Month: June 2009

In Charlottesville, reggae music typically seems like more of a passing fancy than a fundamental part of local music—an indicator of an uptick in Bob Marley blunt posters in UVA dorm rooms, perhaps, or a double-dub dare for some adventurous booking agent. Heck, it was a phase for local Lem Oppenheimer, a co-founder of the Easy Star record label and manager of the Easy Star All-Stars. Oppenheimer simply found a way to make the phase last.

Getting better all the time: The Easy Star All-Stars unveil Easy Star’s Lonely Hearts Dub Band at Is on June 5.

After he graduated from Oberlin College, Oppenheimer and a few New York friends pooled the bulk of their savings—roughly $5,000 per person—and started Easy Star in the mid-’90s. In 1997, Oppenheimer and his future wife moved to Charlottesville and saw just what a “phase” reggae could be.

“We did Reggae Mondays at the Blue Moon Diner from 1999 to 2001 or 2002,” said Oppenheimer in a recent interview. “I would go DJ, and we had Jamaican specials. It was a great scene, but it wasn’t particularly like there was a live music element, because there wasn’t anyone to play here.” Acts like The Greg Ward Project and Stable Roots reliably visited from Harrisonburg, and DJ Scotty B threw a few great reggae dance parties, but the idea of anyone making a living from dub or dancehall music seemed about as likely as a reggae band recording a new Dark Side of the Moon.

For those of you familiar with the Easy Star All-Stars, however, you know that this is precisely what the band managed on Dub Side of the Moon—a song-by-song remake of the classic Pink Floyd album. (Yes, it syncs up with The Wizard of Oz.) “Dub Side of the Moon sells enough consistently, and gave us a real base of income coming in, that we could count on,” explained Oppenheimer. “Then Radiodread”—the All-Stars’ take on Radiohead’s OK Computer—“added into that. It doesn’t sell as well as Dub Side but, combined, we [can] expect 300 records sold a week in the U.S.”

And each new effort from Easy Star All-Stars means another peak in Charlottesville’s reggae phase. The group’s latest tour, in support of the Billboard Chart-cracking Easy Star’s Lonely Hearts Dub Band (guess who, Billy Shears?), brings the group back to town for a gig at Is on June 5 ($15, 9pm). It’s a spot the group knows well: Easy Star All-Stars played its first gig in the same space when it was the Starr Hill Music Hall in 2003.

“As someone who’s been to a lot of shows there, I know I have a personal bias,” laughed Oppenheimer. “But that [show] was just one of those spine-tingling ones. They would go into a Pink Floyd song, and all of a sudden they’d stop singing and the whole audience would be singing. It was a good one.” You can expect a good deal of tracks from the Lonely Hearts Dub album, like the entrancing “Within You, Without You,” as well as some Dub Side tracks and the obligatory “Karma Police” cover from Radiodread.

On a separate track, props to Is booking agent Jeyon Falsini for once more giving a room to a sound we don’t hear too often in town. Falsini’s efforts at Is make the venue a spot to check out in the next month, when he brings back Brooklyn art-cowpoke Andy Friedman on June 12, lends a stage to Scottsville’s The Honey Dewdrops on June 18 for the release of the group’s first record, If the Sun Will Shine, and outdoes himself with sets by Sarah White, The Invisible Hand and The Extraordinaires on June 20. Seems like a good phase for Falsini and Is.

Fred Oesch and Debbie Davis in the 1,200-square-foot, octagonal house he designed for her in North Garden. Davis and her sister laid the Buckingham slate floor; her Murphy bed folds out of the wall behind the easy chair.

It’s an overcast day, and inside a small clearing on Debbie Davis’ 26-acre property, the sunlight is dim. Muted by clouds, it lights everything evenly: the octagonal house, the geodesic greenhouse, and the shed with 15 solar panels arranged on the roof. In the house, Davis checks a digital readout connected to her solar inverter. “Even today I’ve made a little bit of electricity,” she says.

