carbon based design technologies

3/4″ scrap mdo! What more can i say!

The wood still needs some trimming and a sealant (thinking clear urethane), and the frame needs a’finishin’ too but hey! Its getting there!

finally finalized the design on the towel rack, when heidi goes “hey id like one! but oh! i also need another, different one!” great! back to the drawring board!

oh i jest. it was actually a pretty easy mod; all i really had to do was cut down some stock to be symmetrical, decide where the center shelf would be be, and whack it a lot to make sure everything fit!

made of reclaimed two-by’s and 1/2 inch MDO.

you know, where you keep cats. because they’re easy to control. right.

no so actually, whenever it got freezing cold at heidi’s her cats – Mitch, after Mitch Headberg, and Nikka (prounced “NEH-cuh”, after no one) – would congregate around whatever radiator was available. however, because their ridged tops are not really conducive to cat butts, they could only ever get so close, so heidi asked i make some sort of platform for them to chill out… er… warm up on.

voila!

mitch, giving the new shelf a very luxurious test-sprawl.

nikka, giving it an investigative strut-return-and-strut-again.

both made from reclaimed wood.

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:

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!

not sure why i forgot to post these but, yeah. it was quite a process. basically, the kitchen came with this one gross metal thing that had about 157 years of kitchen grime and as many layers of paint locking it all together. we ripped it out only to reveal a busted ass piece of plywood that was was BARELY hanging onto the wall. after that came down, it revealed raw, heavily chewed up “salmon” brick, which was this cheap brick style that didnt get baked to same temperature as regular bricks, so it crumbles just like tim robbins’ cell at shawshank.

ANY ways, i patched up that wall as best i could; ironically, the places that i patched stuck out the most because they were these strangely flat planes on an otherwise pocky and unsmooth wall. oh well. as you can see from the photos of the build, painting of the room had begun before i even got finished, but eventually it all just blended in, behind the new shelving system.

the wall as i found it.

baby fist sized holes.

chris (top left) doing the one thing he hates the most in life, painting. yes!

near final wall, inbetween sandings and fillings.

angle shot to show smoothness.

shelving complete and installed. camillo had helped me sort out the spacing balance of the vertical supports: center them to the thing they are above!

final detail shot of the knobs i put on the cabinet; my mom got them for me from a mexican import shop, the last time jenn and i were out in tucson arizona. they are nice!

this things was sort of a hassle to build. we have a whole crappe-tonne (thats metric, not imperial) of vhs’s, with a hand full of dvd’s thrown in for good measure. why so many vhs’, one might ask? for the price of one dvd RENTAL, we can get about 3-6 vhs’ – and for KEEPS!

ok, so first thing to notice is that only the top shelf is level – all the rest starting from the top down increase at -5 degree increments, so that when you are standing in front of the rack, all the faces (or sides, really) face you, and not your shin. the lower 4 shelves also have a back piece (set at a 90 to the shelf it self) that keeps the contents from falling through, and adding structural rigidity. made of red oak veneer furniture grade ply.

compressed plastic bags and milk jugs, on a floaty thing, on a made made lake, in upstate new york, enjoying the pleasant day. could not be worse.

last spring, i decided that some garden boxes would be a good idea for the house, a good learning experience for me, and they would be a good place to grow some hot hot habenero’s.

jody, seen any of this yet? its not anywhere near done, but most of the cuts are done, so next up is the align / glue / clamp phase. you can see that a number of the pieces need some flashing trimmed off, and the whole thing need lots and lots of sanding. also, right now, the compression rods are the only thing holding it together; they are also slightly skinnier than the final width (ie, the seat-to-back section still needs like 10 more), but the overall idea of the chair is there.

this ones for jody, sorta. its partially inspired by jody’s teanest, and primarily inspired by a chair from unto this last.

and

via core 77

new photos from various events recently, namely some furniture repainting, a pumkin carved and tonights meal, enchildas horizone grandes. we ran out of green sowse early, so we substituted with free-joles re-free-tos.