Home Builder Developer - Interior Renovation and Design

JULIE LANE PHOTO | Haunt master Oscar Gonzalez created many of the props that visitors to La Maison Blanches Dark Mansion will encounter. See more photos below.

Its that creepy time of year when friends and neighbors delight in scaring one another all in fun, of course. For the second successive year, La Maison Blanche is getting into the act with its Dark Mansion, with proceeds to benefit ongoing research into causes and cures of breast cancer.

As they did last year, owner John Sieni and his partner and haunt master Oscar Gonzalez are out to terrify visitors and locals, with most of the proceeds going to the American Cancer Society in memory of Teresa Montant, a former town worker who lost her battle against breast cancer in October 2011. A small amount is kept to reinvest in the expansion of the haunted house.

For those who visited last year, the price is up from $5 to $15, meaning more money will go to breast cancer research, but Mr. Gonzalez wants people to know theyre getting a lot more for their money this year. He has spent much of the past 12 months practically doubling the size of the Dark Mansion. It now encompasses not only the basement of La Maison Blanche, but also a structure he has created that will be temporarily linked to the southwest side of the building to accommodate the many additions to the eerie experience.

If last years Dark Mansion was an amateur attempt at the macabre, this years displays, even when viewed during the day with lights on are fright-inducing. And thats without the sounds, strobe lights and about a dozen volunteers who will lurk within the recesses of the Dark Mansion ready to jump out and add to the all-together scary experience.

We target what people fear, Mr. Gonzalez said.

He isnt joking when he advises parents not to bring children under the age of 13 and warns those with asthma, heart conditions or seizure disorders not to enter.

The Dark Mansion will be open between 7 and 10 p.m. Friday through Sunday, October 19, 20 and 21 and October 26, 27 and 28.

For the full story on the Dark Mansion, see the Reporter next Thursday.

jlane@timesreview.com

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Dark Mansion returns to frighten all those who dare enter

ROCKFORD The window is quickly closing to apply for Rockfords sole federal magistrate judge position.

The $160,080 position has been held P. Michael Mahoney since 1976. He plans to retire Dec. 31. There are 29 judges in Rockfords federal and state court systems. The jobs pay $160,000 to nearly $180,000 annually, and competition to fill a vacancy typically is steep with dozens of lawyers submitting applications.

District judges are hand-picked by the U.S. president and confirmed by the Senate, but magistrate judges are appointed by the federal courts district judges, similar to associate judges in state court.

Mahoneys vacancy is in the Western Division of the U.S. District Courts Northern District of Illinois, hearing cases in the new Stanley J. Roszkowski Courthouse in downtown Rockford. It is an eight-year appointment.

Completed applications must be submitted by 4:30 p.m. Monday.

Information on eligibility, salary and benefits and how to apply is available at ilnd.uscourts.gov. Clerk Thomas Bruton said the court will not release the names of the applicants or the number of applications it receives.

Once the application period closes, a panel of residents and lawyers of the Western Division will review the applications, make recommendations and narrow the field.

Once the panels work is complete, the judges of the Northern District of Illinois will select Mahoneys replacement. The new judge should be selected in January or February.

Corina Curry: 815-987-1371; ccurry@rrstar.com; @corinacurry

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Wanted: New magistrate judge for Rockford's federal court

With a focus on conservation, One Call Houston is paving the way for greater Houston homeowners, offering an ecologically sound way to reduce utility costs up to 75%.

Houston, TX (PRWEB) October 12, 2012

Geothermal heating works via a heat pump that employs the earth loop system to draw the heat from the ground. Delivering air through a classic duct network similar to central HVAC systems, the geothermal loop draws heat from buried pipes and distributes it as warm air, while at the same time providing hot water, and even heating the floor of your home! This process is reversed in the cooling mode. Instead of extracting heat from the ground, heat is taken from the air in your home and either moved back into the earth loop, or used to preheat the water in your hot water tank. The result is cool, conditioned air throughout the entire house, using only a fraction of the energy that a traditional air conditioning system would use.

When I asked how in depth installing a geothermal system was, I expected a complicated and perhaps messy process. It isnt points out Edgar; we drill a hole and run pipes into the ground, install a small pump and heat exchanger about the size of a traditional AC unit, and youre good to go its not much more complicated that fixing a clogged sewer line, and it will work for virtually everyone! With improvements in technology and the custom processes we've developed for the Houston area, it's very straightforward. This is excellent news for homeowners and business owners both who may be concerned about the logistics of making the switch to geothermal.

So, why make the switch? Geothermal energy uses 75% less energy on average than the more typical Air Conditioning / Heat Pump combination found in most homes, and has the added benefit of heating your hot water. Many people arent away of the benefits says Edgar Connery, owner of One Call Houston nor do they know about the tax breaks & incentives offered for eco-friendly alternatives such as geothermal. Instead, they look at the initial up front cost, not realizing theyll often pay up to 30% less after these incentives and thats before the financing we offer. That's excellent news for Houston homeowners and business owners both, as many of us have been subjected to rising utility costs in recent years.

