Construction Materials

Construction Materials
05/27/11 10:57am

Historic Houston Salvage Warehouse Going Out of Business, Selling Everything at Auction

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North Montrose
7 Comments

It looks like those last-ditch fundraising efforts that might have saved Historic Houston’s Salvage Warehouse from undergoing its own salvage operation weren’t enough. A local auction company will be selling all remaining inventory at the local building-parts-preservation group’s warehouse next week, in what the nonprofit is clearly labeling a “going out of business” sale. Everything at the 1307 W. Clay warehouse will be up for sale: doors, windows, flooring, lumber, plumbing fixtures, tools and equipment for DIY salvagers who’d like to carry on in Historic Houston’s 7-plus-year tradition, office furniture. And yes: Even the organization’s black and white twin Dodge trucks. A page on the website of Worstell Auction Company features photos of many of the vintage goodies, including a screaming “Eisenhower Wins in Landslide” cover from an old Houston Chronicle. (No R-value provided, though. You’ll need to test that out yourself.) Auction date: next Thursday, June 2, at 10 am on the warehouse grounds.

Photos: Historic Houston

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Construction Materials
04/18/11 10:53am

A New Paint Store Without That Fresh-Paint Smell

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Green Design and Development, Openings and Closings, Retail, Rice Village
2 Comments

Opened over the weekend: a 1,500-sq.-ft. space at 6115 Kirby in the Rice Village that its owners are claiming is the country’s first non-toxic retail paint store. The Green Painter, a project of green-building supply house and organic-mattress showroom New Living, takes over a former tile store next door to its parent company. Partner Jeff Kaplan says most of the paint and coatings sold at the Green Painter — including its own NOVOC brand and a lower-priced line of contractor-grade paints — won’t have any volatile organic compounds at all, but the store does carry one line of paints for cabinets, trim, and exteriors that qualifies as a low-VOC product.

Photo: Adam Brackman

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Construction Materials
04/15/11 1:34pm

Pulling Out All the Stops at the Historic Houston Salvage Warehouse Extended Goodbye Sale

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North Montrose, Openings and Closings, Recycling
7 Comments

As of this morning, Historic Houston has been able to raise only $13,000 of the $50,000 executive director Lynn Edmundson had figured the organization would need to keep its North Montrose building-parts salvage warehouse in operation for just 3 more months. After this weekend, she tells Swamplot, she will have lost all employees other than her crew. That means the warehouse at 1307 West Clay St. will only be able to be opened by appointment. This Saturday from 10 to 4, though, she’ll be holding a last-ditch 50-percent-off sale with a bonus: All purchases will be tax-free.

As a nonprofit, Historic Houston is allowed to hold 2 sales-tax-free sales a year. Similar events put on by the organization in past years have been “pretty big successes,” according to Edmundson. “There seems to be something about not paying taxes” that really encourages people to buy, she says.

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Comments
04/11/11 8:19pm

Comment of the Day: The Real Reason They Don’t Build So Many Steel or Concrete Homes in Houston

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Construction Materials, Home Design, Quicklink, Real Estate Marketing
3 Comments

COMMENT OF THE DAY: THE REAL REASON THEY DON’T BUILD SO MANY STEEL OR CONCRETE HOMES IN HOUSTON “Additionally, you’re very limited when building out of steel or concrete, engineering requirements limit the shape and interest in the house. The walls of the second floor HAVE to sit on another wall underneath and forget about turrets and towers (can be done but very difficult). Like it or not, in today’s market turrets and towers add interest to the elevation of the house and they sell!” [commonsense, commenting on Tin House Panic Grips West U]

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Construction Materials
04/08/11 5:12pm

Tin House Panic Grips West U

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Development Restrictions, Home Design, Houston Architects, New Construction: Residential, West University
53 Comments

In an email to the West University city council, public works director Chris Peifer sounds the alarm about the steel-frame home with metal siding currently under construction at 2723 Centenary St., a couple blocks west of Kirby: “As the street view of this structure will deviate greatly from the typical street view/appearance of the neighborhood I wanted to give you notification,” Peifer writes, after noting that the city doesn’t prohibit the use of the materials on the home or regulate “personal taste or esthetics.” And then he adds this: “FYI…Heads up. There are high value properties directly adjacent to this property that may take exception.”

