Home Builder Developer - Interior Renovation and Design

Posted: Saturday, July 19, 2014 9:04 pm

Henricos extension office offers lawn program

HENRICO The Henrico County office of Virginia Cooperative Extension is enrolling residents in SMART Lawns, a program that provides customized plans for growing attractive, healthy lawns.

For a $20 fee, master gardener volunteers will visit a home, analyze the lawn, and prepare a plan for improving its condition, appearance and health. Participants will receive recommendations for fertilizer and lime, as well as suggestions for environmentally friendly weed control, mowing and watering practices.

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Henricos extension office offers lawn program

Alex Skolnick, Kiran Ahluwalia Nitin Mitta rehearsing - Planetary Coalition
Planetary Coalition is a world music project started in New York City by jazz, metal, any-style guitarist and writer Alex Skolnick and his collaborator architect landscape architect Maddy...

By: ArcM9

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Alex Skolnick, Kiran Ahluwalia & Nitin Mitta rehearsing - Planetary Coalition - Video

Q: You toured two beautiful gardens in Roswell, New Mexico in the PBS program. One had a beautiful green "lawn" that did not need to be mowed. Sedum of some kind, I guess. Would such a lawn work here in the northeast heights in Albuquerque? I have converted the dichondra that I had in my courtyard to ice plant. Like dichondra, there is a period where it is ugly and brown, but at least the ice plant takes less water. I would love to have a lawn that required no attention.

Betty H.

A: The lawn you saw on the PBS "Southwest Yard and Garden" program taped in Roswell was a sedum lawn. The gardener was growing mostly dragon's blood sedum. These have large flat leaves and red flowers. In some varieties the leaves can turn reddish or purple in the winter. This characteristic can be used to a gardener's advantage. By grouping plants in drifts of differing colors, the gardener can have interesting winter patterns and color in the lawn instead of the traditional tan color of dormant grasses. Some sedum plants have cylindrical leaves. These plants will lend different textures to the landscape. Some have gray leaves, some have green leaves. They look somewhat like iceplant with which they may be mixed to provide additional summer flowering and to conceal the winter dieback of the iceplants. As you mentioned, in the winter, the iceplant is more likely to die back somewhat and leave "holes" in the landscape. If you choose to add iceplants to the landscape, choose their location carefully to minimize the blotchy look while they have died back until they resume growth and flowering in the spring.

Both sedum and iceplant are succulents and may need little irrigation. Harvested water running off the roof into the landscape may provide much of the water that they need. Be sure that the soil is well-drained to avoid development of diseases in these succulent plants. Be prepared to irrigate during periods of prolonged drought, even in the winter. If there is no precipitation for 1 to 2 months, irrigate to keep the plants hydrated. In the winter, drought for 2 months may indicate that iceplant needs a little irrigation. The sedum plants may not need irrigation unless the drought is even longer.

Because these plants are succulents, they will not withstand foot traffic. Properly placed flagstones or other pavers will be needed to allow access across the areas of sedum and to allow access for removing weeds (yes, weeds will grow through them).

There are other low-growing groundcover plants that may be used to provide a lawn-like look. These include germander, English ivy, prostrate junipers and other low-growing, spreading plants. However, most of these will require more irrigation than sedum plants and many will not provide the flowers and color that sedum can supply.

None of these plants can replace lawn grasses when foot traffic or heavy use is required of the landscape. Choose the appropriate plant for your intended purpose.

Send your gardening questions to Yard and Garden, Attn: Dr. Curtis Smith, NMSU Agricultural Science Center, 1036 Miller Rd. SW, Los Lunas, NM 87031. You may also send to cwsmith@nmsu.edu or leave a message at https://www.facebook.com/NMSUExtExpStnPubs. Curtis W. Smith, Ph.D., is an Extension Horticulture Specialist emeritus with New Mexico State University's Cooperative Extension Service. NMSU and the U.S. Department of Agriculture cooperating.

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Yard & Garden: Sedum can make beautiful, easily maintained lawns

Ripping out the front lawn and its bordering rhododendrons and replacing them with a landscape of native grasses, groundcovers, succulents and rocks once seemed an unfathomable act of defiance. No longer.

As many parts of the United States grapple with drought and rising water bills, The thought of an English garden in the Central Valley of California is sheer madness. It wasnt meant to be, and its sucking up precious groundwater we need for agriculture, said Ann Savageau, a design professor at the University of California at Davis, who recently traded in her lush green lawns for a desert look.