With the many benefits offered by geothermal, Houstonians are taking notice, tempted by the ability to cool their homes for as little as $20/month and often slashing their total energy bill by 70% or more: financing has really put these incredible systems in reach of the average homeowner or business owner by replacing rising utility costs with a cheaper, short term loan payment notes Edgar and subsequently demand has been crazy!.

How crazy? According to Edgars HR manager, the company has nearly doubled in size this year alone. What does that mean for job seekers in Houston? Weve been hiring non-stop since April Edgar stated when asked. We still havent caught up, we cant hire fast enough to keep up with demand were always looking for honest people to come and work for us! Great news to say the least, especially in the current economic conditions.

One Call Houston is a locally owned and operated service company providing air conditioning, heating (HVAC) plumbing and remodeling services to the greater Houston area since 1990. Were one of the few HVAC and Plumbing companies that makes an effort not only to offer our customers ecologically sound options, but also to use these same options in our establishment. (As I write this article One Call is in the process of replacing all of their large fleet trucks with new transit vans, slashing their fuel consumption and carbon footprint by ~60%). Edgars comment? One Call has always treated people right and most of our business is by word of mouth because of that. Ive decided that we should treat the planet like we treat our customers, with honesty and respect.

If youre considering making the switch to geothermal energy for your home (and you should be!) One Call is offering free information to all as well as estimates to those inside the 610 loop. Those interested should call 713-880-5200 or visit http://www.onecallhouston.com (and like their Facebook page for a chance to win $25!).

Written for Local Service News Houston by Douglas Anderson.

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HVAC & Plumbing Co. Gives Houston Area Economy a Boost with Cutting Edge Green Technology

By Jim Donovan

PHILADELPHIA (CBS) Soon the cool air will move in and well be turning up the heat. But do you ever find it hard to maintain an even temperature throughout your entire house? Youre not alone, its a problem many homeowners have.

In this weeks Angies List report, Jim Donovan shows things you can do to in order to make your entire home feel more comfortable.

Upstairs its hot, but downstairs its cold. In many two story homes, theres a significant temperature difference between the first and second floor. But it doesnt have to stay that way.

If you find yourself having problems with temperature on different levels of your house, talk to a reputable heating and cooling company because they can give you suggestions for how to best manage for that. Whether it be settings on your existing system or whether you need to add additional equipment, said Angies List founder, Angie Hicks.

One simple thing you can do involves making an adjustment to your thermostat.

On your thermostat there is a switch for your fan for ON and AUTO. You want to switch that to ON and what that will do, is run your fan continuously. What that does in your house is that keeps the rooms a little more even-temperature because you are continuously circulating the air throughout the house; so its mixing all the air between the upstairs and the downstairs, said HVAC contractor Dave Mejean.

Other options to consider have your ductwork inspected leaks can often keep air from getting where it should.

You cold also add another HVAC system to your home, but that can be expensive, upwards of $7,000.

A cheaper option would be installing a zoning system. They allow you to control the temperature on each floor and cost about $3,000.

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Angie’s List: Evening Out The Temperature In Your Home

The leaves are starting to turn and the chill is in the air, and now is the time for homeowners to prep their residence for Old Man Winter.

With heating costs expected to rise this year, properly winterizing your home could save money on lower heating bills and eliminate costly damage to the house from the elements.

The most important things are to check for leaks around the house and make sure your heating is as efficient as it can be for the house, says Larry Bilotti, executive editor of BobVila.com. Experts recommend inspecting your home and making requisite repairs now before that first snowstorm.

Seal the envelop of your home. Nows the time to walk around your house and look for cracks and places that need sealing or caulking. It will help you save money in the summer and winter by eliminating air infiltration, says home improvement expert Danny Lipford.

Look for cracks around windows, doors, faucets, air conditioning vents, dryer vents and any other place that something can come through the wall. Most cracks can be sealed with good quality exterior caulkits very inexpensive and comes in many colors to match the exterior, says Lipford. If you do find areas with large cracks, you may need to use an expandable foam.

Bilotti suggests patching any areas with cracked paint because exposed wood has no barrier against moisture, which can cause more serious problems.

Make sure doors and windows are sealing properly. Since nearly half of your energy costs go to heating and cooling your home, you want to make certain that windows and doors are tightly sealed, says Bilotti. Check that weatherstripping is installed and that caulking around windows is not cracked or missing. This is also the time to remove screens and install storm windows.

If you already have weatherstripping, look whether the foams in good condition, says Lipford. If its not, take off a small strip and take it with you to the store to match it with new weather stripping because that will give you the best seal.

