I was watching this week’s episode of FutureCar on the Discovery Channel. The entire show was nothing extraordinary until the very last 30 seconds. Throughout the program, they kept returning to this group of young designers, each with their idea of what the future car would be. For me, every design they showed, looked futuristic [...]

I’m amazed how different the various browsers interpret stylesheet settings. My development is against FireFox and during test, I get around to checking Internet Explorer 6. (Eventually, I’ll add IE 7 to my tests.) I always find things that don’t work or look as expected. For those who have a long history with web user [...]

The source for my post’s title is a book by Sarah Susanka. I am in the midst of designing a new home. At the same time, I am watching all of these “dream homes”, “home improvements”, “this old house”, “rezoned”, etc. shows of TV. The TV shows keep showing bigger and bigger homes - [...]

Timing is everything I guess. I am traveling again and this time I booked into a Dolce facility. There is one in Armonk, NY that I absolutely love. The rooms are very European - at least that’s how I describe them. They are not what the Europeans would serve to an American. They are a [...]

I’ve been looking for ideas to shrink the spaces I “think” I must have in my next house. Sarah Susanka is the famed author of “The Not So Big House” and its companion publications. To be honest, I wasn’t able to get much useful content out of her book. It has only served as a [...]

I am designing a new home and one, I hope will prove both to me and others that “size matters” but this time I don’t mean “bigger is better”. My goals are 1000sqft footprint - that means it includes all interior walls, furnishings etc and thus the traditional definition of living space will be some [...]

While the title of this post is a bit cryptic to those not “in the know”, the news is of interest to at least a few. I participated in the “Give-1 Get-1″ campaign being promoted by Laptop.org where people in Canada and the United States with a postal address in Canada and the United States [...]

I was blog surfing this morning and came across a post at Bill de hÓra talking about web applications. I’ve suffered through too many software architecture meetings where 3-tier design was *absolute* only to be followed up a year later by software architecture meetings where our entire focus was on making our 3-tier solution *work*, [...]

Things are finally moving with my next big project. Today I made a number of the exterior construction decisions. In addition to windows, doors, vents, etc. - aka everything that cuts a whole in the shell, I selected colors.
I made a somewhat bold decision and went with a “light over dark”. The roof [...]

I’ve been trialing a number of 3D architecture visualization tools. I won’t attempt a software review because, to be honest, I dislike all of the packages I’ve used. They are any combination of too buggy, difficult to use, impossible to correct certain mistakes, too slow, too limited, etc. With that said, I will say they [...]

I am a very visual person - just as anyone who has tried to give me driving directions, street names are useless to me, I need landmarks.
Anyway, I’ve been struggling we a problem. I finally found the solution.
What is this ? (click on image for a larger view)

I have been trying to figure out the tile pattern for the wetroom. I was considering tiling the entire room in soapstone but I’ve decided to hold the use of soapstone to the kitchen. I also like the look of pebbles. These come in 12″ sheets so the installation is pretty easy and the [...]

I talk about the farmhouse construction ad nauseam. One comment (other than “SHUT UP”) that has been repeated, is “you could not build this place without the internet”. I’d agree, at least in so much as to say I would not be able to do as much of the work myself and with the [...]

If you are curious as to what bamboo cabinets might look like, you could use the Google image search but that vast majority of what you will find are very stark very modern design - perfectly flat and no character. That would be very easy to build but not my style. So, I used GIMP [...]

I struggled with the quickest way to mock up the kitchen cabinets so I could get an idea of what design I’d like and what paint colors or species of wood I might want. Given the kitchen will last a long time, I want to get something I will like for a long time.
I have [...]