Tag: Surplus Materials

Searching for Poetry
Searching for Poetry Amidst Architectural Salvage (Photo: Geo Davis)

Searching for poetry, questing for questions that need no answers to matter and guide and enrich.

This might be my epitaph. Some day. But not yet. I hope.

Today, the vernal equinox, I awoke at 4:00 AM, eager to start cooking a wild boar roast I had thawed. Actually it wasn’t the roast that caffeinated me prior to my first cuppa MUD\WTR, that zero-to-sixtied my green gray matter within seconds.

If the human brain were a computer, it would be the greenest computer on Earth.

The basis for the brain’s greenness is its ultra-high computational efficiency; that is, it can generate a tremendous amount of computational output for the very little power it draws. (Source: Is the human brain a biological computer? | Princeton University Press)

You with me? Caveat emptor: it’s going to be that kind of post!

It wasn’t anticipation of the pulled wild boar that I enjoyed for lunch (and soon will enjoy for dinner) that prevented me from falling back asleep. (I love variety, but if it ain’t broke… And if you’ve cooked 5.4lbs of wild boar shoulder, then share, eat, share, eat, share,…)

It was one of those light-switch-on awakenings. Sound asleep one moment, wide awake the next. 100% alert, cylinders thumping away, and focus dialed in. Monday morning’s are often like that for me. And with an ambitious punch list for the icehouse rehab, I needed to hit the ground running. Or jumpstart the week by roasting a wild boar shoulder?

Both.

But, after talking through exterior trim and clapboard siding with two contractors, explaining how to prune watersprouts (aka “growth shoots) out of our mature American Linden to another contractor, and various other midmorning miscellanea, I headed into the carriage barn for some, ahem, research.

I’m still sorting through architectural salvage and surplus building materials, endeavoring to make final decisions for the icehouse. Woulda-coulda-shoulda tackled this many months ago, and I tried, but the process continues to evolve. In some cases, it’s continues to elude me. So my endeavor continues.

Today I ruled out a couple of ideas I’ve been developing, visions for upcycling deconstructed cabinetry from Sherwood Inn days. The visions have faded, but all is not lost. In the shadowy space they’ve left behind, I stumbled upon something else.

A poem.

Searching for Poetry Amidst Architectural Salvage (Photo: Geo Davis)

Searching for Poetry
```
Wabi-sabi wandering,
wabi-sabi wondering —
reimagining relics,
architectural salvage,
weather worn detritus,
offcuts, rusty remainders,
time textured tatters,
pre-mosaic fragments,
and dust mote mirages —
so much pulling apart,
so much pushing aside,
searching for poetry.
```
Today I concluded that the vision I’d been pursuing — a vision of upcycling deconstructed cabinetry and paneling from the Sherwood Inn’s colonial taproom — had been little more than mirage. However as this mirage vanished, I happened upon a glimmer of clarity, fleeting but encouraging, around an even bigger mystery that I’ve been chasing. Also mirage-like, also elusive, also a problem that persistence might hopefully tame, also a quest for questions that illuminate and instruct even when their answers evanesce.

This glimmer of clarity (try to imagine a spark that just might benefit from attention, a flickering flame that invites kindling with promises of a roaring bonfire) materialized briefly where moments before a mirage had danced and vanished. And what did I see? Companionship. Kinship. Similarity. Affinity. Between poetry and architectural rehabilitation and adaptive reuse. A glimmer and gone. I exaggerate, but the picture is at once protean, subtle, and elusive.

Nevertheless, I will continue to strive, risk, and experiment. I will continue essaying to illustrate the intimate overlap between poetry and construction — especially between composing lyric essay and adaptive reuse of existing buildings and building materials — until my wandering and wondering renders an oasis. Or admits a mirage.
March 20, 2023
Mixed Species Flooring Experiment

Mixed Species Flooring Experiment: character beech and jatoba, a.k.a. Brazilian cherry (Photo: R.P. Murphy)

Repurposing Rosslyn’s icehouse is an ambitious project within a diminutive space. On the one hand, it’s an historic rehabilitation of an obsolescent utility building into a home office/studio with lifestyle perks like a hot tub and firepit. It’s also an experiment in adaptive reuse: reinventing this no-longer functionally relevant building with materials cherry picked from 17+ years of architectural salvage, surplus building materials from several renovations, and a a carriage barn full of lumber harvested, milled, and cured on site from a decade and a half of restoration work in Rosslyn’s fields and forests. There are even a couple of personal objectives woven into the present project, but I’ll hem them in for now do that I can reflect on the mixed species flooring photographed above and below.

