Search results for "Activity improves" in Home Design Ideas

G3 provided a variety of services for the conversion of these mid-19th century landmarked loft warehouses to luxury condominiums. Our participation commenced as a third-party observer for the mezzanine lender, who assumed control of the project when the original developer went bankrupt.
Working both as architect and redevelopment manager, we led the following activities:
• Forensic analysis of construction defects
• Code analysis for egress and fire safety
• Comprehensive façade renovation, including NYC Local Law 11 filing and Landmarks approval
• Development of new metal-and glass exterior façade enclosure for two penthouse levels
• Redesign of residential units to improve marketability and to meet code
• Redesign of building lobby to improve
marketability

G3 provided a variety of services for the conversion of these mid-19th century landmarked loft warehouses to luxury condominiums. Our participation commenced as a third-party observer for the mezzanine lender, who assumed control of the project when the original developer went bankrupt.
Working both as architect and redevelopment manager, we led the following activities:
• Forensic analysis of construction defects
• Code analysis for egress and fire safety
• Comprehensive façade renovation, including NYC Local Law 11 filing and Landmarks approval
• Development of new metal-and glass exterior façade enclosure for two penthouse levels
• Redesign of residential units to improve marketability and to meet code
• Redesign of building lobby to improve
marketability

The original kitchen was meant to accommodate staff only; revise room layout to accommodate the new owner’s active lifestyle. Remodel resulted in greatly improve storage capability in the space. It includes multiple appliances suitable for entertaining. The design team was conscious to keep the vintage character of the home in mind without designing specifically for the period of the house. This was done by incorporating very unique materials.
Find the right local pro for your project

G3 provided a variety of services for the conversion of these mid-19th century landmarked loft warehouses to luxury condominiums. Our participation commenced as a third-party observer for the mezzanine lender, who assumed control of the project when the original developer went bankrupt.
Working both as architect and redevelopment manager, we led the following activities:
• Forensic analysis of construction defects
• Code analysis for egress and fire safety
• Comprehensive façade renovation, including NYC Local Law 11 filing and Landmarks approval
• Development of new metal-and glass exterior façade enclosure for two penthouse levels
• Redesign of residential units to improve marketability and to meet code
• Redesign of building lobby to improve
marketability

The original kitchen was meant to accommodate staff only; revise room layout to accommodate the new owner’s active lifestyle. Remodel resulted in greatly improve storage capability in the space. It includes multiple appliances suitable for entertaining. The design team was conscious to keep the vintage character of the home in mind without designing specifically for the period of the house. This was done by incorporating very unique materials.

