Vaisforhomes: March 2012

Friday, March 30, 2012

Just Listed

5546 Jaclyn Dr Warrenton, VA 20187. Charming rambler in Warranton, VA with a large flat lot. Located in a sought after subdivision. Check out the Virtual Tour

Tuesday, March 20, 2012

Equesterian Estate....

Today's House of the Day is an equestrian estate and vineyard. See more pics at: http://on.wsj.com/yMfD5e

The owners of this Tuscan-style villa in Santa Barbara County, Calif., built their equestrian estate on 10 acres, complete with a six-stall stable, riding arena and a vineyard. —Maya Pope-Chappell

Monday, March 19, 2012

*1 LIGHT TO COMMUTER LOT &1-95*NESTED AMONGST TREES & HOMES ON 1/2 ACRE LOTS*PARK LIKE STTING*ALL BRICK RAMBLER*LARGE FENCED BACKYARD*WOOD FLOORS ON MAIN LEVEL*RECENTLY REMODELED KITCHEN-BATHROOMS-APPLIANCES-TILE FLOOR-FULLY FINISHED BASEMENT*NEW DECK-PRIVACY FENCE-WATER HEATER-WELL PUMP*SUNROOM*2 BRICK HEARTH FIREPLACES*FRONT PORCH*BARN*HOME WARRANTY*NO HOA*ALSO FOR SALE Click the link to look at photos: http://www.postlets.com/rtpb/7232431

Thinking of Soundproofing?

Down the hall, your 10-year-old practices saxophone. In the garage, your husband fires up his table saw. The racket has the artwork on the walls jiggling.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could muffle all that noise? By soundproofing your walls, you’ll gain peace and quiet, and restore a little sanity to your household.

To quiet household noise, you’ll need to reduce vibrations, plug sound leaks, and absorb sounds.

Secret #1: Extra drywall. Sounds are vibrations. Deadening those vibrations is best done with heavy, dense materials that stop noise in its tracks.

When it comes to heavy, brick and stone are great but impractical for retrofitting your interior walls. The easiest strategy is to add a second layer of drywall to build up a thick, sound-deadening barrier.

You don’t have to add drywall everywhere — you can isolate the noisy room (kid’s saxophone) or the quiet room (your reading nook).

You’ll have to refinish and repaint your new drywall, and probably extend electrical outlets and switch boxes, but those are relatively easy and inexpensive DIY projects.

Secret #2: The caulk sandwich. As an extra defense, separate the two layers of drywall with 3/8-inch-thick beads of acoustical caulk ($9-$20 for 28-oz. tube). The caulk deadens vibrations that try to travel from one layer of drywall to the other.

Secret #3: Mass-loaded vinyl. Made especially for noise control, mass-loaded vinyl (MLV) is a flexible material that comes in 4-foot-wide rolls. It’s made to hang on walls or install on floors to help deaden sounds. Sandwich it between layers of drywall to greatly reduce sound transmission through walls.

A 15-foot-long roll of 1/8-inch-thick MLV (60 sq. ft.) is $80-$110. It’s heavy, so if you buy it online, expect to pay another $40-$50 for shipping.

Secret #4: Plugging sound leaks. “Sound is like water,” says Josh Kernan of Westside Drywall in Hubbard, Ore., noting that anywhere water can leak through — cracks and openings — sound can get through, too.

To stop leaking sound, use acoustical caulk to plug holes and gaps around:

ceiling fixtures

switch boxes

receptacle boxes

door casing

Add sweeps ($6–$14) to the bottoms of doors and weatherstripping to door frames.

Secret #5: Absorbing sound with acoustic panels. Acoustic panels absorb sounds before they can bounce off walls and ceilings. They’re made to improve the sound inside a room, such as a home theater, but they’re also helpful in reducing sound transmission through walls.

Made of porous expanded polypropylene (PEPP), panels come in a variety of sizes and thicknesses. Most types for home use are covered in fabrics with dozens of colors to choose from. Some manufacturers offer custom-printed fabrics that turn your sound blocking panel into a piece of wall art: Send in a digital photo, and they’ll reproduce it on your panel.

Panels attach with clips or Velcro, and installation is an easy DIY job. A standard 2-by-2-foot panel is $25-$30.

Secret #6: Quieting ambient noise. Adding soft items to rooms — rugs, carpets, drapes, potted plants — helps reduce vibrations and ambient noise.

