(Oldish) images of my house

These are nice pics that Bruce and Anne had taken of my house soon after it was completed.

Staircase lighting

I had grand plans for staircase lighting that illuminated whenever you stepped on the first steps. I carefully engineered a board and had it all working on the bench using IR reflecting detectors to sense the footsteps. But upon installation I discovered that the sensors sucked -- their practical range was only a few inches and they generated a lot of false positives. So, until I can find a new sensor system the lights are just boringly connected to an old-fashioned light switch. But, at least I can tread safely on the stairs at night now!

Vent Hood 1

Today I started on a mosaic for my vent hood. I'm more or less shamelessly copying one of me favorite local artists Aly Winningham who did the candy island mosaic in the Whole Foods mother ship. Her stuff looks a hundred times better but she has, after all, been at it for years!

Final tree mural

I finished up the tree mural this weekend by painting the air duct grills and going back over it with a lighter pink to blend in the branches a bit. Thanks for Michael and Holly for the help.

Upstairs tree mural

With some help from Michael and Rechelle, I started on the tree mural for the upstaris landing. I've had this planned for some time and finally got around to it this weekend. There's still work remaining but pretty good for a few hours work.

Gate support v 1.1

I thought it needed a little more and I had some leftover material so I added this spiral-y bit.

Gate arch

The gate I made for the side is so heavy that it was causing the post to lean inwards making it hard to open. I couldn't put a tension wire on the opposite side because of an adjacent driveway so my only solution was to add a compression element pushing the post away from the house. To keep with the tree and vine theme I built this from a glued up laminate of 2x2s.

Tree sculpture in bedroom

I've barely had a chance to do any house projects because of work on Traitwise, but recently I did finish up the tree sculpture in my bedroom/bathroom. This is one of the first ideas I had for my house and one of the last to actually get implemented! This view is looking up from my bathroom toward the shared ceiling with my bedroom on the other side of the green wall.

Closet, bathroom, and bedroom

Bruce delivered the major pieces of my closet drawers and shelves today! Hooray, storage! We use the same CNC web-based box builder as before -- "Top Drawer Components" -- just love the results from them. Every box is dove-tailed, perfectly square, and already polyed at very reasonable prices. For the drawers I'll eventually put on drawer plates that will hide the slider hardware.



For some bathroom storage we ordered two different sizes of box and screwed them together for this nice effect. (There's several more bathroom fixtures yet to be installed.)


Meanwhile, last week we started on the "tree" element that spans out between then bathroom and the the bedroom. There's a lot more pieces to add to this, but all the heavy stuff is done.

Apparently I'm everything that's wrong with the world

Good news: the source of everything that's wrong with the world has been located.
Bad news: it's me

For a Christmas eve activity, my neighborhood decided to have an outing in the park directly in front of my house. My contribution was a bonfire. As tends to happen at such gatherings, you meet some of your neighbors for the first time. One neighbor discovers that I'm the owner / builder of the interesting Gaudi-esque house we're standing in front of and proceeds to tell me how much he loves the house and how great it is that I tried something different, etc. After a little while the conversation changes to the historic housing tax exemptions that are common in my neighborhood (for which I, of course, am not eligible since my house is new). They were discussing how much money they would save on taxes by declaring their expensive beautiful houses to be historic. I casually pointed out that while I understoodd their desire for a tax break, and indeed would probably do the same thing if I was in their position, that surely they'd have to understand that I'd be against such tax breaks for obvious reasons. "Oh but what about the character of the neighborhood?" they replied. "Which character would that be?" I replied, "Faux American Colonial? Faux Craftsmen? Faux Gaudi? It's not that I don't like these houses, I do, that's one of the reasons I live here, but let's not pretend that they represent some great monument to human achievement. Again, that said, I totally understand why you guys would want to use the law in your interest and get a tax break. But if it came up for a vote, I'd vote against it."

This was not greeted well. An aggressive: "You don't think we should save historic things?" is quipped back. "I dunno," I mused, "Life includes a lot of change and renewal, sometimes we should embrace it."

And for this bit of shocking opinion on the meaning of life I am met with my neighbor angrily saying: "I can't talk to you anymore." and storming away. At first I thought he was joking because his reaction seems so out of proportion to the topic. Someone else quietly said that they agreed with me and this brought him back angrily shouting: "He said that he wants to destroy all historic things!" I replied calmly, "actually that's not what I said...." but before I could explain my position, he yelled at me while wagging his finger: "You're everything that's wrong with the world. Money! Money! FUCK YOU!!". As he stormed away I quietly replied: "Merry Christmas to you too."

For the record, my full position is that, of course we should save historic things -- I just think that we should do it collectively by purchasing landmarks with public funds and then leasing them out or preserving them. The current method that permits some people to receive a tax break for living in old, beautiful houses strikes me as an extremely inequitable tax reward exclusively benefiting a small cadre of rich people because "historic" homes are almost always in old, nice neighborhoods where the property values are high. Furthermore, the extremely lax standards of what makes something "historic" are capricious. For example, a house around the corner from me has been declared historic because a man who lived in it once was said to be a "prominent doctor" when they found a 1 inch newspaper column about him from the Statesman decades ago. (He's actually still alive so technically he's not quite "historic" yet). By these low standards, every house that has been occupied by a professional (i.e. practically every house in every well-off neighborhood) will become "historic" eventually.