Instead of scoffing, neighbors stopped to ask her landscaper for his business card. Other California towns, including Sacramento and Menlo Park, have begun offering rebates to homeowners who remove their lawns.

Gardeners nationwide are feeling the effects of climate change. In the East, and other areas where heavy downpours have become more intense, a sustainable garden might include native grasses and other plants that do well in heavy rain and the dry weather that can follow.

Awareness is changing in a way that is here to stay, said Brian Sullivan, a vice president for landscapes at The New York Botanical Garden. Yard by yard, region by region, the overall environmental impact of this trend, which I think is very positive, is substantial.

Mowing and watering a traditional lawn requires a lot of time, money, water and fertilizers. Increasingly, many home gardeners want to focus instead on edible gardens, and rethink the rest of their landscaping in a more environmentally sustainable and low-maintenance way.

Its sometimes hard to know where to begin, however, and few people have the funds or time to tackle a total garden makeover all at once.

Some strategies:

Take it in steps

Transitions should be made at your own pace and you do these things in small steps, Sullivan said. Lawn has utility. We play on it, sing on it and look at it. You can still enjoy your lawn, but cut it down by a third or half, or go with groundcovers you can walk on. Theyre not the same, but its about shifting expectations.

Continued here:
Going sustainable

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Kym Grime has joined SKILSKIN as director of payee services. Grime is a certified public accountant and has more than 20 years of experience in finance, accounting and audits. Grime was an audit manager with Ernst & Young for sixyears.

Steele Fitzloff has passed the Washington Landscape Architect Registration Examination to become a licensed landscape architect. Fitzloff is with Bernardo|Wills Architects where he has been a landscape designer since2013.

Cheri Belsaas and Tim Mead have joined the Spokane office of Hill International

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Have an item for Business Beat? Send it to businessbeat@spokesman.com.

Kym Grime has joined SKILSKIN as director of payee services. Grime is a certified public accountant and has more than 20 years of experience in finance, accounting and audits. Grime was an audit manager with Ernst & Young for sixyears.

Steele Fitzloff has passed the Washington Landscape Architect Registration Examination to become a licensed landscape architect. Fitzloff is with Bernardo|Wills Architects where he has been a landscape designer since2013.

Cheri Belsaas and Tim Mead have joined the Spokane office of Hill International. Belsaas is a project controls coordinator with more than 25 years of experience in the construction industry. Mead has more than 30 years of experience in the construction industry and was previously a senior project manager at McCarthy Construction, where he worked on three hospitalprojects.

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Business beat - Sun, 20 Jul 2014 PST

By Cris Tiller

Reporter-Herald Sports Writer

Crystal Landscape coach Bruce Kelly looks thoughtfully into the distance at a now empty baseball field and struggles to come up with any words.

How can he possibly explain what his team accomplished over the past month? He's tried, but words alone hardly seem to do it justice.

His focus drifts downward.

"The word is goosebumps, look," he says pointing to the hair on his arm still standing on end despite the roasting 90 degree heat. "These guys just ... I'm speechless. I don't even know what to say. After a while you run out of stuff to say about how amazing these guys came together."

Thompson Valley's top summer team stormed through the Legion B District Tournament a tournament they wouldn't even have been in if for not being the host capping off a tremendous month of baseball with a 9-3 victory over Fort Morgan in the championship game Saturday at Constantz Field.

The Eagles did it exactly the way they've been doing it ever since a road trip to Nebraska changed everything with team baseball. And it started on the bump.

Josh Lewis gave his team a gem from the mound tossing five innings, surrendering just two hits and giving up one run (that wasn't even earned) to set the table for his team.

The signs of a near-flawless outing were evident from pre-game warm-ups, the key Lewis said to any day on the mound.

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Thompson Valley baseball takes a spot at the table

Volvo 210CL Excavator Land Clearing (no thumb)
helping a friend out by running his rented 210 with no thumb to clear for a house.

By: letsdig18

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Volvo 210CL Excavator Land Clearing (no thumb) - Video

Rensselaer

If a casino is built on the Rensselaer waterfront, we can thank (or blame) Joe Bruno.

The Republican played a leading role in clearing the land for development, and he did so in ways that illustrate the complexities of his time as Senate majority leader.

