March 19th, 2009, 3 Comments »
We’re spending a couple of nights out in rural Texas–the so-called Hill Country–at the Inn Above Onion Creek. It’s this charming country inn with about eight rooms on 100 acres of rolling country. I went for a really nice walk this morning with the very spry three-legged dog that lives here. Part of it passed through a deciduous forest, which is a rare site for a west coaster like myself.
The Inn itself is comprised of a couple of large buildings and some outlying cabins. To the uneducated eye, they look like they’ve been on the property for at least a hundred years. In fact, it’s fairly new, but uses a tremendous amount of reclaimed materials. The doors, floorboards, fixtures and furniture all appear to date back to the early part of the century or earlier.
Here’s an unflattering photo of our room. It doesn’t convey any of the space’s charms. I find it hard to take good, truthful photos of interior spaces–but you can see that it’s full of period detail:
I wouldn’t claim that it’s a heritage building, but the aesthetic does kind of beg the question ‘what makes a house old?’ How much of a house must be ‘original’ for us to, informally, declare it a heritage building?
I’m reminded of the building that houses the Victoria Art Gallery, which is an odd chimera of a 19th century mansion, a modernist expansion in the fifties and a renovation a few years ago. Is still an old house?
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July 9th, 2008, 2 Comments »
Back in the late nineties, we ran a little theatre company in Vancouver (also Darren’s First Web Design). We needed a coffin for one of the shows (George F. Walker’s excellent “Theatre of the Film Noir”, if I recall correctly) and, in light of our shoestring budget, couldn’t afford to buy one.
A member of the creative team had a day job in a retail store, and the store had a ton of pallets in the basement. He got the excellent idea to ‘borrow’ a few of these pallets, tear them apart and build a half-decent coffin out of the wood. It worked out nicely.
I remembered this little anecdote when I read about making temporary housing out of pallets:
Pallets are great material for this application because they are sturdy, inexpensive and readily available. In most cases in a disaster relief effort many of the pallets will arrive as part of the transpiration of food and materials requiring no additional logistics to procure them. If more are needed I-Beam states that they can be built by hand at a rate of 500-600 pallets per day. One transitional shelter measuring 10′ x 20′ would take 80 pallets to build and cost approximately $500.
After those darn plastic chairs (put to great use by Brian Jungen), pallets feel like one of the most ubiquitous human-made objects on Earth. Plus, other forms of aid usually arrives at disaster areas on pallets, so nothing goes to waste.
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April 28th, 2007, 4 Comments »
Back in 2001, we paid the equivalent of CAN $2700/month for a slightly shabby but spacious two bedroom flat in the centre of Dublin. That was considered a pretty good deal at the time.
I know rental rates and housing prices don’t necessarily run in parallel, but I just thought I’d mention that figure by way of introduction. I actually wanted to write about Dublin housing prices, which have soared since the Celtic Tiger phenomenon of the mid-nineties. Consider the facts that I read in today’s Irish Times:
- In 1991, the average price of a ’second-hand house’ (meaning not newly-built) was €76,075 (or CAN $115,935).
- In March, 2007, the average price of a second-hand house was €429,151 (or CAN $654,005).
Prices have increased over five-fold in a 16-year period! That’s just nuts. No wonder there’s extensive speculation about an Irish real estate bubble.
To compare with Vancouver:
- According to Stats Canada (via a PDF whose location I failed to note), in 1991, the average Vancouver home cost about CAN $200,000.
- In November, 2006, the average Vancouver home cost CAN $519,294.
Why that’s a measly increase of two and a half times.
I suppose to do a real analysis you’d have to compare GDP or average net income and these sorts of factors, but Lord knows I’m no economist. Apparently the US is undergoing a significant, uh, correction. Will Ireland and Canada follow?
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