Stacation for a day

I live on the north side of downtown St. Petersburg and about three miles north east of where I'm sitting is a little sliver of wilderness called Weedon Island State Preserve. Here it is from the air.

Weedon Island is a pristine slice of old Florida and the preserve itself starts out in the turtle grass beds of the Bay. It includes a healthy stand of mangroves and continues inland through pine scrubland, grassy savanna and hardwood hammock. What this means is that you get a good view of an entire coastal ecosystem and the creatures of Weedon Island have enough room to be themselves.

Weedon Island has been a beacon to human beings for thousands of years and the evidence of those early habitations keep a team of archeologists working overtime. The earliest inhabitants of Weedon Island lived and fished there from 500 BCE onward. Conquistadors came through Weedon Island when this was an outpost of Spain and it was actually Ponce de Leon who mapped Tampa Bay. Pirates are said to have buried treasure there and in the early part of the 20th century, some dreamer started a movie studio there in the hopes of luring the fledgling film industry away from New York. That industry ended up in some town, I can never remember the name of it, in California instead.

Weedon's hardly untouched by human hands but in an area as built up as this is, it's a very welcome respite as well as yet another reminded how tied to the Gulf of Mexico everything around here is.

Well as luck would have it, my great pal Melody McFarland and her husband Gene are in town this weekend and we're going on an adventure tomorrow morning. Melody's a biologist who's never kayaked through a mangrove swamp before. I cannot wait to count birds, bugs, fish, snakes and mammals (marine and otherwise) with her. Besides, I need a break so badly I can't stand it.

Canoe trail through the mangroves

Cownose rays schooling around a mangrove island.

Atlantic bottlenose dolphins in the Bay. Yes, they really do jump out of the water like this.

No trip to the Florida wilds would be complete with a sighting or two of Nephila clavipes, the yellow silk spider. Truly my favorite Florida creature and that scale is not a Photoshop trick.

If I had to pick a favorite bird, the roseate spoonbill would come close to the top of my list. Few things in life prepare you for the thrill of seeing a pink bird.

More canoe trail scenery

Tampa Bay is one of the few places in North America with a breeding population of white pelicans. If we're lucky we'll see them.

Yellow-crested night herons are pretty common in these parts but they are still captivating.

Snowy egrets are pretty common too, but they're in breeding plumage at this time of year and they look otherworldly when they're tricked out in it.

And no trip into the Florida wilds is complete without running into a couple of these guys. Despite their endangered status, there's quite a population of these guys in Tampa Bay.

I love things biological almost as much as I like design-y stuff and I am a fortunate man indeed to have such good friends as Melody and Gene.

It's optical illusion Friday

The great and powerful Richard Wiseman has been working overtime in keeping me thrilled with his illusions. Here's his latest, and he posted it with the question, "Does this move for you?"

Everything the man throws out there jumps all over the page for me and it never occurred to me that my experience of his illusions isn't universal. Well, it turns out they're not. According to the polls he runs on his blog, up to half of his audience can't see any movement in some of these illusions. While hardly a scientific finding, he's been able to see that these illusions are are not an either/ or proposition. In other words, predicting who'll be able to see them and who won't can't be predicted. So I'm going to throw a bunch of them up here and and you guys if they move for you. I picked these ones specifically because they move for me. If you click on them, they'll show up full-size in another window.

My obsession with these "animated" static images started with this one.

I've been sorting around for an answer for why this image moves so much and I found it. The National Academy of Science has a library of scholarly papers that deal with visual perception. The archives of the National Academy are an information geek's treasure trove. If that weren't enough, I found a great science blog called Neurophilosophy that talks about this stuff less formally.

Now, I've always known that human visual perception is a function of the way our brains are wired. True, it's our eyes that feed the visual stimulus to our brains, but it's our brains that knit the whole mess of stimuli into a coherent narrative. Therein lies the rub.

