Sunday, June 30, 2013

How is Austin changing? What are Imagine Austin's 8 Priority Programs



Imagine Austin’s 8 Priority Programs

Priority Program 1: Invest In a Compact and Connected Austin
Addressing transportation concerns requires the City of Austin and its partners to look for solutions beyond how we travel and begin dealing with underlying conditions that make it difficult for Austinites to move around the city. To do so, we need to coordinate the physical form of Austin—how it’s organized and how it is built with our transportation. When viewed as a coordinated planning framework, the Growth Concept Map, complete communities concept, Capital Improvement Program, small area and transportation master plans, and incentives for business attraction, retention, and expansion can work together to achieve the goal of a compact, connected Austin that is less car-dependent and more walking, bicycling, and transit-friendly.

Priority Program 2: Sustainably Manage Our Water Resources
Central goals of this priority program are to conserve water resources and improve watershed health, which will require extensive involvement in regional efforts and close coordination across all aspects of Austin’s water resources. Bringing together existing efforts allows us to move forward with integrated strategies that address the range of water resources issues such as supply, quality, conservation, public health, and recreation.

Priority Program 3: Continue to Grow Austin’s Economy by Investing in Our Workforce, Education Systems, Entrepreneurs, and Local Businesses
This priority program seeks to ensure Austin’s continued economic health by developing a widely skilled workforce, recruiting new businesses, retaining and growing existing businesses, and tapping into our entrepreneurial spirit. In particular, this priority program seeks to increase job opportunities for Austin residents and increase small businesses and entrepreneurship.

Priority Program 4: Use Green Infrastructure to Protect Environmentally Sensitive Areas and Integrate Nature Into the City
A primary goal of this priority program is to manage Austin’s urban and natural ecosystems in a coordinated and sustainable manner in part by increasing protection of environmentally sensitive land, improving tree cover in every neighborhood,
improving health of the watershed, increasing access to parks, and linking these resources throughout the city. This program seeks to improve environmental, recreational, and transportation functions and improve the connection between people and the environment.

Priority Program 5: Grow and Invest in Austin’s Creative Economy
Growing and investing in Austin’s creative culture is a cornerstone of the city’s identity, as well as of its economy. The focus is to encourage and support Austin’s live music, festivals, theater, film, digital media, and new creative art forms. In order to support the creative industry, this priority program will include educational and economic programs as well as programs that provide affordable transportation, work space, housing, and healthcare.

Priority Program 6: Develop and Maintain Household Affordability Throughout Austin
Rising housing and related costs are major issues facing Austinites. A comprehensive approach is needed to define and provide household affordability for Austinites. In order to maintain and increase household affordability, this priority program will take into consideration not only household costs such as mortgage, rent, and utilities but also transportation and access to daily and weekly needs as essential and inter-related components of household affordability.

Priority Program 7: Create a Healthy Austin
A Healthy Austin Program will reduce chronic and diet-related diseases and risk factors by coordinating access to community and health services, local and healthy food, physical activity, and tobacco-free living. This priority program seeks to create places where people can easily walk, bike, play, and find nearby healthy food options and healthcare.

Priority Program 8: Revise Austin’s Development Regulations and Processes to Promote a
Compact and Connected City
Austin’s City Charter requires that land development regulations be consistent with the comprehensive plan to promote a compact and connected city that depends less on the car and more on walking, bicycling, and transit to get to our daily needs. Significant revisions to existing regulations will be necessary to fully implement the other priority programs described above. Achieving these goals will require a comprehensive review and revision of the Land Development Code, associated technical and criteria manuals, and administrative procedures.


Want to find our more about how Austin is changing? Contact Austin home group:
www.austinhomegroup.com

Source Austin Board of Realtors 



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Wednesday, February 27, 2013

8 Low-Cost Ways to Personalize a Front Entrance


It's always tricky to prioritize decorating dollars, and I tend to funnel most of mine to interior improvements: furniture, fabric, tchotchkes. But lately I've been thinking that the outside of the house — and especially my front entry — deserves its share of the love. The entry may be the first impression of a home, and my entry is best described as mousy.

