D E S I G N /// ck

Well, nothing got done on the house this weekend. After last week's big push I was burned out. Add a deluge of rain and a Battlestar Galactica Season 3 DVD to the mix...

Things will get back on track once this rain lets up. You'll see.

In other news: BSG Season 4 starts this Friday! The Season 3 finale was a little weak, but overall I think it will be a good final season to the series. Alice and I powered through 3 this weekend so we'd be up to date for Friday's shindig.

Update: Check this out!

I've loaded up some pictures of the house from last weekend here. Photo credit to my sister Colleen. If the rain quits tomorrow morning I'll be cruising on the front gable finally.

I uploaded a song from the new Andrew Bird EP Soldier On- "Oh Sister." It's good. He mentions "Sister Winter" and Alice and I are wondering whether he's referencing Sufjan's song or just using a similar metaphor. It sounds like he's playing a mandolin, which I'm sure will excite Colleen, who has started playing one herself. I like when artists tide us over between albums with these EPs. You can listen to it here. Enjoy!

Oh man, I love his books. I'm reading All The Pretty Horses right now and I can't put it down. It's a nice change of pace in my reading of his novels- not as dense as Suttree and not as bleak as The Road. He has made it into the top pantheon of writers in my mind, most of which are dead- so who knows how many more great book he'll write?

The New York Review of Books review of The Road made an interesting observation:

That book [Blood Meridian] is usually viewed... ...as representing a kind of fulcrum, a borderland between the early quartet of Tennessee novels written in the 1960s and 1970s (The Orchard Keeper, Outer Dark, Child of God, and Suttree) that left McCarthy in obscurity and the Border Trilogy (All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing, and Cities of the Plain) that brought him fame. In Blood Meridian lushness of prose counterbalances aridity of setting; digression and indirection have not yet ceded the narrative to the dictates of the trilogy's archetypical western plots; and the Gothic impulse vies fiercely with the call to adventure. Setting aside the halfhearted No Country for Old Men, as charitably even the lover of McCarthy must, The Road seems to work its way back to the rich storytelling borderland of horror and the epic.

In short, we're entering the third stage of Cormac McCarthy's writing. Who's excited now?! For now, I'm plowing through his catalog of books- right now The Border Trilogy. 2008 seems destined to be the Year of Cormac.

My blogging has suffered here on account of all that has been going on at the house. My family came up this weekend to help out, and a lot got accomplished.

After some last minute qualms about the colors, Alice and Mom picked "Mountain Pine Green" for the main color- a dark spruce green bordering on blue. The crappy picture here doesn't do it much justice. It looks really sharp.

The exterior doors are in, after an extended effort with Wilson and Cullin last Tuesday night.

Drew and Duncan and I worked on laying the tongue and groove porch flooring this weekend, 2/3 of which is now finished. Cameron and I put up the new structural porch columns on Monday, which are now waiting to be wrapped in trim and painted.

And a special shout out to Colleen and Jess (Colleen's college friend), who became Wood Window Painting Specialists, performing a task that I really dislike: precise taping and painting.

Coming soon: The front gable! I'll be starting to trim out the window "pop out" above the porch roof and put up the shingles on either side of it.

Work on the house is moving along. Wilson and I finished up the porch stairs on Sunday and all the exterior wood siding and shingles have been delivered. The front and back doors came this morning and look great. Cullin and I will be putting them in this evening (I'll post a picture tomorrow).

Alice and I settled on a color scheme that we both liked- a dark forest green for the main color with a tan-white trim. The windows are "Navaho Red." We're using an opaque stain (that looks like paint) because it bonds to the wood siding much better that normal paint.

The porch floor planking is going to be delivered on Thursday. Between siding, the porch, and painting, there's a lot to do! Luckily my family is coming down to Knoxville this week to help out. We're really looking forward to seeing them (and taking advantage of their manual labor).

Tomorrow I'll be making a "quick" round trip to West Virginia, to visit the Cowen job site. The Dining Hall is on schedule to open for this summer, and it's now at the point where you can really feel how it's going to turn out.

More updates to come...

I just posted another one from Vampire Weekend. This may be my favorite song on the album. I caught myself singing this in the shower this morning. Enjoy.