Human brains evolved to keep us alive as primates first and foremost so they use our eyes to look for patterns and novelty. Just as the T. Rex in Jurassic Park could only see movement, our eyes work in much the same way. Unlike a T. Rex though, we have a brain to oversee the proceedings. When an object stops moving, the visual perceptors in our retinas stop seeing the object and our brains take over. The actual cells receiving the stimulus take a break and the brain steps in and uses what it assumes to be true about a scene to fill in the blanks. Stare at a beige paint chip for long enough and you can see this retinal fading in real life. The minute the view changes though, the cells in the retina spring back into action and send new information to the brain.

Well it turns out that this rentinal fading may save energy, but it can be an evolutionary disadvantage too. If a predator is stalking you, it doesn't really go away when it stops moving. To compensate for retinal fading, our brains evolved an ability to to issue a wake up call to those napping retinal cells and that wake up call is called a microsaccade.

Microsaccades are rapid, imperceptible (the brain adjusts for them), jerking eye movements. Human eyes exhibit these microsaccades all the time and they allow us to perceive stationary objects, among other things. It's also these microsaccades that are making these images move. Sometimes, an image has the right combination of fine lines and contrasting colors to override the mechanism the brain uses to adjust for the microsaccades it triggered in the first place. The result is a static image that appears to move.

Pretty slick. So what's this have to do with designing interiors? Everything. Design plays with perception, not vision and understanding perception is the name of the game. When you know where the chinks in the armor of perception are, you can exploit them. Besides, this is fun.

Now back to my original question, who sees which of these images move?

What does "too taste-specific" mean?

A client came to me yesterday with a photograph very similar to this one as one of his few inspiration images. The image is from Graham and Brown, the British wallpaper people. Further, the pattern is one by Umbra for Graham and Brown. The guy didn't know where to start other than he wanted the feeling of that image interpreted and extrapolated over his entire open floor plan condominium. Perfect, this is just the kind of challenge I love. I asked him what was it about the photograph he liked so much and without hesitation, he said it was the wallpaper.

So I started talking about wallpaper and how cool it is and how my great friend Given Campbell has some patterns he ought to see. He stopped me and said, "Oh I can't use wallpaper."

I reminded him that it was wallpaper that started our conversation and it was wallpaper that was so appealing to him. He went on to explain that he can't use wallpaper in his home because it's too "taste specific." Mind you, this is a man who'd also told me he had no intention of selling any time soon and he was interested in making his house really his.

So when did making a home "taste specific" to the man who owns it become a bad thing? Isn't my whole life spent helping other people make their homes taste-specific to them?

From Awkward Family Photos

It reminds me of a conversation I had with a woman about a year ago, I think I wrote about it in fact. Anyhow, she wanted to know if it's OK to hang family photographs in the "public" areas of her home. I explained to her that hotels have public areas but homes don't. She looked at me as if I were speaking Russian.

I hear things like that with shocking regularity. "I can't do what I want because it's what I like and nobody else will." Or "I can't leave to personal an impression in my living room." Or "I drip a little vanilla extract on a light bulb every night, how do I keep it from leaving a stain?" How about "I want to paint my dining room a bright color but I'm worried about resale." Has everyone become a home stager all of the sudden?

I know where all of this crap's coming from. It's that great Satan HGTV. I swear, they are the Fox News of the design press. Turn it off please. And leave it off.

Your home is your home and by virtue of the fact that you're an adult, you get to do anything inside of it you want to do. Even if it's stuff I find repugnant, who cares? I'm some guy with a big mouth in Florida, not some final arbiter and neither is anyone else. So go ahead, paint your walls with chalkboard paint, put a damn chicken coop in the back yard, hang exciting wallpaper and for the love of God, stop asking for permission to put photos of your kids on the mantle.

If you're going to put your house on the market sometime down the road, deal with it then but you can't live your life for a potential buyer. And seriously, when is the last time you walked out of a house tour because someone had a perfectly painted red dining room? People walk out of house tours because the place is falling down. Gah!

Don't be a Mr. or Ms. Cellophane. Hey! That makes me want to sing some Kander and Ebb!

Life's over faster than anyone wants to admit. Leave a mark already.

How big is the Gulf oil spill?

