An email I received a few weeks back (and subsequently lost due to my over zealous spam filter) pointed this out to me and so I’ve attempted to address the gap and update the About page with some further details. It’s been enjoyable and refreshing, reviewing the work and the progress we’ve made over the last four (how many??? time flies) years…

Following on from my original about text I’ve written a high-level description of the conversion, then some vital statistics and finally some before, during and after photographs…

The Conversion
The roof and walls have been structurally untouched by the conversion, although a number of incursions into them have been made. All original openings have been retained with three windows added to the southerly gable end & six roof-lights to allow natural light into the otherwise unlit first floor. The ‘arrow’ / ventilation slits have been glazed. The existing roof kept, albeit with the addition of in-roof vents toward the bottom edge to provide appropriate air-flow. On three sides, the walls have been completely repointed with lime mortar, the fourth side, the southerly facing gable-end has been limewashed.

The floor was dug out and replaced with a new one containing insulation, a radon barrier damp proof course and under-floor heating.

Originally the barn was in two distinct parts. A full height main area, with large through cart doors and a smaller two storied north-end with stables below and a hay-loft above. Ground and first floor openings have been cut through the internal wall to unify the two parts of the building.

…

Read the rest here >> About the barn

The discussion on Reddit is titled ‘Why hasn’t Christopher Alexander been more influential for architects?‘ and linked to an old article on Slate.com that is a discussion of Christopher Alexander’s work, design patterns and the lack of attention paid to this work in the current training of architects. My personal take on why architects aren’t more greatly influenced by Alexander and his work is that (to quote from my Reddit comment)…

“architects aren’t generally keen on Alexander for reasons of ego – they don’t want to share the ‘glory’ of their designs with anyone else”

…a sweeping generalisation and uncharitable to boot, but the Reddit discussion, coupled with a comment from vasislos a who said ‘it would be interesting to see pictures of how you’re applying the patterns’ restarted my thinking on patterns and led to this post.

My use of patterns evolved through a couple of iterations – my choices in November 2007 and updated in September 2010.

So, I thought a review of my previous lists with some discussion of my own implementations of the selected patterns would be in order, I’ll start with two patterns that sit closely together.

125 Stair seats.
Seats on stairs provide a vantage point, but don’t remove the sitter from the action.
133 Staircase as a stage.
A flared bottom step gives the stairs a function that may otherwise be overlooked.

From Barn Conversion 2012

I can’t claim that these patterns were a great design leap forward or a difficult implementation, but these are powerful and worthwhile. Due to the openness of the ground floor of the barn and the just off centre positioning of the stairs the bottom step is a comfortable, accessible and central place to sit within the main open plan area of the barn. Implementing these patterns was a case of ensuring that the staircase itself was positioned centrally, that the bottom couple of steps provided a suitable place to sit for people of varying heights (as most sets of step do) and that the bottoms of the stairs remained an unclutter, open and defined space in its own right.

With the main structure safe and solid it was time to add some finishing touches.

I’d wanted the bed to have it’s own lighting so went for LED strip lights from the ‘large blue Swedish chain store’. Two packs of four lights for a total of eight provided ample to surround the bed on three sides. The LED’s were hidden behind boards attached horizontally around the bed a metre or so up from the mattress level. Some extra smaller diameter bars of wood were attached to tidy things up, along the top of the short sides and along the bottom of the back. All of these parts were screwed and / or glued into place.

Some finishing around the opening into the bed was necessary, so I used my favoured coach bolts to attach a horizontal board along the front of the bed above the cupboards to fill the gap between the front top-edge of the bed and the mattress. This will be the ‘landing-area’ when climbing up onto the bed and so needs to be sturdy and hard wearing. I also fixed an additional upright to each side of the opening mainly to hide the end of the boards that cover the lighting.

From Barn Conversion 2012

There is a hole in the plasterboard of the wall along the long side of the bed, where I’d cut through to give me access to the masonry of the real wall in order to drill through to get the TV aerial into the barn. I filled the hole and then used some oak boards that were left over from the floor to cover both ends of the wall along the long side of the bed. As this was to be a pirate cabin bed, I used this boarding to accommodate a couple of eBay purchases – a small ships wheel and a port hole (where did we buy such things before eBay came along?!). A couple of skull-and-cross-bone flags and the pirate pact was made…

From Barn Conversion 2012

I boarded-in the end between the bed and the thermal store with some ply. A high shelf to the top right and a lower shelf in the middle of the end board to the left, then door knobs drilled and screwed on the cupboards doors and the job was pretty well done.

From Barn Conversion 2012

I’m currently working on Sketchup plans of the bed and will publish those shortly.

Communications with blog readers has become ever more difficult – the commercialisation of the Akismet spam filter for comments has led to the need to explore other solutions such as the much disliked Captcha I now use – spam email leads to increasingly more draconian email filters. In fact my spam email filters are now so assertive that hardly any email, legitimate or not gets by them and once classified as spam there’s only a short period before the email is deleted entirely from my server. So I’ll tweak things to ensure I’m not losing real messages and be a little more on-the-ball when it comes to email.

Please feel free to email me … mbc at this domain dot com – (you’ll need to make the appropriate substitutions) or click on the envelope icon on the header above … I promise I’ll not ignore you or let my spam filter flush your message.

I was lucky when it came to fitting the cupboard doors under the bed as I’d sized the frame and the doors to fit and for once the plans and reality closely resembled one-another. With hinges fixed to the doors, they quickly and relatively easily screwed onto the frame. I then used twin roller catches at the top of the doors to hold them in place.

