Have a heart

The theme of our house on the outside is hearts. Many are hidden and subtle, carved into the trees and rock work. Once noticed, however,they are obvious and abundant. The trim has literally thousands of hearts routed into the accent centers. Even these from a distance look like a subtle pattern, painted and glazed various shades of brown and blending into the woodwork. But at each intersection of the large 8" wide trim a larger heart will be installed. And for good measure we'll paint each of those hearts bright pink as per special request by Janis.

We'll be creating scores of heart shaped blocks for the task. This pile represents about one third of them.

Each day more pieces are added to our giant jigsaw puzzle, bringing it ever closer to completion.

-grampa dan

Some ideas come hard

The Boughen boys are busy again with the trim in the new house and making great progress. This means I have to keep busy designing and creating the custom trim pieces they will install.

One of the key pieces are to form the decorative surfaces on the bridge over the dining/living room areas. Through the last six months we've been working hard to come up with a design. I've filled dozens of pages in my sketchbooks with ideas but none satisfied us until I finally hit on a dfferent version last evening. At last we had a design that worked! Today I worked on the final revisions of the design and tomorrow I should finish the routing version of the file. It will feature a butterfly background similar to the window trim on the windows.

The design above shows the basic design. As usual we will include a bunch of surprises and details that will take it over the top. Stay tuned...

-grampa dan

Window trim test

Today Janis & I finally had the time to sit down and talk about how we wanted to do our window/door trim in the living room, dining room and entry areas. Janis has long loved a butterflies and so we decided this would be the theme of these areas. The trim will resemble the heart trim on the exterior of the house with a layered panel (of butterflies instead of hearts) in the center.

We started with a sketch as always. We determined the butterfly antenna and tail would have to be removed due to the scale of the butterlies.

We would use our MultiCam CNC router to create the panels. I created the router program and then set the fancy computerized machine into motion.

The test panel looked pretty good. We looked it over carefully and decided to make a couple of minor tweaks to make it better. The butterflies will be enlarged just a tad to help them route better. I'll also adjust the spacing just a little as well. As a point of reference this panel is 8" wide as it will be between and around the big round windows.

Tomorrow the routing of the permanent panels wll begin. I can hardly wait to start putting all the pieces together soon.

-grampa dan