It’s a Brick….Wall.
(…ok, so that was a lame attempt at a Commodores reference.)
Evidenty, turning a painted brick wall, back into brick isn’t all that easy to do. This particular wall has been painted about a dozen times over the last 60-odd years. It was up to Reliable Contracting to turn it back into a brick-looking wall. (I say “Brick-Looking” because there was one point where we contemplated painting it to look like brick.)
This is what it took to get the brick back to brick. Dwane had to use a grinder with a special wheel to grind the paint off. This patch took about 20min.
Looks PERFECT if you ask me. So we said “Go for it!” and he was off…
3 days later, this is what we were looking at.
…and after a coat or two of sealer…
This is the EXACT mix of “beat up cool” and “modern industrial” that we were looking for. Wait till you see the finished product in a few days. It’s simply fantastic.
Hey. There’s a Van in my office!
This was pretty funny to walk in on. The GC had his guys just drive the van in the office to unload it. Normally, not THAT strange…but we’re on the 3rd floor of the building!
The Waiting Game
And now…we wait.
The plans have been submitted to the City of Cleveland for review. We should hear something back in the next week or so, but it can take up to a month…so I’m not holding my breath.
In the meantime, the contractor has started prepping the space by re-paining the ceiling, and taking the walls back to brick. I’ll post some pictures of the progress in the next few days.
A Conference Room and a Kitchen
The Conference room is from another office that Jeff Bogart had done. I was skeptical about a full-wall of glass so close to the reception area, so Jeff gave me a phone number, and an address to go to.
Geoff and I took an hour to drive out there and my suspicions were debunked. The glass works great. (We also got an idea of how big the new conference room will be!)
The Kitchen is from Medina Cigar. They just opened a few weeks ago, and I thought their kitchen was nice for an office environment.
3 Days Progress
Well, here is a glimpse of what happens in three days. Here are 3 shots of the area the bathrooms will be in. We have picked out a few spots that we will take pictures from everyday, and this is one of those. Perhaps we will have some sort of time-elapse slideshow at the end.
The guys are doing a great job so far and we are happy with the progress they have made. They stared with the bathroom walls to allow the plumber to see and do the things he needs to in relation to the walls.
The Motherboard Wall - Phase 1
Here are a few progress pics of the “Motherboard Wall” we’re doing for our office.
What I’m trying to do is use one of the entry walls as a “feature” as well as an art piece. The idea started a long time ago, and we’ve been trying to collect old motherboards, cards, etc. I posted an ad on Craigslist.com a few months ago, and it ended up netting me about 90 motherboards. PLENTY to do what we’re looking for!
The first step was to clean them all. I started with a scrub-brush, but that didn’t do so well. Then I thought “Wait…I’m never going to USE these again. Let’s throw them in the dishwasher!” So I loaded up a dozen to see how that worked.
…and it worked REAL well. They came out VERY clean, but I needed to dry them a little better. The “Sanitize” setting on my dishwasher didn’t dry them all that well. (But they are sanitized now!)
So I set them all on their tops for a few days to let them drip-dry. I didn’t want to paint them and have water spots under the paint. Not that anyone will notice, but it’ll flake off in time.
Now let’s paint them…
I chose a white “Appliance Paint” because I knew it’d coat real well, stay shinny, and be…well…white. My brother looked at it and said it looked like something from Star Wars. I used a primer on one of them and didn’t prime another. The results were that the non-primed motherboard looked 10X better. The Primer needs to be sanded, and that’s not entirely possible with a motherboard. So it ended up looking “dull” compared to the non-primed one.
We’ll be mounting these about 1″ off of a painted green wall, with LED lights every so often both in front and behind the boards. Should look real cool.
More to come.
Neat Bathroom Sign
We like this for the bathrooms…
…just another random idea, brought to you by your friends at Ikea.
Update: I just realized that the women is significantly taller than the man. I guess that’s how they grow them in Sweden.
More Door Ideas
So I was playing in SketchUp again. Here are a couple other ideas for doors. the glass for #1 is about $60 per door, the glass for #2, #3, #4 is about $10 per door because they are stock sizes.
I kinda like #3?
Update: Turns out the glass I found is only 1/8″ thick, so we’re back to option #1.
Office Space Renderings
Here are a few pics I drew up for our new space. I used Google SketchUp to re-create the space off of the PDFs that Jeff Bogart sent. It was pretty easy to trace out the floor plan to get a better feel for the space.
It’ll be interesting to see what things look like in ‘real life’ versus the renderings.
I know that it is a little different than the plans, but I wanted to see how many people we can fit in there before we have to tear down that wall and add more space. Turns out…15 is the magic number.
Door Issues and Ideas
So I learned yesterday that the doors we ordered were a LOT more than the original quote. It’s a long story, but I was asked if we could find something else. While talking to Fred, we came up with the idea to take solid-core slab doors and mill a window into each one. That’d save us a few bucks on each door, and give us the opportunity to do something real cool with our own design.
I cracked open SketchUp and I was off to the races. Here’s what I came up with.
As it turns out, it’ll work! the Per-Door cost is a bit more, but we save enough on the entry doors to off-set the difference.