It's a long story, but the first rupture killed our old hot water heater. When it was disconnected during replacement, the grains back flushed into the main supply system and after the work was completed came out through one toilet and a faucet. So we quickly bypassed the softener then had it replaced. But in the meantime a bunch of the grains had gotten into the NEW heater, and IMO they killed the thermostat of the new heater.
tl;dr - if you see rusty plastic beads anywhere in your plumbing put your water softener in bypass immediately and call a plumber.
non, i think you would know if you have a water softener. it's kind of big, and requires maintenance. they put them in hard water places, where that calcium crap builds up in sink aerators and such. i have never lived anywhere that had one, but have lived places that should have one.
I grew up in an area where everyone had water softeners. I just thought it was something that you had to have until I moved to a different area where no one had them (but they probably should).
Last winter I was back at my parents' home and their water softener was going through it's recharging cycle in the middle of the night and it woke me up. I couldn't sleep so I started googling how they work and it is fascinating. Made me glad I paid attention in my high school chemistry class though.
Got home late between an emergency site visit (cracked toilet tank and a flood on a job the day before contractor handover - ugh) and a traffic accident that delayed me 25 minutes on a seven minute drive. But now I have a glass of wine and taking the dog for a walk!
so i just walked by a bunch of people clubbing with headphones on. .....as the crowd broke out into "starships were meant to fly...." on 7th and 31st.....quietevents.com
my mother in law did it for teething, seemed to help, never tried it ourselves.
regarding the muscle relaxers.... Last time i saw my first college roommate he was taking muscle relaxants for a back injury, smoking opium, and passed out in the fire escape of our dorm.
I've had to take some muscle relaxers lately for spasms in my neck causing sharp stabbing pain behind my ear - when I get done with this deadline I'm going to look into some physical therapy for it, as it is still happening.
I remember a fun night back in my New Orleans days where I had back spasms, was on muscle relaxers, and then went out for a fun night at Lafitte's Blacksmith Shop (well from what I remember and the photos). Purple Voodoo and muscle relaxers make for a great night, that you don't remember parts of the rest of your life.
i don't think bourbon was just for sleep. my mom gave brandy to my sister when she couldn't sleep due to a cold. kind of as a replacement for robitussin or nyquil. to this day, i can't figure why my mom would have brandy in the house.
Oh, shuellmi. SO many snide comments I could make. I think that house is pretty much terrible. It looks too matchy-matchy. No risk-taking, no sense of proportion. You can tell the homeowner is an "architecture buff" and not a trained designer.
They should be ashamed to associate Greene & Greene with that; even if it is just a name drop. But yeah, pretty much agree with both shuellmi and Donna.
i need brandy after that hobbyist attempt at Prairie Style.
not sure where to start. its not horrible, but it has issues......shuelllmi, just laugh really hard. say stuff like, you spent what on that bullshit? find poorly built details and say things like "wow,hope you did not pay a lot for that." keep bringing it back to being screwed out money.
based on my experience, usually just sticking my foot in my mouth by noting the truth - people's whose ego is equal to their wallet who only know how to make money feel really dumb when you talk about their poor design taste decisions. they are very insecure on this area.
...feel really dumb when you talk about their poor design taste decisions. they are very insecure on this area
That's in general I've noticed. It's one of those human things where if you rip on something someone takes pride in, it doesn't really matter if it was a pretty dumb idea and you are just pointing it out; They'll normally get defensive and dig in. It's a really hard concept to get across to my son who's on the autistic spectrum and struggles with social norms of just STFU and smiling. Everyone knows he's right, but it still would go better if he'd learn to 'white lie' and just go with the compliment they are fishing for..."That does look good!" (and just move along with your own life)
It too hard to educate clients. They can't see the difference between that house and Green&Greene. Add to that the fact they hired a 'designer' who in all likelihood became a draftsman for documentation by the homeowner, ala HGTV.
Who posted that chart of design fees, based on level of client involvement?
don't discourage your son; just warn him there will be a lot of haters and that "existentially underdeveloped" people do not need to be tolerated when wrong even if they get all emotional about it. Of course if the victim of their own stupidity is one of those kids that plot mass shooting revenges, then warn the authorities and tell your son to back off for a bit... you know just long enough so that person of lowly "existential development" is contained and sent to treatment for being underdeveloped in life experiences.
I like it, clever and modest size, with a wonderful water feature. Had you rather live here or in Frank Gehry's LA home with the plywood and chain link fences?
JeromeS: "They can't see the difference between that house and Green&Greene."
Does that REALLY matter?
If they could tell the difference they still would not be able to afford the craftsmanship associated with the 'better' design.