From Barn Conversion 2011

With the under-bed cupboard doors in place the next step was to add the second end to the bed, the one that would lie in the middle of the whole construction between the bed and the thermal store.

From Barn Conversion 2011

I’d already built the end frame and I simply attached it to the wall by a single hollow wall anchor cavity fitting and screwed it in one place to the bed frame. I wanted to ensure that the bed remained easily removable in case full access to the thermal store and associated equipment was required at a later date. (As a slight rather dull aside, I used piranha branded anchors which are excellent but I can no longer find – if anyone knows where to get some then please let me know.)

From Barn Conversion 2011

Next I worked across the front of the thermal store, preparing the frame for the large wardrobe doors that would close off the area. On the left I placed a vertical upright screwed to the stud work of the internal wall running up the full height of the door to the bottom of the boxed-in header tank. Then with a horizontal bar I married the wall attached vertical to the middle frame / end-frame of the bed and screwed and bolted it all together. Wherever possible I used coach bolts to fix the frame together, I bought some long, thin ones that allowed easy fixing through double layers of the 4×2′s. I prefer the finish that the rounded stainless steel coach bolt heads give over what are comparatively rather ugly screws.

Some further vertical boards were added to either side of the low cupboard doors to fill narrow gaps that had been left (not shown on the photograph below).

From Barn Conversion 2011

A final vertical upright was screwed into place to sit behind and between the two cupboard doors. I screwed the cupboard doors onto the frame, one fitted perfectly, the other not quite so well and will need some remedial work to conform to my exacting standards (hehe!). I then placed a further horizontal board to fill the gap between the frame and the wardrobe doors (not shown on the photograph below).

That completed the main structural work, leaving mainly cosmetic additions – I’ll cover those in part three.

These subjects have already been pretty well covered elsewhere – I’ve drawn up plans and posted about the initial construction of the cabin bed. I’ll be writing in detail about finishing the cabin bed soon – there are just a few finishing touches to complete. I also hope to put together a set of generic Sketchup plans for building something similar. All-in-all it’s been a really enjoyable process, I’ve found working with timber to build a large, solid fixture to be really satisfying. As I could have predicted ahead of time, the least enjoyable aspect of the build (as anyone who follows me on Twitter where I’ve moaned plenty will already know) has been getting the two sets of wardrobe doors to hang straight and true (and they still don’t – that’s one of the main outstanding tasks).

But doors aside, I (& most importantly my son) are pretty happy with the results – the pirate ship / cabin bed is almost ready to sail. I’ll leave you with an image of the almost completed build…

From Barn Conversion 2011

Beside that I put up some kitchen blinds and salvaged a piece of wood that I’ll use as the basis for a high-level shelf in the kitchen. Pretty poor show really, but Christmas tends to slow down progress…

Happy New Year!

I use Twitter to post irregular updates regarding the blog, progress at the barn or just general comments related to barns, conversions or building in general. I’ve made 120 tweets or so over the last couple of years, with most of those made recently as it’s only now that I’m finding Twitter to be a genuinely useful and interesting tool – it would be great if you would follow me…

Remember the Milk
I avoided to-do lists for a long time, but as the small, easily forgotten details began to mount up during the final phase of the project they became essential. I needed a solution that would be available pretty much wherever I was and whatever I was doing, I’m prone to leaving notebooks just where I don’t want them to be (in the ‘other’ room, in my ‘other’ jacket…) so a technology based solution accessible from my phone or any PC was what I wanted. After a pretty broad sweep of the available options I settled on Remember the Milk (RTM):

• RTM allows access to to-do lists via the web,
• via dedicated apps (as in the case of the iPad/iPhone application),
• or via interfaces with third party applications such as the Blackberry Task application, Twitter and email

…so ticks all the boxes for me. I can access my lists from any of the various computers I use via the web (with a quick and easy to use Google account based login so no need to remember another password). I use the iPad app for heavy duty planning, updating and editing. I use my Blackberry Task list for checking the to-do list when I’m out and about, ticking items off or adding items in ‘real-time’. All my bases are covered!

You can create multiple lists – I keep separate lists for each project I’m involved in (one for the Barn, one for software projects etc.) and general lists such as my Shoppinglist to which I post all items to be bought which can be quickly referred to when in B&Q or wherever. All items can have text tags added and URL’s or locations associated with them. I use the prioritisation feature to ensure that the most pressing items always rise to the top of the list (& my attention).

You’ll need to buy a $25 per year Pro account to make use of the smartphone / iPad apps, but I think that’s money well spent – certainly carries my recommendation.

RememberTheMilk.com

In their own words: Remember The Milk is the popular to-do list that’s everywhere you are: from your phone, to the web, to your Google apps, and more. Used by millions worldwide.

I hadn’t realised that the Vitsoe shelving is made in Britain (or Made by Britain as the current government campaign has it). Due to the name and the simple design approach I’d assumed a Scandanavian heritage, so there are few excuses (except for the cost) not to buy Vitsoe shelving.

On the Vitsoe website is a list of ‘ten principles of good design’, that are as good a list of design principles as I’ve found. Of the ten principles, this one struck a cord with me:

Good design is as little design as possible
Less, but better – because it concentrates on the essential aspects, and the products are not burdened with non-essentials.
Back to purity, back to simplicity

Applying a razor to design & seeking simplicity is certainly something that I feel I should apply to my own attempts at design.

Towards the end of the lunch, one of the aunts recited a poem by the Basque poet Gabriel Aresti:

I shall defend the house of my father
Against wolves
Against drought
Against usury
Against the law

The significance of this, they told me, was that in the Basque country it is the people who belong to the house, not the house that belongs to the people.