To celebrate our 10 year anniversary, I’m sharing this house that has been a part of our marriage for 9 years and 7 months.
The 1,100 sf house was constructed in 1952 and needed a complete renovation.
Along with an complete update of the plumbing and electrical systems, the kitchen was rearranged with the former laundry room opened up for interior access and the insertion of a new powder room within the existing footprint.
Exterior work included a new roof, retrofitting the carport structure, and new concrete flatwork.
We performed the work as owner, architect, and general contractor overseeing the major trades. We also installed and refinished the interior throughout the house.
Last week, our daughter designed and built a roller coaster from materials at home. Watching the girl press against her 3rd grade deadline surfaced messy memories of late night college studios.
Two years ago, a third of Basecamp (now 37signals) quit after the owners suddenly shut down the DEI committee and banned all political talk on their internal chat. I’m certain that number was inflated because they offered a generous separation package of up to six month’s pay to those who quit.
I’m not going to argue the merits of those decisions, but there are three lessons from the drama worth highlighting. Two lessons relate to our craft as Owner Project Managers, the third is a question that I ponder whenever I think about my career.
With all the calls and emails I’ve fielded over the past two years, this week was the first time that someone looked at my online portfolio before contacting me. (LinkedIn recruiters are shockingly lazy!)
The opportunity wasn’t a good fit, but we had a great conversation, and I learned about an exciting position to share with younger architects.
Many years ago, a BoardGameGeek user in Australia asked me to receive several shipments before his arrival in Vegas to attend a friend’s steampunk themed wedding.
When he came to pick up the games, his wife gave me this pink handmade pillow with chibi Star Wars characters for my newborn daughter.
Last year, I joined Post.news. The open and accepting crowd inspired me to start drawing again after years of fearful, constipated dormancy.
I started a series of hand sketches forming the ASL manual alphabet. After a few letters I started adding alliterative sentences. A month into this exercise, I was forced back into the office.
Reinserting a commute into my routine was so disruptive that I dropped the project before completing it.
~
A couple weeks ago I also joined Substack Notes. One of the first folks I met was Charlene Storey, who started a weekly ritual to share pictures of “everyday magic”.
Given my interest in the mundane objects that surround us (I earned my 2003 NaNoWriMo by writing about the stuff in my tiny garage apartment), it’s a perfect way to jump into the new stream.
~
I should finish the alphabet series, but I also like this new weekly thing and I don’t want to wait half a year before archiving these memories.
So for the next 26 weeks, I’ll be doing a series of unplanned diptychs. Let’s see how it goes.
Many years ago, a BoardGameGeek user in Australia asked me to receive several shipments before his arrival in Vegas to attend a friend’s steampunk themed wedding.
When he came to pick up the games, his wife gave me this pink handmade pillow with chibi Star Wars characters for my newborn daughter.
This movie is a modern industry propaganda film with the all-American narration of Jeff Bridges, sponsored by the American Society of Civil Engineers.
It highlights the altruistic sides of the engineering profession — building a bridge in rural Haiti, earthquake analysis in Nepal, and teaching robotics to disadvantaged children. It didn’t convince my daughter to enter the industry, but I enjoyed the heartwarming reminder of why I got into this business.
We joined this profession for a good job, but we didn’t just stay for a tidy nest egg. We change physical reality — we walk over, under, and into our projects. Other professions can’t provide such tangible results.
Given our fears of the incoming pandemic, I skipped his wake, though I left some offerings outside his studio before the world shut down.
I met Alex in his studio during a First Friday art walk soon after moving to Vegas ten years ago. He was working on a series of collages with old black and white magazine images on a black scratchboard background.
It has an intense focus on good and bad (defilement), a clear conception of hell, a strident moral directive evangelize (alleviate suffering), and even included a chapter of detailed logical argumentation to prove the another world is more real than our physical world.