Protect from critters. While youre walking around, look for access points for insects and small animals, says Lipford. Closing any holes can prevent squirrels and other animals from living in your warm attic during the cold winter months and causing long-term problems. He suggests using binoculars to inspect areas around roofs instead of climbing a ladder.

Look for missing, loose or curled shingles. Look at your roof from a distance to see if there are any shingles that are missing, arent lying flat or have curled corners, says Bilotti. Fixing shingles now can help a roof last up to five years longer and prevent a bigger headache come springshingles protect the roof from water and moisture and prevent roof rot and leaks.

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How to Prep Your Home for Winter

Public schools in Oakland are looking for major kitchen remodeling with a measure on the Nov. 6 ballot.

If approved, Measure J would authorize the Oakland Unified School District to issue as much as $475 million in bonds to improve school facilities.

Along with seismic upgrades and lead-paint removal, the bonds could help underwrite a planned overhaul of school kitchens in the district, including building a new central kitchen in West Oakland. It's part of an effort to improve the food the district serves to students, 70 percent of whom are eligible for free or reduced-price meals.

Oakland has made strides toward serving healthier and fresher food in recent years. For instance, the district now buys more fresh fruits and vegetables from within 250 miles of Oakland. There are salad bars at 67 schools.

But it's infrastructure, not ingredients, that has become the biggest barrier to making lunches healthier and tastier. Many schools have antiquated kitchens - if they have a kitchen at all.

"It's a very attractive museum of kitchen dinosaurs," said Zenobia Barlow, executive director of the Center for Ecoliteracy, a nonprofit advocacy group.

The facilities limit what food can be served.

"A lot of what is served is processed and prepackaged and frozen," said Ruth Woodruff, who has a first-grader and a fourth-grader attending Chabot Elementary School. "It gets unwrapped and put on trays and heated."

Some schools, like Piedmont Avenue Elementary, don't even have a kitchen. Meals there are reheated in the corner of a multipurpose room.

"That's not sufficient for them to be able to provide appetizing meals," said Jody London, president of the school board, who is running for re-election. "It's the difference between cooking on a hotplate and cooking on a stove."

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Oakland Measure J to upgrade school kitchens

Environmental Construction and Energy Projects Require High-Accuracy Devices

CHESTERLAND OH - The green building industry is growing quickly, and successful projects benefit from assessment and evaluation from start to finish. From hospitals to industrial operations to single-family homes, measurements of conditions such as temperature, solar radiation, and energy consumption are essential to carrying out and testing your designs.

Today's data loggers are small, low-cost, rugged devices that record unattended indoor and outdoor measurements at user-specified intervals 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Indoor units are already in common use by performance contractors and engineers responsible for monitoring energy efficiency and usage, air quality, and heating ventilation/air conditioning/refrigeration (HVAC/R). Weather stations are used outdoors worldwide by research scientists and farmers for collecting environmental data such as rainfall, wind speed, and solar radiation.

Whether you are an experienced data logger user or are just getting started, this guide from the Applications Specialists at CAS DataLoggers will help you to understand how data loggers fit into the green building industry, and will also give advice about several areas to consider when selecting a logger best suited for your particular needs.

How Data Loggers Fit In

The goals of green building are to increase building efficiency with regard to energy, materials, and water use; to take advantage of natural resources such as solar radiation and wind; and to lessen the environmental impact of building siting, construction, and operation. In practice, some designs address all these factors, while other buildings incorporate just a few.

Data loggers can provide valuable information for nearly every aspect and scale of green design. For example, a facilities manager can monitor temperature in a fifteen story office building over the summer to check whether the fans in the building's cooling tower need adjustment.

A homeowner considering adding passive solar hot water panels to his roof can deploy a weather station first to determine where solar radiation is most intense, and how many sunny days there are per year. Engineers can monitor energy use in a retrofitted elementary school to make sure that new lighting and appliances are actually cutting electricity costs.

In an effort to create a national industry standard, the US Green Building Council (www.usgbc.org) created the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Green Building Rating System. This system serves as a guide for measuring and documenting successful green building practices at all phases of a building's lifecycle. Guidelines cover site selection, new construction, renovation, and occupancy/facilities management, and can apply from homes to entire neighborhoods. Data logging devices are valuable during the LEED Certification process because documentation is required by the USGBC every step of the way, and data loggers can provide you with valuable data, from design concept to operation.

Choosing a Data Logger for Green Design Applications

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Choosing Data Loggers for Your Green Building Project

Bolstered by an Allentown arena project that appears to be full-steam ahead, City Center Investment Corp. has decided to boost the height of its proposed downtown office complex to 11 stories.

At five floors taller than its original proposal, Two City Center will be the second tallest building in downtown Allentown, surpassed only by the PPL tower.

Major demolition started Thursday on the former First National Bank building at Seventh and Hamilton streets to make room for what will be a 181-foot tall brick, glass and limestone structure for up to 900 workers.