Stuart Wade, Envision Virtual Tours
The second-largest and most developed of Georgia's barrier islands, St. Simons is approximately twelve miles long and nearly three miles wide at its widest stretch (roughly the size of Manhattan Island in New York). The island is located in Glynn County on Georgia's coast and lies east of Brunswick (the seat of Glynn County), south of Little St. Simons Island and the Hampton River, and north of Jekyll Island. The resort community of Sea Island is separated from St. Simons on the east by the Black Banks River. Known for its oak tree canopies and historic landmarks, St. Simons is both a tourist destination and, according to the 2010 U.S. census, home to 12,743 residents.
Early History
The earliest
St. Simons Island Village
record of human habitation on the island dates to the Late Archaic Period, about 5,000 to 3,000 years ago. Remnants of shell rings left behind by Native Americans from this era survive on many of the barrier islands, including St. Simons. Centuries later, during the period known by historians as the chiefdom era, the Guale Indians established a chiefdom centered on St. Catherines Island and used St. Simons as their hunting and fishing grounds. By 1500 the Guale had established a permanent village of about 200 people on St. Simons, which they called Guadalquini.
Beginning in 1568, the Spanish attempted to create missions along the Georgia coast. Catholic missions were the primary means by which Georgia's indigenous Native American chiefdoms were assimilated into the Spanish colonial system along the northern frontier of greater Spanish Florida. In the 1600s St. Simons became home to two Spanish missions: San Buenaventura de Guadalquini, on the southern tip of the island, and Santo Domingo de Asao (or Asajo), on the northern tip. Located on the inland side of the island were the pagan refugee villages of San Simón, the island's namesake, and Ocotonico. In 1684 pirate raids left the missions and villages largely abandoned.
Colonial History
As
Fort Frederica
early as 1670, with Great Britain's establishment of the colony of Carolina and its expansion into Georgia territory, Spanish rule was threatened by the English. The Georgia coast was considered "debatable land" by England and Spain, even though Spain had fully retreated from St. Simons by 1702. Thirty-one years later General James Edward Oglethorpe founded the English settlement of Savannah. In 1736 he established Fort Frederica, named after the heir to the British throne, Frederick Louis, prince of Wales, on the west side of St. Simons Island to protect Savannah and the Carolinas from the Spanish threat.
Between 1736 and 1749 Fort Frederica was the hub of British military operations along the Georgia frontier. A town of the same name grew up around the fort and was of great importance to the new colony. By 1740 Frederica's population was 1,000. In 1736 the congregation of what would become Christ Church was organized within Fort Frederica as a mission of the Church of England. Charles Wesley led the first services. In 1742 Britain's decisive victory over Spain in the Battle of Bloody Marsh, during the War of Jenkins' Ear, ended the Spanish threat to the Georgia coast. When the British regimen disbanded in 1749, most of the townspeople relocated to the mainland. Fort Frederica went into decline and, except for a short time of prosperity during the 1760s and 1770s under the leadership of merchant James Spalding, never fully recovered. Today the historic citadel's tabby ruins are maintained by the National Park Service.
Plantation Era
By the start of the American Revolution (1775-83), Fort Frederica was obsolete, and St. Simons was left largely uninhabited as most of its residents joined the patriot army. Besides hosting a small Georgia naval victory on the Fort Frederica River, providing guns from its famous fort for use at Fort Morris in Sunbury, and serving as an arena for pillaging by privateers and British soldiers, the island played almost no role in the war.
Following the war, many of the townspeople, their businesses destroyed, turned to agriculture. The island was transformed into fourteen cotton plantations after acres of live oak trees were cleared for farm land and used for building American warships, including the famous USS Constitution, or "Old Ironsides." Although rice was the predominant crop along the neighboring Altamaha River, St. Simons was known for its production of long-staple cotton, which soon came to be known as Sea Island cotton.
Between
Ebos Landing
the 1780s and the outbreak of the Civil War (1861-65), St. Simons's plantation culture flourished. The saline atmosphere and the availability of cheap slave labor proved an ideal combination for the cultivation of Sea Island cotton. In 1803 a group of Ebo slaves who survived the Middle Passage and arrived on the west side of St. Simons staged a rebellion and drowned themselves. The sacred site is known today as Ebos Landing.
One of the largest owners of land and slaves on St. Simons was Pierce Butler, master of Hampton Point Plantation, located on the northern end of the island. By 1793 Butler owned more than 500 slaves, who cultivated 800 acres of cotton on St. Simons and 300 acres of rice on Butler's Island in the Altamaha River delta. Butler's grandson, Pierce Mease Butler, who at the age of sixteen inherited a share of his grandfather's estate in 1826, was responsible for the largest sale of human beings in the history of the United States: in 1859, to restore his squandered fortune, he sold 429 slaves in Savannah for more than $300,000. The British actress and writer Fanny Kemble, whose tumultuous marriage to Pierce ended in divorce in 1849, published an eyewitness account of the evils of slavery on St. Simons in her book Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838-1839 (1863).
Another
Retreat Plantation
large owner of land and slaves on St. Simons was Major William Page, a friend and employee of Pierce Butler Sr. Before purchasing Retreat Plantation on the southwestern tip of the island in 1804, Page managed the Hampton plantation and Butler's Island. Upon Page's death in 1827, Thomas Butler King inherited the land together with his wife, Page's daughter, Anna Matilda Page King. King expanded his father-in-law's planting empire on St. Simons as well as on the mainland, and by 1835 Retreat Plantation alone was home to as many as 355 slaves.
