OR IS THERE...???
COMING SOON:
More Other Stuff.
Legal Disclaimer: ( AKA "The Fine Print" )
Warning! Double-clicking images may result in larger images.
And Now A SyFy Special Presentation
Prologue:
2029
That huge thing that happened finally ended. Then some survivors got together and did stuff.
FIN
So I've just squandered a few months designing this fully self-contained
sustainable underground house. It was a lot of work and provided me with
a number of interesting challenges to overcome, but it was worth it.
This image showcases the visible parts of the house--the roof, skylights,
rain collector, air exchangers and my innovative solar power plant design.
The design details of my "Solarium" are a secret ( only to be whispered into
the ear of a yet unnamed recipient as I make my final approach to Death's doorstep ).
Suffice it to say that it will power the entire house year-round, will likely keep running
efficiently for several generations with minimal maintenance, and should comprise
about 1/3 of the total construction costs. It is a major investment up front, but it will
quickly pay for itself and continue to benefit the homeowner...essentially, in perpetuity.
As with most of my design projects, there is a certain amount of minutae which I've
left unfinished in the .SKP files. These small details are not necessary to complete,
as the visible elements in place are sufficient to explain the blank spaces.
Basically, once all the conflicts have been resolved in a given design project and there
are no more challenges to be met, I get antsy and have to move on to the next project.
Otherwise, I'd just get bored. So I just walk off the site and leave things half-painted,
with bare wires sticking out of the walls and pipes that lead to nowhere. I just leave
that stuff for the day laborers to deal with. It's beneath my pay grade. I'm an idea man--
a creative force. I don't spend my days haunting Home Depot with a cardboard sign,
begging for drywall gigs. I'm way too busy for that mess. My brain is constantly
vomiting up new ideas, so there's always some new challenge waiting for me.
Case in point: one of my favorite ( therefore, most impossible ) design challenges:
The Mobile Micro-House.
As a kid growing up in semi-rural Pennsylvania, I was fascinated with Conestoga wagons.
Those canvas-covered horse-drawn wooden deathtraps were the original mobile homes--
the first American RV's--rattling along in their gypsy caravans all across the country.
Unfortunately, those old wagons were just wood and canvas. Wooden wheels break easily,
and the closest thing to Triple 'A' back then were displaced bands of indignant Natives,
who were generally more inclined to rain flaming arrows on a gimpy wagon than to
assist in repairing a busted wheel. Today's mobile homes are built to withstand arrows,
as the never-ending quest for greener pastures motivated settlers to more than a
century of mobile home improvements and other unrelated technological advances.
Today, in much of the civilized world, there is also a rising trend towards learning to live
in smaller spaces, unfettered by tons of non-essential material things--like the stacks of
outrageous bills which a large living space can generate. Owning a full-sized home is
financially becoming out-of-reach for many people who are already struggling to get by.
Tiny home living is percieved as infinitely more practical, more affordable, and in some ways
as a gateway to the resurgence of a simpler lifestyle. Less burdened by material possessions,
and compelled to thrive in very close quarters with family members, the whole movement
towards tiny home living is also seen as a return to a more spiritual approach to modern life.
For decades I have repeatedly attacked the problems involved in designing a proper mobile
tiny home--and they are legion. Usually, my designs would fail at some point. It's like
trying to squeeze all the amenities of a planet into the skin of an orange. I ask for too much:
security, comfort, sustainability, mobility, minimal footprint, off-grid capability, a place to read,
a place to sleep, a place to cook, a place to shit, shower and shave--and maybe a little style...?
And therein lies the challenge. I found that I could eliminate any one of my many
requirements and design a successful home based on the remaining parameters,
but where's the challenge in that? After all these years, I believe I've finally solved
the problems which had previosly bamboozled me, and I'm prepared to go out on a limb
and chronicle this latest adventure in architecture before I even finish doing the math...
( I'm obligated to point out the fact that this project still has a 50/50 chance
of crashing, burning, and being gruesomely eviscerated by predatory punicorns. )
This is the goal: an 8' x 12' fully functional micro house on a flatbed trailer!
Stop giggling. That's not being very supportive.
Figure 11: This is the house's backside. In order to start this project correctly,
I needed to first design a micro bathroom small enough to leave a 6' space free
for installing a bed on the same side of the house. Technically, once this miracle
is achieved, the rest of the house should be as easy as joining two Lego blocks.
The problem of miniaturizing a bathroom had been the principal cause
of most of my design failures up until a few weeks ago...
I saw this ridiculously simple solution applied to a full-size house bathroom,
where the concept looked absolutely absurd. It is in fact
SO outrageous that I should have figured it out on my own years ago.
