Blogging is the best form of procrastination

So I should be grading papers right now, to return to students tomorrow. But instead I am blogging and getting ready to go to a friend's house to watch Jeff Green's professional NBA debut (one of the downsides of not having a tv).

I am headed out to the house on Friday to review the HVAC work, get some more boards down on the deck, maybe stain some cedar, and meet with a guy who I hope can drill the faucet hole in our kitchen countertop, which was on our original Simplex punchlist (we've been washing dishes in the bathroom sink). For a host of reasons this didn't get done before the house shipped - another thing on my to-do list is to get a comprehensive punchlist posted, detailing all the items that needed attention after the house was delivered. We didn't have anything big, and Simplex has been attentive to my requests, but I'm sure it'll help folks to see what sort of stuff goes into the post-delivery phase...

Want to spend some money?

I've been meaning for awhile to post some of the sites I've been trolling for furniture and other fun stuff. A couple of good ones: BetterLivingThroughDesign and GrassRootsModern. I'm going to put them all together in one set of links on the sidebar one of the these days pretty soon.

This guy, who built his own very fun house himself, recommends them as well.

Looking to lose yourself in the world of modern building blogs?

LiveModern is the place for you. They have begun aggregating all the modern building blogs out there, and there are lots of them. The interface isn't great yet (they are just posting all the posts from all the blogs, instead of letting you look at which blog is which), but I bet they'll get the bugs out soon. Lots of good stuff in there...

The LiveModern community used to be really vibrant, but has quieted down quite a bit over the last couple of years. The forums are really productive when they hit on something that is relevant for you; hopefully they'll get some more traffic and liven things up again.

Going once, going twice...

Today's Times has a piece on Richard Neutra's Kaufmann House. (Not having spent any real time in California to speak of, I am intrigued by this place they call "Palm Springs.") Anyway, down at the bottom of the article we find the names of the architects responsible for its renovation: Marmol & Radziner, who of course have another noteworthy home in the California desert. There's something about that landscape that really lends itself to modern design. The endless views? That it's dry as a bone? A much different aesthetic than a cabin in the woods. (We don't have scorpions.)

Don't call us, we'll call you

We got a call a couple of months ago from the reporter who wrote this article in the NYPost on Res4; but she never followed up and apparently we weren't good enough for her. (Actually she said it was probably going to be much easier for her to interview someone local.)

All these cookie-cutter articles about prefab seem to read the same after awhile...

85 and sunny

Hard to believe the leaves have just barely started to change. I was working in shorts and a tshirt this weekend. Strange fall. [UPDATE: 29 degrees last night, just about one week after this was originally posted. So fall's here.]


Made a lot of progress on the deck - the ipe is almost all down:


The trench and hole for the gas line and tank are dug, but apparently my HVAC guy is still at least a week from being finished:


One of the BIG downsides of being your own GC is not having continuing relationships with trades. I'm sure I'm at the bottom of this guy's list, and I don't have a whole lot of leverage. So we're just crossing our fingers that we have heat/hot water before it gets too cold...

What I imagine it would be like in a submarine (a really nice submarine, with lots of windows and cool furniture and deer on the outside)

It was cold at the house this weekend, and we don't have heat yet, so we were shut in tight and bundled up in sweatshirts and all that. And for as much as we've imagined all the glass in the house as really opening up to the outside (and that's how it's been most of the time we've been out there - all the windows open, breeze and birdsong coming through), it was a really pleasant experience to be sealed in the house and looking out, instead of feeling the outside coming in. Michael shouted DEER! at one point, and sure enough, out the windows on the hill above the house was a line of six deer, just slowly making their way along one of the deer paths, stopping to nibble on trees. That didn't happen during the day when it was warm out and we were making noise for everything out there to hear. But now it feels kinda like we're inside a bubble, and the woods is alive and undisturbed all around us. And we get to watch.

The magic of TV

Though we are nowhere near finished with anything, our friends from TV land were out at the house again this weekend for the "house is finished" segment of the show. Actually was great, cause it meant we had to clean. Now the upstairs really does feel like the space we've been waiting for:


Of course our first piece of furniture arrived as the camera crew left...

You could have come to my house

We don't have a tv. (Well, actually, we have a tiny little tv, but we keep it in the basement and we don't have cable.) This drives some of my more tv-literate friends crazy. We don't have an ideological stake in the whole no-tv debate (and our kids watch the occasional dvd or youtube video on our computer). We just gave it up when I went back to grad school and never went back.

