I've heard that a few people have been asking why we would have left the front of our building at 224 Queen Street until the very end to finish. Here's why:
- The front is the most intricate. It takes the most time to do well and right. We are saving the best for last.
- Being more intricate it takes much more planning, development, and thought. That takes time.
- The sides and the front are inter-dependent and there is a certain order you need to do things to make it all come together correctly.
- We don't really care that it is the front. We see the whole building as a project to do well The 22.3 feet that people walk by is just another side to us. To put it into perspective the building has 200+ linear feet of wall. 10% of it is the front.
- When we "do" the front it will render the front entrance unusable for an amount of time. We had to build a side entrance to facilitate building access while the front is unusable. That side had to be done first.
- We have worked on the front. You might notice the completely rebuilt porch roof, the seven installed windows, or the completely scraped and primed trim, overhangs, and decorative brackets.
- There are 2.5 of us working on this project on top of our full time jobs. It's done evening and weekends to not disturb the building during business hours. We're doing it as fast as we can.
When ripping apart a 100+ year old building you become keenly aware that the work you are doing lasts longer that your own lifetime. As a result we want to do it right. We have a strong desire to do things well, as they should be done. We want this building to be done correctly, to be efficient, and to be well built. The art of craftsmanship is something we hold near and dear to our hearts and feel that that art is starting to be lost for a quick visual fixes. Everyone is a fan of Mike Holmes until the motto "make it right" affects a building they work in or a renovation budget they are in charge of. "Making it right" takes longer, is more expensive, and often requires work to be done in a way that most would see as illogical. Also, sometimes you have to undo some of your work when you discover something new.
We're excited to be nearing the end of this project. Finishing the highly visible front will be a very dramatic and climatic end to a 4-5 year project. It will be much more satisfying for us to step back from the front and say "we are finished" than to step back from the rear corner by the parking garage and say the same.
Someone had a dialogue with our construction trailer yesterday between 4pm and 6pm.
Someone in the know told us to report it to the police, so we have. While I understand this is normal protocol I think it may, in the end, fan the flames of "damning the man". I'd like to come up with something more meaningful, something more constructive. So far my ideas are:
- Offer the graffiti artist a job. Hey, while you're out painting things why not get paid for it! 10/hour to help us paint some of our buildings downtown.
- We repaint our trailer and ask for something nicer to be painted on it. Seriously, if you painted something REALLY cool on it we'd keep it there.
- Take them hiking or send them on an Outward Bound trip.
- Make them paint our new boat (1964 Flying Junior).
- Give them a scholarship to a design school.
- Give them a semi permanent tattoo of some webdings on their forehead.
Does anyone else have any ideas on what we could do if we actually come face to face with our "artist"?
Silverorange is looking to fill a full-time but temporary HTML/CSS position.
Steven points out what we need.
- A deep understanding of effective, attractive, usable, and standards-based HTML/CSS-based design and layout is required.
- The position is full-time but temporary (June through December) and dedicated to a particular client.
- Location is not an issue, but being within the North American time-zones would help
- A demonstrable body of work is a requirement - we can’t judge your skill-set over the phone.
- Communication and writing abilities are key - you’ll be in frequent and direct contact with the client.
If you meet these requirements and are interested, email your information and some links to some of your work to slice@silverorange.com (no phone calls please).
We've started monitoring our power usage.
For those curious about how we did this:
- We bought one of these and use it to monitor one of the main panels in our building.
- We stream data from the unit over USB (We had to pay to unlock the port - boo!) to a webserver where we log it and use Google's visualization tools to generate the dashboard.
Original dashboard design by Steven Garrity.
It's always sad to be at the end of a trip. As I write this I'm sitting in an airport hotel in Toronto dealing with the effects of jet-lag. This morning we pack up one last time and make the relatively short flight back home to Charlottetown where we will resume our normally scheduled lives.
Travel has become a necessity for us (Becky and I). It is like a drug that we need regular doses of to keep us stimulated and grounded. Travel, for us, began by wanting to see new things. It quickly changed from purely taking it all in to us wanting to "be" in and of a place.
We are starting to see travel as a mindset. Pico Iyer's travel essay simply called "Why We Travel" has been formative for me in the past few years.
I take great comfort that by seeing travel as more than the act of going or being in a place other than home it does not, in fact, end. Iyer, a beautiful writer, says it better than I could ever dream of:
...travel is like love, it is, in the end, mostly because it’s a heightened state of awareness, in which we are mindful, receptive, undimmed by familiarity and ready to be transformed. That is why the best trips, like the best love affairs, never really end.
ClusterShot was featured on TechCrunch today. Cool.
We find it a little weird to be labelled as a stock site or compared to istockphoto.We can't blame anyone for that though. We're trying a few new things that just don't really fit anywhere right now. That's ok.