Here's one from the archives with new life- a few years ago my firm let me develop this prototype tropical house as a pro bono project. This particular version is to provide a house for Andre and Justine Jean, a pastor and his wife in Ft. Liberte, Haiti. It hasn't been built yet, but it was designed to be a viable design for other applications in any tropical climate. I revisited this project last month and came up with the above configuration.

The general design utilizes a modular kit of parts, based on local materials and construction trades, and can be rearranged in many forms to be properly oriented on site. The site for Andre's house is near a large harbor, several miles from the sea, with prevailing cool breezes from the north. The entire house is designed as a wind-catcher, scooping in the cool breeze on the upper level and venting the hot air out through vents on the roof. Additionally, vents between the levels pull air from the lower level (where the breeze is usually absent) with a stack effect utilizing the strong cross breezes of the upper level, much like how a chimney draws smoke upwards.

In a country with unreliable electricity, these passive cooling systems are essential. Typical Haitian houses are essentially small concrete ovens, built with little thought to harnessing the cool breezes passing above their roofs. Hopefully this house can be an example of how much can be done with little, and how design can use the things God has given us for free; things as simple as a cool breeze from the sea.

I started building the front steps of the porch last evening. It was nice to just have some simple work with my hands to do, listening to jazz on the radio. I'll probably finish them up today or tomorrow, and I'll post a picture of the finished product. This weekend is the beginning of laying down the porch floor, which is good since there's a chance of rain (I'll be under cover). After that I'll be finishing up the wood siding for a few weeks and then painting the whole thing!

Alice had a teacher job fair at the University. She looked cute in her new business suit. I think she's starting to get overwhelmed by the idea of finding a job, so pray for her as she tries to let it go and just let it happen. And also pray that she finds the right school.

That's all for now. I'm trying to get out of work a little early so we can go hike House Mountain this evening with the dogs. The weather is beautiful and I need a break from carpentry.

Just a short post for now...

We worked on the house most of the weekend and got the ball rolling. Jason graciously showed up two days in a row to learn the Fundamentals of Framing. We framed the last few walls in for the plumber (who should be finished by Thursday) and strengthened up the porch beams. Daylight Savings Time really helped with more sunlight in the evening. I'll be posting some pictures soon.

Went to the Bon Iver concert last night, and it was awesome. The best part was at the end when he came out in the crowd and played "Skinny Love" completely acoustic. He somehow recreated in concert the intimacy of the cabin recordings on his album. I was standing right behind him while he played. It was very sublime, the kind of thing that makes you close your eyes and soak in the sounds.

Interesting casting... but Giamatti has the acting chops to probably pull it off. I think that it's awesome that talented writers and film makers are examining the beginning of our country and the men (and women) behind that movement. We need reminding, especially this year... We need to look at what the United States of America really is- where we've come from and where we should be going.

In the seizure-inducing video tradition of this blog, here is proof that we live in a post-modern world. Everything is retro, everything is new. All styles blend into new aesthetics [that's just for you jason].

Bonus: If you, like me, grew up listening to Paul Simon's Graceland and still love it, you need to check out Vampire Weekend. If you, like me, consistently clue into the indie scene late you may have not heard of them yet. Believe me, you need to change that. I'll be posting one of their songs on my audio page tonight, so check it out.

Some of you may have had this conversation with me: "Last night I had this intense zombie dream..." Inevitably this leads to a long discussion of zombie movie comparisons, particularly vivid scenes, the zombie survival guide (read: how we all plan to survive a zombie apocalypse), among other things.

I've met other people who have had zombie dreams, but not reoccurring zombie dreams like me. I had one last night and woke up worn out. I can still remember it. In this one, though, the military was trying to eradicate the outbreak and were killing everybody, zombies and non-zombies alike, so I had two things to fight through. Soldiers gunning for me and brain hungry undead. It made for one intense night.

The one reoccurring theme is that the people who are my allies are slowly picked off and return later on as the enemy- as zombies. This is always the most compelling aspects of zombie movies for me. You see the reanimated corpse of a loved one- do you kill it? Do you hesitate? Or even worse: they get bitten and you know and they know that they will turn soon- do you mercy kill? Luckily for me Alice hasn't made a guest starring appearance in my dreams, so I haven't had to face the above scenarios with her.

I don't know why I have these dreams or why they keep coming back. Maybe this is why I don't play video games. I have all the adventure I need while I sleep.