Roof corner with primed wood

Finally a roof!

It seems like an eternity since it first became apparent the roof would be claiming first priority in the Bungaloft project. But a big sigh of relief came over me following a day in the rain installing shingles with my roofer Mike Black and his helper. One day later it was essentially done. I still have to nicely trim the shingles at the edges and finish the varge rafter treatment but worries about rain and wind are now a thing of the past.

Lisa and I had spent some time looking at roofing material options. The variegated appearance of the common architectural style shingles was particularly unappealing. Soon we found that we had to look at somewhat more expensive shingles with a more uniform color but a more exaggerated physical appearance.

Since we had a color scheme in mind, the shingle color selection fell into place easily.

Once we got these shingles on the roof  it was clear we would be happy with our choice.

Now it’s on to the siding. The next big adventure.

Many objects made by human hands throughout history speak to the need to accomplish something extraordinary. Often such objects simply arise from a single-minded dedication and a fair bit of skill. In other instances, such an unusual object could only result from the meeting of maker and benefactor.

no 106 Breguet

One intriguing example of the latter is the Breguet watch no 106 designed for Marie Antoinette. It is a tour-de-force of 18th century horological technology commissioned in 1783 (with no time frame and unlimited budget) as a gift by an anonymous admirer. It wasn’t completed until 1827 – after Marie had been sent to the guillotine and Breguet had passed away. I’ll refrain from commenting on the political, economic and societal circumstances surrounding the creation of this watch but its recent history serves as a bookend for a story that’s a sure candidate for a compelling film plot. The master thief Na’aman Diller, a perfect heist, an unsolved case and a one-of-a-kind watch made for a queen.

With its rock crystal faces – it was clearly intended to fully display both the effort that went into its making and the wonder of its 23 “complications“. But more germane to this story is the fact that Marie Antoinette was the first customer for Breguet’s self-winding watch design called the perpétuelle.

The self-winding mechanism of a mechanical watch is dependent upon the movement of the watch wearer to spin an out-of-balance flywheel configured as a pendulum whose back and forth movement is utilized to keep the watch wound. This in turn is predicated upon the owner actually wearing the watch . . .
And, in the case of a watch such the No 106 Breguet, this is vitally important since the halting of the watch mechanism means not just manually winding the watch but resetting (without a keyboard) each of its various complications as well.

So picture yourself a collector of contemporary and vintage mechanical watches. (Check out the Breguet site for an example of the current state of affairs). You own a collection of watches – many with multiple complications and maybe a even a few with the legendary tourbillon mechanism. To insure they are all ready to wear without tedious adjustment of the mechanism they must be kept wound. Sure, you could spend your mornings going through the collection manually winding each watch in turn (or maybe strap them all to your arms, don a full black cape and go for a nice long stroll.) But as it happens, the easiest way to keep them all ticking is to arrange a means of simply rotating them on the mechanical axis for a given number of turns per day and all is well.

Maybe something like this . . . Strap the watches onto the rotating and spinning arms and set the whole thing in motion.

The common solution is more like this:

Oribita Avanti 12 watch winder

A nice cabinet with individual winder mechanisms for each watch. Simple, efficient and to-the-point.

But take another look at the Breguet no 106 above. The watch is a miniature mechanical circus act in a glass case. There were much simpler watches even in Marie Antoinette’s day (she reputedly carried a simple(r) Breguet watch to the guillotine.) Such a watch served the time keeping function quite satisfactorily. It’s clear from a review of the current offerings that the typical watch winder of the present day is a philosopical sibling of the simpler Breguet.

So I wonder why such mechanical poetry as is displayed in the no 106 might not also find its way into a watch winder. Clearly most perpetuelle owners would be inclined to have their watch collection handled by a winder like the Orbita Avanti. But surely someone would enjoy having the watch-tending chore managed by a more engaging mechanical contrivance.

As it turns out, I was commissioned to pursue this very idea – though the correct chronology has the commission preceding my arrival at the conceptual notion of watch winder as mechanical circus.