Secret #7: Silencing ducts. Sound-deadening duct wrap quiets noisy ducts and adds thermal insulation. A 4-by-30-foot roll of 1-inch-thick wrap is $50.

Secret #8: Adding solid-core doors. A solid core interior door ($60–$80) absorbs sound better than a hollow-core door. Add a sweep to cut airborne sound.

Secret #9: Knowing your STC ratings. Soundproofing products often come with a Sound Transmission Class (STC) rating. STC is a measure of how many decibels of sound reduction a product provides. The higher the STC rating, the better.

An improvement of 10 STC makes the noise seem like it’s been cut in half. On the other hand, a rating difference of 3 STC or less is nearly imperceptible — worth knowing when comparing products.

SIMPLE DIVISION

A Tokyo architect’s shape-shifting apartment takes a holistic approach to live/work style.

Shibata made the 10-person dining table using $130 sawhorse legs from Maruki Wood Products Company topped with a sheet of birch plywood. A hole in the sliding wall fits over the table, enabling it to be used in both the library and the meeting room.
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A movable wall clad in wainscoting on one side slides along tracks in the dining-room ceiling, dividing the room into a meeting space and a library. The Shiro Simple Modern Pendant lights can be easily removed and reattached after moving the wall.
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When Tokyo architect Yuko Shibata and her husband bought an aging 940-square-foot apartment in 2009, she knew she wanted to remodel it to include a home office where she could base her firm. But there was a catch: “My husband wanted to come back to a home, not an office, and I needed a switch of some sort when work was over,” she says. So how to meet the challenge while sticking to a tight budget?

Shibata wanted more shelf space in her home office, so she added a plywood door with built-in bookshelves that opens into her bedroom to form a reading nook. Glimpsed from the adjacent room, the space looks larger than it actually is, thanks to the bright green walls.

For inspiration, she turned to fusuma, the sliding paper screens that effortlessly divide or expand the rooms in traditional Japanese homes. Instead of cloistering her office in a corner, she made use of her entire house. She cut a hole in the wall between her bedroom and the workroom, then installed a huge door that swings open to reveal built-in bookshelves, expanding the workroom and partitioning the bedroom at the same time. To turn the dining room into a meeting room and library, she built a wall that slides on ceiling-mounted tracks, partitioning the room and adding intrigue to a formerly bland space. At night, the apartment swiftly morphs back into a residence.

To keep costs down, she left the apartment’s original structure, plumbing, and wiring untouched. “Limiting the types of work done made it cheaper,” Shibata says. The result: a full-apartment remodel that cost less than she’d spend to rent an office for three years.

GRATEFUL SHED

A family discovers the joys of DIY design—and muddy feet—in their home made up of distinct pods that blends harmoniously with its surroundings in the rainy mountains of Kauai.

SLIDESHOW

Tanya, Chris, Jackson, and Zeke spend much of their day outside.

Tanya and Chris Gamby—a psychologist and web developer/portable outdoor movie theater owner, respectively—have called Hawaii home for most of their lives. After a detour to Los Angeles, where their children, Jackson, now nine, and Zeke, seven, were born, they came back. They were perfectly content with their old plantation house in the town of Lihue, on Kauai, when they accompanied Chris’s sister on her own property search in the island’s lush mountains. When they came across a 20-acre parcel that backed up to verdant, rainy valleys and stunning views, Tanya was immediately smitten. “When I saw the land, I thought, ‘I’d sell my soul to live here,’” says Tanya, who luckily only had to sell her existing house to do so. They bought the property as an extended family, and then the Gambys, with $80,000, limited construction experience, and guidance from local architects Ben Sullivan and Tony Hatto (who are also designing them a larger house on the site), built a temporary hangout made from three 10-by-12-foot modules and dubbed it Ag Shed Villa.

SLIDESHOW

When she’s not at the treehouse, Jackson hangs out in the kids’ room.

Tanya: Our old house sold before we knew how the property would be divided up, and we needed to build something for ourselves quickly. We knew we could do as many 10-by-12 sheds as we wanted, so we thought we’d do three and just take them apart and put them back together as needed. We figured we’d just make this really sweet, simple studio we could use temporarily and eventually turn into a guest room and a home office. So Chris just started build-ing it, and our architects decided they wanted to help us, so they got involved, and it was this total spontaneous collaborative effort that morphed into this building.

