frontstepdesign

Wishing for a trailer

Well, not quite.

I don't live in a McMansion.  I live in a 1300 square foot Craftsman cottage, built in 1948, and added onto several times since.  It's got three bedrooms, 1.5 baths, a zee-shaped dining/living room, and a sunporch that I use for an office.  We've added a mudroom to the back of the galley kitchen, which really improves its functionality - but I still feel as though I'm rattling around, shuffling stuff from here to there, and there to here.  Plus my husband keeps pointing out, there's little acoustic privacy when all the rooms open to another one, in a loop.

So now I want a long, skinny house, a modular house.  With a big all-purpose room on one end, plumbing in the middle for kitchen and bath, and our bedroom on the other end.  Maybe two of these houses, facing each other across a courtyard in the middle.  We could use the second house for guests, or my office, or workout equipment, or rent it out.  Maybe all of the above.  Put some not-quite ceiling high (it's a ten-foot ceiling, you know) storage cabinets along the exterior long walls, with windows above, and full story-high glass to the courtyard.

Maybe I'll get my trailers from one of these people.

Start over!

Per usual in my design work, before I get too far into a project, I stand back and say to myself, 'Self, is this thingamadooey doing its job?' And sometimes it isn't, at which point Self and I hit the reboot button. STARTOVER. (It's too hard to press alone.)

So two posts into the combined knitting/architecture blog idea, I realized it wasn't going to work out. Mostly because the pace of the two blog entries is wildly different: Although I spend much more time doing architecture than knitting, the progress in architecture isn't as evident as quickly, so a blog following it AND my weekend progress in knitting is going to become swamped by the knitting verrrry quickly.  So I'm moving the knitting posts to a different blog (http://szarka.typepad.com/magpieknits/), and will keep the architecture back at frontstepdesign. C'est la vie.

Blogging about accessible architecture. And some knitting.

Squeek supervising proper construction (and blocking!) of Knitty's Recycled Silk Bag.

Ok, so this isn't my very first post.  (For that one, check www.teeshirtquilt.com)  Nor is it my first web site.  But it's my first attempt to gather all the creative things I do together in one place.  At first, I'll catch up with my knitting from this summer, and what's on the needles now. (And in the stash bucket!)  But I do other creative things too, and some of them even earn their keep!  Teeshirt quilts is one that's pretty popular.  I also draw, occasionally paint, and perpetually redo the interior of my house.  Which brings me to the other.

The big other is architecture.  I'll be taking my last exam for licensure in December, and hope to become a registered architect in the State of Florida early next year.  I currently work for other people, but am lining up a few residential jobs to do on my own.  I want to specialize in houses - additions, remodels, and brand new construction - because I am fascinated by domesticity.  I study it in buildings, read books about it, pick other people's brains about it, and experiment on my own.  Domesticity is what makes architecture (with a capital A) accessible.  And I think it ought to be, for lots of reasons that I hope to explore further here.

So from threads to studs  - with an occasional cat picture - here we go.