"When people look out across the horizon and see this building a few blocks from PPL Plaza, they're going to notice that Allentown is beginning to build a bit of a skyline," said Jim Harbaugh, chief operating officer for City Center as he watched demolition begin. "But first they have to take this building down. They've got a big ol' crane and the big boys are going to be swinging today. This is going to be fun."

With its location at one of Allentown's busiest intersections, what figures to be a delicate demolition of the six-story First National Bank building drew an audience Thursday. Swinging a wrecking ball from a more than 100-foot-tall crane, North Star Construction Management, of Allentown, has to remove the building without disturbing passing traffic or the Pennrose senior citizens high rise just a few feet away.

Employees from the nearby Lehigh County Domestic Relations office said all their scheduled breaks would be spent outside.

"It's kind of cool when they give it a good whack," said Domestic Relations employee Tami Wilson as the ball made impact. "Oh, come on, you can do better than that."

The new building will sit across Seventh Street from the city's new $272 million complex. That project is to include an 8,500-seat hockey arena where the Philadelphia Flyers' top minor league affiliate is scheduled to begin playing in October 2014, an eight-story Hamilton Street office building called One City Center and a 180-room hotel.

Two City Center was originally scheduled to be six stories and 200,000 square feet, but Harbaugh said high interest in downtown office space prompted the company to add five floors and 100,000 square feet.

"When the arena project was held up by lawsuits, everyone was sort of sitting on the sidelines," Harbaugh said. "Well, now they're in the game, and we're confident we can lease all 11 floors."

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11-story office structure to replace Allentown bank building

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE 12 October 2012

Construction Set to Start on New Cawthron High Tech Laboratories to Help Boost Export Earnings

Construction is set to start before Christmas on Cawthron Institutes new high technology laboratories at its Halifax Street campus in Nelson. Cawthron is New Zealands largest independent research institute specialising in environmental research and research for the food and aquaculture industries. It also has substantial testing laboratories and provides seafood safety testing for key sectors of the aquaculture industry.

The new $5 million facility on its Halifax Street site will provide nearly 400 square metres of high specification laboratory space, to replace some of its present facilities built in the 1970s. In addition to laboratories the building will also include office space, meeting rooms and staff facilities.

Cawthron Chairman Ian Kearney, says the new building is a key part of Cawthrons drive and focus on continuing innovation in scientific research and development.

A lot of New Zealands economic growth and future direction is reliant on innovative science and original thinking which Cawthron Institute is renowned for. This building is stage one of a four stage project to replace the facilities and laboratories in the Rigg building on the Halifax Street campus. Many of the facilities in the Rigg building are outdated and an orderly programme to replace them is now starting.

Cawthron is now setting the stage to build on its contributions to New Zealands economic development of the past 90 years. Earlier this year Cawthron sold its environmental testing business to R. J. Hill Laboratories to refocus on high-value research and development and the new building underpins this strategy. Cawthron is expanding specialist analytical services in challenging areas of new method development and health claim validations for foods and nutraceuticals.

Mr Kearney says, Some great science has come out of our existing laboratories in Halifax Street which were built in the 1970s. We are now going to be providing 21st century tools and facilities for our scientists. This can only add to the value of the science we will be progressing.

For example, Cawthron recently announced the development of very high-value algae compounds, CNCs, which it is selling to overseas laboratories for hundreds of thousands of dollars a gram.

Cawthron has always focused on using science to provide solutions to problems and these new facilities will assist, Mr Kearney says.

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Construction to Start on New Cawthron High Tech Laboratories

RJM Construction, a St. Louis Park-based general contractor, and North Suburban Eye Specialists have announced they will begin construction of a 32,000 square-foot health care office building in Coon Rapids this month.

A groundbreaking event Oct. 16 will kick off the new building project. It is scheduled to be complete in June 2013.

Located at 3777 Coon Rapids Blvd., North Suburban Eye Specialists will occupy 22,000 square feet; the investment partnership of North Suburban Eye Specialists and United Properties will lease out the remaining space.

The medical group will move from its 13,000 square-foot location across the street on completion of the project.

The building is in one of four areas of Coon Rapids the city has targeted for revitalization and development.

Along with general contractor RJM Construction, North Suburban Eye Specialists and investor United Properties, the project team includes architect Sperides Reiners Architects, Inc. and consulting firm Schlottman & Associates.

RJM Construction and Sperides Reiners Architects began work with North Suburban Eye Specialists in April to collaborate on the plans, budget and project schedule.

The health care building will feature a barreled vault entryway and architectural materials such as metal panels, cultured stone and stucco.

The exterior of the building will be made of pre-cast limestone to complement other nearby medical buildings.

RJM Construction has been providing general contracting services since 1981.

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Construction to state on eye clinic project