The Prince Of Swords

I’ve been working on remodeling my master bedroom for almost a year which has been a fun and frustrating design project. Being in San Antonio there is limited access to modern and minimalist elements besides pieces that have been toned down, mass produced, and offered up at Home Depot. Although there are fabricators around, purely custom work is more expensive than I’m willing to dole out right now. The solution? I’m going to make some of it myself.
The first project is in the bathroom. I have two vanities 24″x 33″ with a 38″ gap between them. The idea is to find a tall chest of drawers (sometimes called a Gentleman’s Chest) to sit between the vanities to break up the horizontal surfaces where the sinks will be. The bathroom originally had a one-piece counter top/sinks. After Googling around for sinks for a while and looking into materials, I’ve decided to cast my own concrete counter top and sink.
I’ve picked the Kohler Purist line for the hardware to match the shower and intend on tinting the concrete to match the grout in the Travertine flooring, an Alabaster color. To start this project, I sketched some designs in a great software package called “SketchUp”. SketchUp works like I think which is in surfaces and solids. Most cad packages I’ve played with tend to deal more in lines which make mocking up a room design super tedious and I’m just not that patient or absolute. SketchUp lets you define a rectangle, then flip orientation, grab a surface, and extrude it into a 3D shape. Very easy. Very intuitive for me. My sketches came together in a few hours and I got a basic idea of what I want.
Sketching on a laptop screen is cheap and easy but runs its value when you try to visualize proportions and context. To help get a better sense of perspective, I decided to prototype the vanity top. Thinking about how to do that, I needed a material that would be easy to work with and cheap since I’d be throwing it away. At a local hobby shop, I looked at foam core board and sheets of Styrofoam but I needed to span almost three feet and carving Styrofoam is very messy and not very exact. Heading to Home Depot I found a nice solution. In the lumber area, I grabbed a piece of insulation sheeting. For about eight bucks I got a 4′x8′ sheet of 5/8″ thick pink boarding by Owens Corning.

Over the weekend, I gathered up some tools (hobby knife, tape measure, fine point Sharpie, tape, calculator) and set out to build a fake counter and sink. Since I was designing around proportions, I whipped out Phi, the golden ratio, 1.618 which is supposed to define intrinsic beauty by resonating with geometry of nature. My sink is minimal so taking the length and width of the vanity and dividing them by Phi gave me the sink dimensions. By taking these base dimensions, I then divided again until I had all other dimensions. Using cardboard from a 12-pack of Coke I cut out place holders for the faucets and handles based on the Rough-in diagrams from Kohler. After seeing the sink in its real environment, the sink looked too deep. I took another dimension, divided by Phi, and cut out a new sink wall. Much better. With the depth was set, I cut out the other three walls and the sink prototype was done.

I’m leaving this fake pink sink in place to live with it for a few days and see how the proportions in context work out. To complete the illusion if the pink throws me off, I’ll paint it with some off-white latex paint. Then all I have left to do is figure out how to actually make this sink.

I recently trashed my MacBook by probably installing some random badness (like trying to recompile SCPlugin for MacTel use) so I decided to wipe and re-install which turned out to be a very quick and easy process (minus the transfer time for my music collection).

Now that I’m back up, I’ve been continuing my Mac metamorphosis. The only legacy app from Windows I hadn’t replaced yet was Visio, which I’ve never really liked but due to some process engineering work I’ve been doing lately, has been making it appearance on my desktop regularly. There are a couple of solutions like running Parallels or even maybe VMWare, but I’ve decided that it is time to move on and not put any Microsoft apps of the past on my shiny new Little BlacBook.

For graphing in Mac, OmniGraffle is your answer. I downloaded the trial and jumped right in. The main goal was to recreate the Riva Visio Stencils. Riva is a process diagramming method that focuses on Roles, Activities, and interactions. It comes from the book “Business Process Management: A rigorous approach” by Martin Ould. It was brought to my attention by Neil Benson at Increase Consulting in the UK. I use it to map what people do and how they could interact with a software system.

Business Process Management: A Rigorous Approach (Paperback)
by Martyn A. Ould
@Amazon

Here is Martyn Ould’s site. There are Visio stencils you can download.
http ://www.the-old-school.demon.co.uk/vc/riva.htm

Things I like about Riva:
- focused on roles and their interactions (via explicit state changes)
- compact diagrams vs boxes and diamonds
- it is easier for me to follow these diagrams than swimlanes since your focus bounces all over the lanes where Riva has a clear flow
- case refinement is easier to extend (decisions or cases) than with typical diamonds for decisions since cases are represented in a linear path that can be added to, where adding more diamonds alters the diagram much more

After I maxed out the 20 object limit in the OmniGraffle trial, I bought a Pro license and got down to polishing a first draft of my Riva Stencils. My bet was that by building a set of stencils I’d learn OmniGraffle faster since I had a clear goal in mind plus I’ll be doing some modeling this week and put the stencils to real use.

After about 10 hours of dinking with it, my first draft is complete with Web 2.0 rounded corners! The main lesson I’ve learned is that Mac is Beautiful and works. As crazy as it sounds to non-Mac peoples, the quality and style of my Mac
seriously does make me happier to work with it which again confirms the “Broken Windows” theory from the famous psychology experiments.

If these work well this week, I may release them to Graffletopia.com and share the love.

My Very Firstest OmniGraffle Stencils