My favorite part is how it floats in the air. Reminds me of Fallingwater, except no water.
Oh, whoops, these are the plans for our children's treehouse.
Just around the corner, and to your left, is a pit
Is it a nice, deep pit? Have you found a good source for scorpions yet?
I've mentioned the insane hotel I stayed in in Dallas/Fort Worth for business once? A giant interior courtyard, including a scale-model Alamo, a river with riverboat, an artificial canyonscape carved from real sandstone, and around a corner in one of the winding paths carved through the canyonscape, an unexpected pit of flames. All it needed was vicious monkeys, and it would have been perfect.
I may be making things up. I'm not sure there was a riverboat. There was a man dressed up as a riverboat gambler, hired to walk around flipping a silver dollar. But there may not have been an associated boat.
You're creating jobs and shit. Hooray.
You didn't say that you hired JRoth to build your e-house in Second Life.
4: Oh my god, I've been to that hotel. The worst part is that it's in the middle of nowhere, so you can't go anywhere else other than that fucking courtyard.
JRoth-for-Heebie-creation looks like a great place for UnFoggedCon latest edition...
I suppose it would be terribly gauche to ask how much all this cost. I'm very curious though, mostly because I've had a lot of little things done to our house and have been shocked by how much they all cost (most recently: extremely minor plumbing work: $2,500), and have therefore spent a lot of time wondering how anyone ever has anything major done to their house, because when I scale up all the little things in a linear fashion I quickly get to sums like hundreds of thousands of dollars. And that's before you even add in any frivolous extras like architect's fees. And I'm sure the right answer is that things don't scale linearly, and where a minor thing migth cost $5,000, some much more major project that's literally 10x the work might only cost $15 or $20. At least that's my guess.
8: Why would you want to leave the courtyard? It may have been the most awesome place I have ever been in in my life.
4. You've presumably read this? The hotel sounds scarily familiar.
10: Did the plumber at least have an impressive ass crack?
11: Fear for my life? The designers of that courtyard were clearly capable of anything. It was like being trapped in Westworld.
10: We should all list our income IQ house price.
Does the software that you use to make these plans have a "view this room with your mess in it" function? I'm imagining something like the Etsy "view this in a room" feature.
When we added the AI lab/machine shop to our house a la Ironman it cost several billion.
||
A while back I mentioned a libertarian student who had suggested a futures market for kidneys. Many in the unfoggetariat argued that it wouldn't work, because kidneys aren't fungible.
For her second draft, the student gave a citation for the idea: this essay at the Lew Rockwell House of Crazy. It looks like this is a relatively thought through idea in libertarian circles. Basically, the broker buys (or leases) the right to harvest your organs when you die. I imagine that they would just have a database of people's tissue types and the tissue types of people needed organs, and will be gambling that there will be a good match when you die. I'm a little worried that this kind of market might provide incentives for unethical behavior.
Also, the system would not be as efficient as the one that some people have alleged the Chinese have in place. Matas and Kilgore claim that the Chinese have a database of the tissue types of all their death row prisoners, and when someone requests a transplant, they use the database to schedule the execution of a prisoner who is a good match.
|>
4 et al: Yes you have mentioned it before. My one brush with Gaylordtopia remains Opryland in Nashville but it was enough. There's one near DC now.
Hanging out in the atria of Gaylords is what the whole un-hep world would be doing Saturday night if the Nazis had won the war
A couple of photos of the Gaylord Texan atrium. I think shot from the "Alamo". The canyon (probably meant to represent Palo Duro Canyon--where the helicopter crashed in Midnight Run).
We should all list our income IQ house price.
Purchase Price or I'm-Trapped-Here-Forever/In-Soviet-Russia,-House-Owns-YOU-Post-Bubble Likely Worth?
21: Have you considered selling a kidney option?
Topically, because I'm just looking at the pictures on a full screen for the first time, I really like the design, especially the half-loft and the big windows. I was wondering if the eave of the roof over the giant windows as well as the thing with the slats that can shade but doesn't stop rain (stop me if I'm too technical) are at a depth calculated to block the hot overhead sun and let in the lower angle of the winter sun. Is that a real thing or did somebody just make that up to try to sell replacement windows with a special coating?
Probably a sign of incipient middle age, but I'm starting to develop strong feelings about natural light as opposed to Natural Light.
are at a depth calculated to block the hot overhead sun and let in the lower angle of the winter sun.
They are! I don't know about the winter part, actually, but the slats are angled according to mid-August, late afternoon sun angle, or something like that.
That sounds nice. Most of my windows catch the full morning sun regardless of whether I want them to or not. Given Pittsburgh's clouds and frequent cold, this is probably a net win energy-wise, but they just put the windows wherever they put them in similar houses with no thought for site.
The JRoth-heebie space is even more awesome in real life than in the drawings.
Above the kids' room is a mezzanine
This, however, confused me. I would call it a loft, mezzanines having no association for me other than theater tickets.
Ah, I was confused by the mezzanine concept as well -- at first I thought there was another level with a library.
Those plans look absolutely fantastic.
Oh, sorry, just the word that stuck. The kids' room is normal ceiling height, and then you can climb a ladder and get over it.
Growing up, my room had a normal height ceiling, but I wasn't allowed to climb a ladder so I never got over it.
then you can climb a ladder and get over it.
Strangely, this is my advice to Obama.
26: How old is your house? Our new(-to-us) one is almost 110 years old and while all of the houses on our side of the street follow two common basic plans and the ones on the other side have two different ones, our house at least seems to have been set up very well to let light and thus heat/cool flow through appropriately. I'm amazed that it kept cool through all of June, though now we're relying heavily on air conditioning.
