Category Archives: Design

Design, Garden/Furniture

Water Heater Cabinet

Playful design and materials experiments applied to a utilitarian object

Our old water heater cabinet, after years of my attempted fixes, finally needed replacement. It is located in a corner with poor drainage, and so I wanted to use materials that are resistant to rust and rot.

Seizing this as a (small) design opportunity, I tried a million different ideas, trying to break away from the old  design. Ultimately, I failed. The area is just too constricted between the back steps, window and plants. I came back to the same shed roof cabinet design .

I settled on trex composite decking for the frame and cement board siding, because they are impervious to rot and termites. Fasteners are stainless steel when available, otherwise galvanized steel, for resistance to rust. There is no wood in the cabinet.

One thing I did change was the colors. We selected very bright colors, as a preview of how we plan to repaint our house.

Somewhere along the way, I decided that the peaked roof of the cabinet kind of resembled a cat’s ear. We decided to add a cat’s eye, nose and whiskers to the front, creating a cat’s face-or at least half of one. Lisa suggested using materials from our garden. We used round river rocks for the eye and nose, bamboo for the whiskers. I made wire “settings” for the rocks, similar to how diamonds are set in jewelry. We also wanted sort of a grab-bar on the side, to help going up and down the stairs. We added a long piece of bamboo that resembles a cat’s tail.

A water pipe enters the cabinet on the side. I wanted to make a cover plate for the hole. In it, a cat’s head emerges from the trim to bite the pipe. This is a nod to our cat, who can be a little bite-y at times.

Photos, from the top:

Finished cabinet

Manipulated photo, showing the full cat’s face and bamboo tail

Cat face detail, showing rock eye and nose, and bamboo whiskers

Biting cat cover plate

Cartoons, Design

Holiday Cartoons

1 Comment

Design fun with a different medium

What’s a .gif?

“.gif” stands for Graphic Interchange Format. They are those annoying little animated images on web pages that repeat endlessly. They are basically short, simple animations.

I am fascinated by animation. The way still images turn into motion is still magic to me. Years ago I went through a phase of making flip books. They were pads of paper with drawings on the bottom, a slightly different one on each page. When you flipped the pages with your thumb, you got a moving image.

After much research, I discovered that I could create .gif’s and put them on my website. My website, however, will only show very small .gif’s. That limits the number of frames and the number of pixels in each frame. I can make very short cartoons, about 12 frames maximum. These .gif’s are like short flip books.

The images are limited to 200 x200 pixels maximum. Due to this low image resolution, I draw directly on the computer, using the mouse as a pen. Its really different, and difficult, to draw with a mouse. But the digital drawings are easy to erase, so I just keep trying until I get it right.

Intrigued with the idea of making my own cartoons, and challenged by the limits, I set to it. After many experiments, I started to get some successes. Here are some of my first .gif’s, greetings for the holiday

Sketchy Bunny: This is the first cartoon .gif I got to work. It looks like a first attempt, but has a certain awkward charm. I drew the lines using the mouse and then paint bucketed the color.

Wonderful Easter: I used the computer to draw this rabbit, creating painted ellipses and circles. The resulting smooth drawing has a completely different feel, and the hopping motion is a little better.

Happy Bunny: I used the same drawing and focused on the motion. I like the jumping feeling, and the cartoony way the body jumps higher than the legs.

Elijah’s Cup: After the leaping rabbits, I wanted to create a subtle cartoon with very little motion. This .gif is based on a part of the Passover sedar (dinner). A glass of wine is set out for Elijah. The youngest child opens the door to let in Elijah’s spirit, who is said to sip from the glass. We would watch the glass for the slight motion that showed Elijah had visited. He came every year, perhaps helped a little by my father’s knee against the table leg. In this cartoon, if you look closely the wine in the glass moves a little. Not directly related to Elijah’s cup, matzo ( a plain flat cracker bread) is eaten at the sedar. A piece of the matzo also disappears in the animation.

Happy and wonderful spring, and good holidays to you…

Design, Garden/Furniture

Three Landscape Ideas

Trying my hand at a new (to me) design problem 

Some friends recently approached my garden designer wife Lisa about re-doing their home. As a first step, we decided to focus on their backyard.Their backyard  (photo at top) is very wide, about 200′. It varies in depth. Between their back porch and a fenced pool it squeezes down to 6′. At either end it spreads out to about 40′ deep. The house, yard and pool all face west. From the side of a hill in El Cajon, they can see all the way to the Pacific Ocean.

They want to accommodate a number of activities in their yard: a sitting/view area at the north (left in photo), another sitting area with a fire pit in the south area. They want to change most of their grass to water-conserving plants, but keep small grass areas for their dogs at both ends.

Things change when grass is removed. The typical, pre-drought concept was that a yard was all grass, with planter areas cut out around the edges. When you have grass, the typically complicated circulation patterns are easy to accommodate-you just walk across the grass. When grass is replaced by plants that can’t be walked on, circulation becomes a major consideration. Before the landscaping could be designed, we needed to have a hardscape (the hard walking/sitting surfaces) concept.

We were all excited by a beach theme. Our friends had also seen our yard and liked the flagstone. I developed three concepts, one with flagstones and two using a beach theme. I prepared these rough sketches with color. They are meant to show ideas without being too specific about details. In the sketches the pool is on the left, the house is on an angle to the right. The back porch is in the middle right. Click on the images to enlarge them.

“Flagstone Scatter”, the top concept, plays with the spaces between flagstones. When they are set close together, they become a hard walkable area with small gaps. Widely spaced they can become individual stones in landscaping. I contrasted the irregular flagstones with cut stone in a contrasting color, to mark the paths to the sitting areas and the pool.

“On the Boardwalk” uses beach images. A boardwalk, formed with railroad ties, connects the two seating areas. The seating areas are shaped like sea shells, with dog grass areas in their openings. A concrete walk to the pool extends off the boardwalk like an oceanside pier. Below the concept are studies I made of shells from our backyard.

“Bubbles and Shells” also uses beach shapes. The sitting areas and pool path are nautilus shells. Stepping stones and the dog grass areas are bubbles (circles). The circulation between the two sitting areas is hidden in this concept, unlike the Boardwalk concept. The narrow space is landscaped with sand and grassy beach dunes. The porch becomes the link between the sitting areas. A tall lifeguard chair is added to the pool area, providing a vertical accent.

Our friends can select their favorite concept, and add elements they like from the other schemes.