Das Haus, June 2012

Haus Das

HOME & LIFESTYLE MAGAZINE

THE HOMESTEADER Rural limestone home has generations of history

JUNE / JULY 2012

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Haus Das

features

8 At home IN ELLIS COUNTY

The Homesteader

5

The Magic of Hardwood

Little maintenance required for quality wood flooring

Fourth generation restores farmhouse’s outer beauty

13

Saving Resources

Recycling program gives residents opportunity to go green

14

A Fruitful Hobby

Hays man’s fruit trees provide season full of good eats

DAS HAUS • www.HDNews.net

JUNE / JULY 2012 • 3

Do You Remodel Bathrooms?

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Haus Das

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Designer Gayle Weber gweber@dailynews.net

KanConnect.net from The Hays Daily News.

It’s your home, home on the web.

Contributors Diane Gasper-O’Brien • Writer Gayle Weber • Writer Raymond Hillegas • Photographer Steven Hausler • Photographer Juno Ogle • Creative Services Tiffany Reddig • Creative Services Elisha Jones • Creative Services

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hardwood

The magic of

F

rom installing new to restoring old, hardwood flooring comes with a variety of options and benefits for homeowners.

The virtually maintenancefree, allergen-reducing flooring is a large investment up front, but Andy Urban, owner of Urban Hardwood Flooring, now in its 10th year operating in and around Ellis County, said it’s the last floor homeowners will have to install.

“Your big investment is having them put in,” Urban said. “After that, it can be recoated — eliminate all the surface scratches, traffic areas, wear and tear.” >>>>

By GAYLE WEBER

We’ve got the quality • We’ve got the style • We’ve got the look We Are

The Look

Creating a new living space or a make-over for an existing space can be overwhelming. Knowing how to start is often the greatest challenge and that’s when we are often asked for assistance.

As design consultants, our first step is getting to know the client and what the functional requirements of the project are. I am a strong believer in function over form. It’s important that the client remember that the space is his or hers, not the designer’s. We work hard to keep the client involved in the entire project and see ourselves as “guides” leading the client through the design process.

To get a sense of the style a client wants in the home, we like to have them collect inspirational images or pictures of what they would like to achieve. In most cases, we like to go into the home and diagram the space including trafficways, planned activities, and structural features.

We take this information and create sample floor-plans including furniture layout.

As a general rule, furniture selection often begins with the largest piece in the room. In a living room, we would choose the sofa. In a dining room, we would select the dining table.

While this is likely the most frequent method of furniture selection, we may also start with a smaller, inspirational piece: a chair that the client just loves or a very special antique chest. Once we have our starting point, we develop a full color story and texture mix. A client’s personality is reflected throughout the project, right down to the smallest details and accessories.

Great design can be achieved without an over-sized budget.

Careful selection of quality furniture and accents can keep the budget in check. New textiles are being introduced constantly allowing for a variety of style decisions at different price points. We use our training and experience to guide our clients towards decisions reflecting appropriate investment for level of use and function.

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“Literally every floor is salvageable.”

before

Urban specializes in a sandon-site flooring installation, meaning Urban finishes the wood on site, and homeowners have the opportunity to mix and match stains on the flooring until it is exactly how they want it.

Options are unlimited in terms of color, wood species, patterns, inlays and borders.

No two hardwood floors are the same, Urban said.

Urban’s work is split between homeowners installing hardwoods for the first time, and those who find original hardwood flooring under a layer of carpet or other floor covering.

“Pretty much every house prior to 1965 probably has hardwood floors,” Urban said.

And even through years of neglect, “literally every floor is salvageable,” he said. That includes water-damaged and pet-stained floors.

Hardwood flooring has evolved through the years, with installation now being 99 percent dustless. Floors no longer need to be waxed, and there is little maintenance.

“Just Swiffer,” Urban said.

6 • JUNE / JULY 2012

Andy Urban, Urban Hardwood Flooring

during

after

Photos courtesy of Andy Urban

DAS HAUS • www.HDNews.net

Homesteader The

story by Diane Gasper-O’Brien photography by Raymond Hillegas

At home IN ELLIS COUNTY

I

t’s hard for Viola Burns to get rid of any limestone she runs across. It’s easy to understand why.

She grew up in a limestone home built in 1882, tucked into the hills in the southwest corner of Ellis County and built by relatives who had come to the United States from Czechoslovakia in 1865.

After her father died in the late 1970s and her mother built a modern, ranch-style home just south of the homestead, Viola and her husband, Ralph, acquired the family home and began restoring it.

When the old single-car garage was torn down, Viola had rocks from its outside walls made into a double-decker wall in the hill on the west side of her house.

“My mom had said, ‘We lifted all those rocks by hand,’ ” Viola said. “So I thought, ‘We just need to keep them.’ ” And after her husband died in 2008, she built a two-car garage with limestone covering that includes a kitchen and an upstairs that she hopes to make into a quilting area some day.

Native stone became a part of Viola’s fabric from the time she was born in 1943, the oldest of Raymond and Mildred Kutina’s six children.

She remembers having no electricity and no running water in her early years. But they are fond memories.

“My dream was to be able to come back out here some day,” she said. “After Dad died, it was either restore it, or it probably would have fallen in.”

First up for the Burns couple was replacing about 25 large pieces of stone on the back side of the house.

When they replaced the old plaster and lathe on the walls with Sheetrock, Ralph and Viola got a history lesson.

“We found a check signed by my grandfather in the wall,” Viola said.