Originally we were going to put in a green roof and living walls—we had wanted to do that on our bigger house, too. So we started with a design and quickly discovered that there were some issues with living walls and mold in Hawaii, and then we found out that even though there’s all this research on Hawaii being a great place for green roofs, we couldn’t get home insurance here if we put them in. We have everything in place, so as soon as that changes we will put them in, but unfortunately we can’t do it yet.

As it became a real building, our architects engineered it for us so that it would actually meet the codes. It was sort of a back and forth with the architects—we had the shape of the building and the design laid out, and they picked some of the materials, like the cement boards for the walls and the polycarbonate roofing, which was something they always wanted to try. The bathroom walls and the shower are made out of polycarbonate, which is beautiful in certain areas and in some it’s actually really hot, so the downside is we’ve created almost a greenhouse effect in places. But in the rainy season it’s incredibly beautiful. The other thing is, it’s loud. There have been times when it really starts to rain up here, and we can’t hear each other at all.

SLIDESHOW

Just off the kitchen is the lanai, which serves as the family’s main gathering spot. The polycarbonate roof lets light through but keeps the rain at bay.

Chris: The layout is pretty simple: We started off by building three small pods, and it was just going to be these 10-by-12 rooms with interconnected decks in an L shape, but it turned out to be too much of a hassle to make connecting decks so we just enclosed the whole thing. We have the kitchen at one end of the L, and then the middle is a connecting glass hallway containing the dining room. The corner is our all-purpose closet/laundry room, and up above that is our master loft, and then there’s another connecting glass area that’s our living room, and that connects to the kids’ pod down at the end. The layout is a little funky, but it all flows together. It’s pretty small—only 600-plus square feet—but if you’re in the kitchen, with canvas walls and screens everywhere, you can’t see the kids in their room but you can hear them. For the most part it’s nice because we’re all together.

SLIDESHOW

Connecting the kitchen and laundry area is the dining area, enclosed with floor-to-ceiling glass panels. “Chris built the whole thing,” says Tanya.

Tanya: The house is very nontraditional for Kauai. It’s funky but fun.

Chris: We had to make it up as we went, so some things don’t work perfectly, but overall I think it turned out pretty well. There was a lot of experimental stuff that we tried because we knew we’d eventually build a bigger house and we thought this was a good testing ground.

Tanya: Doing both the Ag Shed Villa and the “real” house, we found that it’s scary to experiment on a real house. It’s very expensive. It’s fun to experiment on something small, because your investment is not as big. If you mess it up or the siding’s wrong on 100 square feet, it’s a lot easier to fix. It was the first time we could say, “Yeah, try that, let’s see what happens.” We definitely changed some of our bigger house stuff based on the Ag Shed, like incorporating the boulders that are all over the land—we’ll repeat that. We actually unearthed one the size of a minivan that we’re going to use in the bigger house.

We had some good unexpected surprises. Initially, we were going to put glass doors everywhere but we had to get out of our previous house before the new one was finished, so we just put canvas up on one wall—it’s so temperate here that it worked fine until we decided we needed a real wall. Chris put up a half-canvas, half-polycarbonate wall temporarily, and I ended up loving it. It looks really cool, it keeps the rain out, it’s solid, it can flip up if we want it to, and I don’t see us ever changing it. A glass door would have been predictable and followed the pattern of the house, but this worked so much better.

SLIDESHOW

Nearby, the bathroom includes a composting toilet and a Home Depot sink on a pedestal Chris made from chunks of found wood.

Chris: Having a good plan is really important, too. It’s nice to want to do things on the fly and make it up as you go, but planning out certain things is hugely important. When I originally started building, my footings were a little small and we could see the building sinking on one side—it actually dropped down an inch or two. So we went back in and beefed up the footings, and they aren’t going anywhere now. It would have been nice to know ahead of time how big the footings needed to be. That was pretty key.

Tanya: The whole idea for the structure was that this would be a really fun place for the kids for a few years. Chris made a pallet treehouse just outside their bedroom, and we added a slide right out of their bedroom window that leads to it. They’re out there all the time; they use all of that stuff constantly. But timeouts aren’t very effective; you go into their room and they’re gone.

Chris: The kids also like to run into the house and lock the door to the slide behind them—they take turns locking each other out for fun. So it does get a fair amount of use. Tanya: The photographers were saying we reminded them of the Swiss Family Robinson. The day they were here, the kids took three showers, and they were still running around all muddy. And that’s exactly how I wanted them to grow up.

For more images of the project, please view our slideshow