The Roof

Photo of Pine Green's Original Multicolored Roof
(note this was before the kitchen and master bedroom were added to the house)

  Since I first laid eyes on Pine Green I knew its roof was going to be a challenge... indeed it was. The asbestos roof that I inherited when I bought Pine Green, although it had for the most part protected the house for decades, was beyond its useful life:

Broken asbestos shingles

Close up of the asbestos shingles

In addition to the asbestos, small portions of the roof had some newer (albeit still too old) asphalt shingles mixed in:

Asphalt and asbestos shingles mixed

In fact, the worst leak we found in the house over the past year was at the very location where these newer asphalt shingles met up with the asbestos shingles. This may have been a contributing factor to the extensive rot we found behind the master bedroom shower early last year.

 We struggled for months to find an appropriate roofing material and to line up a roofer to do the job. Along the way, we discovered many things we hadn't realized before. For example, I thought the colorized photo presented at the top of this post was a matter of dramatic license more than reality. Surely the whimsical reds, greens, and other colors weren't what the original roof actually looked like... After all, the asbestos shingle roof was the original roof, right? And it didn't appear to vary much in color. Well it turns out the asbestos roof was not the original roof. One of the roofers bidding on the job early on discovered another roof still lay beneath the asbestos shingles. Around the same time, while I was finishing up re-insulating the attic (which is a whole other story), I discovered this:

Portion of the original roof preserved in the attic

The kitchen and master bedroom are not original to the house, although they were added just a few years later with the guidance of Sam Stoltz and the same tradesmen who constructed the original home. One slightly quirky yet telling result of this is that a portion of the original roof is preserved inside the attic in the vicinity of the master bedroom. It's a difficult area to access, which is why I had not seen it before. So I was a bit astonished when I found this, as I realized that the colorized picture was not such a case of dramatic license after all... indeed the original roof had green, red, even purplish hues. I'm still not sure how it was done - we suspect Stoltz somehow stained the shingles, perhaps similar to the way he stained the siding. It most certainly at the time resulted in even more of that "Hansel and Gretel" feel for which the house is known.

In an attempt to find a replacement roof that suited the character of the home, we explored the gamut of nearly all available styles and materials. We considered asphalt, various metals, tile, composite materials, real cedar shake... even synthetic thatch! At one point we had settled - for sure we thought - on a product called Ludoshake, a lightweight clay tile intended to mimic the look of cedar shake. We had intended to use a combination of two colors that would mimic both the shake look of the asbestos shingle, as well as the multicolor combination of the original asphalt shingle roof.

We even had the roof evaluated to determine what structural upgrades would be needed to support it. I knew it would be very expensive to do this type of roof, but it turned out it was simply ridiculously expensive... so much so that even considering the super long life of clay tiles, the lifecycle cost of installing such a product compared to others became debatable. Removing the asbestos, and all its associated special handling due to environmental regulations, was going to be expensive enough. Perhaps one day Pine Green will receive such a luxury treatment... but for now we think we found "the one"...

It was likely a bit of serendipity that the Ludoshake goose chase bought us time to discover a relatively new shingle we had not seen before. As can be seen in the before and afters below, it has multiple colors that give a nod to the original roof, and, while it is an architectural shingle, it is not as showy or an overkill attempt at forced perspective as we found many other architectural shingles to be.

So in late February, after much toil, the real work began::

Workers demolishing the multiple roof layers down to the roof deck

A glimpse of what was: a bit of the original roof still intact after years of lying beneath asbestos shingles before it was stripped away

Pine Green down to the bare roof deck - overall the wood was in great condition with relatively little replacement needed

 As part of the project, we decided to go ahead and demolish the now defunct rear brick chimney. We suspected it was leading to drainage and structural issues, and the apparent damage once it was removed was a little more than we expected:

Rear chimney gone -  significant wood rot is going to mean a  bit of a tricky restoration is needed to  make what's left blend with the rest of the house

The garage and playhouse (now art studio) were also included in the project:

Garage receiving the new shingles

We've still got some additional woodwork and other details to cover, and the new shiny copper drip edge is going to take some getting used to (although it will patina soon enough), but for now, we're quite happy with the transformation:

Before

After

Sunroom corner during roof removal

After

Before

After

Before

After

While the roof has been a major focus, we have also been launching into more landscape improvements in preparation for the 2013 Private Gardens of Lake Eola Heights Historic District on April 21, which will feature Pine Green along with many other homes in the neighborhood. In fact, if you look carefully, you can see one of our newest additions to the right side of the house (in front of the kitchen window) is a wonderful weeping yaupon holly tree. We're honored to have Pine Green as part of the event, and we're certainly glad we got the roof done in time!