Figure 33: A sliding "pocket door" leads into the bathroom, which is no wider
than the door itself. The bathroom is actually two separate rooms, each about the
size of a very small closet. The first room is a "wet room" containing a sink, a mirror,
and a wall-mounted shower head attached to a flexible hose. The walls and doors are
waterproofed, and the floor is graded down towards the far corner where a drain under
the sink funnels water to a holding tank beneath the flatbed. No need to allocate precious
cubic footage to install a separate shower cubicle--the whole room is a shower cubicle.
( It's really quite primitive when you think about it. It almost makes me want to remove the
pipe from under the sink--why not just wash your hands AND your feet at the same time!? )
Figure 34: Ideally, this part of the bathrom will house a small composting toilet,
though the homeowner may opt for a different system, such as a chemical toilet
filled with some mysterious weird-smelling blue fluid...or an empty KFC bucket.
A wall-mounted shelving unit for tissue rolls and other supplies encloses the
toilet's ventilation pipe, and the shelving has 3"-high guards to prevent supplies
from falling out during travel. There is also a high window for adequate ventilation.
When it's all said and done, this bathroom is probably NOT for the claustrophobically
challenged, but as confined as the space is, it's STILL nearly a quarter of the entire house.
As for that pipe under the sink...
Figure 62: SketchUp has a tool that is intended to make pipes "easy" to extrude,
but you really have to jump through some hoops to do it, and your measurements
have to be absolutely precise. That actually WOULD be easy if SketchUp didn't
tend to occasionally wander from its 1/16" constraints and miss some marks by
an additional 1/32". You almost have to go into the program with an electron
microscope to repair those tiny abberations afterwards. And look at that confusing
tangle of facets, points and guidelines--I had to practically design an entire
miniature rollercoaster just to define a path for the pipe to follow!!!
Figure 05: On the "construction site", the framing for the folding bed
is installed, providing sturdy dependable support for the bed/sofa,
as well as an additional 24 cubic feet of storage space underneath.
Figure 06: The folding bed rides on several little wheels on top of this frame.
The three aligned notches cut into the top of the frame are positioned to catch
three of those little wheels when the bed is folded back into a sofa. The frame
occupies the entire length of this space--in effect, the whole room is a futon.
Figure 17: In this image, the "daylight configuration" is demonstrated. The bed
has been collapsed into a sofa and the table has been extruded out from the
"tiny window" frame, revealing the full 20" x 42" window. My "guest" seems to
like the arrangement. I don't know who she is. She's just some runaway who
lives in a tent in the woods. Sometimes she breaks in to use the bathroom.
Figure 29: This is a closer look at the "daylight configuration" essentials. Four
magnets in the "foot" of the table grip a corresponding metal strip in the floor.
Now--since you brought it up--I actually downloaded this "spokesmodel"
as part of a set from the SKP 3D Warehouse. It was listed as a set of "3D men"
in various positions, though the men all turned out to have breasts for some reason.
Nevertheless, I've been repainting them and using them in several of my projects.
Figure 9: The window/table, retracted.
Figure 22: The "moonlight configuration" is shown here. The desk has been
retracted back into the window frame and the sofa has been extended out into
a cozy 4' x 6' bed. With the window retracted, the triple layers of polarized
laminate renders the tiny 4" x 26" window virtually opaque from the outside.
As the image implies, this opaque quality tends to inspire gratuitous nudity.
Figure 52: This is the unfinished galley area, featuring an electric space heater,
a small studio refrigerator, and a sink hidden under the countertop. A built-in "ladder"
( one of two ) makes access to upper storage areas fun and easy. My single greatest disappointment at this stage of the design is that I can't squeeze a washer/dryer unit
into this tiny house. Even the new LG combo units are much too large, and they're
the smallest washer/dryer units on the market today. Too bad. A prospective
homeowner may want to park in front of a laundromat every now and then.
Figure 65: Here is "The Coffin", which no tiny home should be without.
This device is actually a containment unit for a pair of 55-gallon water drums.
The exposed drum is the core of a simple solar water heater--the other drum
is for cold water. At the moment, these drums are top-loaders by necessity,
but it will pose no challenge to attach a hose that will make it easy to fill
the drums from street level. Once he drums are filled, the Sun and gravity
are all anyone needs to enjoy the conveniences of indoor plumbing. Also--
in an emergency--the H2O containment unit can be stripped of its drums,
lifted up out of the roof, and used as an actual coffin. ...Or a guest bivvy.