More next time . . .

It’s purpose is to blend the incoming hot and cold water into a thermostatically-controlled,  non-scalding, never-too-cold stream of blissful showerdom. A normally spendy component of a spendier shower system, I got it for a quarter of the going rate thus fitting it right into a less noticeable column of  the ballooning budget. But i digress . . .

The more interesting bit is the fact that this becomes part of the custom shower fitting project. Because I found very few shower systems I liked and fewer still that were affordable (in the plunk down hard cold cash sense), I concluded it was time to add the shower fixtures to the ambitious collection of things-to-do-in-the-shop-for-the-house. (Having machine tools in the shop is often handy and sometimes conducive to excessive flights of fancy. We’ll see which this is . . . )

I’ve subsequently tracked down the second of the three bits of valving necessary to do the behind the scenes work. Some brass fittings and connectors for the PEX house plumbing lines will join the components and present some threaded pipe at the business side of the shower wall. At that point the creative work begins.

TriMet, the Portland area transit authority, recently opened the new North/South light rail route in the downtown area. After a lengthy period of construction, traffic snarls and businesses struggling to deal with the turmoil, a free-ride day opened the new route.

It is interesting to sense the contrast between the modern electric-powered transit infrastructure and the classically inspired buildings.

Replacing all but one lane of automobile traffic on two major downtown streets is an example of the self conscious decision Portland made about it’s transportation future. And yet it could be argued that Portland’s growing network of light rail is, if anything, a lesson learned from the past.

The sleek new MAX light rail train

There was once an extensive network of electric trolleys throughout Portland. Like so many other American cities, the automobile led to the eventual abandonment of most of that legacy.

It’s perhaps ironic to contemplate the fact that some of the the earliest Portland trolley lines were set up as real estate promotion lines although this is not true of the trolley shown below.

Mt Tabor Trolley - PDXHistory.com

The PDXHistory.com web site has an interesting page of early streetcar history in Portland which includes the photo above – Mt. Tabor Car No. 438 near 65th & Belmont.

Our habit of taking the occasional walking tour of Portland’s architecture was rewarded on this particular day by the beautiful light that often follows a bit of rain while there’s still water on the ground.

I enjoy that brief time between the soft light of a overcast day and the challenging light of a cloudless sky when things seem especially vibrant. We seized the moment and strolled along to take in some less familiar buildings from the city’s past.

Bet even here were reminders of the troubled economy.

It was a nice distraction from the Bungaloft project.

We’re thinking it would be cool to have a small group of people who would like to do architecture walks. Maybe a Meetup group is in the works . . .

It’s been quite a while since I posted to our house project blog. Suffice it to say that things became overly difficult for me as I watched my little house disappear before my eyes. I would get very depressed, than regain my equilibrium, only to return to panic.

Three weeks ago I fell through a hole in the floor that hadn’t been properly boarded over and reinjured my knee. It would not bear any weight and would not bend – at all. I couldn’t even bend it enough to sit on the toilet in our tiny bathroom with the door closed so I had to take care of that with my leg sticking out the door. I thought it was hard cooking meals in our tiny kitchen, but try it on crutches!

My knee has gotten much better and I can walk again, although I still can’t straighten it and I wouldn’t try to walk very far on it. It’ll do for now. We will probably go to Costa Rica to have arthroscopy surgery to correct the torn cartilage that was found by MRI one and-a-half years ago. It will cost approximately $1,000 there as opposed to $12,000 or so here. It’s hard to get a true picture of the cost here because of the absurd way we are billed for medical procedures.

Everyone involved in your surgery gets to send their own bill and they’re indisputable. Since you can’t know what it’s going to cost until it’s over and you’re staring at the bills with your mouth wide open in horror, you can’t shop for your anesthesiologist, or radiologist, or for any of the numerous people involved. So, I can only guess at the price. When I asked my doctor a year-and-a-half ago how much the surgery would cost he looked at me like I was crazy. I know people who have been billed $70,000 for a two-week stay in the hospital for pneumonia and $20,000 for an appendectomy that involved only one day in the hospital. So, a safe guess would be between $10,000 and $15,000.