You’re looking at two different hardwood species in these flooring samples: beech (this batch has been selected for its “character”, patterned grain) and jatoba (a.k.a. Brazilian cherry). Both of these are surplus remaining from our 2006-9 rehab of the house, and either/both of them *might* find their way into the icehouse. I’ll explain more in due course, but today I’d like to narrow our focus to our preliminary “research”, experimentation with enough whimsy and creative license that it almost feels like playing around.

I’m referring to a sort of exploratory brainstorming, decidedly unscientific experimentation but curiosity-fueled artistic experimentation. The question we’ve begun to explore is what might be possible if we combined dissimilar wood species in the same floor? Could the beechwood and the jatoba hardwood flooring merge into an appealing design element? Would this experiment in combinatorial creativity contribute meaningfully to a unique, cohesive design?

Wondering and wandering into this experiment was made possible by Pam and Tony who pulled stock from storage, arranged patterns playfully, and sent me the photographs to ponder. And while there’s still plenty of experimentation ahead in this little mixed species flooring experiment, the creative cogs have begun to spin…

Flooring Experiment: jatoba, a.k.a. Brazilian cherry (Photo: R.P. Murphy)

Why Experiment with Mixed Species Flooring?

Sometimes the singing underneath surfaces in a timely manner. Good fortune allows the insights of Kathleen Kralowec to help answer this question. All of the following excerpts are drawn from her article, a wise wander that opens as if I’d written it myself.

This article, I warn you, is itself an experiment: a conscious act of wandering.
Kathleen Kralowec, “Why Artists Must Experiment” (Source: Medium)

Let’s wander a bit with Kralowec.

Recognizing an act as an experiment releases it from a lot of… demands of perfection. The outcome of experimentation is knowledge, and failure is just as valuable as success, because one has expanded one’s awareness of one’s own abilities, one’s deeper ideas, the potential of a media, a process, a genre, an art-form.

And so we play with beech and jatoba, experimenting and exploring, yielding to our curiosity, risking failure, but also possibly failing our way toward success.

Flooring Experiment: character beech (Photo: R.P. Murphy)

Artists must experiment in order to find their way… because there is no other road-map, no other way to discover how best to navigate…

As creatives we must grow comfortable with the prospect of forging our own way, navigating by trial-and-error. Kralowec goes on to propose the notion of a creative/artistic studio as a laboratory. Experimentation — and this encompasses failures as well as success — is fundamental to the creative process. And so Pam and Tony and I plunge headfirst into our laboratory, experimenting, mapping the unknown.

Practice, or rehearsal, is meant to increase precision on an existing pattern of action. Experimentation takes us outside those repetitions, to unexplored territory, untried actions… Experiment is an open door, an invitation to do things that might not work, and its necessary for what we may as well call innovation in the arts.

Jettisoning the familiar patterns, the customary solutions, and the “right way” is liberating, and sometimes a little unnerving. Welcome to the wilderness!

Experimentation allows one to explore the wilderness of one’s own talent and the wilderness of one’s own mind… Sometimes one must let go, enter into the experimental space, give oneself that permission to stumble, in order to advance to the next stage.

Mixed Species Flooring Experiment: character beech and jatoba, a.k.a. Brazilian cherry (Photo: R.P. Murphy)

And stumble, we will. Stumble, I do. Often. But every once in a while, wandering in this metaphorical wilderness of experimentation, we discover something singular, something remarkable.

Extending Kralowec’s notion of art studio as experimental laboratory to our creative practice(s) in general, then it’s incumbent upon us to untether from the familiar, the tried and true, the already discovered, in order to wonder and wander uninhibited, in order to explore and experiment without prejudice and confining assumptions. Not always, of course. And we must be willing to fail. Often. It is this vulnerability combined with curiosity, and with the courage to challenge our constraints and catalyze that curiosity through experimentation into the possibility of discovery.