Aug 8, 16 10:41 pm ·
·
file,
Demand the craftsmanship and the market will adapt and the supply of skilled craftsmen will increase and therefore with supply, the competition created by increasing supply of craftsmen with a prevailing demand of higher skill requirements in our design....the cost of skilled craftsmen will drop and become more available.
We the design profession needs to 'architect' this. We "architected" our way to the unskilled labor market that we have today. We just have to do the exact opposite and 'architect' our way to higher quality through increasingly sophistication of our design.
We created the change. We are the 'architects' of change so damn it.... architect the change.
I thought that fad does out after first year studio.
Aug 9, 16 12:47 am ·
·
N.S.,
True but I was being expressive and the use of 'architect' in a verb form was intentional.
Press / Hold down the Page Down key to zip down past the rant/rambling if you don't care about it.
*** Personal Rant / Rambling ***
The point is we are responsible (at least in part) for the loss in quality of craftsmanship when we stop demanding it in design. In some way, the international style and modernism (ornament is crime, less is more, etc,), the suburban tract development had progressively led to a loss of crafts because people stop using ornamented woodwork, mill-work, lathe work, etc. in connection with the built environment. Everything became simple panels out of a factory that we stop seeing actual crafts and trade skills because construction became field of rough carpenters and discontinuing of finish carpentry and craftsmen.
It doesn't help when about half the contractors have no construction experience and of the other half, maybe 2/3 of them have only rough carpentry and non-carpentry experience. I small percentage only has the real skills. If that skill is demanded more and more people are called upon and develop the skills, there will be a "price war" (aka competition) that will lower the price of skilled crafts but also the unskilled labor as well because they either get knocked out of the market or they have to drop their price or join the train ride and develop skills to compete.
Builders build what we design substantively. Assuming on average, 80% retention to the plans. If you demand more skill, you should see around 80% of what we demand made. If you require more craft overall, that will trickle down in the process even if there is a 20% loss factor (cheapening down). If you hold the builders to quality, you should see at least 15 out of every 20 items requiring craftsmanship / skilled trade. There is some level of quantifying albeit these numbers are arbitrary and pulled out of the ass but nonetheless, the principle should hold true.
If you incrementally increase the demand for craftsmanship and retain it through the final construction, the quality of built work increases, the supply of craftsmen will incrementally increase. It gradually slipped to where we are now and as long as we demand more quality, the supply of skilled craftsmen will increase. The rules of supply & demand will subsequently come into affect.
As long as we don't demand skilled craftsmen, there will be no market force to demand it.
We are partly responsible for decreasing the demand of skilled craftsmen. We made that. We have to become the party responsible for increasing the demand of skilled craftsmen. We are the ones DESIGNING the buildings.... right? We are the ones making the "architectural" decisions, right? (Lets put the title/licensing bullshit aside for the essence of my point)... We ARE the "Architects", right?
The more the client/developer makes the decisions, the more they are really the architects and the less we are the architects and the more we are just draftsmen/draftswomen drafting someone else's design. We let too much slip over the years and we have to take back what is ours otherwise we might as well discontinue the whole title 'architect' and 'architecture profession' and architecture education.
Also, our value becomes nothing more than a minimum wage worker because that's the top of the value chain at that point. No more architects.... just draftsmen working for 1.1x to 1.5x minimum wage.
Volunteer: I'd (metaphorically) kill or die to spend one summer in Gehry's house. I wouldn't want to spend one minute in that linked house, *unless* it was with my good architecture friends doing a communal ripping of the project to (metaphorical) shreds while walking through it drinking wine, and if the owner didn't ever hear any of what we said.
I never want to say something mean about a project to an owner's face. They should be able to enjoy the space they love without some snooty architect like me diminishing their enjoyment of it.
I keep reading that modular and/or prefab construction is going to save tons of money over traditional techniques, can anyone explain to me how? Every system i've seen is possibly faster and better quality, but def. not cheaper.
I'm also fairly sure that land and zoning are huge factors in housing costs... Am I way off base?
Get past the exterior, there are some really fantastic interior spaces in the Gehry house. I would rather spend time in the Gehry house than most other dreadfully boring houses I have been in...
I have seen more artistic and cleverly thought through trailer park homes in the worst parts of Appalachia than this Gehry house
No, you haven't. You've seen, no doubt, some incredibly cool and ingenious responses to given circumstances, responses that your mind interprets as artistic. But nothing not done by Gehry is intentionally artistic in the same way that Gehry is, and by comparing his work to trailer homes, as if they are always necessarily bad, you're already showing your own bias toward the people for whom chain link is the only option.
