Westford days

What is Duration, but the persevering of a thing in its existence?

                                                         Gale Crt. Gentiles IV. 287(1677)

Things are going to start moving fast soon. I spent the last couple of weeks carefully ripping out particleboard and fiberglass bats. What I found underneath was sometimes  living and breathing. Mold and spiders had taken up residence and I had to evict them. But after all of the gutting, I'm now down to the unfortunately cheap studs and aluminum skin. I feel a bit like I'm peeling back the facade and left with the dwarf behind the curtain instead of the Wizard. But then I remembered why I got into this, and I kept ripping away. 

It does bring up the notion of the Ship of Theseus paradox, and whether replacing all the components of a system makes it a new system or if it retains its thingness. Although I'm really not much for high-mindedness these days, and as I mentioned before, this is really about the process for me. So yes the concept and even the thing retains meaning so I'm going to treat it as the same Wilderness 3000 I started out with. Some parts of it need a little help, however. One of the things that did in the de-con process was to cut pieces out in their biggest possible form so maybe I can re-use them. This probably made this step take 2x as long, but hopefully it will have some payback.

A word on materials. Since my budget is so limited, I've made a conscious decision to use almost exclusively recycled materials. This either means free, scrap, or making use of places like re-build (http://www.rebuildvt.org/rebuild/Building_Materials). This means that what I am able to find defines the project in a big way. I made my biggest materials acquisition recently in the way of an old awning off a Burlington tex-mex joint. I'd been looking for something to make for a new arched roof structure, and it just kind of showed up in such a fortuitous way when I was scanning the scrap yard. 

Quite the ask and ye shall receive moment. Steel and aluminum frames. I know just from the quality of the welds and embedded material costs that these things weren't cheap. I snatched the pair up for $100. 

Now I've been working on integrating them into the design.

Its been a great creative challenge to merge two existing objects into a new mutation. Its a bit like playing at matchmaker, looking for the two to have a pretty baby. Note, the 'clamshell' awnings are split down the middle and aren't actually attached to the angled awning. This image below is the current offspring which uses the angled awning as a sort of warped Conestoga wagon or broken greenhouse roof. The clamshells almost suggest half of an observatory. 

On the home front, I am still sleeping on the floor. The rig is 5 miles from town and 15 miles from the big town. The lack of facilities is draining, so I'm looking forward to getting to somewhere more domestic, as it will be a while before I get to plumbing in the trailer. 

Speaking of facilities, I've been having ideas about the bathroom and kitchen that I will incorporate into the design. I want to combine the shower and toilet functions in away that is usable and not gross. This ingenious Japanese design comes from the Paco 3x3x3 cube house where the toilet and shower are tucked into the floor and revealed by lifting up a panel.

http://www.apartmenttherapy.com/plant-furniture-from-moss-rugs-79463 Having noticed these pages pop up on design blogs around the web, I decided that I would take it a step further and corporate moss into the shower. 

That's probably enough for now, but I'll post again soon with more big concept renderings.