What more can be said about this semester that hasn’t already been discussed? It has been 3 months of hard, time consuming work.
I sit here a senior of the Clemson School of Architecture, now in my last semester, and I can’t count where the minutes went. I imagine most of it was somewhere between the hours of 11PM and 3AM, the time when most architecture students come out to work, yet I still cannot figure out how 4 years passed by so quickly. This semester only reinforces the fact that time is only a blur. Even as I write this friends, new and old, are leaving for the holidays where it seems like only weeks ago I was meeting all the graduate students and talking to friends who I hadn’t seen for an entire summer. Summer left and Fall came, with every month passing our project growing and evolving. Winter happened and so did the beginning of the build stage. Before we all knew it Thanksgiving was here and we truly began to see that it was the end.
And so it was. This week ended one of the coolest most hands on semesters I’ve had the fortune of being involved in. Friendships were forged and West Ashley gained an amazing structure that will only continue to benefit the community. In the end I cannot ask anymore out of Charleston or The CAC.C. Thank you & Goodnight
–BeeJ
Great built work! I visited last week. But remember always use stainless in the lowcountry…those fasteners (i’m guessing galvanized) are already rusting/weathering onto your pristine white painted structure.
Thanks for visiting the West Ashley Community Garden. We are particularly proud of that project, and are very excited to see it be used by the community this spring. I’ll have to stop by and check out the screw issue you mentioned. We did not use galvanized screws as you suspected, but Polymer-Coated Star-Drive Screws from Lowes that are lifetime guaranteed not to rust. What I did notice last time i visited the site was a lot of sap bleeding through the paint at knot holes. We tried our best to overcome that by priming all the wood with an oil-based stain blocker before applying two top coats of latex exterior paint, but the treated lumber was still pretty wet when we were applying it. Another coat of paint in about a year should do the trick to cover those sap stains.