Paul Rademacher is an Engineer at Google and yesterday he came up with a new application for Google Earth that shows just how big it is.

Paul's application then shows how big the spill would be if it were superimposed over a series of world cities and then you can superimpose it anywhere on earth you want to.

The map of the spill that Paul used was from May 6th, almost a week ago.

Here it is over New York.

And over LA.

And over Vancouver.

And over London.

Drill baby drill, right?

Here's that link again.

Brava! A reader shares her successful renovation story

A reader sent me her final after photos from her kitchen renovation yesterday and in her note she paid me the ultimate compliment. She's been reading K&RD for the last year and she used this site as a resource for ideas and advice. I am a flattered and grateful somebody today, that's for sure.

Here's where she started and here are some of her own words to describe her project.

We’ve owned our house for 11 years and lived in it for all but two when we rented it out while my husband went to graduate school. This is not our forever home and our goal is to move sometime in the next 2-3 years to a larger house. We renovated the kitchen mostly because the old one was literally crumbling in our hands.

I am a stay at home mom of 2 preschoolers.  The major advantage was that I was available for a good part of most days to keep an eye on things and answer questions.  My schedule was flexible enough to be able to get estimates and talk with tradespeople during the day. However, I don’t have many hours free during the day without one or both kids, so it was difficult to make many appointments during normal business hours.  I used the internet to do a lot of research; I bought things online or through Craigslist (dryer, faucet, stove hood, sink) and I bought the cabinets from Thomasville via Home Depot- largely because they let me walk out the door with their catalog and I could just run in at any random time and place my order.

Our house was built sometime in the late 1800s.  It’s a row house and is on a 14’ wide lot.  The kitchen is 12’5” x 7’10” and includes a 3’x 6’ space for the boiler and hot water heater. It’s a modified galley with a small “L” at one end which contains the kitchen sink. There are no square corners, or level surfaces.  The floor slopes in different directions and the walls are all crooked. I had a white kitchen before and I kept it white. We really wanted something in keeping with the wide moldings and baseboards in the rest of the house, but did want some sense of contemporary style as well.

We retained the basic configuration of the kitchen but changed all of the appliance locations. We moved the stove to an exterior wall so that it could be directly vented to the outside --no more smelling a meal the day after we cook it!  This configuration meant that we didn’t have to buy as powerful a hood and it allowed us to retain cupboard space above the stove. It also puts all the meal prep on one side of the kitchen.  We moved the refrigerator to the side of the kitchen where the stove had been. On one side of the refrigerator we installed a 6” utility closet. On the other side is a pantry which consists of a base cabinet, a narrow counter, and wall cabinets resting directly on the base. We had found a very reasonably priced counter depth side-by-side, however, the day we went to buy appliances, I measured across the back of the space --which had not been accessible when I made the original plan --and found that it was an inch smaller than the front. So we have a narrower, deeper refrigerator with a bottom freezer. Finally we moved the dishwasher which had been in the corner by the sink. There had been about six inches to stand sideways to the sink to rinse dishes and load the dishwasher. We put in a blind corner cabinet and moved the dishwasher out 21”.

In addition to the blind corner cabinet, we now have a pullout trash/recycling bin and to the right of the stove we have drawers for pots and pans and cooking utensils.  Above that we have a microwave shelf and upper cabinets above that.  This area has a toaster and electric tea kettle.  Our major run of counter is 7’ or so.

We also redid the laundry area which consists of a double closet. The closet was made deeper, given doors and we put the washer and dryer side-by-side. We replaced our dryer with a ventless Bosch (awesome Craigslist find) and added a counter and wire shelving above. We added a small electronics station in one corner of the foyer which is a charging station and has drawers and shelves. It also gives us a little space for things like vases and candles.

Finishes:

The lighting is can lighting placed straight down the middle of the room.  We didn’t put any pendants in because the ceiling is lower than the main living area and the window is off center.  The under cabinet lighting are Xenon fixtures by Kichler.  All are on dimmers.

