A "Green" Palette
December 20, 2004
Contributed by Anne DeWolf, Co-owner & Designer, Arciform LLC

Last weekend's gathering at the house was about the interior finishes. The concept for the 1909 House is to restore & maintain the original character of the house as close as possible as well as introduce earth friendly techniques and finishes that are practical as well as beautiful. With that in mind the interior is falling into place and people that attended enjoyed the preview.

The kitchen will be a combination of custom cabinets painted in a medium green and custom cabinets made of Alder stained dark - Arciform builds it's own and use sustainable wheatboard to build our cabinet boxes. The green I chose is a historic color found in Miller Paint's Historic Color Collection, but would not have been found in kitchens at the time this house was built. The kitchen of the time was mainly filled with freestanding furniture and the preferred color of these furnishings was white due to the heightened awareness of "germs" and the thought that white would show dirt better and could therefore be cleaned promptly. Today's kitchens mainly contain built in cabinetry for ultimate storage and that plays into the utilitarian function of the design. The green I chose will ease maintenance. The stained peninsula will represent the furniture like cabinetry of the era end the dark stain will tie in with other stain grade elements in the rest of the home. The counter will be made of Slatescape in dark charcoal - provided and installed by Nu-Art. Slatescape is a solid surface material made large of compressed recycled content. It has a look similar to soap stone which was used often as counter during the 1880¹s through the 1930¹s.

The color green in the custom Arciform project cabinetry seen here, will be similar in the 1909 House kitchen

The flooring will be environmentally friendly, sheet linoleum provided and installed by Lansing Linoleum. This long wearing material has been around for the last 90+ years and has made several reappearances for its use as kitchen flooring throughout the last century. Today it is very popular again mainly for its biodegradable content, durability and the range of beautiful colors is comes in. And for any you out there that HATE cleaning floors, the medium to dark colors seem to hide the dirt longer. :)

The backsplash tile in the kitchen is going to be an off-white subway tile with beautiful 3"x6" Art Works Tube Lined Tiles as accents that carries a Craftsman period motif. This tile comes from England and is available through United Tile here in Portland.

The downstairs bathroom will be a range of soft yellows. Half way up the wall we are installing 4x4 tiles with green accents. The floor will be tiled with white 1x1 hex tiles with black and white accents. Stay tuned for the surprise inlay pattern! Being located at the north side of the house this lighter color scheme will bring a cheerful atmosphere to the space.

The upstairs bath will have an elegant overall feel. The floor will be a pale gray-blue linoleum, the cabinets and the platform around The Jason Hydrotherapy bath from A-Boy will be a dark stained Alder and the backsplash tile at the sink and the shower will be white subway tile with black accents. This color scheme is typical for bathrooms of that area. (One side note: I just have to say working with A-Boy on this entire project has been so great and they have really been of great assistance at helping us choose the right fixtures for this home.)

The colors throughout the rest of the house will be of light to medium value and will range form yellow, through green, brown and beige to off-white in the kitchen. I am very excited about this pallet. It will be elegant as well as playful and special.

A couple of more items that occurred in recent days:

• I met with Amy Whitworth and Kathleen Leech of The Garden Design Studio last week and they have put together a BEAUTIFUL landscape design that incorporates elements that are respectful to the environment. Included are native plantings, bioswales, composting area, and the reuse of some of the hardscape elements already found in the yard. I can not wait to see how everything will fall into place. Click here for the description and a few drawings from their presentation.
  
• Thankfully, with cold days a plenty now, the old oil tank has been decommissioned in the backyard and a new above ground high efficiency tank installed in the basement by First Call Heating & Cooling. We have chosen to go with clean burning BioDiesel, supplied by Albina Fuel as our heating source and expect it to be up and running tomorrow. That will make those Saturday Sessions more cozy for sure. For more information on BioDiesel, please go to our FAQ page under BioDiesel/BioHeat.
• Our James Hardie siding through Allied Building Supply is going on as well. I'll let Richard report more on that and the creative, historically inspired application we have done. Oh Richard??? :)
  

Deck the Halls with Walls of Plaster!
Fa-la-la-la-la-la-la-la.
December 8, 2004
Contributed by Richard DeWolf, Founder, Arciform LLC

OK, bad holiday song pun, but it had to be said. No really, we have our master plasterer Christian Wolstencroft upstairs plastering the bedrooms. Our crew is busily staying one piece of trim ahead of him as he goes. All of the ceiling upstairs in the bedrooms and hall were acoustical tiles. To solve this problem, we are screwing the blueboard directly on top of them - it makes no sense to remove them causing more refuse and also it doesn't send added particulates into the air. If you want to see this in action, take a look at the video clip.

The bedrooms upstairs are having the color put directly into the plaster giving them a very nice, rich color. The trim is being installed prior to the color impregnated plaster around the old style paneled doors and windows we put in from Jeld-Wen Doors & Windows. It's the finer details like this that really give the house back the authentic character it once had. The sitting room downstairs had all of the original trim, so thankfully we have a real template from which to work on this.

Besides all that, now we just have to finish painting the trim, refinish the fir floors, and put up lighting fixtures to be done with the bedrooms! Whew! Then it's on to the kitchen. We start building the full inset custom cabinets in the Arciform shop next week. The James Hardie siding is being delivered next week and we will start wrapping up the outside one board at a time.

Old news is good news - actually it's downright hysterical!
December 2, 2004
Contributed by Melissa Fryback, Writing on behalf of Arciform LLC

While removing the front square window in front of the house to replace it with a larger one, the revelation as to how old the window was, was revealed. A large amount of newspaper had been stuffed around the window. Dated October 5th, 1930, the paper was largely falling apart as it was removed, but portions were saved and given to me to take a look at. I couldn't help but chuckle. In these meager yellowed strips a picture of what life was like during the prohibition and depression era develops. I've included the pieces I found most interesting... take a look for yourself! I especially like the deal on Antelope, or the anti-pollution council that existed - and we thought that was only a subject of matter today! Seems that people cared even back then!