Arts and Crafts gone overboard... click on the links for the pictures.
My folks were coming to visit - and we had one room (mine, of course) which I hadn't done a thing with aside from pile boxes into it and get things minimally functional. So, having watched one too many housep0rn shows, I needed to do a makeover! And since the rest of the house is pretty much Southwestern, I decided to elevate things a bit.
I was trying to find a good mural to put up - but couldn't find one. Instead, I did my own. The frame was silver and black spraypainted molding, and the border between the mural and the blue-painted surround is black and silver automotive detail tape. Yep, pinstripe tape. And it works better than I thought it would. Mount a Tix Clock underneath it, and put in the appropriate accessories like a telephone and blue flex conduit, and it looks pretty sharp. Oh, and outlet cover boxes add a certain, um... well, I like the way they look with conduit sticking out of it.
Trying to figure out what to do with the desk - that was a bit of trouble. I thought about painting it, but that was just too much like work. Besides, it matched the bookcases on the other end of the room fairly well. I've got a lot of screws and velcro holding up cords in the back, but a really fortunate find was an LED lamp at Office Max that, when lit casts the proper glow over everything. Add in a glowing keyboard and mouse pad from Xoxide.com, and about the only thing that'd make it look better would be a 3-bank of 21" LCD panels. Well, maybe in 5 years or so I can indulge myself with those...
Another view of the desk Desk 2 shows the scanner - it lives in vain. Interestingly, it's a USB scanner but I can't put it through a USB hub, either powered or unpowered - or the computer won't see it.
I've got a rather tall bookcase that I didn't want to mess up the finish on, but I needed to tie in somehow. I tried the silver paper that I used on the shelves in the front and back, but had a heck of a time getting it to lay flat without wrinkling. (Let's face it, silver gift-wrap paper just doesn't have any tensile strength worth mentioning.) I tried silver mylar sheets, but had the same problem - it wrinkled easily and I didn't want that sort of look.
Finally, after thinking about it a lot, I figured if you can't keep the mylar from wrinkling, you can wrinkle the hell out of it and use it THAT way. And it came out looking pretty good. You'll note the clock further on, connected with the ubiquitous blue flex conduit...
And the fan. Oh, THAT was a lot of fun! I'm glad I was able to find the proper fan for this. It wouldn't be inaccurate to say that this one fan sparked a lot of other ideas. You'll notice the blue flex conduit to the track lighting... And another view of it all is here. The controller for the track lights is in the box on the ceiling, and I've got it set for about 90% brightness on the bulbs in the track lighting. Naturally, I've got a remote control set up on the fan, and a motion-sensing switch to provide power. Uunfortunately, the way the room is wired, there wasn't any convenient way to get electricity to the track lighting separately. It would have looked pretty bad if I'd tried.
You may have noticed some labels scattered here and there, and wonder what they say. Here's 1 sheet and another. A third isn't available on this system to upload. Caution - they're rather large .bmp files - I haven't optimized them yet.
Well, hope you enjoy the pictures. I know I could do more with the geek factor (and more blue conduit, and maybe painting the ceiling black, putting in fiber optic stars and constellations and such), but time was limited and my budget stretched to the max. As it was, I had fun putting it all together, but kind of look forward to not haunting Home Depot and Lowes for a while...
J.
Comments are in the extended entry...
uhh... ... dork much?
Posted by: rawb at April 20, 2005 09:43 AMNo, not as much as I used to! (grin)
You missed the room with the parachute ceiling I had at the old house. This is rather... restrained ... compared to that.
Funny thing - when you're in your 20s, you don't think much of fitting your environment to yourself. Brick & board bookcases, secondhand furniture and such do fine. But as you get a bit older, you want to customize your environment some. You take down the thumbtacked posters and put up framed prints, the sheets covering the windows get replaced by blinds and curtains, the ratty couch gets replaced and the cable spool/folding chair dining room furniture gets swapped out for a real table and a china hutch. Then one day you look at the walls and go "Damn. I can't stand the same old, same old any more" and try something different, especially after watching one too many home makeover shows. And you find that the stuff you laughed about twenty years previous is the stuff that you'd kind of like to see around you.
