Renovation Chronicle: Remaking Our Queens Co-op
19.09.11
I’m not handy. One time, I tried to put in a paper towel holder—it wound up listing on an unsightly angle. A small shelf that I had installed in our apartment bathroom, after hanging perilously for months, just fell off. Recently, I somehow broke a night light…taking it out of the socket.
This is all to say that I’m not one of these do-it-yourselfers who could show Bob Vila a trick or two. When my wife and I recently bought a co-op apartment in Forest Hills, Queens, I knew I’d need an architect. I will similarly rely on a contractor, preferably one whose fee wouldn’t require raising the national debt limit. This place, it needs A LOT of work.
Knowing my un-handy chromosome, our first go-round at purchasing a home didn’t involve any renovations. Our row house in Baltimore had been gut renovated before we bought it. And yet, our first night there was still harried, because I, um, couldn’t turn on the boiler’s pilot light. That purchase was about at the peak of the real estate bubble, in 2006. Leaving for New York City two years later, we sold the place, for a loss.
Source: Wall Street Journal (blog)
'God helped me in everything'
08.10.11
ILDERTON - Ida Regio holds her pencil with perfectly manicured finger nails, painted in the colour of Tuscan Sun, as she delicately etches a beautiful rose.
Every autumn, the 91-year-old is pained the flowers in her stylish gardens are dying. So in her sketches, she immortalizes them.
In the gallery in her Ilderton home, opened last year, Regio's stunning flowers are painted in vibrant hues - golden yellow, lush green, deep reds. They pose for all now, not to be forgotten. They join more than 100 other artworks, including the Bluenose II, a ballerina, swans, other animals and her beloved Pope.
The portrait of Blessed John Paul II is her favourite. Regio loved his humanity.
"That one I did very fast. I was with him. My heart was there and my hands were just going. That one was really my heart," Regio says, as she sits beside her portrait of the pope, who was beatified last May.
Since a fall a couple of years ago, Regio cannot stand at her easel to create the rich, realistic oil paintings, so she sits in her favourite chair, where she also sleeps each night, and sketches. She plans to paint again.
Source: London Free Press