Every project has it's constraints, that's the best part. You get to dream up novel solutions, be artist and engineer, see a thing in your mind and make it real. One unique project was the Park Ave. house, my earliest large project and on whose roof ridge i sat in contemplating my meateater status in this blog a couple days ago.The house was built almost entirely from the trees that grew there. The design came into being after the sawyer got the best out of each log and we saw what lumber there was available. We mined two ancient cadar stumps for all the shake blocks, built concrete forms from the scrap boards, and heated the place for two years from the leftover outside slabs created during the milling process. The alders got milled, stacked and eventually became all the interior paneling. The forest never really left, it just changed form.
It fit my daughter and i like a well taiorled suit, every detail customized to fit our needs and tastes.
It was sad to see her go, but we needed the dough as a down payment on a bit of forest we wanted to buy and turn into a small organic farm. Phil, her new owner, good friend, and the bus's mechanic from day one, loved her too.