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Construction Materials
03/22/11 1:59pm

Carefully Wrapped Stimulus Package: Rice’s New Brockman Hall for Physics

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Institutional Buildings, Openings and Closings, Rice University
18 Comments

A few days ahead of its scheduled public debut later this week, Swamplot photographer Candace Garcia got the new Brockman Hall for Physics to sit still for a brief photo session at its new Rice University home. (That wasn’t too difficult: The structure features underground labs specially outfitted to dampen vibrations.) For the occasion, the university’s newest model chose several different outfits: a gridded terracotta rainscreen over a slip of colored aluminum composite cladding on its southern face, a patterned glass curtain wall silk-screened with a Penrose pattern on the north, and underneath, some plain concrete leggings:

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Construction Materials
03/22/11 10:30am

Can Historic Houston’s Salvage Warehouse Be Salvaged?

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North Montrose, Openings and Closings
5 Comments

Note: The discounting has begun. See update below.

A weekend and a day after she sent out word that Historic Houston’s 7-year-old recycled-house-parts warehouse at 1307 West Clay St. would be shutting down, the nonprofit organization’s founder and executive director says she’s currently evaluating a few options that might allow her to keep the salvage operation in business. “Some very incredible offers came forward on Friday,” Lynn Edmundson tells Swamplot, “and I am spending the next day or two investigating each one to see if any of them will work out . . . as an interim strategy to keep the warehouse opened and operating for a few more months.”

Edmundson also says numerous supporters of the organization asked her to “calculate what cash we would need to stay afloat for 3 months — and then ask for it.” Which she did in a follow-up email she sent out Friday, seeking 500 donations of $100 each. Edmundson says she was encouraged by the immediate response: The first $1,000 was raised within 5 minutes of sending out the request. “We may not raise all that we need,” she says, but whatever amount is raised might “buy us a little more time to explore the options that have been offered.”

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Construction Materials
03/18/11 10:17am

Historic Houston Ending Its Salvage Program, Shutting Down North Montrose Salvage Warehouse

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North Montrose, Openings and Closings
21 Comments

Local nonprofit Historic Houston is no longer accepting donations of building materials, and is closing its salvage warehouse and ending its salvage program, reports the organization’s founder and executive director, Lynn Edmundson. The organization stored and sold donated historic building materials reclaimed from doomed houses at a leased warehouse and yard at 1307 W. Clay and a separate “overflow” facility across the street at 1214 Joe Annie. Historic Houston’s 9-year-old salvage program typically removed and saved doors, windows, flooring, shiplap, siding, stair rails treads, and plumbing and lighting fixtures from old houses slated for demolition.

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Comments
12/16/10 1:40pm

Facebook Comment of the Day: Why There’s No Brick Around the Back Side of the House

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Construction Materials, Home Design, Quicklink
No Comments

FACEBOOK COMMENT OF THE DAY: WHY THERE’S NO BRICK AROUND THE BACK SIDE OF THE HOUSE “Masonry-front houses [are] the reverse mullet of housing — party in the front, business in the back.” [Alice Pavlak, on Swamplot’s Facebook page, commenting — and voting — on Favorite Houston Design Cliché: The Official 2010 Ballot]

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Construction Materials
11/23/10 3:34pm

Price Cut: More Than 2 Sides to a Pasadena Single-Story

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Homes for Sale, Pasadena, Price Reductions
21 Comments

How many stories are hidden within the walls — or better, are covering the walls — of this 60-year-old home on Tupelo Ave. in Pasadena, about a mile south of the city’s namesake freeway? There are so many sides to it. Including, inside, what looks like a theatrical one:

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Construction Materials
09/17/10 1:20pm