That housep0rn's dangerous. It gets you to thinking... "Hey, that'd look neat..." and suddenly you find yourself doing things you never thought about doing before.
What's even worse is when your wife urges you on.
So - where do I rate on your Dork scale?
J.
Posted by: JLawson at April 20, 2005 10:12 AMI dunno, it looks prtty cool to me. Remember the discussion we had a couple of months ago? Back then we were talking steel grey walls with simulated rows of rivets every so many feet. Kind of the 1950's high-tech spacecraft look.
Posted by: James at April 20, 2005 02:53 PMJerry, I have the perfect solution for your clock and its multiple exhortations that it not have its power interrupted: power it through a Uninterruptible Power Supply. The smallest one manufactured would be more than enough; the clock couldn't possibly draw as much as a computer and its associated electron absorbers, so if your power went off the damn' thing would probably still be going strong a week later. Just think of the advantages: an incredibly geeky clock protected by a UPS, as if it were essential to the continued operation of the house. You would wrap the needle of your Geekmeter around its peg, assuming there's anyone left out there that remembers what that refers to....
Posted by: John C. at April 20, 2005 03:11 PMJames - I thought about the steel-gray walls - then decided against it. I thought about rivet strips, and decided against them as being too much work. The wood trim around the mural's about as much as I could get away with as far as simulated rivets go. And I may do something else with the corners of that - I don't like the way they look. (I know - picky, picky...)
John - re the UPS, the clock needs 12V DC. The box and conduit hide a standard wall outlet and the wart that powers the clock. A SMALL UPS would be just the ticket - especially if I could mount it so it feeds the conduit line properly and hides the outlet. If you see one, let me know!
J.
Oh man... I think John C may have just passed you on the dork scale.
Posted by: rawb at April 21, 2005 10:45 AMWhy, Rawb, you say that like it's supposed to be a BAD thing!
Intelligent people have interests and hobbies. Clubbing and Bar hopping gets old after a while, and TV kind of palls unless you're a complete couch potato. If you were a poker aficionado, and devoted a whole lot of money into making one room in your house the PERFECT (according to you) place for you and your poker buddies to hang out, would we be justified in calling you a dork? (Not that we would in the first place, we'd just go "Cool room, if you're into poker. But where's the beer keg refrigerator?") Or if you were into backpacking and had a room really rigged up, complete with fake trees and a fountain/stream, we'd be impressed.
If I were to judge most of my friends by your apparent criteria, they'd likely all rate high on your dork-o-meter. But that doesn't matter - I can appreciate the effort they put into their hobbies, even if I don't share their particular passion.
Putting someone down (and publically, too) because you don't share their interests - that's so high school. I thought I'd taught you better than that! (Grin)
J.
Posted by: JLawson at April 21, 2005 01:51 PMIntelligent people have no interests and no hobbies! Intelligent people are meant to be cogs in wheels! How dare they develope as people >=[
Don't even suggest such a thing. As a matter of fact, Jerry, in newspeak 2.3, we're removing the words "interest" and "hobby" altogether! When people can't express themselves through a word, the actual activity will cease to exist.
Interests and hobbies are the propaganda of subversives, and we don't need them, Jerry. There have been no scientific studies that prove or even suggest that interests or hobbies are beneficial to daily life, much less "necessary".
The absolute only redeeming quality about your so-called "interests" and "hobbies" is that it increases consumption and consumerism, but you could have instead payed somebody tens of thousands to do it for you and thus help keep the economy strong. You purposely missed that opportunity, you hate the free market, and you are bordering on subversive anti-capitalist behavior.
Posted by: rawb at April 21, 2005 03:42 PM/snark
Hopefully.... ?
Remember, we're all dorks here. We miss subtle contextual cues all the time!
J.
And believe me, I've done my part to stimulate the economy - I've got the bills to prove it, too! (Grin)
J.