For the exclusive benefit of the hydrodynamically challenged, this is a low-tech
gravity feed system. Water pressure is dependent on the force of gravity
in your specific region of spacetime. Here on Earth, gravity is widely recognized
as a "weak force", therefore it would be illogical to expect your shower settings
to include any nuances beyond "off" and "gentle spring rain".
Figure 70: This is the "glass roof" which I made specifically to help me determine
the total volume of useable storage space in the ceiling. The roof is a translucent
clone of the actual roof, occupying the exact same space, so anything I design for
the ceiling storage area will fit precisely under the actual roof when I'm finished.
Figure 79: These illustrations show the ceiling storage area from different perspectives.
There are two areas which are specifically intended to be cat-friendly. One is a "cave"
and the other is a "sun deck"--if a cat lives here, it will be a happy cat. The two large
obvious open spaces in the ceiling will be illuminated by skylight windows in the roof.
Figure 75: This view shows the ceiling storage area completely installed.
I'm still not sure where my batteries are going to be located, but I'll need to
find room somewhere for at least four marine DieHards and a converter
to power the house from a bank of six solar panels built into the roof.
30 square feet of solar cells should be more than adequate to power
such a tiny habitat, but I may have to stash the batteries
in the storage space under the futon...?
Figure 72: Here is an overview of the interior space sans roof and ceiling.
Figure 84: These are the solar panels for the house. There are six
individual sections, each inset into the surface of the roof and covered
with a durable arrow-proof glass composite. That will amount to about
15 square feet of solar panelling on each side of the roof. Consider this
the "basic package"--there are a number of available faces on every
side of the house for mounting additional solar panels if desired.
Figure 86: So I got it all worked out in the holograph in my head now,
and it all seems to work. Therefore, I am done being bored by this.
NEXT!
A FEW months back, Stan asked about a program that would be ( paraphrasing ) "like graph paper on the computer" for designing his own houses. I searched the torrent sites for something like that, knowing that just such a program was of great use to me a few years ago, but Broderbund's 3D Home Deluxe no longer exists. Though fundamentally just an interior design assistant, that program allowed you to make a floor plan on digital graph paper prior to testing out the space with pieces of digital furniture. Unfortunately, I couldn't find it anywhere out there. Eventually, I found one of its bastard children: Sweet Home 3D. It's a little more difficult to use--because it has so much more functionality than its predecessor--but it's worth a few extra hours to master.
SH3D has a similar interface, but it goes way beyond 3DHD. Both programs start off about the same in terms of easily creating walls and rooms. When it's time to begin placing pieces of furniture, SH3D outshines the older programs with a massive library of fully configurable objects, furnishings, people, pets--and even cars. Objects can be resized, repainted, reupholstered and placed literally anywhere. If you'd like to mount a sofa on the wall, you can! You have total control of the X,Y and Z axes of every object, and can additionally position any object by arc degrees. Also, if you want to use a specific material on an object which can't already be found in the vast collection of paints and textures, you can make your own materials in a graphics editor of your choosing and import it into SH3D. I made a solar cell tile in Paint Shop to apply to my solar panels, just as one example.
3DHD used to then provide configurable views of your work in 3D. It created nice passable drawings so you could get an adequate feel for your completed space. These drawings were sufficient for the purpose, but SH3D goes a step further by generating really nice full-color Sims-style imagery in real time as you work. Once you're satisfied with your results, SH3D goes the extra mile for you--the library also contains a formidable armament of configurable lighting options, allowing the user to place any sort of lighting anywhere in the floor plan! These lights don't actually light up in the 3D drawings, but this is where the program really excels over its aging relatives:
SH3D has its own rendering engine, much like Chief Architect, but it renders images faster than the POV engine, quickly providing the user with beautifully rendered views including precisely calculated lights, shadows and reflections. 3D Home Deluxe never even came close--no wonder it's no longer available. It was wiped out by a superior species!
So...I took a little break from my mobile micro project to test out this new program before recommending it to Stan. Below is a sampling of test images I rendered in SH3D of a donut-shaped house I designed on-the-fly to see what the program was really capable of achieving...
Stan may have to learn a couple of new tricks to run this program, but it's so easy to learn and the results are totally worth the effort. I am formally giving SH3D a well-deserved five stars for ease of use and spectacular results. This software should be in every school computer.
Here are some of the results of my test of SH3D:
Who's that standing behind the Green Door...?
Cat seeking a bit of privacy.
Lunch break.
" I coulda SWORN I heard a can being opened..."
Pausing to contemplate the House Shrine.
Having passed the initial test, I decided to stray from the curvature fantasy
and redesigned the house as an octagon. In the long run, this is a more
efficient design in that it is much easier to measure out and would thus be
an easier--and quicker--build than the round house would have been...