The absurdity of this to me is that after I die my unique house will probably become "historic" and the owner after me will get a big fat tax break. But I, who actually did all the work to create this unique house, who literally hurt his back laying the bricks, who spent a great deal of money and effort to create something interesting that might be appreciated into the future, I get nothing. Meanwhile, my neighbor who hypocritically likes my new house yet has forgotten that something had to be torn down to build it will get a tax break for living in and maintaining a house that is supposedly in the "character of the neighborhood" despite the fact that his house is only one of maybe two or three adobe-style houses in this supposedly "historic" neighborhood.

New paintings by Heather Jarry

I commissioned a set of watercolors from Heather Jarry, a friend I've known since 6th grade. I adore Heather and her work and wanted to fill my house with her playful, colorful images. A few months ago we went down to the UT life science's library and I showed her a bunch of images that inspired me ranging from the research plates of the 19th century expedition of HMS Challenger to the molecular renderings of David Goodsell. I'm thrilled with the results. Be sure to click through on these images and see the details. Now I just have to figure out where I'm hanging all this new artwork!


A river of fireflies, inspired by the stories of synchronized fireflies from Strogatz.


Closeup of the fireflies


Inspired by microscopic drawings from HMS Challenger


Inspired by a diagram in Visual Complex Analysis



"Actin and Myosin", inspired by a drawing in Machinery of Life by David Goodsell


Water.


Study #1, elements of the Myosin, Actin can be seen here


Study #2


Study #3

Bed stain

Stained the bed today (not what you're thinking!). Almost done with this project! It's taken way too long.

Bed

I haven't been posting house progress for a while. My night-time project for the last week has been construction of a bed with a little bit of a floating cloud theme. I laminated four 4x8 sheets of maple plywood together and then cut out circles of various radii.


After Alex's sanding for many hours...


Here's the rough-cut end table before I cut out the circles...

Rugs!

The first of a few new rugs has arrived. Thanks to Amberlee for all the help in finding these. I especially like the runner in the entrance.

Finished workshop drawers

Today I finished attaching the hardware to my new tool drawers. I'm stupidly excited about them as I can put away all my tools and clear out a lot of clutter from my shop.

We ordered the boxes from Drawer Connection. They really did a great job; they are perfectly square, dovetailed joined, glued, sanded, and polyed. As Bruce said, "I'll never build another box again." It's a demonstration to me how custom web-based CNC construction is the future of a lot of products. We ordered about 30 boxes of all different sizes and the total was only about $1100 including shipping. There's no possible way we could have made them for that.

Porch branches

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Bruce and I finished up the porch branches on Friday; they have not yet been stained so the color is different. It's funny -- this is one of the very first details I thought of for the house design and one of the very last to be implemented so for me this small detail is very important in that it collapses some sort of psychic "todo" stack and thereby provides the relief that one feels in crossing-out a complicated set of tasks (never mind that the list has grown substantially since then! :-)

House projects

Arch cut for the handrail on the main stairs.


Kitchen nearly complete.


Bruce gets out the Gallagher Saw!



Bruce and I start mounting branches on the front porch.


This one branch was a bitch, we gnawed away it it with probably 30 cuts before we got it to fit right!


We wrapped up many of the recent house projects. The upstairs porch is screened in and has a pane of glass on one side which significantly reduced the noise from the neighbor's AC unit -- now I can have my bedroom windows open!

The rear kitchen is done except for drawer pulls and a couple of electric outlets.

We cut an arch into one of the supports along side the staircase that had been bothering me for a long time because it didn't leave room for your hand to slide along the hand rail. Bruce and I came up with this cut arch solution which also I think looks really cool -- opened up the space a lot.

We started adding branches to the front porch beams which was part of the original plan but we had never gotten around to it. One of these branches was much harder than the others we ended up make many small cuts until we got it positioned just right.

Sound insulation, screens

The wallboard guys came today and added two layers of sound proofing to my bedroom wall.


Kurt finished the screen installation. You can hardly see them. Of course, after a while they'll get dirty. The section on the left is where glass will go which will hopefully abate some of the sound of the neighbor's AC unit.

Sound proofing, Screens

Looking up into the ceiling Bruce cut a hole to gain access to underneath the bathroom.


This wall and the adjacent one are going to have sound proofing board added tomorrow so bed and pictures were taken out of the room.


Bruce finished up the back of the new shop cabinets. The wall board guys will clean this up tomorrow.


Crammed my bed temporarily into the spare room.


Pulled the railings out from the back porch to insert the new screens. But the screens didn't quite fit so there's some modification to be done.

There is a bathroom immediately adjacent to my bedroom and anytime it is used at night I can hear, well, everything. This is despite the fact that the walls are filled with 3" of foam. To abate this, Bruce opened up the the ceiling and sprayed in cellulose insulation above and below the bathroom. This made a tremendous amount of dust but didn't do much to dampen the sound. Tomorrow the wallboard guys come and we're going to expand the adjoining walls with another inch of special sound-proofing board. This requires rebuilding two walls, two doors, and repainting so I've temporarily moved my bed into the spare bedroom. Meanwhile, the cabinets were framed up and an attempted mounting of the porch screens determined that there were a few mis-measurements and will require some modifications.

Pipe move

The plumber Dale came by today to reroute the pipe that was in the middle of my new cabinet space. Unfortunately I forgot to mention to him that the bottom needed to be cut out (you can see the stub at the bottom) to make way for a larger drawer so either I live with it or have him rebuild that when he comes over for the kitchenette plumbing next week.