January 2010

The Lawrence Street House – Charrette

January 30, 2010

What is a charrette? The classic definition is an intense period of design activity. It usually consists of gathering several of the involved people, clients and designers in one room for an uninterrupted time of brain-storming. We have found this to be valuable, resulting in incredible results with our previous project, theSAGE, so thought we [...]

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Junk Mail

January 26, 2010

So last time I talked about phone books. Today I’d like to talk about junk mail. No one gets junk mail do we? Oh, really? You do? Our recycle bin at home is dominated by the junk mail that comes to us in the snail mail. I think that’s the dominant form of paper we [...]

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The Lawrence Street House – Front Porch

January 23, 2010

This post is Front Porch because we also have a Side Porch I’ll talk about in a future post. Part of our desire to be downtown is neighborhood. Connecting with people and the whole aspect of our culture that we’ve lost in the suburbs. We’ve noticed, when walking around this neighborhood that people are out [...]

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The Lawrence Street House – Denofficebedroom

January 23, 2010

See, I got the title down to one word. In our plan, we have this room right off the living room. It’s one of those multi-use use rooms that help save money, space and consumption. Our three bedroom house won’t have the third bedroom sitting vacant all the time. DEN/OFFICE: This will be the primary [...]

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The Lawrence Street House – Plumbing

January 22, 2010

One way to save energy is through a compact plumbing design. One of our goals as we laid out the design was to keep the plumbing — especially the hot water runs — as short as possible. I shared that goal with a friend in the design community who said we wouldn’t be able to [...]

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The Lawrence Street House – Schematic Pt 3

January 15, 2010

Well, here’s a small version of where we’re at to date. We have a rough idea of the rooms and arrangements and are working on the three-dimensional aspects. Actually, that brings up a good point I’d like to insert here. Thinking about the WHOLE design. I perform design reviews for subdivisions and see a lot [...]

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Saving Water

January 14, 2010

Water. Something we in the US take largely for granted. We go to the faucet, turn it on and don’t really think twice about it. For us it’s abundant, cheap and clean. And for those of us in the Pacific Northwest, it’s cool, refreshing and drinkable — right out of the tap. But a lot [...]

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Phantom Electricity

January 11, 2010

This handy little device is called “Kill A Watt”. I have one. It’s been very educational. You can buy them at most any hardware store and our local library will even check one out to you for free. What is does is measure the amount of electricity flowing to any device: computer, TV, DVD player, [...]

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White

January 9, 2010

If you’re following a recent wave on Facebook, you’ll have noticed women posting their bra color to raise awareness about breast cancer. Well, I had already planned this post, so thought it timely to go for it. I was originally going to call it “Halves and Doubles: Underwear”, but decided to change simply to “White”. [...]

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The Lawrence Street House – Schematic Pt 2

January 9, 2010

As we started the design, we looked at our relationships of rooms to each other (from our notebook), the aspects of the rooms we wanted (the den needed to also double as a guest bedroom) and the relationships of all of this to the outdoor living areas of our lot and our relationship to the [...]

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