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JUNE / JULY 2012 • 9

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And under each window of the upstairs dormers, they found a braided palm, which they saved and placed back in the wall just before they put up the sheetrock.

They learned, Viola said, that was a Catholic tradition, to take palms received from church on Palm Sunday in the springtime and place them in the walls of your home.

Along the way, Viola also learned the Kutina family story goes something like this.

When Viola’s great-grandparents, John and Barbara Kutina, and their five grown children moved to Kansas from Chicago in the late 1870s, they each built a limestone house.

“And this is the only one still standing,” said Viola, who remembers the day electricity was installed in the home in the late ’40s.

“I was in first grade and home sick that day,” she said. “I just watched them string wires. It was interesting.”

A limestone rock in the front yard now commemorates the establishing of the Kutina homestead in 1878, where John and Barbara Kutina lived in a dug house for a few years before completing their limestone home in about 1882.

The rooms with 9.5-foot ceilings are furnished with items from several DAS HAUS • www.HDNews.net

time periods, many of which came from relatives.

There is a Victrola from a distant cousin in Pennsylvania, an original platform rocker from a great-aunt and a small rocker and a pedal sewing machine from her mother-in-law.

Several items such as photos and a few other antique pieces Ralph

and Viola picked up at auctions, all the while making numerous trips annually to Houston for 17 years.

Ralph, who had fought cancer for several years and also battled heart problems, died about four years ago before the couple could get started with their latest project — a new garage.

JUNE / JULY 2012 • 11

“We had talked about it and had plans drawn up,” Viola said, “but it’s hard to find anyone to lay native stone now.”

The new garage structure was finished in 2009, and Viola said work on the inside will be ongoing.

That seems to be a common thing on the homestead, she said with a laugh.

A few years after the original construction, square footage was added to the east side of the original house, as well as a kitchen and a second story with three rooms.

The most recent addition to the home was a large master bedroom that was built onto the northwest side of the home in 2006 when Viola was scheduled for knee replacement.

She knew she wouldn’t be able to maneuver the steps to their upstairs bedroom.

Now widowed, Viola still thoroughly enjoys her time on the homestead and welcomes frequent visits from her own family that includes two children and their spouses, five grandchildren and soon-to-be five great-grandchildren.

She has no intentions of moving into town.

“It’s quiet here, far enough off the road you don’t hear traffic,” she said.

“I like the solitude, and I have some good neighbors out here — and family that’s close.

“And,” she added, “there are a lot of memories here.”

12 • JUNE / JULY 2012

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T

Saving resources saving RESOURCES

By GAYLE WEBER

Wow!

he blue bags tossed out into Hays streets each week are a sign of progress, but there’s not as many blue bags as Marvin Honas would like.

The Hays recycling program allows residents to put recyclable materials in blue plastic bags and set them beside polycarts for pickup.

On a week-to-week basis, only 38 percent of Hays residents recycle, said Honas, the city of Hays’ solid waste superintendent.

Eighty percent of Hays residents recycle occasionally, Honas said.

“In my estimation, it actually does make a difference,” Honas said of recycling.

“There are so many figures out there, whether it be the number of trees cut down, water consumed when a product is made or the electricity used. “... It does save a pretty good number of things and preserves our natural resources, which who knows how long they’ll be around.”

The city of Hays recycling program accepts most plastics, papers, glass bottles and aluminum cans. Styrofoam and plastic bags cannot be recycled.

For more information on the program, visit www.haysusa.com or call (785) 6287357.

“If I’m going to take care of the yard, I’m going to have something that will last, something I can utilize.”

Jim Thyfault

A fruitful hobby

J

im Thyfault’s summer plans involve picking a modest crop of first-year fruit from the variety of trees he planted last year.

The dwarf trees, which will grow to about 14-feet tall, were 7 to a fruitful HOBBY 9 years old when he

By GAYLE WEBER planted them, ensuring he would have a crop sooner rather than later.

“They told me they would produce,” the 78-year-old Hays resident said. “I had my doubts, but seeing is believing.”

Thyfault surrounded his home with plum, pear, apple, peach and cherry trees — all planted in tandem with a like variety in order to allow for pollination of the trees.

14 • JUNE / JULY 2012

DAS HAUS • www.HDNews.net

LEFT: Jim Thyfault shows some of the apricots that had set on the tree in his yard in April. He estimates he will be able to pick them this month. LOWER LEFT: Thyfault talks about care for his fruit trees. RIGHT: A strawberry plant is supported by pieces of wood to prevent the fruit from spoiling. BOTTOM: Plums are pictured on one of Thyfault’s trees.

He also has a single apricot tree, which was bearing large fruit already in late April. With the warm spring, fruit set on early — and grew fast.

“We’re gonna eat some good fruit,” Thyfault said, reassuring his wife the fruit would be used.

He covered the trees with tarps during the winter and has a watering system in place to keep moisture around the trees, which also prevents freezing. He prunes in the spring to encourage new growth and just generally provides a lot of TLC. “I’ve taken care of them. I’ve watered them,” Thyfault said. “If I’m going to take care of the yard, I’m going to have something that will last, something I can utilize — so that’s the reason I planted the fruit trees.”

His gardening ventures don’t stop at trees, with a plentiful vegetable garden in his backyard. And among the radishes, tomatoes and green onions are a stable of strawberry plants, already producing a juicy red fruit in late April. He planted them last July and kept them inside under a heat lamp all winter.

“It’s a lot of work but I was a farmer and I love the outside,” Thyfault said.