Cabinets are Eden by Thomasville painted white. I honestly did look at Ikea cabinets, but I hate their white cabinets and think that the wood cabinets are too modern looking for our space.  The other even more vital issue was the lack of choices in size.  The Thomasville cabinets had a much larger range- allowing me to get a 6 inch utility cabinet, as well as 33 inch and 27 inch cabinets.  This made a huge difference in how I was able to utilize our space. Hardware is brushed nickel with round pulls on doors and handles on drawers.  Nothing special- will wait for that long term house.

The counter is bianco romano granite with a very minimal amount of red and a decent amount of movement.  The counter choice was tough.  I wanted a light color, but didn’t want anything from India.  Try googling things like “labor standards” “India” “quarries”.  It makes China look like a nice place to get a job.

The backsplash is white subway tile- of the Home Depot special variety.

We left a bookshelf and a small alcove to the left of the sink intact.

We retained the original moldings, but replaced baseboards due to lead concerns and damage.

The sink is an apron front sink by Elkay.  I started out with a Kohler faucet (Finial Traditional) that I got on Craig’s List still attached to its kitchen sink.  It was really beautiful except that it was brushed chrome instead of brushed nickel.  I didn’t figure that out until the plumber installed it.  This isn’t a kitchen that needs 3 different kinds of metal. So- I now have the quick-run-to-the-big-box Moen faucet.

The floor is wood.  We wanted to unify the floor with the rest of the house, so we installed unfinished red oak.  It’s finished in Minwax “Special Walnut” which is about as close a match as you could hope for.  Unfortunately, the floors in each of the 3 parts of the house aren’t even, so we had to install thresholds between each space.

The appliances are stainless steel and a mix of brands.  I have an older GE spacesaver microwave, a Kenmore Elite range with a warming drawer and a couple of other nice features. I have to say it’s glorious not to be cooking on a white range that got completely scratched up by our renters. The refrigerator is from Kitchen Aid and the dishwasher is Bosch. The dishwasher is actually white --I wanted it to be a little more unobtrusive.  The appliances are not fabulous, but I really wasn’t excited about putting a bunch of money into appliances that I’m leaving in a couple of years.  They are a sight better than what I had.

Finally the walls are Benjamin Moore Potpourri Green and ceiling is white.

Things I would do differently:

Consider using a kitchen designer especially on a shorter time frame.  For various reasons, I had months and months to work on the planning.

Put in additional lighting in front of the bookshelf/pantry area.

I loved working with the contractor but he doesn’t have years of established relationships with subs.  The subs were the cause of most of the problems we had.  The granite people were especially problematic.

I would pay for more babysitting for the kids.  We probably would have ended up with different appliances had we not had kids in tow.

I should not have let the granite people do business the way they did.  It’s a long story, but the snowstorms and scheduling snafus made me feel pressured.  The person measuring was late and I needed to leave to pick my daughter up, so he was rushed.  The installers came late in the day when the kids were in need of too much attention, so I couldn’t pay as much attention to the granite installation as I should have.  The granite didn’t fit as well as it should have, so the contractor ended up with a bit of work to compensate.

I would pay more attention to the faucet set-up then I did.

Best Problem solved:

The tile across the bottom of the window looked crooked because it was level to the counter but not to the window which is leveled to the crooked ceiling.  It really wrecked the look of the kitchen.  On the last day, I looked at it and asked the contractor to install a deeper window sill- fortunately there was enough room to install a sill over the top of the old sill.  He was kind enough to agree at the last minute and that camouflaged the problem sufficiently.

Biggest Gut Check

Ordering the cabinets based on my own design and measurements.

The One Thing that Makes Me Grind My Teeth:

The contractor’s assistant used a roller on one coat on my woodwork.  Newsflash: the roller marks are hard to cover.

Things I love:

Not having a trash bin in the middle of the kitchen.

Having a new stovetop

Having room for food storage

Having a broom closet

Having a counter to fold clothes on

Room to stand between the sink and dishwasher

Awesome lighting

And now here are her after shots. Again, brava!

As my reader shows here, it's possible to do a terrific job without breaking the bank. What a thrill and thanks so much for showing me these photos and allowing me to let you tell your story.