Home Builder Developer - Interior Renovation and Design

Provided by The New York Times

ELMWOOD PARK, N.J. Three months ago, Rosalia Juskin dialed 911 from behind a locked basement door. She said her husband, Michael, 100, was ignoring her pleas, so she asked the police for help opening the door. When they arrived, Ms. Juskin, 88, described the episode as an accident.

It was the third time in three years that the police had been called to the couples home at 58 Spruce Street. Not seeing any obvious threat, they left, and then notified adult protective services. Hes 100 years old, and she chalked it up to that, the Elmwood Park police chief, Michael Foligno, said. She didnt feel it was purposeful.

On Sunday, Mr. Juskin killed his wife with an ax in her bed as she slept. Then he took a knife into the bathroom and killed himself by cutting his wrists, said John L. Molinelli, the Bergen County prosecutor. A relative found the couples bloodied bodies the next day.

National experts in crimes of the elderly said that Mr. Juskins actions made him among the oldest killers in the countrys recent history.

The crime tore asunder a relationship that had been unraveling in recent years, pulled at again and again by the erratic and occasionally aggressive behavior of a man who showed signs of mental deterioration, the authorities said. Those who heard the cries for help said they either understood the tumult as a symptom of old age, or lacked the resources to intervene.

Basically, you have two elderly people sort of starting to lose their faculties, not any type of criminal behavior, Chief Foligno said, adding that Ms. Juskin had not shown signs of serious illness. Theres nothing else you could have done or foreseen that a murder would happen.

That visit by the Police Departments to the Juskins two-story brick and clapboard home in January was the most peculiar of three they had made in recent years.

In March 2012, they responded to a 911 call and found Mr. Juskin showing erratic, dementia-type behavior, Chief Foligno said, and so officers took him to the hospital.

A year and a half later, they found Mr. Juskin berating his wife over her cooking and other matters, Chief Foligno said. The argument spilled into what Ms. Juskin described to the police as harassment. Not having seen evidence of violence, the officers left again, the chief said.

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Cops Say They Could Do Little Before Man, 100, Killed Wife, Self

Towson Unitarian Universalist Church has won a grant to produce a rain garden on a slope on its property. . As part of the grant, the public is invited to a workshop to learn how to plan gardens that capture rainwater before it races into local waterways and then help to plant the church's new rain garden.

"The workshop is about educating people and getting them involved in the process," said Jack Leonard, a landscape designer based in Hereford, who has designed the church's rain garden. He is involved in the planting of 10 more area rain gardens this spring, he said.

"Everybody will get information to design their own plantings," Leonard said. "In the end, everybody can walk away proud of what they accomplished."

The new plantings will also include a "bayscape" garden of native plants near the church entrance, as well as the 230-square-foot rain garden farther down the property's slope.

The rain garden is designed to handle up to an inch or so of rain enough to keep most pollutants from going into the Chesapeake Bay watershed, he said. With the combination of earth berms, river rocks and plantings, the water should soak into the ground rather than run down the hill into the stream.

Plants native to the Chesapeake Bay watershed will be used exclusively. Flowering dogwood, inkberry holly, bee balm and goldenrod support local insects and birds, including butterflies and songbirds, Leonard said. Turtlehead, which sprouts flowers that resemble the head of a turtle, will be planted because it is a host plant for the Baltimore Checkerspot butterfly.

Many gardens are filled with non-native plants that can't sustain the local butterflies and other creatures.

"You're not giving them anything to eat," Leonard said. "It's like having a restaurant without anything to eat."

Leonard noted that every property, residential or commercial, has a roof or paved space where runoff can occur. Each time a family plants a rain garden, runoff and pollution into the Chesapeake Bay watershed is reduced. Encouraging home gardeners to make rain gardens is a part of a larger effort, he said.

"We're going to fix it by getting people to understand the problem," he said. "Let's fix the problem piece by piece."

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Public invited to rain garden workshop at Towson Unitarian

Landscape architect Hargreaves Associates for the first timerevealed imagesfor The Commons,afuture park in downtown Minneapolis shoulderinghigh expectations from the public for recreation and commercial growth in the area.

The San Francisco-based firm outlined four generalapproaches that contain essentially the same features for the 4.2-acre, two-block park sited just west of the new Vikings Stadium. The key difference istheconfigurations of these elements.