Fortunately, jazzing up a front entrance doesn't have to cost a fortune. Try these eight strategies to create a showstopper entryway without blowing your budget. Got another trick to add? We'd love to hear the details in the Comments!
1. Create a mini room.Here a bench with cheery outdoor pillows, a hanging paper lantern and a framed chalkboard combine to turn a plain entrance into a sitting space all its own — all without breaking the bank. Mix and match furniture to suit your home's architecture and style.
modern entry by Wind and Willow Home
by Wind and Willow Home
by Wind and Willow Home
2. Spell out a welcome. A stencil, a can of spray paint and presto! A plain concrete stoop turns into a hospitable howdy. If you can't or don't want to paint directly on the surface, try stenciling a plain cotton or sisal doormat instead.
3. Invest in showstopping hardware. Swap out bland doorknobs and knockers for instant pizzazz on the cheap. You can search flea markets and architectural salvage stores for one-of-a-kind vintage models, but even home centers carry eye-catching styles these days. Choose a knocker that offers a glimpse into your personality and interior style, whether it's an equestrian motif for horse lovers or a nautical theme for a house on the coast.
4. Pile up plantings.Plants are one of the easiest and most affordable ways to give your entrance a polished look, and they can enhance any effect you're going for. Mass tumbles of old-fashioned blooms in weathered tin or tole tubs for a cottage; stick with variegated greens and sleek containers in a modern setting. For a traditional house, create a symmetrical grouping of palms, ficus or roses in ceramic or terra-cotta planters.
5. Light the way. Why settle for a boring outdoor light fixture when you can hang a piece of eye candy? Outdoor chandeliers are delightfully unexpected. If you want to use it for illumination, look for a model that's designed for outdoor use, but if you just want the decorative effect, you can mount an indoor fixture without wiring it.
traditional entry by Garden Studio
by Garden Studio
by Garden Studio
6. Paint the door an unexpected color. It sounds obvious, and yet so many of us take the easy way out and go with brown, black or white. If the task of choosing a bolder hue throws you for a loop, try this trick: Snap a photo of your house, then take it to the paint store so you can see how different colors work with your exterior.

Choose a shade that contrasts strongly with the primary paint color: bright pink paired with pale gray siding, turquoise against rusty red brick, plum on khaki stucco. Lipstick red in a field of crisp white is a classic, but branch out and try other colors — perhaps kelly green or Chinese yellow.

Get guidance on what color to paint your front door
7. Decorate the doorway surround. Set off your front door and give it greater presence by adding a decorative frame. If the architecture will accommodate such a treatment, line it with decorative tiles or a mosaic. If not, you can achieve a similar effect with paint.
eclectic exterior by Jeffrey Gordon Smith Landscape Architecture
by Jeffrey Gordon Smith Landscape Architecture
by Jeffrey Gordon Smith Landscape Architecture
8. Have fun with house numbers. Forget hardware-store numbers on the mailbox. Make yours pop: fun colors, funky fonts, creative placement. Just be sure that you don't sacrifice clear visibility and readability for the sake of visual interest.

Source Houzz By Lisa Frederick
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Monday, February 25, 2013