The hospital I am considering in Costa Rica, however, actually lists their prices for each procedure – a veritable surgical menu. They can control their costs, which we can’t do here. Too many stakeholders in whose interest controlling costs are not favorable.

So, still no roof and no siding, but I’m walking again and have gotten the hang of living in a fifth wheel. We had a great garden over the summer and I’m really excited about next year – especially as we’ll be back in our house and can spend more time in our garden!

Lisa

The summer spent digging through the layers of history, dismantling and casting aside the broken parts to begin the restoration and improvement of our little house is now running headlong into the rigors of 20 degree weather and the rapid passage of precious time. If a definition of learning is – make a mistake, size up the result and then decide whether you can live with it or need to tear it apart and redo it, then I should be ready to defend my dissertation sometime next summer. It’s just a question of whether it will be in archeology, temporary weather abatement practices or living in impossibly small spaces while worrying about being unemployed.

Or perhaps my relationship with this blog will be key to the learning experience. It started as a means to flexibly expand upon my website that is presently stuck in html gridlock. I thought it would be a way to explore the idea embodied in the title I gave it – Métier.  That wonderful French word for which one definition is “Work or activity for which a person is particularly suited” seemed to sum up a lot of the question that seems to preoccupy mine leisure thoughts - what the heck am I suited for? But the premature end of work in the shop and the big hole that left in my schedule made it seem the time was ripe for remodelling the house. We had been thinking about it for years. So why not just start posting to the blog about the house project as well?

What I didn’t count on was the ravenous beast the house project would turn into. It’s easy enough to play the philosophical card and just imagine how great it will be that about a third (maybe a half?, two thirds?) of the house will actually be new when we are done with it. But the transition from mild despair to grudging acceptance of the inevitable eventually left me feeling apprehensive about laying the whole mess out on the table to fully examine it. Then add to that my sense of WTF? when I discovered that in my attempt to eliminate the scourge of bogus users registering on the blog I had also eliminated Lisa and all of her posts. Blogger paralysis . . . .

So, with with this December entry on a morning when it is possibly too cold for a mere Portland resident raised in Texas to do anything outside, I throw down the gauntlet and challenge myself to live the fully examined life. Blog on . . . and put that gauntlet back on – it’s cold!

I thus continue by following up this post with Lisa’s now belated last post that more fully informs the comment that begins this post.

Every year that we can manage it, we will go to the Hood River Fruit Loop tour. (But then we’ll accept just about any excuse to drive out to the Columbia River Gorge.) The hills leading up to Mount Hood are a beautiful backdrop to the agricultural endeavors that bring us so much culinary delight. We always enjoy stopping at different places each year to see if we can remember where we went the year before. It’s just one of the little joys of getting older . . .

This year we decided to reverse our usual route so that we might arrive at one of our favorite destinations in time for lunch. This great house sits just across the street from the Apple Valley Country Store and Bakery. Since I’m right in the middle of rebuilding our porch, I have a heightened awareness of porches – and this is a particularly substantial example.

So the first order of business is standing in line next to the smoker for some barbecue. A little solo guitar music playing in the background made up for the annoying over-parenting going on behind us. Once lunch was finished, it was time to go into the store and sample the wide variety of fruit jams and preserves that they produce and sell. If there is still room after lunch and sampling, there also good pies being made and served on site as well.

Towards the end of our tour we once again sought out this amazing, iconoclastic apple and pear orchard – The Mount Hood Organic Farms and Cottages. The proprietor has not only a wealth of fruit knowledge but also a proclivity for eccentric architecture as well. The photo above is his vintage apple sorter in a long room apparently designed to house it.

The odd thing to me is the apparent disconnect between my experience of the place and the one presented on their web site. Perhaps the eccentric architecture crowd just isn’t well-heeled enough to go after.

This is a detail of some of the work underway to decorate the building compound that looks to be a long term owner/builder project.

