The View From Our Window
Many of the signs we are making in the shop these days are for the contractors and suppliers for our new house. All of the signs are dimensional of course. The latest sign is for the great folks who will be doing the spray foam in the ceiling of the new house. The signs line the sidewalk out front.
More signs are in progress and will be up early next week.
-grampa dan
With many of our projects we are frustrated by limitations. Budgets almost always draw the line on how far we can go. Space limitations can thwart an all out project on occasion. Regulations and rules sometimes limit a design in some respects. Authorities would much rather have us conform to endless rules than be creative. Often people I do projects for worry about what other people might think or how it might affect resale value of their property. Instead of doing what they think is cool they (and us as designers and fabricators) merely settle for the minumum. They play it safe. Instead of doing what they want they march along with the masses.
It can be frustrating at times. But at our house we know and practice a cure that makes us feel much, much better. Instead of marching along with everyone else we choose to simply dance a happy dance.
When we do our own projects we purposely think of designs that will allow us to go absolutely crazy. There are no limits. What others may think or talk about behind our backs doesn't concern us. We aren't building for them this time so they have no say. The purpose of our projects on our property is to make US smile. This is where we live and work each day. When we get to our projects it is time to pull out the stops, wire down the accelerator and go for broke. And that is what we will do. Life is far too short to settle for anything less.
As we designed our house Janis & I constantly asked ourselves 'what if?' What if we made the windows round? What if we sculpted giant trees to 'hold up' the front of the house? What if we designed hundreds of hearts into the trim and painted them pink? What if the rocks along the bottom of the house were painted purple and blue? What if we had a cool bridge that spanned the living room to get to the other side of the house upstairs? What if the fence curved along the front of the property instead ofgoing straight? What if we shaped our property to be hilly instead of making it flat? What if we did all kinds of crazy things all through the house? Each time the answers were anything but 'normal'. If it made us both laugh it was deemed perfect and made part of the plan.
The giant trees we are sculpting as centerpieces for the front of the house are coming along nicely. Peter was merely instructed to go crazy and he happlily complied. He has no trouble dancing to the same music Janis & I listen to daily. The trees, as penci rod, are still largely invisible from the road but that will soon change when the concrete goes on and is sculpted. Locals will have much to debate in the coffee shop and around town. We'll be at home, smiling a big smile. Life is fun!
-grampa dan
Our ideas often start as mere scribbles. When I work for clients these quick scribbles never see the light of day outside my studio. For our house project they are the start of discussions on what is going to happen. On some parts we will use our state of the art CNC router. On the rest of the project things will be done all by hand. Fancy routed trim will be combined with sculpted fiberglass reinforced concrete for these pieces.
The beam project is a good example of the often hidden processes. I showed in a recent post how we go from concept drawing through the engineering process and on to construction. Building the bulk of these pieces on the ground saves many hours of scaffold time. They will be finished in place.
Then it was on to the details. The first sketch of these details was on a scrap of paper to illustrate my thoughts to Peter and Janis. We were exploring possible panel treatments on the beams. The owl sketch was an idea for the ends of the protruding beams. That idea got shelved as we thought it added one more unnecessary element to an already busy idea.
When we started bolting the plywood to the welded steel beam structure I broke out some felt pens and the scribbling started once more. This excercise was to determine panel size shape and placement.
Once everyone was in agreement I took a few quick notes to record our thoughts.
While the crew finsihed off stapling mesh to the beams I headed up to the computer in my studio to work on the 3D files I would need for routing these detailed pieces. I use a wonderful program called EnRoute to create the CNC routing files. EnRoute allows me to be both precise and creative at the same time. Using the rendering tools I can visualise my thoughts on the screen. I would work on the diagonal corner blocks first.
I started with a precise vector drawing. Then using the powerful tools inside EnRoute I first created the various shaped reliefs and added the woodgrain as a last step using a bitmap I had created. The results looked like this on my screen...
The program (with input from me) automatically creates tool paths which I saved and then sent to the CNC router out in the workshop. The router in turn creates the pieces we need.
These corner bloicks will be seamlessly integrated into the hand sculpted beam we first sketched. The CNC router allows us to quickly fabricate certain parts of our projects. Combined with the hand done portions the result is pure magic. Stay tuned to see how everything will fit together and become reality.
-grampa dan
Custom Design & Construction