Save Money - Reuse Projects


We put out the call for you to share your creative salvage ideas, and you answered with new uses for wine barrels, church pews, old windows, shutters, shipping containers, bowling alleys and dilapidated barns. Ever resourceful, you've scoured the landfill drop-off areas, reused what could have been refuse in your remodeling jobs, gone Dumpster diving and asked neighbors for those old bricks they had lying around. Thank you to everyone for sharing your stories. Be sure to check out the original salvage Houzz call to see all of the projects and ideas; we have room to share only a portion of them here.
SALVAGE BY HOUZZERS
When putting together this kitchen, Jutta Rikola customized cabinetry from pieces found in a kitchen that was about to be demolished, and from other pieces found in a barn. A few energizing coats of bold paint and some snazzy hardware breathed new life into the cabinets in their new home. You'll hardly recognize them when you see the before shots.
SALVAGE BY HOUZZERS
Houzz pro Jo White added big curb appeal with something she found at the county dump. She transformed a discarded iron daybed into beautiful French-inspired handrails around her cottage door.
David Lipchik creates boxes for succulents that hang vertically on the wall, like art, from salvaged wood. Here's his tutorial.
Art supplies don't come cheap; thus artists are some of the most clever scavengers around. Artist Terry Widner took an old, no-longer-used laminated computer desk and made 4-foot art panels out of its MDF core. The pieces became interesting canvases for artwork.
Theaters have provided wonderful pieces for reuse for clever Houzzers. Houzz user mirandahastings repurposed doors from a 1930s movie theater. She hung them on barn door hardware, and they now cover the pantry.
Pro Doyle Hudson made these large pendant lights from speakers that once sat atop the snack bar at a Midwestern drive-in movie theater.
SALVAGE BY HOUZZERS
Houzz user lynnsmith57 scooped up an old theater "Coming Attractions" display for $5 at an auction and turned it into a one-of-a-kind mirror.
When it comes to reusing wood, knowing its history automatically transforms the items into conversation pieces. Houzzer summilux scooped up purpleheart planks from dismantled railroad cars and crafted these shelves. The wood "was dimensionally stable and required no planing and only a little sanding. It lives on, among other things, on my wife's desktop, various bookcases, a trestle table and cabinet shelving," he says.
Summilux offers a great tip: Repurpose stained glass and other art glass pieces in places where insulation is not an issue, such as an interior door.
SALVAGE BY HOUZZERS
Sometimes the history comes from the site where your home stands. Houzz user Holly and her husband had to take down a poorly constructed addition at their 1851 stone farmhouse. They were able to salvage old beams full of character from the old addition and use them in the kitchen as columns.
SALVAGE BY HOUZZERS
Holly's husband also salvaged boards from the shoddily built addition and made a beautiful farm table out of them.
SALVAGE BY HOUZZERS
Houzz user lindagreg created a charming hay barn from an old shipping container. (This popular trend has been dubbed "cargotecture.")

"We added windows with barn wood shutters, old horseshoes for decoration on shutters, made a fake roof out of old rusty tin and painted it red!" she says.
Foxhuntmom repurposed an entire building, transforming a 1950s gas station into her home. When she bought her land near Fayetteville, Arkansas, the station had already been decommissioned.
eclectic living room SALVAGE BY HOUZZERS
"We're located in the beautiful Ozarks, and repurposing here is a way of life," foxhuntmom says. "My ceilings are old weathered wrinkle tin, and my cabinets are heart pine salvaged from a Victorian demolition. The barn and bunkhouse above are framed with telephone poles. The horse post and rail fencing is oak from salvaged barns."
Interior designer Gina Fitzsimmons turned a Dumpster dive into a patinated shutter panels. "They were very old and made with wooden pegs holding them together," she says. Now they flank framed antique seagull bookplates. "The wall was a stunner by the time we got it all put together!" she says.

Check out more ways to reuse shutters
Pine Street Carpenters & The Kitchen Studio kept the aged feeling in this former ice cellar, originally built in 1845. They fashioned the stairs and band board from another home that was being remodeled nearby.
Houzz user ddelora scooped up an old grammaphone at a yard sale for $5. Her husband connected an old broom handle and a galvanized elbow, she painted it, and it was transformed into a giant flower sculpture for her yard.
SALVAGE BY HOUZZERS
When it comes to gathering and reusing bricks, the less matchy-matchy they are, the better. Houzz user meddler saved bricks from an old chimney while also collecting bricks with writing on one side and half bricks that were old and an interestesting color.

"In old neighborhoods people always seem to have a few bricks that they would like to get rid of and will just give them to you," meddler says. "We laid our entire patio using all these bricks in a random laying. The bricks you collect need to be about the same thickness. At the end we filed the spaces between the bricks with polymeric sand and watered in. It is a beautiful and very unique brick patio." Yes it is, meddler!
SALVAGE BY HOUZZERS
When G3 Studios Decorative Painting needed extra space for animals, it turned to an extra heated shed on the property. The problem was, there was only a shoestring budget for renovation.