A view across several of the buildings gives a sense of the overall effect. Of course, much more of it is under construction than completed at this point.

Before we depart, Lisa takes in a view of Mount Hood from the large inviting green in front of the buildings. Her view from that vantage point is directly towards the magnificent Mt. Hood.

We clung to the belief that we would be able to do the same with our little bungalow. Somehow the disappearing drywall would only reveal the solid virtues of our modest dwelling. Instead we got triage with multiple compound fractures and lingering thoughts of housanasia. The aforementioned bathroom addition we discovered set the stage for what was to come.

Soon-to-disappear kitchen wall

And it came in the form of the troublesome kitchen wall. We knew that was no concrete basement wall due to the visible contours of the extant structure. The building department had said if the wall gets modified to remove the windows we wanted out then  there must be a shearwall in its place. (That seismic zone again!) But without even a footer and stemwall there could hardly be a shearwall. So we deftly sidestepped the issue by pretending it didn’t exist. Until it did .

With a bit of barter credit in my back pocket I called in my skilled and experienced friend Tom Hughes to prod me along. As it turned out, his assistance was as valuable for the prodding as for his considerable experience as a builder. And pinning the blame on him for what had disappeared when Lisa returned home each day came in handy as well. At the end of his three days at the site, the front porch had also disappeared.

So now we race to get the little naked house roofed and dry before the Oregon rains begin in earnest. A lot more fiddling with non-parallel, non-plumb, non-square (and probably even out-of-round somewhere) to get sheathing on the rafters. We did have the good fortune of recycling quite a bit of fir tongue and groove from the porch deck and some of the interior subfloor to plank our eaves with. Then comes the rainscreen siding so we can get inside before things get too cold as well.

Cloud Cabinet - Tom Hughes 2009

Little miracles make life worth just that much more. And my tenure in the building sometimes referred as “the hole” for it’s inauspicious placement below grade in the Portland neighborhood known as Sullivan’s Gulch has been nothing if not slightly miraculous. With cavernous shop space in that funcky, old-warehouse style, the hole has been the source of introductions to a number of interesting, talented or friendly (sometimes all three!) individuals.

Among those is Tom Hughes, who can claim title to talented builder and artist among many other skills and interests. When not building or remodeling houses, Tom can often be found in his shop down the hall from mine working on projects such as this semi-theatrical, kinetic, wall-hung cabinet featuring one of my favorite subjects – birds.

As is often the case around the 28th Ave. studios, barter is a common feature of my friendship with Tom. The photos I made of this cabinet and the others in the series thus far were the fruits of that barterous relationship. Tom will be showing these pieces in the upcoming Portland Open Studios tour.

Peel P50

At 6′ 5″ inches tall, my interest in things small might seem inexplicable, but the fact remains – small things are cool. And there is not much cooler than a Peel P50. Check out the links at left and @ the image of the Peel P50 above for some great shots of this great little vintage wonder.

Isetta plus teardrop

When I was a bit shorter my father worked for Porsche Cars Southwest in San Antonio, Texas, the southwest regional distributor for Porsche (“por sha, not porsh” as he used to say.) I grew up around interesting cars and car people.
So when my young eyes first glimped a BMW Iseta, I knew that it was just about the coolest thing a car could be – small. Of course, the next logical step is to add a teardrop trailer – another growing interest of mine. An even smaller one can be seen here on the Tales and Trails website.

The park - in the middle of Naito Parkway!

One wet Portland afternoon Lisa and I set off on one our periodic architecture tours in the downtown area. I decided it was time to visit Portland’s smallest park.

Mill Ends Park

It was a perfect, rainy Portland afternoon, the kind that makes color sublime and car tires hiss. Mill Ends Park, created as a home for leprechauns, appears with different vegetative scenery in every picture you will find of it.
Portland being a center of the once booming lumber industry, the term Mill’s End refers to the pieces left over in the process of converting tress to lumber. The story of the park’s creation is an interesting bit of Portland history and worth investigating at the Portland Parks and Recreation site.

The current theme.