A New House

December 19, 2023 Nick Momrik4 Comments

We’re having a house built!

The planning phase has a been a lot of work, but we made it to the end. The plans are finalized and the construction agreement has been signed. This photo is only a portion of the revisions.

Our first meeting with the builder, Cobblestone Homes, was on August 21st and we signed on December 11th, which was our 13th meeting. In the end, we went with a custom build, heavily inspired by their popular split ranch floor plan. Their plan was too big for us, so we moved in some walls, changed the location of the basement stairs, and made a larger walk-in closet and pantry. We saved about 200 square feet and will get exactly what we want.

I did some early drawings before passing off to the architect. Since this is based off a Cobblestone plan, I believe they hold the copyright. This was my first attempt and we ended up flipping the entire house.

This next drawing I did is very close to what we ended up with. The final plan is 1,947 square feet.

Hopefully we close on the loan in a few weeks and then the lot becomes ours. If the weather cooperates, they should be able to break ground in February. We can’t wait!

Quarterly Maker Box #MKR08 by Adam Savage Part 2

December 23, 2017December 22, 2017 Nick Momrik1 Comment

In part 1 I said there would be more to come as I worked on the projects in the box, so here we go. The first project’s instructions were titled “How to Draw Essay” which consisted of Adam describing some of his experience with sketching and then giving several tasks.

Step 1 consisted of filling 5 pages of the notebook by drawing cylinders. It gets you thinking in 3 dimensional space. This was a neat exercise. I tried to draw different cylinders to keep it interesting.

Cylinders Page 1

Cylinders Page 2

Cylinders Page 3

Cylinders Page 4

Cylinders Page 5

In step 2, the exercise was to draw things from life. I couldn’t tell you the last time I tried to do this. I felt accomplished when a sketch was recognizable (though you may disagree on that!).

Life Page 1

Life Page 2

Life Page 3

Life Page 4

Life Page 5

Am I ever going to work as an artist? No. Every one of us can be an artist in our own way at our own level though. It’s fun to put ideas on paper and a good skill to practice. Definitely helps with making things when you can see that idea in your head on paper.

There was a time growing up when I wanted to be an artist. Maybe a lot of kids have a bit of that feeling when going through those early creative stages. Apparently I missed out on the gene my Papa Momrik had that was also passed on to my Uncle John, because they both had some talent. I never turned out to be any good at drawing, but I still have those creative juices and try to use them in my own ways.

Quarterly Maker Box #MKR08 by Adam Savage Part 1

December 17, 2017December 20, 2017 Nick Momrik2 Comments

Several weeks ago, when I posted about Brain Candy Live!, I mentioned being a fan of Adam Savage’s work. Well, I saw him post a YouTube video announcing that he’d be curating a Maker Box for Quarterly and jumped on it. Apparently I’m not getting enough from my AdaBox and HackerBoxes subscriptions, which I already have a hard time keeping up with. I do love getting surprise packages and I understand some of it is paying for an experience.

It was unclear how many boxes Adam would be involved in, but it definitely sounded like multiple. Turns out there will be two, announced in a teaser of the first box. At $99 per box, it’s a pricey subscription compared to others. What they don’t tell you is that it’s another $8 for shipping, so really $107. Bit of a surprise when my other subscriptions include shipping in the quoted price.

The first of Adam’s boxes, which is Quarterly’s Maker Box #MKR08, arrived this week. Of course I did an unboxing video. Doing these has become good practice at describing things on-the-fly.

Neat box. Very unique. I’d been thinking about buying several items in the box, so it’s nice when a surprise comes through like this. Each Quarterly Maker Box must come with a puzzle that leads you to a web page about the contents. So naturally I worked on the puzzle before diving into the projects. To go along with one of the themes of the box, the puzzle involved doing a scaled drawing. It was actually a lot of fun and I think it turned out pretty well!