Donna there horse barns down the road from you in Kentucky that are more attractive and show better design, construction, not to mention landscaping. I had rather convert one of them than live in the Frank Gehry house.
to answer your question re: prefab - I think it is a labor cost issue. Really only makes sense in the most expensive of markets - NYC or CHI or London. The hope is you cut out a huge # of trades by getting the work done off-site in a non-union shop (ideally somewhere in a smaller town where wages are low) and crane it into place.
Working in Chicago, Labor is around 70% of construction cost. That means you can VE the finishes all you want but there isn't much savings to be had - much more effective to start removing labor.
Volunteer, a barn with better design, construction, and landscaping: sure. Tobacco barns are a sort of miracle of functionality meets form. But they aren't art. Art isn't only design, construction, or landscaping: art is content. Gehry's house has content, expressed through form. That Japonesque-Craftsmanish house linked above doesn't have content either...although it does "have a little flair for the dramatic", per the owner's comment. LOL.
They also added new custom-made windows to the front from the Pella Architect Series that Hammond designed to look like stained glass. They aren’t. A red film applied to certain squares of each window give that illusion.
I'm sure there's an entire Pinterest page devoted to "looks like custom stained glass but uses plastic!"
Ugh jesus now I can't stop! The stone is supposed to resemble dry-stack masonry but it has these huge-ass mortar joints! WTF! White windows are Colonial, not Craftsman, so the Wrightian mullions are senseless! A baseboard heater in front of a "dry stack" masonry wall, barf!!! The proportions of the entry hall are soooo suburban builder, and then they left the walk-off mat on the photograph for publication, aren't gay men supposed to be good at styling things!?! Dining table turned at 45 degrees in the room, did a junior realtor compose these shots?!
The more I look the worse it gets. It's barely a level above builder quality.
Thread Central
tl;dr - if you see rusty plastic beads anywhere in your plumbing put your water softener in bypass immediately and call a plumber.
non, i think you would know if you have a water softener. it's kind of big, and requires maintenance. they put them in hard water places, where that calcium crap builds up in sink aerators and such. i have never lived anywhere that had one, but have lived places that should have one.
I grew up in an area where everyone had water softeners. I just thought it was something that you had to have until I moved to a different area where no one had them (but they probably should).
Last winter I was back at my parents' home and their water softener was going through it's recharging cycle in the middle of the night and it woke me up. I couldn't sleep so I started googling how they work and it is fascinating. Made me glad I paid attention in my high school chemistry class though.
^-- can't do better than that. time for you to call it day and go home.
I'm writing specs tonight. Several 50 hr weeks in a row making me cranky. Need gin.
so i just walked by a bunch of people clubbing with headphones on. .....as the crowd broke out into "starships were meant to fly...." on 7th and 31st.....quietevents.com
Shoutout to Peter Normand for addressing challenging questions.
is it ok to was down muscle relaxer and back pain meds with a beer?
No.
now you tell me. went down well and slept like a baby. do people still give their infants bourbon when they do not fall asleep?
my mother in law did it for teething, seemed to help, never tried it ourselves.
regarding the muscle relaxers.... Last time i saw my first college roommate he was taking muscle relaxants for a back injury, smoking opium, and passed out in the fire escape of our dorm.
I've had to take some muscle relaxers lately for spasms in my neck causing sharp stabbing pain behind my ear - when I get done with this deadline I'm going to look into some physical therapy for it, as it is still happening.
I remember a fun night back in my New Orleans days where I had back spasms, was on muscle relaxers, and then went out for a fun night at Lafitte's Blacksmith Shop (well from what I remember and the photos). Purple Voodoo and muscle relaxers make for a great night, that you don't remember parts of the rest of your life.
i don't think bourbon was just for sleep. my mom gave brandy to my sister when she couldn't sleep due to a cold. kind of as a replacement for robitussin or nyquil. to this day, i can't figure why my mom would have brandy in the house.
to be young and dumb......
house down the street from me was featured in the newspaper, happy for them, but hurts that they used a "building designer" instead of an architect
http://www.detroitnews.com/story/life/home-garden/2016/08/04/couple-transforms-home-even-lot-waterfall/88273794/
Oh, shuellmi. SO many snide comments I could make. I think that house is pretty much terrible. It looks too matchy-matchy. No risk-taking, no sense of proportion. You can tell the homeowner is an "architecture buff" and not a trained designer.
The water and garden aspect is cool, though.
They should be ashamed to associate Greene & Greene with that; even if it is just a name drop. But yeah, pretty much agree with both shuellmi and Donna.
i need to figure out a nice way to tell people their home is terrible.
