What, exactly, does your professional day entail?
Tiffany: I spend my days managing the day-to-day affairs of an orthopedic research laboratory.  This mainly involves being an IT department/handyman/bench jockey/accountant.
Laura: I spend my days at a redevelopment authority managing a large of chunk of the city. I try to get control of vacant properties in blighted areas and turn them around for future development. I'm helping to develop everything from a five story apartment complex to a stormwater management skatepark under an expressway overpass.

Tiffany, living in Philadelphia and working in an orthopaedic research laboratory, you must have visited the Mutter Museum once or twice. What kind of craft project would you make out of bones? Human or animal.
Tiffany: I don't know how to sugarcoat this—that's a weird question. I feel like any answer I give would be teetering on the precipice of Ed Gein territory. Bone is elastically anisotropic, i.e., its strength properties depend on direction (much like wood, and unlike steel, plastics, etc.).  In that regard, I can only imagine that femurs would make fantastic table legs, assuming you like really macabre tables and are confident that possessing them alone would not be enough to convict you. That being said, animal bones (usually bovine or buffalo ribs) have traditionally been used as percussive instruments. So I guess if I had to do something with bones, I'd learn to play them like a xylophone, a la the Flintstones.

Laura, I'm going to assume that as a city planner you have to deal with a lot of bureaucracy and compromise. In your ideal world, totally free and unhindered, how would you transform all the vacant, blighted properties in Philly? (or just one)
My life as a city planner is a balancing act between the forces of inspiration, perspiration, and bureaucracy. It's politics, big P and little p. If I were running the show in a city as large and disparate as Philadelphia, free and unhindered, I would start on the neighborhood level with the basics of life—food, air, and shelter. No one should have to take two buses to get vegetables or to go to a park. Everyone should have access to well-designed homes, especially in Philadelphia, which is an old, brick city. I see the vast amount of vacant properties as our opportunity to develop new forms of housing types, construction models, and local food production.

What was the impetus for the shim wall? How did it serve a personal need?
We had just bought a house and had been watching way too much DIY Network, so we knew we wanted to do some sort of cool wood feature in the house. We'd seen people put wood flooring on walls, and it looked fantastic but was way out of our budget. After going through a series of too-difficult or too-expensive ideas, we hit on the shims, which were cheap and (for the most part) already uniformly cut and shaped. In a long narrow row house, it's almost impossible for the TV to not be the focus of the room, but this wall definitely helped steal some attention from the 40-inch. So we got the wood feature we wanted and gave guests something to look at other than the TV.

It seems the home—home improvement, building, reconstructing, personalizing, etc... can be a metaphor for human endeavor and the actualization of self. Is there a unique renovation with personal meaning that you've made to your home in the process of fixing it up?
This shim wall is probably the most unique and personal thing we've ever done.  We build a lot of custom things, but they always tend to be more about function than form. This is probably the first time we've done something that was almost entirely aesthetic, and it really does capture our personality and the sense of style that we wanted for this house. It adds richness, texture, depth, and dimension to the room, and it softens the starkness of the TV wall.  And let's face it: we freakin' love TV, so there was no way we were going to put it in some "media room" in the basement.

In what ways are you a “maker”?
For practically every major purchase we consider, at some point in the conversation one of us will say, "Could we build it?"  I guess that makes us makers.

What are you working on lately?
In Lottery Fantasy Land, we're always working on redesigning our house and improving its layout and whatnot.  In reality, we're working on our version of that black pipe shelf you guys featured a couple of issues ago, making a rain barrel, building a storage shed, and decking over our cement backyard.

What does being a RM 100 finalist mean to you?
It's really nice to be recognized and hear all the nice things people have had to say, especially since the project was so labor intensive. We underestimated what it was going to take to sand all those shims (around 1,600 or so), but we also underestimated how much we, and others, were going to love the end result. As is true of everything except squeezing your own orange juice, we got out of it what we put into it.