But here's what we're missing: according to prefabcosm, Bob Vila is doing a whole series on the construction of a modular home by Simplex. Well, Bob, if you'd visited our little cabin you'd not only have gotten to see the Simplex modular process but a fun modern design to boot! (And maybe we'd be finished by now...)

Guinea Pigs

The first flatpak house is finished. Built in Massachusetts by artist Amy Goodwin. Took a couple of years, apparently. But pretty great looking.


As an aside, I some day would like to be a guinea pig. "Donate" some land to an architect, tell em what I like, and then say "go!"

Buying Spree

Though we are absolutely out of money, we have begun shopping in earnest for furniture. There are some pieces that we have always wanted to have - modern classics, you might say - and now we feel justified in actually buying them. And I've been wondering - is it worth it to us to have originals of design classics (like the Noguchi table and the Eames LCW)? How do you decide? There's the quality question. There's the vanity element of owning the real thing; there's the financial element (though they'll hold their value, maybe?); there's the integrity element (are you really getting the same design?). There's the legal question, which interests me more in the very esoteric sense of who owns good ideas. And there's the whole democratization of design thing. So what to do?






Like I said, we're out of money, so I think I know what we're going to do...

Addababyittsaboy!

No name yet - we've apparently got til Sunday, when we have to turn in the birth certificate...

Everybody's doing great:

Don't know if my feet are gonna like it, but it looks great

Blogging has been a little slow lately - I haven't gotten much accomplished out there with things picking up here at home. C'est la vie. I got out there Sunday to get some more work done on the deck (and to await a Sears repairmen - for out non-functioning refrigerator - who never showed up):


And I got to take a look at our freshly polished concrete basement slab, which looks pretty terrific:




It's actually a bit darker than I thought it would be. And it sharpened, rather than smoothed out, the visible texture of the troweling from when the slab was poured, which also surprised me. We chose not to have any stain or color added. I think it looks pretty great. Here's a close-up (I had to use the flash, which distorts the color a little - it's more of a brown; and the stone is just the aggregate in the concrete - we didn't add anything to get that speckled appearance, which is more prominent in some places than in others):




I'll say just a couple of things about the process (which I was not there for and didn't see in action). The machine can't polish edges very well, so the first half-inch or so off the wall is a bit rough. This is fine for us - we'll have square trim like we have upstairs to cover it up. But polishing an open floor (before framing) would avoid a lot of that. It also appears to have been VERY messy. The wet grinding creates a kind of slurry that gets thrown around - it's all over the drywall, and sometimes reaches more than a foot above the floor (though no dust anywhere). There was also some tearing of the drywall paper where the machine bumped it. Any greater level of finish in the basement and we could have been in a bit of trouble. Now we're going to have to be cafeful with what kind of mess we make on the floor down there, but I think doing this earlier on would have been better (though really there's a down side no matter what). And - this is weird - there are some faint brown stains on the floor where insects have died. I'll keep an eye on that.

Our guy was Jim Cuviello at Complete Decorative Concrete Solutions on the Maryland eastern shore. I'd recommend him (though the only other residential concrete polisher I could find was in OHIO!). Cost $6750 for roughly 1000 sf.

Other prefab you can try on

Well, our little project doesn't seem as if it will be ready for renters in the immediate future (more on my - slow - progress soon). But if you've got $800 lying around, you can rent this fancy version of Rocio Romero's LV for a night:


The owner is apparently a general contractor and using this as a marketing tool (not a bad advertisement for your work, I gotta admit). NapaPreFab, he calls it. If you're in wine country and have more money than you know what to do with (and if you're in wine country this may very well be the case), this is probably more fun than the Ritz.

NIMBY

Frank Lloyd Wright supposedly said something to the effect of: if you live in the ugliest building in your neighborhood, you don't have to look at it. Well some folks in my old neighborhood are pretty upset that they have to look at this:


I haven't seen it in person yet, but I'm not so upset. Our old building, where the renter in our small 1BR apt no longer has a kitchen window because the new building covered it up, is the red brick one on the right of the giant pink thing. Now our building (along with many others in the neighborhood) isn't so historically-situated either, something seemingly lost on many of the folks making such a stink. Anyway, this is (tangentially) related to one of the many reasons we decided to find unrestricted property for our cabin: no one can complain about what it looks like except us.