An acquaintance, who has no problem telling people he made $400k last year, just built a monstrosity of a house. Not the worst i've seen, but........
combination of jealousy and pity
i need brandy after that hobbyist attempt at Prairie Style. not sure where to start. its not horrible, but it has issues......shuelllmi, just laugh really hard. say stuff like, you spent what on that bullshit? find poorly built details and say things like "wow,hope you did not pay a lot for that." keep bringing it back to being screwed out money.
based on my experience, usually just sticking my foot in my mouth by noting the truth - people's whose ego is equal to their wallet who only know how to make money feel really dumb when you talk about their poor design taste decisions. they are very insecure on this area.
...feel really dumb when you talk about their poor design taste decisions. they are very insecure on this area
That's in general I've noticed. It's one of those human things where if you rip on something someone takes pride in, it doesn't really matter if it was a pretty dumb idea and you are just pointing it out; They'll normally get defensive and dig in. It's a really hard concept to get across to my son who's on the autistic spectrum and struggles with social norms of just STFU and smiling. Everyone knows he's right, but it still would go better if he'd learn to 'white lie' and just go with the compliment they are fishing for..."That does look good!" (and just move along with your own life)
It too hard to educate clients. They can't see the difference between that house and Green&Greene. Add to that the fact they hired a 'designer' who in all likelihood became a draftsman for documentation by the homeowner, ala HGTV.
Who posted that chart of design fees, based on level of client involvement?
you design, I draw = $100,000
don't discourage your son; just warn him there will be a lot of haters and that "existentially underdeveloped" people do not need to be tolerated when wrong even if they get all emotional about it. Of course if the victim of their own stupidity is one of those kids that plot mass shooting revenges, then warn the authorities and tell your son to back off for a bit... you know just long enough so that person of lowly "existential development" is contained and sent to treatment for being underdeveloped in life experiences.
I like it, clever and modest size, with a wonderful water feature. Had you rather live here or in Frank Gehry's LA home with the plywood and chain link fences?
JeromeS: "They can't see the difference between that house and Green&Greene."
Does that REALLY matter?
If they could tell the difference they still would not be able to afford the craftsmanship associated with the 'better' design.
file,
Demand the craftsmanship and the market will adapt and the supply of skilled craftsmen will increase and therefore with supply, the competition created by increasing supply of craftsmen with a prevailing demand of higher skill requirements in our design....the cost of skilled craftsmen will drop and become more available.
We the design profession needs to 'architect' this. We "architected" our way to the unskilled labor market that we have today. We just have to do the exact opposite and 'architect' our way to higher quality through increasingly sophistication of our design.
We created the change. We are the 'architects' of change so damn it.... architect the change.
I thought that fad does out after first year studio.
N.S.,
True but I was being expressive and the use of 'architect' in a verb form was intentional.
Press / Hold down the Page Down key to zip down past the rant/rambling if you don't care about it.
*** Personal Rant / Rambling ***
The point is we are responsible (at least in part) for the loss in quality of craftsmanship when we stop demanding it in design. In some way, the international style and modernism (ornament is crime, less is more, etc,), the suburban tract development had progressively led to a loss of crafts because people stop using ornamented woodwork, mill-work, lathe work, etc. in connection with the built environment. Everything became simple panels out of a factory that we stop seeing actual crafts and trade skills because construction became field of rough carpenters and discontinuing of finish carpentry and craftsmen.
It doesn't help when about half the contractors have no construction experience and of the other half, maybe 2/3 of them have only rough carpentry and non-carpentry experience. I small percentage only has the real skills. If that skill is demanded more and more people are called upon and develop the skills, there will be a "price war" (aka competition) that will lower the price of skilled crafts but also the unskilled labor as well because they either get knocked out of the market or they have to drop their price or join the train ride and develop skills to compete.
Builders build what we design substantively. Assuming on average, 80% retention to the plans. If you demand more skill, you should see around 80% of what we demand made. If you require more craft overall, that will trickle down in the process even if there is a 20% loss factor (cheapening down). If you hold the builders to quality, you should see at least 15 out of every 20 items requiring craftsmanship / skilled trade. There is some level of quantifying albeit these numbers are arbitrary and pulled out of the ass but nonetheless, the principle should hold true.
If you incrementally increase the demand for craftsmanship and retain it through the final construction, the quality of built work increases, the supply of craftsmen will incrementally increase. It gradually slipped to where we are now and as long as we demand more quality, the supply of skilled craftsmen will increase. The rules of supply & demand will subsequently come into affect.
As long as we don't demand skilled craftsmen, there will be no market force to demand it.