The center of life during the island's plantation era was Christ Church, Frederica. Organized in 1807 by a group of island planters, the Episcopal church is the second oldest in the Diocese of Georgia. Embargoes imposed by the War of 1812 (1812-15) prevented the parishioners from building a church structure, so they worshiped in the home of John Beck, which stood on the site of Oglethorpe's only St. Simons residence, Orange Hall.
The first Christ Church building, finished on the present site in 1820, was ruined by occupying Union troops during the Civil War. In 1884 the Reverend Anson Dodge Jr. rebuilt the church as a memorial to his first wife, Ellen. The cruciform building with a trussed gothic roof and stained-glass windows remains active today as Christ Church.
Civil War and Beyond
The
St. Simons Island Lighthouse
outbreak of the Civil War in 1861 put a sudden end to St. Simons's lucrative plantation era. In January of that year, Confederate troops were stationed at the south end of the island to guard the entrance to Brunswick Harbor. Slaves from Retreat Plantation, owned by Thomas Butler King, built earthworks and batteries. Plantation residents were scattered—the men joined the Confederate army and their families moved to the mainland. Cannon fire was heard on the island in December 1861, and Confederate troops retreated in February 1862, after dynamiting the lighthouse to keep its beacon from aiding Union troops. Soon thereafter, Union troops occupied the island, which was used as a camp for freed slaves. By August 1862 more than 500 former slaves lived on St. Simons, including Susie King Taylor, who organized a school for freed slave children. But in November the ex-slaves were taken to Hilton Head, South Carolina, and Fernandina, Florida, leaving the island abandoned.
After the Civil War the island never returned to its status as an agricultural community. The plantations lay dormant because there were no slaves to work the fields. After Union general William T. Sherman's January 1865 Special Field Order No. 15 —a demand that former plantations be divided and distributed to former slaves—was overturned by U.S. president Andrew Johnson less than a year later, freedmen and women were forced to work as sharecroppers on the small farms that dotted the land previously occupied by the sprawling plantations.
By
St. Simons Lumber Mills
1870 real economic recovery began with the reestablishment of the timber industry. Norman Dodge and Titus G. Meigs of New York set up lumber mill operations at Gascoigne Bluff, formerly Hamilton Plantation. The lumber mills provided welcome employment for both blacks and whites and also provided mail and passenger boats to the mainland. Such water traffic, together with the construction of a new lighthouse in 1872, designed by architect Charles B. Cluskey, marked the beginning of St. Simons's tourism industry. The keeper of the lighthouse created a small amusement park, which drew many visitors, as did the seemingly miraculous light that traveled from the top of the lighthouse tower to the bottom. The island became a summer retreat for families from the mainland, particularly from Baxley, Brunswick, and Waycross.
The island's resort industry was thriving by the 1880s. Beachfront structures, such as a new pier and grand hotel, were built on the southeastern end of the island and could be accessed by ferry. Around this time wealthy northerners began vacationing on the island.
Twentieth Century
The
St. Simons Island Pier and Village
opening in 1924 of the Brunswick–St. Simons Highway, today known as the Torras Causeway, was a milestone in the development of resorts in the area. St. Simons's beaches were now easily accessible to locals and tourists alike. More than 5,000 automobiles took the short drive from Brunswick to St. Simons via the causeway on its opening day, paving the way for convenient residential and resort development.
In 1926 automotive pioneer Howard Coffin of Detroit, Michigan, bought large tracts of land on St. Simons, including the former Retreat Plantation, and constructed a golf course, yacht club, paved roads, and a residential subdivision. Although the causeway had brought large numbers of summer people to the island, St. Simons remained a small community with only a few hundred permanent residents until the 1940s.
The
St. Simons Island
outbreak of World War II (1941-45) brought more visitors and residents to St. Simons. Troops stationed at Jacksonville, Florida; Savannah; and nearby Camp Stewart took weekend vacations on the island, and a new naval air base and radar school became home to even more officers and soldiers. The increased wartime population brought the island its first public school. With a major shipyard for the production of Liberty ships in nearby Brunswick, the waters of St. Simons became active with German U-boats. In April 1942, just off the coast, the Texas Company oil tanker S. S. Oklahoma and the S. S. Esso Baton Rouge were torpedoed by the Germans, bringing the war very close to home for island residents.
Due in large part to the military's improvement of the island's infrastructure during the war, development on the island boomed in the 1950s and 1960s. More permanent homes and subdivisions were built, and the island was no longer just a summer resort but also a thriving community. In 1950 the Methodist conference and retreat center Epworth by the Sea opened on Gascoigne Bluff. In 1961 novelist Eugenia Price visited St. Simons and began work on her first works of fiction, known as the St. Simons Trilogy. Inspired by real events on the island, Price's trilogy renewed interest in the history of Georgia's coast, and the novelist herself relocated to the island in 1965 and lived there for thirty-one years. St. Simons is also home to contemporary Georgia writer Tina McElroy Ansa.
Since
Epworth by the Sea
1980 St. Simons's population has doubled. The island's continued status as a vacation destination and its ongoing development boom have put historic landmarks and natural areas at risk. While such landmarks as the Fort Frederica ruins and the Battle of Bloody Marsh site are preserved and maintained by the National Park Service, and while the historic lighthouse is maintained by the Coastal Georgia Historical Society, historic Ebos Landing has been taken over by a sewage treatment plant.
Several coastal organizations have formed in recent years to save natural areas on the island. The St. Simons Land Trust, for example, has received donations of large tracts of land and plans to protect property in the island's three traditional African American neighborhoods. Despite its rapid growth and development, St. Simons remains one of the most beautiful and important islands on the Georgia coast.