Merry Christmas from Pine Green!

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas...

Well, it has been several months since my last post, and believe or not it's been a year since we moved to Pine Green. We'll take some time in the coming weeks to update the blog with our latest progress, but for now, we hope everyone has a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

Summer & Sunflowers

Living room arrangement of sunflowers grown at Pine Green

Summer has managed to slow us down a bit, especially as far as yardwork, although we're still managing to put in several hours of work per week maintaining the yard. A couple of months ago I decided to create an experimental "garden" space (as opposed to landscape) on the east side of the property in front of the parking area. We'll likely rotate through various plants throughout the year, but I decided to start by planting a variety of sunflower seeds:

Young sunflowers (foreground) - May 21, 2012

They grew quickly and densely. I decided not to thin them, and although not as big, sturdy, and bold as I might have hoped, they put on a pretty good show:

Sunflowers near their peak in July 2012

We've also been trying to figure out the best low maintenance solution for the chimney's fountain and pond. The water tends to get green with algae quickly; algaecide is limited in effectiveness, and chlorine is too harsh for the pump system we have. So last week, inspired by one of our neighbors, as well as my experiences in lake management, we decided to experiment in converting it to a "living" system by cleaning the fountain thoroughly then adding a water lily and a submersed plant called coontail:

Lily on the right; coontail more difficult to see on the left (underwater)

Lily's flower

Fountain with plantings

The hope is the lily will provide shade, reducing sunlight available for algae to photosynthesize, and the coontail will compete for nutrients in the water as it grows, keeping algae in check. We shall see how well it works in practice.

Other than that, one rainy weekend we repainted the living room and dining room - a subtle change but a nice improvement. We've also added some new lighting and window treatments. I've spent a lot of time outside over the past several weeks working on creating rain gardens to reduce the exposure of the garage and house to runoff. The rain gardens are mainly planted with muhly grass, since it is both drought and flood tolerant. Hopefully it will have some pink plumes in the fall so I'm waiting until then to post some photos. Other newer plantings include cassia, plumbago, lantana, pumpkins, and beautyberry - the latter being a successful transplant from some I gathered in the wild at my parents' farm.

Reid has also diligently been working on converting the playhouse to a personal art studio - he'll be doing a "guest blog" entry on that and more in the future.

And I'm slowly working on re-insulating the attic and starting to gather my thoughts on perhaps getting the house and accessory buildings re-roofed this fall or winter.

Summer has finally brought about some good rains, a richness to the landscape, and a bit of an urban oasis for birds and plenty of other wildlife. As for me, I'm spending more time inside, looking forward to some cooler temperatures in a few months, and crossing my fingers that my pumpkins actually manage to fruit in the fall.

Presenting Pine Green Back to the Neighborhood

We've been working on a lot of things at Pine Green over the past few weeks, mostly in the yard while the weather was still somewhat bearable. March marked the end of Pine Green's last traditional pine tree:

Dead pine behind the playhouse

Most of the pines had either died or been removed over time to protect the house from threat during hurricanes. This last one, upwards of 50 feet tall or more and with a thick trunk, had been looming for a while, standing dead in perhaps one of the worst locations at the southwest property corner, threatening multiple neighboring properties as well as my own. One of our neighbors who is skilled in tree removal did the work for us. It turned out the tree was much more rotten that we had thought, making it unsafe to climb, so he had to use a lift during the removal:

During tree removal 

Pine Gone 

Although best suited for South Florida, we do plan on keeping the one stately Norfolk Island Pine, and perhaps planting a few additional ones to frame the house, so that the namesake "Pine Green" will endure.

