design, build, learn. repeat.

Rebuilding Hoxie Street

Well I am very excited to see progress in my effort to singlehandedly* rebuild Hoxie Street here in East Biloxi! Danny’s house (a combination rehab/rebuild) now has a nearly finished exterior, thanks to the fast work of Habitat for Humanity of Northern Virginia; they started sheetrocking the inside today: And just a block down the street, Habitat has begun digging foundations for Lendell’s house, the first house that I designed from the ground up (10 feet up, in this case). It sounds like this project will be moving faster than I could have hoped for (even despite a few obstacles …

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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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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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Rehab

No, not that kind. Unless these houses are going into rehab for their terrible, terrible addiction to being in disrepair. This is a house in East Biloxi for which we’ll be drawing up rehab plans, and it’s one of the many that have sat mostly untouched for the past two years. Sorry for the crappy quality, they’re cell-phone pictures. They show it well enough though to see the ugly stucco job (why you would take a beautiful wood siding and put this over it, I do not know) and the state of the interior. The second picture shows the view …

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Category Archives

Residential Design

Everything to do with residential design, including single- and multi-family housing.