READ MORE • To tie, or not to tie? • Building with bales

Davis’ North Garden house is completely off the grid—in other words, it’s not connected to public utility lines. She makes all her own power with the solar array and, as a backup, a propane generator. “My goal is to not have it come on,” she says. By being thoughtful about how and when she uses electricity (for example, not doing laundry on a cloudy day), she’s able to reach that goal on all but a handful of days throughout the year. “When the sun is shining and I’m home, I’ll have everything plugged in,” she says.

For architect Fred Oesch, the Davis house represents the first off-the-grid project in his portfolio (he’s owned Oesch Environmental Design for 10 years and has been involved in alternative building since the ’70s). But energy efficiency and alternative heating and cooling are common threads throughout his work. And it’s typical of his clients that, like Davis, they’re finely tuned in to how their houses’ systems function.

Hot and cool

Take for example a Nellysford couple, Mark and Lisa (they asked that we not use their last names), who live in a U-shaped passive-solar home that Oesch designed in 2000 to take advantage of free heating and daylighting provided by the sun. In the winter, light enters the large windows on the south wall and, because of the sun’s low angle and the house’s narrow 16-foot width, heats the entire concrete floor.

Davis’ geodesic greenhouse, built from a kit, allows her to grow food and herbs year-round; outside, she tends more growing beds and eliminates lawn space altogether.

Mark and Lisa have learned that they hardly ever need to fire up their radiant heat system, relying instead on the sun-warmed floor and a small woodstove to keep them comfy. Toasty feet and lots of daylight have a big psychological impact, Mark says. “You can handle it being a little bit cooler….A warm floor, with the air temperature at 65, can be really really pleasant—much better than a cold floor and 70 degrees.”

Efficient winter heating is wonderful, but as Oesch and other experts will tell you, central Virginia has more days when homes need to be cooled per year than warmed. Insulation is important, along with overhangs to shade south-facing windows, but in almost all his designs, Oesch also incorporates what he calls a thermal chimney—an open space extending from first floor to roof, drawing warm air up and out in the summer. In Mark and Lisa’s case, a second-floor mezzanine and skylights create the thermal chimney. In all seasons, their energy costs are minimal—averaging $40-45 per month. “Our accountant couldn’t believe it,” says Lisa. “She thought we’d made a mistake in our utility bill.”

In Davis’ house, built by Bruce Guss, the main living space is essentially one room, about as tall (25 feet) as it is wide; when she opens the skylights in the reciprocal beam roof, the entire space becomes the “chimney” and the house quickly cools. “I don’t have A/C,” she says. “It works really well.”

Pulling the threads together

As with many of Oesch’s projects, both houses featured here have long lists of sustainable materials and aspects. Both use local lumber, a timber-frame structure with partial straw-bale infill, and on-demand hot water heaters. Mark and Lisa’s place includes SIP panels and an earth-sheltered back wall that helps modulate temperature; Davis’ features a Buckingham slate floor and a vegetated roof covered in sedum plants from a local nursery. “I take a very holistic approach to try to arrive at an optimum solution,” Oesch says. “Most of the time rather than going with one exclusive system or material throughout the whole building, it makes sense to use every material or system to its best advantage in any given location within the building.”

The octagonal house, which features a vegetated roof, is compact by design. “I wouldn’t want a big house,” says Davis, whose goals ran more toward autonomy and efficiency.

These houses are, in a sense, like machines well-tuned to their environments, but they are integrated by an earthy, imaginative feel. When you learn that straw bale on a north wall has great insulation properties, you appreciate its organic, sculptural look that much more. When you know that window trim came from on-site trees that had to be cut anyway for construction, it takes on a deeper appeal. And living with an awareness of the sun—whether a house’s solar design is passive or active—has its own satisfaction.

For Oesch and his clients, the holistic approach extends outside to encompass house sites, too. Davis, a permaculturist and herbalist, conceives of the entire clearing in which her house sits as a garden site. “I do not want to own a lawnmower,” she says. “Everything will be wood chip paths or garden beds.” She’s well on her way, with perennial beds, young fruit trees, three beehives and a series of small depressions that catch and hold rainwater.
 
Inside her greenhouse is a moist, colorful world where familiar vegetables (chard, basil) grow alongside more exotic foods and flowers (quinoa, brugmansia). “I consider this part of my home,” she says. A self-described “plant person,” she relishes the chance to create a homestead where she can grow much of her own food and explore the interrelationships between plants, weather, animals and insects.