Sponsored
Delaware County, OH
Whisler Home Improvement
Franklin County's Committed Home Improvement Professionals

This Dallas outdoor living space showcases a unique landscape design by a skilled landscape architect, featuring a dedicated putting green for recreational fun. Lush artificial turf surrounds the green, offering a low-maintenance, vibrant lawn. Mature trees provide natural shade, creating a private and engaging backyard perfect for active outdoor enjoyment in Dallas.

Bellweather Construction, LLC is a trained and certified remodeling and home improvement general contractor that specializes in period-appropriate renovations and energy efficiency improvements. Bellweather's managing partner, William Giesey, has over 20 years of experience providing construction management and design services for high-quality home renovations in Philadelphia and its Main Line suburbs. Will is a BPI-certified building analyst, NARI-certified kitchen and bath remodeler, and active member of his local NARI chapter. He is the acting chairman of a local historical commission and has participated in award-winning restoration and historic preservation projects. His work has been showcased on home tours and featured in magazines.

To meet the needs of this active Portland family, we improved the flow of the kitchen and dining areas and enlarged the kitchen window, strengthening the connection between the dining room, kitchen and outdoor deck. We refinished the existing maple floors, installed walnut cabinets, updated the lighting, and replaced outdated appliances with modern, energy-efficient stainless steel models.

To meet the needs of this active Portland family, we improved the flow of the kitchen and dining areas and enlarged the kitchen window, strengthening the connection between the dining room, kitchen and outdoor deck. We refinished the existing maple floors, installed walnut cabinets, updated the lighting, and replaced outdated appliances with modern, energy-efficient stainless steel models.

To meet the needs of this active Portland family, we improved the flow of the kitchen and dining areas and enlarged the kitchen window, strengthening the connection between the dining room, kitchen and outdoor deck. We refinished the existing maple floors, installed walnut cabinets, updated the lighting, and replaced outdated appliances with modern, energy-efficient stainless steel models.

Decorative table legs conceal spice racks for the chef while the pot filler above the stove makes this kitchen a dream for the active chef in the home. Toe kick heaters have been used to help keep this space warm in the sometimes harsh climate of the north shore of Long Island.

