carbon based design technologies

so ive been thinking it might be nice to break up the heavy pattern action of the wallpaper. even though its a small room, mind bending patterns might not be the most *ahem* friendly in the morning, nor for any other time when youd want to shower. you know shower, pleasant time, peace, whatever.

so ive drafted up some sketches of what id like using some found imagery on the net. basically its a three panel triptych with the widest being the middle that runs the length of the shower. the images dont necessarily have to match, so much as give the impression you are showering in an awesome space.

trying to make some rad wall paper for me bathing room. i always like mind bending stuff, although because i can make it me self, there is very little time commitment. heres some proofs.

a one-to-one zoom on the print i have up now in test phase – need to see if it gets the “girlfriend stamp of approval”; tradition, made of some floral elements i rotated (illustrator > effect > distort & transform > transform), plus an ink blot, a lion, a stag and some upside down stars -hail santa!:

and heres one i made today, thats a little more geometric, less floral, less traditional, and totally more mind bendy! (thats the loopable image, but it will be about 4 feet tall when printed):

actually the hardest part – which im sure is all math – is figuring out how to draw the boundaries, so the graphic loops. i think one of my next stops is to make an incorrectly looping image, but whose incorrect loop is ALMOST unnoticeable.

yes, my little abode has a face.

like a book stuck on a very full shelf. like a bookcover designed years ago. like a design that was cool. like a style that left before it even got here. yeah. thats my haus wynbrooks face. notice how you cant see the address numbers? oh yeah, thats because there are none. i have NO idea what even happened to the last ones, if there ever were ones, or the mailperson just figured – for years – that that odd number between 43 and 39 “must be here!” or what, i dont know.

got plans, of course. i got plans. and i could photoshop till hell wont have it. and hell doesnt. but for now im working on products and furniture for my store so i can start to be semi-independent of other bosses, and have a LITTLE extra income. so for now BIG haus wynbrook plans – like locally appropriate and low maintenance landscaping (a la brick house), painted form stone, ditch the eye-lid window shades, paint the main one white, etc – just have to wait.

so at SOME point im going to pull all this houses carpet. this lovely splotchy salmon brown weird carpet. and actually reuse it in the man-basement. but anyways! so it needs to come off everywhere its stapled 417 times-per-square-inch to the mostly-beautiful hardwood floors beneath. (and just to qualify that last exaggeration, there are not one, not two, but three distinctly – as in “takes three different guns” distinctly – different staples holding this carpet to just the landing. MAN my knuckles were KILLIN me by the time id finished what felt like a 10 square foot section – and thats just the landing!)

so heres the landing, as seen from the big room, with the little closette just visible on the right. and whats this?!?! giant black stain from hell. and its deep. like sanding for years deep. like all you can do is replace the wood deep. yeah. roof leaked, and there the water sat, replenished, until them roof guys came and patched up. and so now the boards are toast.

any one with any amazing ideas is more than welcome to send em my way!

fudge.

ive sanded out most of the textural differences, but the discoloration runs more’n skin deep, my friends.

more’n skin deep.

theres this LITTLE teeny tiny closet (closette?) thats assumedly for linens, and was gross and dark and weird and coated in pink fluffy wallpaper, and approaching-mustard yellow painted shelves.

right.

pulled them shelves… and painted that beotch right quick!

then sand the crap out of (and off of) the shelves and whack em back in!

what do you get when your customer asks for a plunger to be added to the baltimore skyline?

and actually, i dont think it turned out half bad, although my favorite party is dorky and only knowable by me; the black is black cut vinyl, while the gradient portion is actually printed, laminated and then contour cut. deadly combo!

like book ends, but for records! to be on sale shortly in pending webstore action of hotness!!!!!!!1

made of scrap aluminum and cool-covered old records.

yeah, picked up some big-ass letters from the junk heap at work, and stuck ‘em on my wall in my living room. +cheesy purple christmas lights = awesomeness.

and then wit dem purple sizzurp lights:

visually very messy – as well as very actually messy from sitting in the rain and mud and such – i will freely admit. but there is something cool in there, somewhere, i just need to figure out how to coax it out without spending 5 arms and 3 legs to get there. i think the secret – like a good paint job – is in uniformity; get the lighting even and equi-distant, and / or get them faced!