Mark and Lisa’s property has a different feel—quite steep, thickly wooded, and dotted with ornamental plantings. They value their trees for looks as well as shading; they and Oesch shifted the house site from its original location both to spare an unusually large locust tree and to align it with an outcropping of granite boulders that make a focal point. Those kinds of decisions are part of Oesch’s goal of “seamlessly integrating building and site.”

Small footprints

Ultimately, as with any discussion of green architecture, the story of these two houses extends to the wider world and how it’s impacted by individual choices. Oesch and his clients share a passion for living lightly.

Locally milled poplar forms the main support posts in Davis’ house, built by Bruce Guss. “Having a very small house, you have to be more organized,” she says.

Lisa says, “I’ve worked in the environmental field my whole life and so these are really my values—to try to do the right thing by the environment in every aspect of living.” She and Mark, along with Oesch, weighed dozens of tradeoffs: energy for transporting materials versus their energy-efficiency once installed; perfect solar orientation versus optimum aesthetics. They even considered that, as Mark says, “Ultimately the house will be dismantled. I don’t know when; I hope it lasts a long time. But when it is, how recyclable is it going to be?”

In Davis’ case “the right thing” meant a conscious choice not to tap into the energy grid. “Since I didn’t have powerlines [supplying the property], I decided I didn’t want them,” she says. Rather than thinking of her solar system as a smart investment just for herself—she probably won’t recoup the $35,000 cost in her lifetime—she considers it a buy-in to a technology that will help others in the future. “Vote with your dollars,” she says simply.
Even the size of Davis’ house (1,200 square feet) represents a green choice. It’s enough space for her, with little or no excess. “I wanted everything really compact,” she says. When she first approached Oesch, she made a sketch of a rectangular, one-room house with a Murphy bed. (“Why do you need a room for a bed?” she asks.) Oesch went from there and, she says, “made [the house] really beautiful. People walk in and go ‘Aaahhhh…’”

Indeed, though Davis eschews the dedicated bedroom and other luxuries, her home is eminently comfortable. And, she says, “It’s not solar survival camp.” She has a laptop, a dryer and a dishwasher, and she feels empowered rather than deprived by her compact home. “I wouldn’t want a big house; I’d rather weed the garden than clean the house.”

For his part, Oesch is an ardent proponent of the idea that green architecture is cost-effective and adaptable to many different tastes. “It’s my contention that you can incorporate all of these basic principles into virtually any style. I don’t have an ego stamp I put on my projects.”

It’s easy to talk about getting off the grid, but how many of us would actually do it? As Fred Oesch’s first residential client who wanted to live completely disconnected from utility systems, Debbie Davis is unusually committed to her green goals. “In general principle, she wanted to be off the grid,” says Oesch. “That was an objective right up front. I salute her for that.”

Davis’ 15 solar panels provide almost all the power she needs. She has a backup propane generator, of which she says “My goal is not to have it come on.”

For folks who want to make their own electricity with photovoltaic panels, the decision about whether to tie into the public grid is a key one. Making power and then storing it in a battery bank, as Davis does, means a much larger investment (batteries are roughly a third of the total cost), and the manufacturing of the batteries has an impact on the environment. “Batteries are the weak link in the current technology,” says Oesch. On the other hand, if homeowners opt to tie into the grid, they get to sell excess power back to the utility company—but they’re vulnerable to blackouts along with the rest of us. For that reason, says Oesch, “I usually recommend a small battery backup system.”

For Davis, the choice to go off the grid is a way of expressing her hope that more people will be able to afford the technology in the future. The $35,000 cost of her system means she’s truly put her money where her mouth is, but it’s also a way to achieve autonomy. “It’s a good feeling. If there’s a bad snowstorm or thunderstorm, I’m all cosy and my house will be warm,” she says. Spending half an hour, once a month, adding water to her 16 batteries is the only chore associated with maintaining the system.

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Davis would like to go further, eventually adding a solar hot-water system. “It will cut back on my propane [use],” she says. “That will be the next step.”

