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September 30, 2002

total cost

eek....

Posted by tbartels at 12:33 AM | Comments (0)

September 29, 2002

sixty-two percent

How much of it is finished, I keep asking myself this question. Well, for the most part it is ready to be complete, but I have a snag. The support system for my 4' cantilevers is not available in Gainesville, and special ordering such a part may be a while...I am not sure what to do, so I trudge on, plans unchanged. Friday and yesterday I borrowed vehicles from friends for a few hours at a time to transport all of my materials to the trail-head of my site, and today, with the help of an extremely generous friend(Jonathan) I lugged all of the wood back to it's new resting place. My shoulders hurt. After failing to be able to dig through cypress roots, we successfully installed the major portion of the structure in it's new location. It is right next to the stream running through the swamp and now it actually extends out over the water. You can't sit on it yet, but it will be nice, when you can.

            

Aside from the last picture, which is my design prof. preparing for is confrontation with batman, these are all from my site today while we were working on my structure, I forgot to take the last picture when the planks had all been installed, and it really started to look like a viewing platform, but I will be posting more pics of the finished product soon. Getting the 14' 4"x4" posts into the ground was a bit of a challenge, I needed two four-foot holes to drop this thing into and once we got to about three feet, the holes -- filled with water from the stream, not 3 feet away -- kept collapsing as we tried to dig any further. We decided to try to ram the posts in for the last foot, since the soil seemed maleable enough to manipulate something through. A mad dash to Lowe't to buy a hatchet so I could turn the ends of the posts into spikes for killing the largest vampire you could ever imagine. We dropped it into place, and that didn't work entirely, on it's own, so Jonathan climed up to the first teir and jumped on it until it was in about another 6 inches and by most standards, pretty stable.

Posted by tbartels at 11:59 PM | Comments (0)

September 27, 2002

i can hack it

Up all night, playing with power tools, not a good idea, but i still have all my fingers and toes in working order, time to take a shower, eat and find a vehicle to get to the home improvement store....As usual, it is going slower than expected and I am not nearly as close to done as i was hoping to be by now, but I am not too far behind and I did plan in a full day of buffer space, so everything should be okay.






These are some photos of my site, I needed some way to get a decent documentation of what was happening on the site in section, so I pulled a clothesline taught across the site in three different places and lined up the photo with the rope as I moved parallel too it and then pasted the pieces together to get the above pictures, I am working on some drawings to accompany these photos, I still need to find some time for those too...

Posted by tbartels at 06:12 PM | Comments (0)

September 26, 2002

spend it all

I spent nearly $250 on supplies for my latest project, I am building a small observation shell, or as some people will call it, a picnic fort. I was pretty discouraged by the price while stacking loads of wood at Lowes, started to doubt my abilities and really wasn't sure that I was heading in the right direction, but in all I decided that I know I won't be satisfied with anything less, and I am completely capable of making this thing happen....hopefully. Essentially I am building an observation deck in the middle of a forested swamp, I am using three main elements of the device to control your position within the swamp and redraw the elements around, in order to explain what the swamp is about.

Posted by tbartels at 05:48 PM | Comments (0)

unlimited potential

The whole idea behind me starting this web log was to track my progress in my architectural design course, but as of yet, I have made myself too busy to make anything happen. I also seem to justify not posting anything when I haven't even worked out a design for the blog itself yet, but I am sick of that, so thus starts the posting.

As I write this I am working out the details of a full-scale site installment for my Architectural Design 7 class, I will try to provide a little history, since I am so near the end of this project and only now have I decided to start posting. The focus of this semester is on the Florida Landscape and dealing with something, obviously not urban -- this really is near and dear to my heart -- putting something out in the woods, or on the coast where you don't have other people's architecture to confront, only nature and your own crazy little head full of ideas. We were asked to come up with an "instrument" for a specific site, something that would/could be used to better understand what the site was about, why the site was special etc. My site is the Gum Root Swamp(pdf, big), just north of Newnan's lake. So why did I choose the swamp? For one, it had the word gum in it's name, and anything that isn't a supermarket candy isle and has the word gum in it's name, has to have some redeeming quality, and two, because I knew close to nothing about swamps. To avois getting too lengthy in any one post I am going to post a lot from now through monday -- when the project is due -- and hopfully get up to speed by then. If I am as lucky as I wish I were this weekend I will get some time to work out a new design by then too, but don't cross anything waiting for it, because it might get stuck that way. At the very least there will be pictures from my site and some drawings, soon.

Posted by tbartels at 01:13 AM | Comments (2)

September 19, 2002

empty blog

never fall in love with an empty blog, you are only destine for heartache.

Posted by tbartels at 05:57 AM | Comments (1)