We moved our son into his own room, which was formerly our office. We needed to find a shelving system that worked in our bedroom. I really wanted to go with the Vitsoe 606, but ultimately it came down to price. Although, I love the quote, “I am not rich enough to buy cheaply.” How’s that for the justification to buy just about anything? Ultimately, our friend Ron at the Green Ant hooked us up with a nice walnut cado shelving system. Below is a great article about the 606.

From the Financial Times’ How to Spend It magazine. By Deyan Sudjic.

We all struggle to keep at bay the avalanche of shoes, books, newspapers, old toys, ancient Christmas tree lights and retired kettles that constantly threatens to spill out of every corner of the home to overwhelm us.

Turn your back on the domestic world for a moment, and the armed truce that we have with our possessions turns instantly into an open conflict. Yet there is salvation at hand, an evangelist has come amongst does, dispensing instant calm in the midst of domestic chaos. The Vistoe system brings with it such an air of sanctity that you could be forgiven for thinking that you were buying spiritual enlightenment, rather than a humble shelf.

But Vitsœ is not just any shelf. This shelf is a ticket that gains you admission to a better, gentler world. It’s a product of the legendary German designer Dieter Rams, the main who did all that matt black stuff for Braun, and a designer who has such a famously well-developed sense of visual order that he can’t bear to go on a country walk without picking up every scrap of litter he finds. His Vitsœ shelves are a study in refined less-is-more minimalism. With Vitsœ, he has created the visual badge of a secret society.

Walk into a living room, spot the tell-tale signs of the metal legs, and you know exactly the kind of people you are dealing with. This is the shelving that Richard Rogers has in his own home, for heaven’s sake. This is the kind of minimalism that doesn’t need to raise its voice to deafen you.

It consists of a set of skinny metal shelves, supported by deftly sculpted vertical aluminium extrusions. But Vitsœ offers so many permutations, bolt-on extras and high-performance competence that you simply know that it will suddenly transform your life. It encourages us to believe that we can win the essentially Canute-ishnature of our struggle with stuff.

Of course, Vitsœ does everything it says it will. What it can’t achieve is all of those implied extras. Fill every one of those shelves with neatly ordered rows of discs, video cassettes, books and lever arch files, and they are still there, staring down at you from the wall. You can put all your books on a shelf, but you still haven’t turned into a Zen Buddhist.

VITSOE

Before we moved in to our condo, one of the biggest selling points about was the backyard. It’s maintained by the HOA and no one is ever out there. Basically we just look out onto a park like setting. But each unit on the ground floor maintains about 10 feet of space of the yard. We’ve been focusing on renovations on the inside and slowly doing work on the outside. Two summers ago we built the fence, last year my Dad and I built the deck, and this spring we finally finished the garden. We worked with a local company, Xeriscape Design, on the layout, material choices, plants and they did the installation.

We bought the place from an older lady who had planted the original garden. There were some problems, lots of perennials, lots of water needy plants and a nearly dead apple tree that dropped rotten apples twice a year.

Here are a couple of “during” photos. I bought the concrete pavers from Modern Precast. They were in their scratch and dent pile and all different colors. We did a couple of test layouts to figure out where they should go.

I’m finishing up landscaping our backyard and took a slight detour to work on the deck area. I had always wanted to paint the white wall on one side of the deck that is blinding in direct sunlight, the idea was to paint individual bricks in a graduated color pattern. Of course I thought it’d only take a few hours. Fortunately, I invited my friends Joe and Jessica over for a “small painting project.” 8 hours later we were finished.

Ikea just launched new wall unit system Besta. I’ve always loved MDF Italia wall units, which are crazy expensive. I liked them so much I’ve been trying to learn cabinet making just so I could knock them off. Then along came Ikea. The configuration I got took about six hours to set-up and cost $550. Luckily my friends Joe and Jessica came over to help. After putting their Ikea kitchen together, they’ve become Ikea assembly experts.

Our friend Bryce was diagnosed with cancer last year. Before he started chemo they decided to take a two week family vacation to Hawaii. While they were gone we decided to do a quick make-over on their bedroom and bathroom. Bryce had been working on their bathroom on and off for 3 years and it still wasn’t finished. They were down to 1 bathroom for 6 people!

Two weeks didn’t leave much time to tile a bathroom, install a new window, paint and organize. We called in help and favors from everyone we knew and barely finished before they got home.

When we moved in we were focused on the interior renovations. What was supposed to take 6 months took 3 years+. The inside is basically finished and now we’re focusing on the outside. We have a really nice entryway, but it was completely overgrown and there was this weird pile of rocks alongside the stairs.

My overall idea for the exterior is to consolidate materials into fewer and more cohesive choices. Instead of 10 different types of stones, maybe 3. I already had a nice rusty metal planter that I liked, so I thought I’d bring more rusted steel into the mix. My concept was to visually extend the stairs and add low ground cover. We first planted Irish Moss but that didn’t live and this year we replanted Whooly Thyme.

We’re pretty happy with the results, I love the way the stairs have rusted.

The renovations continue and it’s time to for another project in the side yard (the fence was last summer). I got some ipe deck lumber from my friend Scott, who had it left over from some of design/build company’s jobs. The problem was I had a lot of short boards and there were some 1″ and some 3/4″. What to do? Ah ha, fly my 73 year-old, retired, engineer Dad for a week of manual labor. He’ll be able to figure it out.

We came up with a rough plan, use the 3/4″ boards for the small deck and because we had so many short lengths we hung the joist every 12″. I thought we’d have enough wood for the whole deck but we only had about 50%. Luckily MacBeath Hardwoods in town had a bunch of ipe boards in a pile out back of their warehouse. They had been there a while, so we were able to negotiate on the price, they even milled some down. Ipe turns grey over time so it didn’t match the other lumber I had. I was going to sand the whole deck but once it was installed I really liked the effect of different colors.

The problem with the lumber I had was a lot of the boards were warped and crowned. I did a little research and found this tool called the BoWrench which worked amazingly well. Without it we would’ve been hosed.

As for the hardware we bought screws specifically for ipe decks. Stainless steel, special threads, powder coated heads, but the crazy thing was they were 30 cents apiece! x 600. We had to counter-sink and pre-drill all the holes anyway so probably not worth it. It’s rock hard wood, funny enough the first hole I attempted to drill broke the bit. I had to get some Bosch titanium bits and they worked fine.

Anyway, the deck came out great. We lucked out on buying the exact amount of treated lumber for the structure. We weren’t really measuring the width of the boards to the final side but it worked out perfectly with out needing to rip the end board.