Norfolk Island Pine by the garage behind blooming azalea

We also had Zoysia sod installed, and we've planted giant apostle iris, flag iris, coontie, impatiens, sunflowers, philodendrons, perennial peanut, sunshine mimosa (sensitive plant), and more. We've continued to transplant some existing plants to better suited locations, and we've continued to giveaway some that no longer fit the landscape. We also managed to get the most important irrigation zones operable. With the recent drought and all the new plantings and transplantings, we've had to water quite a bit!

Back yard in 2011

Back yard in April 2012

Front yard in 2011

Front yard in April 2012

On a side note, our flag iris plantings were a case of mistaken identity. We had ordered giant apostle iris ("Regina iris") and the supplier ended up sending the wrong species, which turned out to be a type of flag iris (I still haven't identified the precise variety). Turns out it's a fairly common mistake in the industry, although the two types of iris are quite different. So we went out and bought some of the real giant apostle iris as well and planted them to provide some structure to the front yard.

Front yard (northeast side) in 2011

Front yard (northeast side) in April 2012 - giant apostle iris in foreground

The flag irises are more delicate and are struggling a bit now - we're trying to save as many as we can. Both types of irises have such beautiful flowers:

Flag iris

Giant apostle iris (Neomarica caerulea 'Regina')

Most folks we've talked to have loved the fact that we've opened the property up quite a bit and presented it back to the neighborhood. Not everyone of course - some liked the hidden mystery and wilder look. Over time, however, our new plantings will fill in, and we'll continue to add more, still keeping the place open but giving it more character. Maybe we'll win over nearly everyone one day :)

For now however, I anticipate we'll be doing less in the landscape over the summer and instead turning our attention to the house itself, as we still have many projects to work on inside and out.

Meet Sam Stoltz

Sam Stoltz

A few weeks ago, one of my neighbors graciously gave me a copy of Grace Hagedorn's book Sam Stoltz - Artist. Builder. Decorator:

I had been wanting to get my hands on this book for months, ever since I began researching Sam. It's a wonderful biography of Stoltz and covers many of the Central Florida homes he built. Bill Bean, the previous owner of Pine Green, also dropped off some great photos and documents about Sam - a few of which I'm including in this post.

Sam Stoltz grew up in Nebraska, had his own art studio in Chicago, and moved to Orlando in 1925 at age 50 with his wife Patti to start a second career.

Patti Stoltz

Sam did not have formal architectural training, but he had lots of experience growing up and with Patti's help had designed their first home near Chicago. Sam ultimately contributed a plethora of homes to Central Florida, including homes in Orlando, College Park, Winter Park, Mount Plymouth, and Windermere. Perhaps the most unique of Sam's creations are a series of homes in Mount Plymouth built in a storybook style. These are called the Plymouthonians, and many are still in existence today. It is worth a road trip to get a glimpse of these homes (Mount Plymouth is in Lake County, west of Sanford, on SR 46).

Sam also helped with the rebuild of the Dubsdread Club House in College Park after it had been destroyed by fire in 1934. Although it has since been extensively renovated, the Club House still features Sam's classic pecky cypress beams and Florida fieldstone fireplace, which looks very much like the one in my livingroom, albeit larger.

Sam almost always incorporated wildlife into his works in some way. He was referred to as the "world's greatest poultry painter." Sam had a plaster fresco technique with a whimsical artistry that was ahead of his time, as evidenced by the flamingo scene in my bathroom that I previously posted. On the outside of the chimney at Pine Green, we have slowly begun restoration of his plaster flamingos:

Chimney before

Chimney after cleaning

For now we've done a simple cleaning to remove some of the mildew stains. This alone brought much of the color of the flamingos back to light. Eventually, we may add some subtle color to fill in patches that have chipped away over time. We want to preserve some of the aged character of the chimney, so we don't plan to try to clean it back to pristine condition.

Over the past few weeks, we've continued to begin to implement Joe Brook's landscape plan for Pine Green, removing some plants and transplanting others to open the property up more and to prepare for some new plantings. Meanwhile, the huge azaleas are in bloom, reminding us that spring is about to begin, and we're looking forward to watching Pine Green continue to amaze us:

Azaleas right before blooms opened

Azaleas in bloom