What They’re Doing to Mai’s Restaurant in Midtown

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Houston Architects, Midtown, Renovations, Restaurants, Retail
16 Comments

Mai, oh Mai: The folks at Dang La Architecture, perhaps best known for slathering Styrofoam, a tan stucco-like surface, and a low thin beard of fakish-looking stone over the facades of several formerly distinctive-looking Midtown restaurants, have done it again. This time the firm’s chicken-fried-steak-inspired vision has completely transformed the exterior of Mai’s Vietnamese restaurant on Milam St. at Francis. Mai’s was famously singed by a fire in February, which destroyed the building’s interior and collapsed the roof, leaving only a 2-story brick shell. That made the perfect canvas for Dang La’s Second Life-like design concept: sort of an urban palazzo — minus those superfluous middle floors.

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Comments
07/27/10 3:14pm

Comment of the Day: The Very Special Secret Behind That “New Home” Smell

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Construction Materials, Homebuilders, New Construction, Quicklink
31 Comments

COMMENT OF THE DAY: THE VERY SPECIAL SECRET BEHIND THAT “NEW HOME” SMELL “After having worked for two major local homebuilders, I was shocked to discover that most subcontractors leave an organic surprise for every new homeowner in the form of a bowel movement, hidden somewhere in the home…closets, attic, pantry, fireplace, you name it. And I’m talking about ALL homebuilders. I was told by upper management that it’s a ’statement’ from the have-nots to the haves. Charming.” [marketingwiz, commenting on Comment of the Day: Someone Was Sleeping in My Room!]

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Construction Materials
07/16/10 9:45am

What the Last Century Built: Idylwood Modern, in Concrete

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Homes for Sale, Idylwood
15 Comments

This house on Merry Lane in Idylwood is one of 4 “Century Built” homes designed in the late 1940s and early ’50s by a not-particularly-famous Houston architect named Allen R. Williams Jr. Where are the others? One — demolished a while back — was somewhere off Campbell Rd. north of I-10, though nobody seems to remember where. Another is on West 43rd St. in Garden Oaks. The third, built not far from Idylwood in Simms Woods, was restored and renovated by architect and interior designer Ben Koush in 2005, who dug up the home’s history, got it registered as the city’s first modern protected landmark, and now features it on his firm’s website and in occasional home tours.

All the homes had walls made of lightweight hollow concrete tiles (with electrical wires running through them in conduit), heavy slab foundations with grade beams and piers, metal casement windows, and roofs made of concrete panels and insulated with Fiberglas boards. And they all had similar floor plans. The Idylwood house has been on the market since the end of last month — for $150,000 — because its original owner, Carl Stallworth, passed away recently.

What could you do with this place?

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Apartments
06/25/10 2:04pm

A Bright Stucco Future for the Norman Apartments

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Construction Materials, Montrose, New Construction: Residential, Redevelopment
5 Comments

The Norman apartment building at 717 West Alabama at Stanford St. caught fire and burned last August. The 8-unit Montrose building, which the Houston Press saw fit to declare the city’s “Best Apartment” back in 2004, showed up in Swamplot’s Daily Demolition Report just before Christmas. A reader sends in pics of the new multicolored stucco-and-foam construction going up in its place and notes:

It appears that they were quick to rebuild, It looked to me that they used the old piers, and just added the support beams for a (pier & beam foundation). Glad to see that they took advantage of the exsiting foundation.

And look, new foam quoins at the corner, to hold the stucco rainbow together! Are they fireproof?

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Braes Heights
04/06/10 4:07pm

That Sixties Stoner House in Braes Heights

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Construction Materials, Home Decor, Homes for Sale, Interiors
5 Comments

Dude! Decorating an older home with flagstones is so choice! They go anywhere — floors, walls. All it takes is a little of that sticky stuff and a little, you know: imagination.

And there’s no heavy lifting, cuz you’re just sticking it on!

Like this one place, in Braes Heights? It was built in the early sixties. Wait’ll you see what we did to the garage!

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