Our house it too new to have the pre-AC cooling measures and too old to have the modern ones.
Thanks again, Heebie. I may have to quote you in my promotional materials. I can link here, right?
25: The slats are angled and spaced for full summer shade and maximum solar penetration in winter. Obviously, as a simple, orthogonal device, it's fairly approximate as the day goes on, but the bottom line is relatively little sunlight in summer and as much as possible in winter.
IIRC, the solar position in the "floating" rendering was around the equinox, which is why you get about 50% shade beneath the slats and 1/3 window coverage from the overhang.
3: alas, Pit is only 1 step deep, due to floodplain issues.
BTW, I'll be there in just 8 days. Insanely excited to see it nearly finished.
Obviously, as a simple, orthogonal device...
Laydeez. The addition looks very good.
Thanks again, Heebie. I may have to quote you in my promotional materials. I can link here, right?
No problem.
After all, you're the one who has to explain how exactly you have a client named "Heebie-Geebie".
36: Not floodplain. Something about the floor joists.
Floor joists hang in brackets that look like the letter 'U' as written by somebody who didn't really know how to write letters.
Don't mind me. Just free associating.
40: Oh, right. At first it was floodplain fear, then we realized we could go deeper, but it would have been a structural PITA.
Since this is the house thread, what do you think of the following plan (hint JRoth give me free advice hint hint):
I have a reasonably large, for this city, backyard that now looks like a postapocalyptic wasteland patrolled by my mangy pitbull. So, the idea is to fix it up, and I'm thinking of building a deck and planting some stuff. I also have a small guestroom with a 1/2 bath next to it, toilet but no shower. The guestroom is downstairs and in the back, and basically near where access to the backyard deck could be. There is an awesome shower upstairs, but it's not convenient to the guest room and serves my room and my kid's room. The guest room is currently being used as a storage room, but maybe someday I'll find a friend and the friend could stay in the house. So it would be nice for the friend to have a shower.
So, what if instead of installing a tiny shower in the 1/2 bath, I put up an outside shower, a kind of wooden extension to the deck with high walls? Maybe with some kind of solar heating thing? Ideally it would be somewhat useable even in winter mornings here, when the temperature can be in the 50s. Would nobody use it? Would nobody use it unless I built a walled privacy path from the room to the outside shower (this seems prohibitive).
What if you put in an outside shower with high walls and a roof?
BTW, I just want to note that the process H-G mentions at the outset was awesome. Not the Skype part, but the super-intensive 2 day starting period, in which I measured and drew the house on site, used their printer to have a base drawing, then developed a half dozen schemes based on what they said, the discussion we'd had here way back when, and other stuff I came up with, all while AB chatted with them and H-G made dinner. At the end of the night, we picked several schemes to pursue in more detail, which I then spent the next day drawing up. By the end of the second day, the design you see was largely set (with lots of refinement to come, obvs).
Well, a roof seems both generally unnecessary here and likely to make it dank (maybe?)? Also, the goal is to do something pretty cheap, not to basically build out a bathroom extension to the house. The privacy problem would be crossing from the room over the deck to where the outside shower might be, such that neighbors could peer in from their windows over the yard on three sides; not a problem for me as I don't mind showing off my incredible physique, but it might be a problem for the guests.
45: I think most people (that you'd be friends with) would be down with an outdoor shower, and that it could make for a nice defining feature of the deck. That is, rather than just a big expanse of boards with railings, now you have one end of it that's semi-walled, and that starts to define the rest of it.
Keep a nice, fluffy robe in the guest room. Privacy problem solved.
I like it. Particularly the deck-defining part.
Someone is registering seehalfordsguests.com as we speak. Or "speak."
Outdoor showers are teh awesome -- my mom has a rickety wooden enclosure around the merest of pipe with a showerhead on it in her backyard on Long Island, and showering outdoors is delightful at pretty much any temperature above freezing. Even in the rain!
And the modesty issue is no thing, you just bring a robe like JRoth says. Do it.
Outdoor showers are teh awesome -- my mom has a rickety wooden enclosure around the merest of pipe with a showerhead on it in her backyard on Long Island, and showering outdoors is delightful at pretty much any temperature above freezing. Even in the rain!
My grandmother had one of these at her shore house. It was quite nice.
ABSOLUTELY have an outdoor shower. My sister put hers in and the three of them have taken maybe a handful of indoor showers in the past year. You will LOVE your outdoor shower, and your neighbors will love your incredible physique and everybody wins!
(Says the woman who was recently told by her shouty neighbor that I should put up curtains because no one wants to see my ugly aging body. 'Cept that just last night, as I was standing in the exact same place, deadheading the exact same coreopsis, a man came around the corner on his bike and said "Dang! girl. You're gonna give me an erection." This, my friends, is why you cannot must suit only yourself in the matter of how to behave. There is no pleasing all the neighbors simultaneously.)
"Deck-defining" just sounds as if it should precede the word "feats", and be read out loud by a ringmaster.
There is no pleasing all the neighbors simultaneously.
Have you ever had so many different ideas about what to say that you just couldn't pick one?
you just couldn't pick one [low hanging fruit]?
FTFY
I was not thinking defensively when I wrote that, true.
I suppose I was thinking defensively when I made an indirect joke.
I'm putting in outdoor showers and bathtubs in my new place and they are the best. get a book on balinese houses and check out the infinite possibilities. my aunt used to have one in martha's vineyard and it was amazing. even slightly cool weather and rain can still be great when the water's hot. and you could likely get enough from solar to run it on its own circuit separate from the house.
