A hike up Mt. Verstovia

I joined some friends on a hike up Mt. Verstovia on a gorgeous day in August. I will share some pictures.  Right before the hike, my good friend and co-worker Eileen and I were at work.  I was going to drive us and someone else out to the trail head.  As Eileen was preparing some snacks to eat on the hike, I was casually throwing my keys into the air and catching them.  They landed in the light fixture up above and I had to stack some tables up to retrieve them! I have a SketchUp drawing of the building I work in that I update from time-to-time. I thought since I was up there that I might as well take some measurements of the light fixture so I could include it in the SketchUp drawing. I just wanted to tell that story and share a picture from that.

SketchUp drawing.

Compare this vibrant green picture to the picture from a hike in September.

Projects

A funny thing I've joked about this month is that since my volunteer term with Americorps has ended, I've become a "real" volunteer. There was about a week's worth of work left on the house at the time my year-long service ended on April 1st. I thought it would be pretty ridiculous to spend all those hours and all that work on the house to just quit right before the finish because I wasn't going to be logging any more hours.  So I decided to stay until the house was done. We finished on the 9th and the family moved in that weekend.

Pardon the cleaning supplies. I didn't have a good chance to take pictures once everything was cleaned. 

Lately, I've been helping a former student build a shed in his backyard. We got the fourth wall up tonight. While we were finishing putting the wall together, J.J., another former student, was walking by and we got him to help us put the wall in place.

This is the SketchUp version of the shed at roughly the same stage as the real one.

I also have been working on the progress of getting this cedar strip kayak built. I say "working on the progress" because I don't feel like I've done very much, but I am getting something done. I will cut-out forms of plywood that are like section cuts of the kayak and they will be spaced out every foot. The shape of each form is a crucial part of the building process and each curve has to be drawn precisely. This book I have, The Strip-Built Sea Kayak, written by Nick Schade, has the numbers for all the offsets that define the shape of each form. After plugging the x and y coordinates in an excel spreadsheet, I then saved it as a script file and imported that into AutoCAD. AutoCAD will graph the coordinates and then I can even take that to the printers to print it to scale, or I could piece together sheets of paper and just print it normally. Of course, I had to import the AutoCAD drawings into SketchUp and see what that would look like. ;)

The funny thing is, I don't even own AutoCAD or Excel, but I am very thankful for 30-day trials!

Here's what it looks like in Excel. Excel was useful to sort the x and y coordinates. The graph would've turned out like a connect-the-dots thing in AutoCAD otherwise.

This is the form in AutoCAD. I am not done with the form drawings, however, I have to include the offsets for the cockpit area. After that I'll print these off and paste them to some plywood and cut them out.

And here's what it looks like in SketchUp.

I hope you have a wonderful week!

<3<3<3<3

Joshua

I drew where I work on SketchUp

It should be in Google Earth soon.

Russian Bishop's House

I drew the Russian Bishop's house and it is now on Google Earth.  The Russian Bishop's house is a registered landmark of the National Historical Park.  A quote from the website on the Bishop's house: "The Bishop's House was completed in 1842 and was the center of Russian Orthodox Church authority in a diocese that stretched from California to Siberian Kamchatka." The house is the oldest of four surviving structures from the Russian American times; they are scattered about and I'm having trouble finding where they are located.

Here is a photo of the drawing I made compared to a photo of the real thing.

Here are some photos of the interior of the house.

Here is a 3D view of the drawing.  (Because I love the 3D link thing)

The house is underway

The new shed: (I found out if I move my pictures it breaks the link. I usually retype them, but I've been waiting on photos to upload. Anyway, read up! :)

This is the spot I was taking pictures from, but now I realize it's not going to suffice. I need to have a better angle on the front of the house. I'll have newer pictures to show soon.

The past few weeks have been pretty good out on the job site. We got a very late start on the house this year and we are wondering if we will be able to finish in time. We are going on it now, though, as best we can. After the excavation was finished, we put the forms around the perimeter of the house to make the footing for the foundation. We had to use the transit level to make sure it was even in all spots. We had quite a bit of adjusting to do, which means lots of shoveling. We cut all the rebar and tied it inside the forms. By last Thursday we were all ready to pour and this morning we finally poured the concrete for the footing.

We also started on building a new storage shed. We are almost all done with the shed. I was pretty sick this weekend and so on Saturday I drew the shed. I drew it in the same fashion that we built it, as opposed to just drawing the exterior, i.e. it is very detailed. I went by the job site on Sunday to take measurements of the shed and make sure I did everything accurately. I did pretty well! I had to change my roof from a 6:12 pitch to a 4:12 and that was about it. There's this new thing SketchUp allows you to do now which is linking to a 3d view of an object; I've wanted to post something in this blog again to try it out.

Here is the shed without any plywood or roofing:

Here is the shed with the exterior shell:

The SketchUp Post

If I had SketchUp in college, I don't think I would've passed one class. I drew the decks on the YABAH house from last year. This year's house will get started as soon as the lot is ready; the excavation is supposed to be taking place this week. Currently there are a lot of trees on the lot.

I started drawing some of the buildings around Sitka. I had drawn a couple buildings in Nampa and made a collection of them online. Only one is in the '3D buildings' layer on Google Earth so far; the other two are pending. Nampa Collection

Nampa Library

Yesteryear Shoppe

The buildings in Sitka that I want to draw are a part of the National Register of Historic Places. So if I drew them quite nicely they could be added to the collection of digital drawings of the historic places. I pretty much finished the Russian Bishop's House, but I would like to tidy it up a bit. I'm having fun drawing the Russian Orthodox Church (St. Michael's Cathedral). I love the onion dome!

Russian Bishop's House

Russian Orthodox Church (St. Michael's Cathedral)

2008 YABAH House

During the beginning weeks of the 2009 YABAH year, I was helping finish up last year's house. I don't have any good pictures of the house yet. I just took close up pictures. I have some "before" pictures of one of the decks we were working on, but instead of an "after" picture, I have an "after" drawing.

And the deck:

Before

After