Happy humpday and birthday-eve for myself and Vivan. Let’s hit a humpday recap of our week so far.
The team worked hard over the weekend to get everything ready to hit the ground running this week. On Monday, we finished priming our wooden boards for the “woven wall” partitions. Now they are all labeled and ready for painting (once we finalize our color selections). We landed on the strategy to paint the main structural elements (columns and beams) the darker brown. The wall accents and cedar shake perlin substructure will be a lighter neutral color. We are all hopeful that these colors will age well with the grayed out deck boards and blend well with the sweetgrass and surroundings of our site.
Yesterday and today are unique studio days since the dean and her team are here in Charleston with Clemson’s Marketing and Communications team. Yesterday, small teams of three took turns checking out of studio to check in as models for Clemson’s marketing team. Malu, Kaden, and I got some extra sketching time downtown to demonstrate what our field studies course with David looks like on a normal day. Spoiler alert: it involves a lot of staring, sketching, and sometimes watercolor!
After our photo-op, we returned to the Design Center and Nolan, Shane, Kylee (and monkey?) headed out to Corinne Jones Park to do some repairs on a past A+CB project. They were all smiles while doing some good ole fashion manual labor! To finish up, Abby, Carlos, and Tyler headed out to meet Bradford and the team for a walk around the marsh.
Back at the Design Center, paint colors were getting selected, the shop was getting cleaned, and steel was getting prepped for welding. After several hours of flipping through paint decks, renders, and reference images, we narrowed down the paint options to around ten different shades of light yellow/green and darker brown. This morning, David is heading to the store to buy these paint sample buckets for us to compare. Hopefully the sun peeks out so that we can compare the colors in true daylight rather than the artificial lighting inside the building.
Once we narrowed down our paint colors and agreed on where darker vs lighter accent paints would go, we headed down to the shop to do some more cleanup and prep work. Leftover wooden boards were carried out to the discard pile (and brought back in after David saw them outside), more dust was swept, and final organizing of PPE was done. Now the shop is ready for its photo-op too! While cleanup was happening, Vivian and I finished off the last of the vertical trellis prep work by cutting our piping spacers which will bridge the gap between our trellises and the adjacent wooden posts. After they were all cut (shoutout goo machine), they were ready to get grinded and prepped for welding.
On today’s agenda, we will begin painting the mockup walls, welding the trellis frames together, and smiling for the marketing team! Despite our delayed ground-breaking on site, we are staying busy and keeping the build moving in the shop. Time for the real work to get started!
Bonus picture: Vivian and her hot dog shirt