At this stage we’re still early in our experimentation. Discovery is still eluding us. But our curiosity and our carefree experimentation are raring to go!

https://www.instagram.com/p/CmFsG48OEa4/

Now that we’ve experimented with the beech and jatoba flooring in their raw, unaltered state I have a couple of follow-on experiments I’m hoping to run. Stay tuned!

December 13, 2022
Leftovers as Ingredients

Ingredients for Christmas Turkey Dressing (Photo: Geo Davis)

Last night, I enjoyed Christmas dinner, the sequel. No, not the movie. The leftovers. Leftover turkey, mashed potatoes, gravy, green beans, roasted, butternut squash, all smothered under her blanket of gravy. And for dessert, pumpkin pie, and pecan pie.

And, as you may have predicted, it was delicious. Perhaps even more delicious than the first go round. Have you ever noticed that some meals just taste better the second time around? Hold that thought…

And note that I didn’t mention leftover turkey dressing / stuffing. There’s still plenty of that, but I’m one-and-done with stuffing. I enjoy making it, but after an initial scoop (and a small scoop at that) on Thanksgiving and Christmas, I’m on the the tastier dishes. It’s too filling. Too heavy. Too, well, just less appealing to me, even when drowning in gravy.

Ingredients for Christmas Turkey Dressing (Photo: Geo Davis)

Leftovers

This post is brought to you by leftovers. Yes, the ones crammed into your refrigerator right now. But not just those. Let’s expand our thinking beyond food. I imagine you have all sorts of remainders and vestigial scraps tucked into the nooks and crannies of your home. Junk drawers, closets, garage,… I’m thinking about all of those items (I’ll stick with “items” for now, but fair warning that I’ll soon ask you to consider them “ingredients”) that you could have thrown away but didn’t because you suspected that you’d be able to use them again in the future.

You with me?

Don’t worry, I’m not going to show you photographs of the two ingredients above as they after becoming turning dressing, after being served on Christmas, after getting scooped into a glass container, and after spending some time in the refrigerator. Sure, the turkey dressing is still edible, but it’s decidedly less photogenic at this stage.

But last night while feasting on our Christmas dinner sequel I got to wondering why the leftovers tasted better during their debut. It’s different than stew and soup and even some pasta dishes, all of which seem to hit their stride only after they’ve had some time to rest a while. And maybe it has something to do with the fact that my first experience with this meal followed a morning-until-late-afternoon cooking frenzy. Whereas last night I simply sat down and devoured the goodness.

Leftovers as Ingredients (Photo: R.P. Murphy)

Ingredients

This post is *also* brought to you by ingredients. Yes, like the fresh celery and onions above, we joyfully imagine crisp, colorful ingredients bursting with flavor. But poking through the fridge, pushing aside containered leftovers, wondering what in the world to eat, we get a different feeling. Less joyful. More resigned. But sometimes, last night’s dinner for example, we are surprised when we embrace the sequel.

Sometimes we get creative and reimagine the leftovers, decide to experiment with different combinations, different preparations. We cease to think of the leftovers as unfinished extras from the first meal, and we repurpose them as the ingredients for a brand new creation. Remember corn cakes and turkey gravy? Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t.

While overeating Christmas dinner for the second time it struck me how similar edible leftovers and building materials can be. Think of surplus lumber and architectural salvage. They get pushed to the back of the proverbial fridge (in our case, usually one of the outbuildings) in the hopes of one day becoming the ingredients for something relevant and exciting and new.

Leftovers as Ingredients (Photo: R.P. Murphy)

Leftovers as Ingredients

You see where I’m going with this?

I’ve repeatedly mentioned that the icehouse rehabilitation is an adaptive reuse project. Transform an obsolete utility building into a useful, relevant multi-use space that adds value to our life at Rosslyn. And, in addition to repurposing this handsome historic building, we have endeavored to repurpose as many surplus building materials and architectural salvage artifacts as reasonable (i.e. functionally and aesthetically viable) in the design and rehabilitation process.

