design, build, learn. repeat.

Progress on Rosetti

The inside of Patty’s house is starting to take its finished form, as the first wall and ceiling materials were installed over the holidays. Brian Stewart somehow coordinated up to 30-40 volunteers at a time to make great progress on installing the tongue-and-groove pine board that we chose for the ceilings, walls, and most of the floor. Although the material is nothing fancy — standard No.2 Southern Yellow Pine — it gives the room a very warm look, especially when the sun shines on it, and it should look great when finished: By itself, it looks a little overwhelmingly uniform. …

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(Belated) Happy New Year

Happy 2008! It was good to spend some time back home for the first time since I moved down to Mississippi. I’m back in Biloxi now, having flown into New Orleans late on the 1st. It’s surprisingly cold here on the coast, and our house’s heater is struggling, but we should be back in the sixties by the weekend. Work is starting back up: yesterday it was just me and David and Mike in the office; today we added Jody, and I picked Sarah and James up from the airport this evening. In some exciting news, construction is just starting …

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Christmas in Virginia

Christmas came with plenty of good food: Crepes, orange rolls, beef wellington, cranberry sauce, salad, gingersnaps, almond butter cookies, peanut brittle, ice cream, and more. Adding to the list of healthy foods are Dutch treats, like Chocoladeletters — big chocolates that come in all letters of the alphabet: From the back of one (this is a Dutch rhyme about Black Pete): “Zwarte Piet ging uit fietsen, toen klapte zijn band. Hij moest toen gaan lopen, met de fiets aan zijn hand, Hij kwam in een dorpje en zei tegen de smid. Ik geloof dat er in mijn achterband een pepernootje …

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Home for the Holidays

Home! And sleeping on an air mattress. Turns out I left and my parents decided to get another Dutch kid. (No, really. Jasper, a Dutch high school exchange student). My flights went smoothly — New Orleans to Charlotte to Roanoke. On the second leg, in the type of ridiculous coincidence that suggests the universe is playing games with us all, I ran into an old UVA friend, Amanda, who was my best friend’s roommate in first year, and who has gone on to get her Master’s and is now working on Ph.D. in English. You’re making the rest of us …

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Railing Brainstorming

Thought I’d put some railing ideas out there. We’re trying to find a way to make the railing a special part of the house without it becoming too expensive or complicated. Some of our design objectives include: Use thinner or visually lighter members so you can see through the railing when you’re sitting down. Provide some kind of visual screening/privacy (directly conflicts with #1, but might be achieved by some partial or movable screening or by a trellis/vine system). Give the railing enough dimension for potted plants and so on. Visually and materially coordinate with rest of house. I’ve drawn …

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Update in pictures

For anyone following the progress of Patty’s house, we have some quality photos courtesy of Leslie, an architectural photographer who volunteered with Architecture for Humanity for a couple days.

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Soy Bomb

Just in time for Christmas, we’ve turned the inside of Patty’s house into a winter wonderland. Gulf South Insulation came in yesterday to spray a coating of soy-based insulation into the house. This stuff is pretty cool and has three main advantages for us: When combined with standard roll insulation that we will also be putting in, we will get a very good insulation factor, which will keep the house from gaining or losing too much heat. Because it sprays in, it will fill in all the little holes in the framing to give us 100% cover and increase airtightness. …

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Moss Point

Moss Point, Mississippi is a smallish city just north of Pascagoula. Unlike most of the coastal cities, it is oriented not towards a beach and casinos but towards its riverfront, which is quite picturesque. They are rebuilding from flood damage sustained during Katrina, and the city government has decided to use this opportunity to revamp its vision for the city, focusing on becoming a progressive city with a first-class downtown, scenic riverfront, opportunities for eco-tourism and recreation, and revitalized neighborhoods. For anyone interested in community-based design and hurricane recovery, Moss Point’s past two years have been very interesting. It turns …

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A House for Danny

This is Danny: Danny’s house was flooded by several feet of water during Hurricane Katrina, and needed to be gutted. He then hired a company to raise his house onto a new foundation to bring the floor up to around 4 feet above the ground. However, during this process they found the rear 2/3 of the house to be structurally unsuitable for raising. The result is a house in which the front is still standing and simply needs refurbishing, while the rear is essentially being rebuilt from the ground up: I worked with Danny to come up with a new …

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Treehouse Update!

We’ve made a lot of progress on Patty’s house. Thanks to the efforts of a number of volunteer groups, particularly First Presbyterian, the exterior of the house is more or less finished. It finally looks like a real house, it’s great! A couple more pictures below…

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