoulders. "It was mainly in the chimney. There was a lot of smoke."

Teran said it's too early to know what caused the fire.

That it might have been caused by a fireplace or chimney fire is "hearsay right now, but we're looking into it," he said.

About 20 firefighters from the Bainbridge, Poulsbo and North Kitsap fire departments were at the scene. The Leschi fire boat came from Seattle and floated on standby for several minutes. It was sent back after firefighters contained the blaze.

Nancy Jacobson, 29, of Seattle said the house is owned by her parents. She and her friends were staying over the weekend. The house is usually unoccupied.

She and Sullivan planned to marry at the house in a few months.

"We sent out the save-the-dates two days ago," Sullivan said.

Nancy Jacobson said the house was built by her "great-great-grandfather."

"And his great-great-grandchildren will rebuild it, right?" Kate Jacobson said to her sister.

Most of the fire was extinguished by 8 a.m.

Continue reading here:
Fire destroys large, century-old home on Bainbridge's Restoration Point