I’ve talked about the repurposed columns and the loft flooring experiment, and I recently celebrated the upcycled coatrack and the antique ice hook (which will be displayed prominently as decor once rehab is complete). I’ve post a couple of updates on our “research” into upcycling garapa decking and re-milling our homegrown lumber into flooring (and other interior millwork). In the weeks and months ahead much of Hroth and Pam’s focus will shift indoors, and I’ll be relating additional opportunities that we’re exploring for repurposing our building leftovers as the raw ingredients for a brand new working and relaxing space that will fuse more than a century’s ingenuity and artifacts into an integrated, cohesive (and hopefully beautiful+charming) space.

As we journey through the icehouse rehabilitation, endeavoring to create relevance and value for leftovers while ensuring that the final result achieves these lofty aspirations of functional and aesthetic integration, cohesion, and attractiveness, brainstorming and collaboration become more and more important. And more and more enjoyable! With such a diverse cast of contributors, I’m hoping that we’ll cross pollinate and evolve ideas that none of us individually would have come up with. Co-creation is sure to conjure out-of-the-box ideas and original solutions that draw upon the diversity of experiences and passions and perspectives. So, please consider this an open invitation to share your suggestions!

December 28, 2022
Upcycling Decking Debris

Adaptive reuse has become an increasingly important principle for me in recent years. And one of the most ambitious (yet most critical) objectives for the icehouse rehabilitation project is repurposing surplus building materials and existing architectural salvage from previous projects; upcycling decking debris and other deconstruction byproducts from sixteen years of remodels and rehabs; and miscellaneous materials reclaimed from Rosslyn’s buildings, fields, and forests (such as a carriage barn full of cured ash, elm, and other lumber that was harvested, milled, and dried on-site.)

Glorious Garapa: Upcycling Decking Debris (Source: R.P. Murphy)

Hroth is continuing to experiment with the garapa decking we salvaged from our summer 2022 deck rebuild. I’m hoping to repurpose this honey toned Brazilian hardwood as paneling in the icehouse bathroom. Hroth has planed these boards down to 5/8” and the lumber is beginning to look really good. Maybe 1/2” will be perfect?

https://www.instagram.com/reel/Cj7Igsig6Uo/

In addition to milling off the grooved edges (originally used for securing hidden fasteners to deck substructure) and planing the boards down, the next step will be choosing a suitable joint between boards. I’ll share updates as we continue to explore upcycling the old garapa decking.

What the Heck is Upcycling?

Nowadays we throw around words like upcycling, recycling, repurposing, adaptive reuse, etc. without stopping to ensure that we all understand what these words even mean. Upcycle That, a (@upcyclethat), a website launched in 2012 to showcase upcycling ideas and inspiration, offers this clear and concise way to think of upcycling.

Upcycling is taking something that’s considered waste and repurposing it. The upcycled item often becomes more functional or beautiful than what it previously was. That’s why it’s called upcycling, because the value of the item is increased! (Source: Upcycle That)

Junk, debris, byproducts, and leftovers reimagined and transformed into valuable new items. That’s upcycling.

If this sounds a little bit like recycling, let’s turn to the Upcycle That team again for help clarifying the difference between upcycling and recycling.

Recycling and Upcycling have different processes. In the recycling process, items are broken down to be reused. Paper is shredded and turned into pulp, plastic is shredded and melted into pellets, glass is smashed and melted to be recast. This downcycling is an essential step in the recycling process, but it does degrade the value of the materials.

Upcycling is a creative process where waste is looked at as a resource. Materials are reused in a clever new way, giving them a second life and function. Think of a pallet coffee table. Upcycling transforms the pallet into a lovely piece of furniture. (Source: Upcycle That)

I would add to the downside of degrading the source materials another frequent cost of recycling: energy consumption. Not only can the act of recycling gradually diminish the quality of the paper, glass, plastic, etc., but the process(es) by which the down cycling takes place almost always consumes energy. By sidestepping the down cycle-step in recycling, upcycling reduces the need for energy consumption.

Energy Use to Upcycle Garapa

As a quick followup to this last question of energy consumption during the downcycling vs. upcycling processes, I should note that transforming our old garapa decking into a finish material for the icehouse bathhouse is not without its own energy inputs. As you can see in the video above, these boards are being passed through a wood planer and they’ve already had their sides trimmed on a table saw. So, electricity has been an inevitable input in order to transform what on another project might have been considered demolition debris into what on our icehouse project will become beautiful bathroom paneling.

October 19, 2022