Let's jump back to 2004, when the proposed casino site was home to Rensselaer's high school and middle school. That's when developer U.W. Marx came along with a remarkable proposal: The company offered to build a new school campus in exchange for the valuable waterfront property.

Bruno, the former boxer, fought for the switch from the get-go and put the power of his office into his punches.

He threw taxpayer dollars at the plan, including $5 million for infrastructure at the site of the new school, and $475,000 to relocate City Hall away from the waterfront site. The plan also received $7 million in federal funds for road improvements, and additional state grants totaling at least $5 million.

Bruno sponsored special legislation that allowed U.W. Marx to both design and build the school, along with a separate bill that allowed the city to annex the land from North Greenbush. (Town officials were initially reluctant, but Bruno helped overcome the hesitation with $4 million for projects that included a new water tower.)

And when the Rensselaer school board dragged its feet on the plan, Bruno publicly chided members for moving too slowly.

All together, it was a remarkable amount of involvement in a local issue for a state leader.

It's even safe to say, I think, that the audacious land swap wouldn't have happened without Bruno's intervention. On Friday, I asked him about his commitment to the project.

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Chris Churchill: Credit, or blame, for casino where it's due

CHICAGO (WLS) --

Chicago-area interior designer Leslie M. Stern understands how to create accessible environments with style.

"When Eileen hired me, she told me she was moving from a large home in the suburbs to a condo," Stern said. "To make it more accessible for her and her husband, we first had to work on renovating the kitchen and the bathroom."

Once a Chicago public high school art teacher to deaf and hard of hearing students, Stern used her experiences to design barrier-free interiors in homes and buildings.

"It depends on the disability, sometimes many physical changes have to be made, but many of them are just common sense," she said. "Selecting materials that are safer for anybody to use."

Issues with client Eileen's home were physical, visual and safety.

"It's didn't have enough lighting, the cabinets were not easy to use for someone with mobility issues, the bathrooms - we wanted something so that there would be less chance to fall," Stern said. "The bathroom is the most dangerous room in the house."

"After we were done with the renovation, we worked on the furniture," Stern said. "We used as much furniture as we could, but we re-purposed it, re-upholstered it, built up the cushions so that it gives better support."

"Eileen does have some low-vision issues, she wanted to have recess lighting but sometimes that can be glary, so we did it with fluorescent lights so we don't have the heat issues," Stern said.

"I worked on flooring because that was very important, so making sure we have floors that are not slippery easy to walk on, eliminating a lot of the thresholds," she said.

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Chicago-area interior designer focuses on accessibility and style

To hear professional home inspectors tell it, Americans take better care of their automobiles than their homes. Consequently, every home buyer should plan to spend the $400 to $600 necessary to have the house they like best thoroughly examined by an independent third party.

But before you order an inspection, you should do some preliminary investigating of your own. That way, you can protect against picking the wrong house and allowing a better-maintained property to slip away.

Even rookie buyers can get a good idea of just how well a house has been kept. Even when the seller has given the place a fresh shave and a haircut that is, painted the house and trimmed the lawn or done whatever else is necessary to make the property presentable, there can still be telltale signs that the seller hasn't been as diligent as he or she could have been.

For example, a clean furnace filter can be taken as an indication the house has been well cared for. But who's to say the seller didn't just change that filter for the first time in years? If the filter hasn't been changed regularly, the furnace hasn't been working efficiently and it may not last for its expected life span.

So how do you know? You don't. But if you spy a pile of spare filters, it's a pretty good sign that the owner is on the ball. Someone in the process of selling isn't buying extra filters he or she won't use.

Another clue that the furnace is in good shape: Look for a service log showing that the machine has been serviced regularly, at least once a year.

Of course, home buyers shouldn't substitute this kind of rudimentary investigation for a complete and exhaustive inspection by a trained professional. Even if the furnace has been serviced consistently, it could be on its last legs, and only a pro will be able to determine that.

If you are really interested in a property, make an appointment with the owner to return without an agent in tow. Give yourself plenty of time to give the place a good once-over.

Don't be afraid to kick the tires. You have every right to open closets, flush toilets, run the dishwasher through a full cycle, turn on all the cooktop burners, check the refrigerator and open the windows. The owners shouldn't object, not if they really want to sell.

You don't want to put every house you tour under this kind of microscope. That would be counterproductive. But once you narrow your choices down to two or three, it's time to take a harder look. Then, after you make your final decision, it's time to call in the experts.

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Buyers should look for signs that a home hasn't been well-maintained