SUDDENLY--WITHOUT ANY WARNING...
my 3rd leg.
it was an old bent stick barely covered in shards of aging cracked chipped gloss black paint, but topped with an elegantly curved and comfortable translucent blue plexiglas grip and a simple chrome band.
it was a found object, passed to me from a sincere heart, and i have been
honored to transform this sad fixer-upper into my trusted 3rd leg.
haven't left home without it in the last four-plus years.
the 1st thing i did was tailor a heavy guage 3/4" matching blue wrist strap, because some old coot kept dropping my sticks and leaving them hanging at the tail end of supermarket checkouts. ah, the good old days--when the pain was only intermittent, and a forgetful old fart could walk almost half a block before his hip started to scream in his ear. i don't remember what i originally cut the strap from,
but i was probably just happy about finding the right color. it might have been a dog leash.
the shaft itself i was originally planning to just lightly coat with fresh paint and polyurethane, primarily to preserve the gnarly texture. ultimately, i decided to punch up the safety aspect and redesign for increasing the frail old stick's strength and resilience. to this end, i 1st painted the stick with a thick layer of yellow glue. then i began to cut roughly foot-long segments of cotton twine, soaking each in a slightly thinned yellow glue before coiling each strand precisely around the shaft.
gradually wrapping from one end to the other, the process required 200+ feet of twine and spanned 2 1/2 days. once dry, i painted the entire stick with another coat of yellow glue. when that dried,
i mixed a batch of pthalo blue/iridescent silver acrylic paint to the
desired spectra, and applied 5 coats over 2 days. last but certainly not least,
the obligatory dusting of krylon clear.
the whole ordeal took a week, but the final result is a slightly heavier, more robust stick
which also just happens to look fabulous compared to when it 1st left the womb.
when not in use, it hangs on the kitchen wall, suspended by a comically kitschy
oversized blue push-pin. it's still not finished--the grip could really use a good buffing.
no way of knowing how many years of accumulated dings and road rash have dulled
what must have originally been an impressive glassy finish. i ain't got no damn buffer,
so i'll have to look into the feasability of using polyurethane to fill in the scuffed spots...
WTF?
So I finally broke down and ordered a whole fucking pound-and-a-half chunk of $culpey.
It should arrive in just a few days. I can no longer appease my sculptor's soul with mere two-dimensional simulations of 3D, and my clock is ticking. It is my intention to produce at least a few small projects before last call. I have to keep the projects small, because $culpey ain't cheap, and also because I don't want to start something big and kick the proverbial spitoon halfway through. I have a few large projects worked out in my journal which could easily be scaled down to a more manageable size, and I'm excited by the challenge of nano-sizing some of the finer details. My close-up vision sans bifocals is still good enough to thread a needle, and sewing needles are great for etching fine details in ceramic clay--$culpey shouldn't be too different...?
I will naturally post pics and progress reports on an updated version of this blog page...
"You must have had something to hide, or you would not have made an effort to hide it.
Were it otherwise, we most surely would have found something, which we did not.
Therefore, whatever it is that you may or may not have hidden is now hidden,
undeniable proof that you are guilty beyond any shadow of a doubt."
~ Detective Hugh Jayniss, Scotland Yard
Let's make bad decisions.
"Don Quixote jousted with windmills, but when all is said and done,
the wind is still mightier than the sword. Macarena!"
~ Vasolini Petrocelli, Archduke of Canadia
TIP OF THE DAY #27:
Never get stoned right before a big presentation.
Funding For This Page Provided By Grants From:
The Preserve The Illusion Society Of America
The National Film Council Of Lesser Canadia
The Fuggidahl Foundation
The Draconian Alliance
Cyberdyne Systems Corporation
Hitler's Old-Fashioned Fruit Pastries
Scientologists For A More Believable Backstory
A Nun With A Gun And A Grudge
and
Viewers At Home Like You With Too Much Free Time On Your Hands
Who Just Don't Feel Like Masturbating Right Now
M*2015
The Preserve The Illusion Society Of America
The National Film Council Of Lesser Canadia
The Fuggidahl Foundation
The Draconian Alliance
Cyberdyne Systems Corporation
Hitler's Old-Fashioned Fruit Pastries
Scientologists For A More Believable Backstory
A Nun With A Gun And A Grudge
and
Viewers At Home Like You With Too Much Free Time On Your Hands
Who Just Don't Feel Like Masturbating Right Now
M*2015
November 20th, 2015: Stumbled across this online.
The "Escape Traveler" is about 50 sq. ft. bigger
than my design, but still eerily similar...
No comments:
Post a Comment