jacob maslow's (torsx) Blog

A kids room is the room in the house that changes the most, and it is the room most often designed for the age the child is now. The result is a room that is perfect for a year and wrong for the next five. The trick is to design for the child the room will hold at ten and at sixteen, not just the...

Most renovation ideas lists are written for the photograph, not the house. They lead with open floor plans, waterfall islands, and freestanding tubs, and skip the part where the wall you remove was holding something up. The ideas that add real value are the ones that fix what is broken before you...

Pigeons are persistent. One pair on a rooftop ledge becomes a flock of forty within a season, and by the time most property owners call for help, the damage—fouled HVAC equipment, corroded signage, slip hazards from droppings—is already expensive. For property managers and real estate professiona...

The architect was proud of the living room. The render showed a 14 foot window wall, a polished concrete floor, and a fireplace set into a flat white wall. The client moved in on a Tuesday in November. By Friday she was wearing a coat at her desk. The window wall, the concrete, and the flat white...

the Building ForgotThe air inside a building is never cleaner than the air outside it. The mechanical system can dilute it, filter it, and recirculate it, but the baseline is set at the property line. The trees, the paving, the traffic, and the wind patterns on the block determine what the roofto...

A living room and a kids room in the same house are usually designed as if they belong to different buildings. One gets the budget, the paint samples, and the designer. The other gets the hand me down rug, the crib that becomes a bed that becomes a desk, and a colour scheme chosen by whoever was ...

A private garden is a small piece of ground asked to do a lot. It has to screen the house from the street, hold a place to sit, grow something alive, and look after itself well enough that the owner actually enjoys it. The best private gardens feel inevitable, as if they could not have been arran...

A house is the largest single purchase most people will ever make, and the one they cannot return. The architect is the person who turns a vague idea of home into a set of drawings a builder can actually build. Choosing that person well is the difference between a house that fits the life of the ...

A home renovation is a test of patience, money, and marriage in roughly equal parts. The work itself is only part of the project. The decisions made before the first wall comes down decide whether the result is a house that fits the life in it, or a year of disruption that ends in a space that st...

A building talks before it fails. A stain on a ceiling, a draft by a window, a hinge that sticks, a drain that gurgles. Each is a small signal that something larger is starting. Property maintenance done well is the practice of reading those signals and acting on them before they become repairs. ...