The type of water feature, changes in soil height, placement of the programmable space and vision for the support services pavilion placed in each plan are still up for negotiation depending on public feedback.

There are two things that appear certain regardless of which approach is selected. First, there will likely be the presence ofa grand promenade, or tree-lined walkway, along 4thand 5thStreets. The second, which was a talking point at the first public meeting and remained an issue at the second, is thatPortland Avenue will still host car traffic, but less of it.

Portland Avenue will be significantly narrower, said Mary Margaret Jones, principal at Hargreaves. And it can be closed at times for events.

Instead of the existing three traffic lanes, two parking lanes and one bike lane, the new Portland will have two car lanes, and two parking lanes will turn into bike lanes.

As for the design approaches presented Wednesday night to a crowd of several hundred residents at the Mill City Museum, the four concepts fall along a gradient or spectrum.

On one end of the conceptual gradient is the approach that separates the uses into distinct districts. The other end of the spectrum is a moreblended layout witha central focus point.

The images provided by Hargreaves arent final renderings but provide a visual for the broad brushstrokes of these variousapproaches.

The first, called Contrast, separates uses by the physical barrier of Portland with the open lawn on the east side and a more organic landscape on the west side. The fourth, called Unite, has a single, defining design, and the other two are a compromise that fall in between on the spectrum.

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Hargreaves presents four "approaches" to Downtown East Commons

Land clearing part 1
Thanks for watching and stay tuned for the next one.

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Land clearing part 1 - Video

Ralph Mills Excavating Inc Land Clearing 3/31/2015
Ralph Mills Excavating Inc clearing trees on a fence row. March 31, 2015.

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Ralph Mills Excavating Inc Land Clearing 3/31/2015 - Video

OVER 30 years, Australian beef production has substantially improved parts of its environmental footprint, a new study has reported.

The headline figures of the study, the first to do a thorough life cycle analysis (LCA) on several aspects of beefs environmental impact, show that the drive for production efficiency and social pressures have diminished beefs impact on the environment in several important areas - water, land use and greenhouse gas emissions.

Funded by Meat and Livestock Australia (MLA), the study was compiled by a team of authors led by Steve Wiedemann of FSA Consulting, Toowoomba, and published in the latest issue of the journal Agricultural Systems.

Greenhouse gas (GHG) emission intensity (emissions produced per kilo of beef) fell by 14 per cent over 30 years, the study found, not counting the additional 42pc fall in GHG emissions brought about by land clearing bans, mainly in Queensland.

That fall came about despite a twofold increase in fossil fuel use for beef production, driven by the increased number of cattle in feedlots.

Part of the nature of this study is that it traces impacts right back to extraction from the ground, Mr Weidemann said.

We follow that grain supply right back to the fertiliser used for that grain.

Irrespective of the twofold increase in fossil fuel use, the improvements driven by productivity is far greater.

More efficient production drove the improvements.

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Beef industry treading more lightly

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David Blad of Vashon Tile Company now shares a showroom with Roadside Attraction Design Studio.

image credit: Natalie Martin/Staff Photo

Local tile artist David Blad has partnered with kitchen and bath designer Judith Neary to open a small joint studio and showroom in town.

In the A-frame building near Thriftway, the two have displayed a variety of kitchen and bath samples tiles, stone slabs, cabinets and more and say they are ready to help homeowners with their building or remodeling projects.

We can give people good direction in a short amount of time, Blad said.

Neary, who owns Roadside Attraction Design Studio and has over 30 years experience in interior design, opened a small studio in the same building as Cafe Luna about a year ago. However, she recently moved to the A-frame after Skunk Works, an art gallery and bike shop, vacated its street-level storefront on Bank Road.

In the larger space, shes now joined by Blad, who owns Vashon Tile Company and has been doing custom tile installations for over 30 years.

Blad is also a well-known tile artist who has exhibited and sold his colorful, handmade and hand-painted tile artwork on the island. Recently hes been creating artwork using a method involving crushed glass on porcelain tile.

Blad noted that while he sometimes puts his more artful installations in local homes, most homeowners stick to traditional tile work for kitchens, baths and other rooms. With help from some contractors who work for him, he says hes completed hundreds possibly thousands of projects in Vashon homes.

I just like (working with) tile, he said. I like the hard surface and the durability of it, the longevity of tile.

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Tile artist joins interior designer in new showroom