ok not years later, but i swear im so bad at photodocumenting, it feels like it. anyways, took some shots of what its looks like for literally forever, only i just somehow didnt document it. back legs still dont have their final covers glued on, because i kind of liked the subtle difference between then front to back. also have plans to add som support rods to the whole set up – there by ruining all the chairs lines, i know – but since i took it home for testing, and tested it, it basically failed. its got these major cracks up the front lip dead-center, from where the front legs literally want to splay.

here is chair as chair is now:

detail shots:

so, basically, when i moved in to haus wynbrook, the basement was owned by the washer machine. and i dont mean like “he pays the mortgage” kind of own, i mean like PWN TO OWN, chair-across-the-back, leaping from the ring-side with knee-to-face double whammy kind of own.

why?

because the damn thing would always overflow. see, for like 50 years that thing drained directly into the sink which, im guessing, after 50 years, would and did get clogged with all sorts of lint. but so it was, every load i did, meant a soaked basement. not like tides-of-destruction, biblical-tale style water, but enough that youd take that last step off the bottom of the stairs whilst rounding the corner *SPLISH* and immediately regret it.

solution?

pipe the damn thing into the main waste pipe. thats, oh, 6 inches to the washers left. thats also luckily recently replaced with 3″ pvc, which means normal human tools – as apposed to trying to tie into 1,000 pound cast iron pipes! what the hell! who invented that idea!?!?!

the before:

and the after:

yes, i made that thing, that haloed beast, that angelic creature. oh i revel in its beauty, perhaps the most manly thing i have ever made. i mean, ive worked on car engines, built houses and smoked cigars. and its by far the most manly thing i ever made. ‘things got more one-directional flaps, traps, pipes, bits and bobs than a small hardware shop. and man, that was fur-sure a crash course in pvc-plumbing. but it works!

attack of the matte black again! and red. and yes, this post is really only about the paint job that i put on a 20 dollar second-hand vacuum cleaner. yes, all my coworkers think i am insane.

before:

but look how much better it looks! and faster! i did, incase you wondered, clean the BUHJEESUS out of that thing which anyone who has ever painted anything knows is pretty key to a decent paint job. also helped that thing gain about 4 more horses, i swear!

heres a towel rack i made, out of reclaimed scrap from around the shop. still needs a bit of refinement – i got to get my dado to cut JUST a hair shy of what it cuts when set to be .5 inches, but i know all it needs is a bit of experimenting. soon to be for sale in my new web store! more photos to follow once its ‘el perfecto.’

so it would appear that the last real tenant of haus wynbrook left me with a fairly complete kit of thomasville brand ‘fredericksburg’ style furniture; dining table (with leaf), three side and one arm chairs, mens chest of drawers (bureau?) and an assumedly womens(?) chest of drawers. and one white lazy-boy-like chair. on sale starting pretty soon @ baltimore.craigslist.org. refurbished sets of 6 chairs (2 arm, 4 side) same but current style are going for 1,299 bucks on ebay! holy scheisse!

wallpaper care of Eric Cahan, via minimalissimo.

wednesday, if all goes well, this website shall run dark for a day, in protest of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), and its senate-sibling the Protect Intellectual Property act (PIPA). if you have never heard of either, time to read the news.

basically, these are poorly written and poorly targeted attempts by ‘big content’ to stop their content from being findable online. only, their proposed solution is to illegalize association with any site anywhere that has ever posted a link to anything perceived as illegal. boy, that doesnt sound totalitarian, does it? oh wait. yeah. it does.

sites who will go black: mozilla.com, wikipedia.org, boingboing.com, reddit.com, moveon.org, wordpress.org, and on, and on… go here to find out more.

here be a fresh one, and it still needs some tweaking, but the idea is there. and actually, its not really that fresh – this exact layout occurred to me about 10 years ago before i had something to stick it on to, so i just sort of filed it away under “designs for a later point in life” or something. im liking – who am i kidding, i always like – futura, but i might something JUST a bit different. always hated the futura C’s, for instance. and the R’s too. and R is such a great letter shape!

yes, i really drawr this bad. no really. its like, always been this way. but it also always turns out.

right, its just a log. but it WILL be something. soonly. and to boot, heidi just got me the BAD-ass tool i needed to convert this from log-to-table, a belt sander called The Dragster no less!

anyways, i painted some stuff.

this one was all series taping. you can see where the masking took off the crappy paint job (i did from way back) inbetween the stripes. also, incase you didnt click that link it used to be all white. well, after it was all beige.

this one was pretty much point and paint (although i did tape off the sockets).

don needed to ‘pimp his ride’ so we both agreed a few giant digits were pretty much the clear choice for going forward!