Progress so far
Since my last post, I’ve ‘squared out’ my bubble diagram into a comprehensible plan for both floors of my house. I’ve also recreated my plans in MineCraft (video game) to help me visualise my drawing in a more three dimensional manner. In my most recent meeting with Murray, we discussed how I can start rendering my plans into a perspective drawing. It was difficult to understand the extremely complicated process over a zoom call, but I managed to get a general enough idea of all the mechanics. My next step is to purchase some large paper and a meter stick so I can finally start exploring perspectives with my design.
How to Have a Beautiful Mind
Here is a short transcription of a section from my last meeting with Murray (talking about roofs)
Me: green
Murray: blue
OK, so I was so I was also wondering, so if I were to go with a more flat roof, how would drainage work, for rain on the actual roof.
(Green Hat questioning)
(Blue Hat organises hats)
Two ways. There’s always two ways. If you do an inverted roof, those actually work on a flat roof.
(Yellow Hat values/insights)
Oh.
You don’t want water sitting on an exposed membrane. At the point where the water is sitting it emphasises the sun’s rays and increases the deterioration of the tar. So you want to get the water away as fast as you can, so you basically slope the structure or you can actually get a special kind of insulation. They can actually hot-wire cut that into various shapes. So you can say, look, I’ve got a ten foot span from the centre to the outside wall and I need an 1/8 of an inch of slope. So that would be an exposed membrane, top membrane.
(White Hat information/facts)
Okay, cool.
(Red Hat feelings/intuition)
Is that too much information?
(Green Hat questioning)
No, no, that’s all good. So I suppose, you’d choose either depending on the structure of your building?
(Green Hat questioning)
No, it’s not connected. I mean, if I was doing either of these roofs, As I said, everything will be the same, until you get to the last bit of the roof. The inverted roof will have the insulation on top, and the exposed roof will have the insulation below the water-proof membrane.
(Black Hat critical thinking)
Oh, I see. OK, so pretty much just choose whichever one.
(Yellow Hat values/insights)
Yeah, a sloped top deck is just fussier. If you wanted to go Spanish, you can. You get to the top of the top table, up one of the two arch ones so that every tile you see actually has another tile tucked underneath it. They do weigh a lot, but they never break, unless a plane crashes down. But yeah, they don’t wear out, but they are very much vernacular. I mean, as soon as you put them on a house, people will go, oh, Spanish, you know, and maybe you were going for a West Coast look
(Yellow Hat values/insights)
(White Hat information/facts)
yeah, I’m most likely going to stick with a simpler roof design.
(Red Hat feelings/intuition)
What else could you do a roof with here? Shingled shakes. Not so much anymore, simply because they don’t have enough trees. There used to be shake and shingle mills all up and down the Fraser. If you walk the river south of us actually, you come to historic places with the little brass plaques. ‘Shingle factory used to be here’, you know, and they were made out of the stump ends and the offcuts from the lumber mills. So they would, you know, have a chunk of wood about 18 inches long, big round chunk of the tree, and they would take that and split it into shakes and shingles. But we don’t see that anymore. You just don’t.
(Red Hat feelings/intuition)
(White Hat information/facts)
Some do it, but there’s there’s two problems. One is shingles are thinner. They tend to split more easily and they tend to rot faster. Shakes, which are also made out of cedar, are split.
(Black Hat critical thinking)
So shingles are sawn, shakes are split. The split ones last longer. They give you that very woodsy look because they’re not the same thickness. Shingles are exactly the same. They’re all this big at one end this big at the other end. Shakes Split more randomly.
(White Hat information/facts)