The house came with an overgrown hazelnut tree. I found the hard work of trimming the tree gave several benefits, some unexpected. I include a recipe for cured hazelnut-smoked goose breast.
Monthly Archive: April 2011
Apr
12
Bad-planning: Arranging the upstairs wet room
We’ve been particularly busy with planning the upstairs wet room, involving several design dilemmas. I’m including here some sketches of our solutions to those problems. The bathroom is a very small space indeed. We’ve taken some inspiration from the lilliputian bathrooms we’ve encountered at various hotels in Brussels over the years. The Belgian bath designers can fit a whole bathroom into the tiniest spaces. Ours will be about 3 m2, which is far from the smallest of the Brussels bathrooms. A Belgian would probably think we have plenty of room for a tub too.
Apr
06
Adventures in Brown-Thumb Gardening: Strawberry-Herb Hanging Baskets
I have a brown thumb. This has been well demonstrated to me by numerous crunchy brown houseplants. Any plant under my control generally looks vibrant and happy for a few months, and then suddenly dies. Then I give up on plants. I tend to forget about my ineptness if I haven’t had to care for …
Apr
01
Bad-planning: Small gray bathroom inspiration
We want the bathroom to be neutral colored, but not just all white and boring. Gray appeals particularly: Pretty much any color looks great with gray, including the white of the ceramic ware (unlike, say, cream). I realize that gray is a huge trend right now, and in ten years, it’ll look soooo 2011 (or 2009…). On the other hand, I did like gray in certain contexts long before this fashion started, so why not run with it? Here some examples of gray bathrooms from around the web.
About the author, this blog, and our church.
Together with my spouse, I bought a redundant church in a somewhat randomly chosen spot in Germany in early 2011 and we are working on making it habitable - and fabulous.
This blog is an account of our conversion adventures. I've also developed quite an enthusiasm for church conversions, and church architecture in general.
The building was built by the New Apostolic Church in the 1970s. It has lots of fundamental architectural features in common with gothic chapels (soaring ceiling, single nave, huge pointed windows, layout, etc.), but expressed using a modernist/post-modernist architectural vocabulary.
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