Bellweather Construction, LLC is a trained and certified remodeling and home improvement general contractor that specializes in period-appropriate renovations and energy efficiency improvements. Bellweather's managing partner, William Giesey, has over 20 years of experience providing construction management and design services for high-quality home renovations in Philadelphia and its Main Line suburbs. Will is a BPI-certified building analyst, NARI-certified kitchen and bath remodeler, and active member of his local NARI chapter. He is the acting chairman of a local historical commission and has participated in award-winning restoration and historic preservation projects. His work has been showcased on home tours and featured in magazines.

Hey Fam! We are delighted to announce that we have been nominated for - My Home Improvement magazine's "Best of 2023" contest in the category of Outdoor Living.
Voting opens July 12th at Noon and will close on July 18th at 11:59 pm.
How to vote:
Visit our website at: https://atlantahomeimprovement.com/best-of-2023/
Scroll through the alphabetized categories to find your nomination. Vote for just your entry or as many entries as you'd like! *IMPORTANT: You must click the “vote” button at the bottom of the last page, or your vote will not be counted.
You can vote once per day, per email
The voting page will not be active until July 12th at Noon.
Vote for us!!

2013 NARI CAPITAL COTY, MERIT AWARD WINNER, RESIDENTIAL EXTERIOR
A family of five living in a Chantilly, Virginia, neighborhood with a lot of improvement going on decided to do a project of their own. An active family, they decided their old deck was ragged, beat up and needed revamping.
After discussing their needs, the design team at Michael Nash Design, Build & Homes developed a plan for a covered porch and a wrap-around upscale deck. Traffic flow and multiple entrances were important, as was a place for the kids to leave their muddy shoes.
A double staircase leading the deck into the large backyard provides a panoramic view of the parkland behind the property. A side staircase lets the kids come into the covered porch and mudroom prior to entering the main house.
The covered porch touts large colonial style columns, a beaded cedar (stained) ceiling, recess lighting, ceiling fans and a large television with outdoor surround sound.
The deck touts synthetic railing and stained grade decking and offers extended living space just outside of the kitchen and family room, as well as a grill space and outdoor patio seating.
This new outdoor facility has become the jewel of their neighborhood and now the family can enjoy their backyard activities more than ever.

Sponsored
Columbus, OH
EverHome Improvement & Design
Top Choice for Reliable Tile & Stone | Franklin County, Ohio

This is a prime example of premium quality craftsmanship in the landscape design/build business. By redesigning the front entrance to create a porch/landing with an additional parking court, we significantly improved the appearance and value of the property in Rye, New York.
The new driveway was constructed of a porous asphalt material which improved the stormwater management adjacent to the wetland.
The landscape planting featured a variety of long blooming, native flowering perennials which attract beneficial insect species. This contributes to the successful management of the landscape with sustainable organics.
The custom kinetic sculpture adds a nice finishing touch.
Instead of a typical evergreen hedge, native clethra was planted on the property border to define the space while contributing fragrance, grace and pollinators to what easily could have been a less active, sterile space.
Heavily planted ground cover natives such as ajuga, creeping jenny, Irish moss, sweet woodruff and geraniums made the need for weeding practically obsolete.
The use of ground covers as mulch was most effective for resource management.

This commercial renovation at 3020 Lincoln Avenue in Coquitlam involved a targeted tenant improvement for a professional notary office. The scope focused on modernizing the interior environment to create a calm, welcoming, and functional client reception area while maintaining durability and code compliance standards required for commercial spaces.
New commercial-grade flooring was installed throughout, paired with updated lighting to enhance brightness and improve overall spatial clarity. The layout was optimized to support client flow and privacy, while finishes were selected to reflect a clean, professional aesthetic appropriate for a legal services environment.
Executing renovations within an active commercial setting requires structured scheduling, material coordination, and strict adherence to strata and municipal requirements. Arani Construction delivers commercial tenant improvements across Coquitlam and the Greater Vancouver area with an emphasis on organization, technical precision, and minimal operational disruption.

The ovens are hidden behind pocket doors with punched tin panels. When these doors are completely open, it activates the electrical power for the ovens. Subzero refrigerators with freezer drawers are housed in the tall cabinet on the right, while the similar cabinet on the left is a handy working pantry when opened.
6


