The Desk

The new desk

The storage cabinet closed. Inside is the printer, modem and power strip

The inside of the storage cabinet

Note the arrangement for holding the various cables in place under the desktop. They are easily disengaged if need be.

Detail from one of the cabinet side panels

The office desk is nearly done. We are waiting on a little more hardware and there are a couple of tweaks here and there, but the big stuff is done and in place. I used cherry wood throughout.

You might recall from a previous post that Nancy and I came up with the design by creating a mock-up to test out the arrangement. From there I translated that into a plan for two cabinet bases, a large desk top and a "wing" that slots into the desk and provides good work space and views for Nance, who spends lots of time working at this desk. She's managed with some pretty rudimentary set-ups in the past, so its nice to create something that sets her up well.

The right hand cabinet is a conventional set of drawers; the top one is a simple drawer and the bottom one is a file cabinet sized arrangement.

The left hand cabinet looks like a matching cabinet with drawers but in fact serves as storage for the printer, the power strip, and the modem. The side of the cabinet opens to reveal the stuff inside but doesn't look like a door.

The wing is designed to easily come off so that we can have space to set up a bed in the office when we want to make it into a guest room.

When I was working out the plan, Nancy challenged me to come up with something clever for sides of the cabinets and I was sort of stumped. After tossing around some ideas I decided to stamp the side panels with letters and numbers--the idea being that desks, cabinets, printers and the like are pretty much about generating and holding letters and numbers. The result is subtle, but I'm pleased with how it came out.

A bonus is the keyboard drawer which I picked up the at the state of Vermont salvage store in Waterbury. It is versatile, easy to use, and very solid; a new version of this mechanism would cost over $100. It was a good catch at $10.

When the drawer slides arrive I will build a slide out base for the printer so it'll be easy to load up paper. The drawer pulls will be in that same order and installing those will round off this part of the project. Yet to come are an upper shelving unit along the back of the desk for storage and such. That'll be easy compared to the desk and cabinets.

Colors, drawings and a porch

We've made some commitments on colors and that feels great, with a couple of exceptions which we have to tweak. I feel grateful to Teri who has been helping us out because I think we would have agonized about this stuff and its actually felt kind of easy.

Joe did a fine job finishing up the set of stairs and small landing entering into the west doorway. I spent almost no time on this design-wise because we're planning to do something a bit more elaborate and integrated down the road, but it made sense to get something in place before the winter so we can call it done.

Meanwhile, I've been hunched over my drafting table working on the plans for our kitchen cabinetry. Having looked over various approaches, I've narrowed in on how I want to go about building them and have starting doing construction drawings accordingly. After a bit of hesitation, I'm getting excited about this project. It'll be a pleasurable challenge.

I'd like to lay my weary bones tonight, On a bed of California stars

Joe and I wrapped up the rest of the porch roofing yesterday under continuing balmy November clear skies. We decked the roof with alternating 1x6 and 1x1 runs of rough sawn material. We could have just made it easy and done the whole thing in 1x6. but that woulda been boring and I find it so compelling to take some more time to make it interesting when I see the opportunity.

What this means is, when you look up from the porch, you'll see a wide-narrow-wide-narrow pattern of planking that repeats left to right all the way up. You'll notice this pattern in the photos.

This afternoon not only did I make stars, I saw stars...

To make the porch detail even that much more fun, today I spent the afternoon cutting a star pattern into the roof. Our original plan was to have translucent roofing material which would allow light through the star cut-outs, but somewhere along the line we decided that it would look a little less attractive to have semi-clear corrugated plastic as the roofing material over this one portion of the house. The drawback is that when the finished roof goes on over these stars, light will not shine through, so they'll be less apparent. What I might do is paint the underside of the tar paper which we'll put down before the metal roof is installed. That way there will at least be some brightness on the surface at the top of the cut-out. We'll see these when we are in the kitchen doing dishes.

Half of the fun of this whole house project is the opportunity to make little details like this happen. It would pain me deeply not to be able to do this. You could go and paint some stars on the underside of your porch roof if you wanted -- and that would be fine, but how much cooler is it to have them built-in as a part of the building. Paint fades, cut-outs are there for the long haul.

The bit about seeing stars... I took a good bonk on the ol' cognator this afternoon that drew more blood than you'd guess and sort of put me out for an hour or two. I think I'm all better now, but it doesn't look that way to see the notch on my head.

Color

We need to order our window very soon, and before we do that, we need to determine the color of the exterior of the windows and that is a motivation to determine the color scheme for the exterior of the house. We're working on it, but if you, dear reader, have some sense of inspiration or great suggestions, please feel free to speak up. We don't want to be boring; we want to be bold but dignified with whatever we come up with.

I started sketching a photocopy of south elevation without worrying too much about whether it made sense or looked good. I just wanted to start playing with ideas.

Update

Wow. Its been over a month since the last posting.

In the meantime we've continued to refine our plans. It is a process of moving to ever greater detail about everything. I used to work for an architect and my experience of the design process in that setting was was a steady, but not rapid, progression from one stage of design to the next. There hasn't been the same breathing room in our process, or to be a little more accurate, we've had to jump around a bit and do some pricing while still working elements of the design out. Its in the last week or two that I feel like the two are more realistically in sync.

I've struggled a bit with working out the details of the site plan. I can easily see, feel, and mentally experience the house, but when it comes to representing and "feeling" the contours of the site, I find it a bit harder. I built a model today, but it wasn't as revealing as I'd hoped it would be.

We area still waiting on confirmation of our septic plan. We hope to get that in the next week or so. With that in hand, we'll be able to move pretty quickly with scheduling and beginning work.

The photo above is of a rest area on I-89 in Williston. Its captured my attention for a number of years and I recently stopped and snapped some pics.

Slow and Steady

The last couple of weeks have had lots of ups and downs. After arriving at a settled plan, we dove in once more, revamped, simplified and came out the other end with the next iteration. Feeling a little worn down from the process and not trusting the last bit of work I'd done, I put down my drafting tools on a Friday afternoon and decided that I needed to forget about the house for a bit. I spent the next day and a half building bee equipment, cleaning bike parts, and puting Nancy's bike back together. I needed a little distance. It took a while, but I DID forget about the house and it was good to have done so. On Sunday night when we came back to plan our next moves we looked at the plans and we were both struck with a sense of "Hey... that's it... its good." Further refinements have transpired, but at this point we're around the last corner design-wise and it feels very good.

On the other hand, the septic issues have been rough. Our ideal siting for the house is not feasable given the resulting location of the system and the soils underneath. That pushes the house back up into the site a bit more then we'd like. Its not perfect, but I think we both feel like we can go with it. More to come this week.

Also, we're clear now that a slab-on-grade will not work here, so guess what? We're gonna have a basement. That's great from an extra space point of view, but increases costs. On the whole, I'm actually pretty glad about it. We can now do a root cellar, we'll have semi-c0nditioned work space in the winter... nice stuff.

What, you may ask, is happening in the picture above. Well, after cleaning my bike chain, I cooked it in a mixture of parafin and some of our beeswax. The connection? You know; getting away from the house project and all. Thinking about something else for a little bit.