In today’s buyers’ market, you hear stories of $500,000 homes selling for as little as $250,000—a buyer’s jackpot by any standard. Price reductions are everywhere—so how can a savvy homebuyer make the most of them?

Searching for discounted properties is easy enough. Log on to realcentralva.com for an up-to-date list of price-reduced or foreclosure properties. The site’s database allows you to search by the amount of time a property has lingered on the market or its percentage decrease in price.

The downside to this approach is that every other buyer from Culpeper to Crozet has access to the same information—everyone is looking for a “distressed” situation right now (real estate parlance for short sales or foreclosure properties)—so it’s unlikely you’ll get the drop on a deeply discounted property before anyone else.

Which is why, for the best deals, sometimes it pays to skip the listings all together and do a little investigating on your own. Routinely walking around neighborhoods that interest you is a great way to get a feel for what’s happening there. How can you tell a property is about to be reduced before it’s actually listed as such? There are a few telltale signs.

Number one, the house sits empty with a For Sale sign out front. This means the owner is likely straddled with two monthly payments—one for the house she’s trying to sell, and the other she currently lives in, a predicament no savvy investor wants to be in.

Number two, the house has been on the market for more than two months. Most real estate transactions occur within the first eight weeks of being listed. After the second month, the clock starts ticking. Meaning, if the seller hasn’t already dropped the price, you can bet she’s at least mulling it over. Now is the time to make her an offer.
 
But what to offer? The biggest mistake deal-crazed buyers make is thinking they’re in a position to low-ball the seller by offering 40 to 50 percent less than the purchase price. Most sellers can’t afford to let a property go for a pittance and, in fact, may be offended at the suggestion and decide not to work with you at all.

As a good rule of thumb, offering 20 to 30 percent less than the asking price is a good place to start the negotiations.

If you do want to make a low-ball offer: First find out if the seller is delinquent on her property taxes, a signal that she’s indeed over her head. This information is open to the public and easily attainable at the county assessor’s office. It’s not the most endearing way to buy a house, but sometimes that’s what it takes to get the best deals.—Jessie Knadler

Moving day

One of the more ridiculous projects we’ve ever done at our house: moving an old wooden shed to a new spot, 30 feet or so uphill. Why? you ask. Well, we were supposed to tear it down altogether for insurance reasons—its stone foundation was beyond precarious—but we liked the building, knew we’d make use of it, and convinced the powers that be to let us rebuild instead of demolishing. While we were at it, we figured we’d move the shed to the edge of the yard to make our outdoor space more open.

A crude system of rollers allowed us to winch the building uphill. Sort of.

First step: Remove rotting floorboards and shore up the bottom of the walls with a band of wide planks and diagonal braces in the corners. Next: Attach a heavy chain and comealong to the frame of the shed and, at the other end, a large tree. We then used hydraulic and floor jacks to lift the shed off its foundation and insert a system of rollers (really just lengths of iron pipe, with planks to roll on).

There then ensued many, many hours of winching the shed a few inches at a time and making endless adjustments to compensate for the slope of the yard and the general crookedness of the structure—both of which meant the shed kept falling off its rollers. In truth, this was less a D.I.Y. project than a H.Y.D.D.I. (Help Your Dad Do It) project, and we’re glad no one lost a finger. Now, where the shed used to be, we’re growing tomatoes.—Spackled Egg

Measure for measure

Tape measure: The simplest, most idiot-proof tool in the universe, right? Well, yes and no. Yes, because any schmoe can take a measurement for a couch or a rug. No, because if your numbers have to be at all precise, a little quality makes a big difference in a seemingly very basic tool.

Read product descriptions for tape measures online, and you’ll be amazed by the language: The tape is actually a “blade,” it has something called “standout” based on “cross curve technology,” and its “recoil” properties must be considered. The hook, lock and case are all vitally important too. Clearly, an inferior tape measure will not do.