We are partly responsible for decreasing the demand of skilled craftsmen. We made that. We have to become the party responsible for increasing the demand of skilled craftsmen. We are the ones DESIGNING the buildings.... right? We are the ones making the "architectural" decisions, right? (Lets put the title/licensing bullshit aside for the essence of my point)... We ARE the "Architects", right?
The more the client/developer makes the decisions, the more they are really the architects and the less we are the architects and the more we are just draftsmen/draftswomen drafting someone else's design. We let too much slip over the years and we have to take back what is ours otherwise we might as well discontinue the whole title 'architect' and 'architecture profession' and architecture education.
Also, our value becomes nothing more than a minimum wage worker because that's the top of the value chain at that point. No more architects.... just draftsmen working for 1.1x to 1.5x minimum wage.
Is this where we want to go? I hope not.
*** End of personal rant / rambling ***
I like how he uses the word "we", as if he's actually in the profession.
David Cole,
We are all in this larger overall profession in some capacity.
no you are not Balky. bakky stands for balky.
Volunteer: I'd (metaphorically) kill or die to spend one summer in Gehry's house. I wouldn't want to spend one minute in that linked house, *unless* it was with my good architecture friends doing a communal ripping of the project to (metaphorical) shreds while walking through it drinking wine, and if the owner didn't ever hear any of what we said.
I never want to say something mean about a project to an owner's face. They should be able to enjoy the space they love without some snooty architect like me diminishing their enjoyment of it.
but donna, how will they know that it could have been way better without telling them how smart I am?
They're nice people, glad their happy.
I keep reading that modular and/or prefab construction is going to save tons of money over traditional techniques, can anyone explain to me how? Every system i've seen is possibly faster and better quality, but def. not cheaper.
I'm also fairly sure that land and zoning are huge factors in housing costs... Am I way off base?
or,
I have seen more artistic and cleverly thought through trailer park homes in the worst parts of Appalachia than this Gehry house.
Get past the exterior, there are some really fantastic interior spaces in the Gehry house. I would rather spend time in the Gehry house than most other dreadfully boring houses I have been in...
I have seen more artistic and cleverly thought through trailer park homes in the worst parts of Appalachia than this Gehry house
No, you haven't. You've seen, no doubt, some incredibly cool and ingenious responses to given circumstances, responses that your mind interprets as artistic. But nothing not done by Gehry is intentionally artistic in the same way that Gehry is, and by comparing his work to trailer homes, as if they are always necessarily bad, you're already showing your own bias toward the people for whom chain link is the only option.
you'd think there would be a better kicthen faucet.. perhaps a piece of green garden hose held up with a quick tie.
Gehry's house for the win.
Donna there horse barns down the road from you in Kentucky that are more attractive and show better design, construction, not to mention landscaping. I had rather convert one of them than live in the Frank Gehry house.
Gehry for zee win.
nice Josh.
i forgot that house has a conversation pit. Love it.
shuellmi -
to answer your question re: prefab - I think it is a labor cost issue. Really only makes sense in the most expensive of markets - NYC or CHI or London. The hope is you cut out a huge # of trades by getting the work done off-site in a non-union shop (ideally somewhere in a smaller town where wages are low) and crane it into place.
Working in Chicago, Labor is around 70% of construction cost. That means you can VE the finishes all you want but there isn't much savings to be had - much more effective to start removing labor.
Volunteer, a barn with better design, construction, and landscaping: sure. Tobacco barns are a sort of miracle of functionality meets form. But they aren't art. Art isn't only design, construction, or landscaping: art is content. Gehry's house has content, expressed through form. That Japonesque-Craftsmanish house linked above doesn't have content either...although it does "have a little flair for the dramatic", per the owner's comment. LOL.
Also love this quote:
They also added new custom-made windows to the front from the Pella Architect Series that Hammond designed to look like stained glass. They aren’t. A red film applied to certain squares of each window give that illusion.
I'm sure there's an entire Pinterest page devoted to "looks like custom stained glass but uses plastic!"
Ugh jesus now I can't stop! The stone is supposed to resemble dry-stack masonry but it has these huge-ass mortar joints! WTF! White windows are Colonial, not Craftsman, so the Wrightian mullions are senseless! A baseboard heater in front of a "dry stack" masonry wall, barf!!! The proportions of the entry hall are soooo suburban builder, and then they left the walk-off mat on the photograph for publication, aren't gay men supposed to be good at styling things!?! Dining table turned at 45 degrees in the room, did a junior realtor compose these shots?!
The more I look the worse it gets. It's barely a level above builder quality.
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