"We found some barns in the area which had collapsed, and the owners gave us permission to use what we needed," says one of the team members. "We found barn wood, tin panels, farm equipment parts, doors and windows. We also scoured roadsides and garage sales, where we found more doors and windows. We used pallets and broken-down outdoor decor, which we repurposed. If it was free, we found a way to use it. We even found insulation left over from my jobsites."

After completing the work the G3 group loved the building so much, they joined the dogs and now use it as office space and a painting studio.
Trixylarue dressed her guest bath in head-to-toe salvaged pieces. "We took flooring out of a house that was built in 1881. After hauling it home, taking the nails out, stripping it twice, putting poly on it, it became the countertop and flooring," she says.

She added her grandmother's old sheet music to the thin plywood vanity doors, as well as framing some of it and hanging it on the walls.
"The wall above the vanity is beadboard from a lakeside cottage, with the original paint and stain," trixylarue says.
SALVAGE BY HOUZZERS
In this kitchen by The Bohemian Kitchen of Gozan Interiors, an old stove's cast iron door has found a new use over the stove as a backsplash accent. "The rusty old door was cleaned and oiled and surrounded by Artistic Tile and Daltile's rusty iron border," says the designer.
SALVAGE BY HOUZZERS
JB Architects designed this striking accent wall, which is made up of old winery racks.
HOUZZER Salvage Projects
Houzzers have given pieces of bygone bridges new lives too. JB Architects reused an old timber bridge in new cladding and frames.
Wine Country Craftsmanloves to reuse Napa wine barrel rings in a unique way. One way is to turn the rings into interesting light fixtures, like this industrial pendant.
When Houzz user blairbec moved into a condo, she wasn't wild about the dining room light fixture and couldn't find one she liked, so she made her own. She repurposed the living room fixture's frame (she'd replaced it with a ceiling fan), added a $7 bamboo table runner and a parasol she was given as a gift while living in China. She repainted the parasol's tip black and added a tassel and beads.
HOUZZER Salvage Projects
Houzz user Carlo M. turned sturdy teak from a bridge in Indonesia into a beautiful outdoor table and benches.
"Upon finishing our front bath and shower remodel, I got an estimate for a glass shower wall that exceeded the entire cost of the remodel," says Bradley Ross. Instead of shelling out for the expensive glass, he found an old French pocket door, painted and sealed it multiple times and added tempered shatterproof glass. "To finish the look and protect the glass from water spots, we placed a poly brocade curtain behind the door," he says. The total costs were just a fraction of the cost of a glass enclosure, and now the shower has a unique architectural element.
SALVAGE BY HOUZZERS
"I salvaged all of the double-hung windows from our original porch before we put on an addition and repurposed them into dining room mirrors by brushing a coat of metallic gold paint over the original, aged base paint and replacing the glass with mirrors," says Lorre Jackson of Casart Coverings. By the way, Jackson says she has more of these windows than she has time to list on Craigslist, so let her know if you're interested in scooping any of them up.
SALVAGE BY HOUZZERS
When Rollin Fox of Sleeping Grape Wine Cellars was able to acquire 60 white ash church pews, he thought he'd died and gone to heaven. "We estimated them to be over 85 years old; the quality of the wood in them would be difficult to equal today," he says. "They are in 12-foot sections, perfectly clear, and have no flaws — a woodworker's dream!"
Fox milled the pews and used them in a series of wine cellars playfully dubbed "Shrines for Wine." "So far we have built three wine cellars using the milled pews. Some of the larger portions of the Gothic arch doors are from newly acquired ash, but the majority of the pieces are from the retired pews," he says.
Speaking of churches, Hull Historical used salvaged materials from a Roman Catholic church in this new Gothic revival home, creating new millwork to match the salvaged materials.
SALVAGE BY HOUZZERS
Houzz user Lea Kawabe laid her eyes on these old crates and saw a dining room table.
SALVAGE BY HOUZZERS
Source Houzz By Becky Harris
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