Indeed, “standout”—the amount of blade that will stick straight out from the case before flopping over—can be crucial if you are working alone and measuring, say, horizontally along a wall. And when you’re locking, unlocking and recoiling that blade dozens of times in a day, you’ll certainly appreciate a better-made tool. So it makes sense to pay a little more, if you’ll be taking some serious measurements. For a tape that will really measure up, $15-20 isn’t too much to spend.—Erika Howsare

 

Your name here

This clay pot project might look simple (and it is!), but it’s so much more than that. Think kitschy organizational tool (Crayons? Fruit? Pens?). Think thoughtful gift made more special with a personalized note written directly on it. In fact, think about it a little longer, and you can probably come up with some brilliant uses of your own.
 
Materials: Clay flower pot, chalkboard paint (found at any craft store)
 
Tools: Foam brush, piece of newspaper for surface protection
 
1. Put pot upright on newspaper.
2. Apply one coat of chalkboard paint using foam brush.
3. Wait an hour.
4. Apply another coat of chalkboard paint using foam brush.
5. Wait another hour and apply a third coat (this is optional depending on your preference and painting skills).—Caite White

Anita Gupta

Lots of people look for a big kitchen when they’re house-shopping—sometimes more because of looks than function. Not so with Anita Gupta. The enormous granite-topped island in her kitchen is an essential feature, because she runs a business making custom cakes for weddings and birthdays. “This was the thing I needed the most,” she explains: “the island to roll out huge fondant sheets for 20-inch cakes.”

She got what she needed a year and a half ago, when she, her husband and their young kids (two at the time; now three) moved into this brand-new house off Cherry Avenue. They’d been living in a “little tiny condo,” she says, where she’d started Maliha Creations and learned the ropes of maintaining a state-inspected kitchen at home. Here, the spaciousness was a relief. She has a separate fridge for the cakes, a double oven, and “a huge stash of pans in the basement.”

One might think that keeping the kitchen up to health-department standards would be tough with a young family, but Gupta says that’s not so. “It’s actually easier because we live here, so we’re obviously going to keep it clean. I want my family to be healthy; I would do this anyway.”

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“I do everything at night when [the kids] are in bed. They’re curious, and my oldest is really into it. She wants to open a bakery when she grows up. She’s almost 6.

“I won’t take more than three [orders in a week]. With wedding cakes, for a Saturday wedding, I start on a Wednesday night when I bake the cakes. On Thursday I frost and fill. They sit overnight in the fridge and get nice and hard. Then Friday I decorate. Saturday I do delivery. My husband is a humongous help. We tag team on the deliveries.

“I use that little tiny mixer—surprise, surprise! I do batches. Once they’re baked and cooled, I put the whole thing in the fridge and the whole space has to be cleaned. I go through a lot of cleaning stuff.

“[Thursday] I bring the cakes inside and start with a huge ball of fondant. This half of the island will be covered with cornstarch so it doesn’t stick. I just use a regular rolling pin. I lift that huge sheet of fondant onto the cake; I have my tools out and ready. These are the smoothers. This [pizza cutter] cuts off the excess. These dowels go in every tier for support. The biggest challenge is to make sure they’re structurally sound. And there’s quite a bit of math. I have recipes scaled for certain size cake pans—when I have to go up or down, or feed a certain number of guests, there’s a lot of math.

“After it’s all put together, I start the decorating. Some are airbrushed. My husband built a hood for me outside. The first time I airbrushed a cake here, it was outside without a hood and the door was cracked. The next morning, we noticed our socks were pink. The counters were pink. I had to get the carpets cleaned. The whole downstairs was pink.

“If it’s a really difficult design, knowing it gets delivered Saturday morning, sometimes Friday night can be stressful. But that’s also the part I enjoy the most. Now that I’ve done it so many times, I can say ‘This is what I need to do.’ The first time I did a Rotunda cake it was hard, but I just did another one last week and it was much easier.

“[To transport cakes] you just crank up the A/C and drive really slow. That’s always the most stressful—if a dowel shifts on the bottom, that could be the end. It hasn’t happened yet [knocks on wood]. It’s going to happen. It’s happened to every cake person I know; once it happens it’s almost a relief.

“This is my one-woman factory. Since I do everything after [the kids are] in bed, dinner is done. It does take some planning. It’s almost two separate kitchens. I do tell people if they want to have children around keep [the cake] away, because they can’t help themselves [from touching the cake]. Adults too—‘Is it real?’”