OK, now this is serious

So yesterday I got nominated for an Apartment Therapy Homie Award and I thought it was more funny and strange than anything. As it got bandied around the blogosphere though, a bit of a competition started up. I still don't really care a whit or a fig for Apartment Therapy but damn it, there's a competition on.

At the risk of sounding like a complete sell-out (I'd use whore but Christian from Maison21 has the trademark on that word --hah!) Follow this link and vote for me. What better way to remain a fly in their ointment than to place well in one of their awards?

Christian's post on this topic is priceless, check it out and while you're voting vote for Maison21 too.

Riding Google's Wave

This is a kitchen layout.

Here's another view of it.

So far as kitchen designs go, it does what it needs to do at a price point someone's willing to pay. In addition to that it has a lot of function built into a relatively small space and it pulls off all that function while still looking orderly and clean. A design like this will last a family for years and barring any radical changes in popular taste, this kitchen renovation is a purchase they will never have to make again.

Obviously, it's one of mine and it's a Sketchup model. How it got to its current state though is a good story.

Around a month or so ago, two of my long time readers contacted me about designing a floor plan for a house they're renovating. That's not unusual, I get calls like that all the time. What was unusual was that they were 300 miles away and their budget wouldn't allow for any on-site time for me.

So they sent me a .pdf of their floor plan and a SketchUp model of the house the way it's configured now.

So I rebuilt their floor plan on top of the one they'd provided and I designed a kitchen in it. I specified a bunch of finishes and thought long and hard about all of the parts that were going to go into this project.

Ordinarily, when I have the basics of a floor plan and a budget put together, I call on the client and we have a sit down to review everything. Ordinarily, I print out everything on 11" x 17" paper and we talk through the whole plan. I take notes during that conversation and then make whatever changes are needed after the appointment. That's pretty much how kitchen design works and it's worked that way since the days of hand drawn renderings.

Well in this case, my clients were too far away to drive for an appointment, so we arranged for a virtual one.

The conversation was going to be about budgets, so I exported my SketchUp model as an AutoCad file and then imported it into 20/20. 20/20 is a CAD derived POS software I use to price kitchens. The clients in question are also users of Google Wave and the plan was to use Wave as a collaboration tool if we needed it.

At the appointed hour, they called me (on my Google Voice number, natch) and I e-mailed them a couple of perspective drawings. Now these files are huge and e-mailing them takes forever.

Eventually the files arrived and we started our conversation. There were some changes that needed to be made so I started making them as we spoke.

As I made changes, I would save them as .jpg files and pop them right into the Wave we'd started. Sort of like this.

Once I would set the .jpg files into Wave, they were visible immediately to my clients. They would click on them and see them in full size. It was amazing, there was no guess work or chance for miscommunication. What I couldn't get over was the speed at which I could make a change, make a .jpg and then get it in front of them to see what they thought.

In the course of an hour-and-a-half phone call we accomplished something that usually takes weeks.

The next day I had a hangover from drinking all that Google Kool-Aid the night before but I couldn't help but to think that I'd somehow touched the future of my profession. Doing design long-distance has always had the problem of not being immediate, but Google Wave just changed that.

Google Wave is where distance communication is headed. But it's not just for static communication, after all that's what e-mail does. But Wave is immediate and it happens in real time. It's not chat because it can have everything from calendars to maps inserted right into the stream without missing a beat. For now, Google Wave is in limited release. As cool as it is, it's not quite ready for prime time. With time, its functionality will increase and improve. For now though, it's an impressive tool and I can't get near it without thinking about how powerful it will be when it's fully up to speed.

So congrats Google Gang, you came up with another winner. If you'd like to learn more about Google Wave, here's a link to Google's Wave information page.

Isn't it ironic?

That's the nomination page from Apartment Therapy's 2009 Homie Awards. Check out who's the third blog listed under Hot Movers.

All hail reader Nim and her delicious blog Bitchlexia for nominating me. I can't think of anything more fun than ending up on a list on Apartment Therapy. Other than a black list that is.

***edited to add: I just realized that this is a competition. Get on there and vote!

This tree stand is modern and traditional at the same time. Excellent!

How cool is that? I have pretty modern sensibilities. I love a clean line and a minimum of fuss. At the same time, I am an absolute sap when it comes to Christmas. I love it that there's a day built right into the calendar that's an excuse to show the people around you that you love them. Because Christmas has so many emotions attached to it, it seems to give nostalgia buffs a free pass to crowd up their homes and neighborhoods with as much offensively tasteless crap as China can crank out. Ewww. No thanks. So what's a sensible minimalist to do with his tree?

Well thanks to the clever gals at Design Boner, I found a solution.

This is the simply named Pine Tree Stand by Maria Håård for Design House Stockholm. The Pine Tree stand is made from lacquered steel and it's available for online purchase through Design House Stockholm. Never fear, they ship world wide and they conduct business across all currencies. The Pine Tree Stand comes in three colors and retails for the very reasonable $75 US.

Although it may be too late for this year, it's never too early to plan for next year. And as they say in Stockholm, god jul!

A microscopic look at some counter materials

Dartmouth College

Another great contact I've made through Twitter in the last few months is the Aspex Corporation in Pittsburgh, PA. Aspex has been in business since the early '90s and they have embraced social media with a savvy and confidence that makes them stand out. The Aspex Corporation makes Scanning Electron Microscopes among other things and that a company in a very technical field and a kitchen designer could strike up a casual acquaintance is a great example of the expansion and simultaneous contraction of the world made possible by social media.

A scanning electron microscope (or SEM) is an instrument for visualizing the surfaces of objects and materials not possible through ordinary optical microscopes. Rather than using a lens to magnify reflected light (an optical microscope) SEMs use a focused beam of electrons to scan a surface.

Aspex Corporation

The electrons bounce back to a detector and the detector generates an image. SEMs can only "see" a small section of an object at a time. So the object being examined is placed on a Sample Stage in the SEM and the stage makes small, incremental movements called rasters. The rasters are then compiled into a complete image and displayed on a screen. It's pretty cool stuff. Most people have seen SEM images of ant's heads or snowflakes and that's a quick explanation of how those images were made.

Well Aspex is running an offer to scan and analyze any sample that can fit inside the chamber of one of their SEMs for free so I took them up on their offer.

I enjoy cutting through marketing speak to an almost unhealthy degree and counter materials are a product category rife with it. For as long as they've been around, I've heard the claims made by quartz composite manufacturers that their products were "perfectly smooth and non-porous." Since this claim is always made during a comparison with the surface irregularities of granite my BS meter goes off.

Quartz composites are a perfectly fine material and I specify their use all the time. In my mind, they are an alternative to natural stone counters but not a substitute for them. They have a very unique look and there are specific times when their use is called for. At the same time, sometimes the over all look of a room calls for granite or soapstone or marble. These materials are not interchangeable and each one has its strengths and weaknesses.

So when Aspex Corporation made its offer to scan any sample I could fit into the chamber of one of their SEMs, I decided to put to the test the quartz composite claims of perfect smoothness and non porosity.

I took two samples that had been sitting on the end of my desk for years and shipped them off to Aspex.

The samples I sent were a piece of Santa Cecelia granite and Sienna Ridge by Silestone. This is by no means an accurate sampling of an entire industry's products. Rather, this is a test of two very specific and very well handled samples. The evidence presented here is anecdotal at best but I still there's something valid to be learned.

photo from Aspex Corp.

Here are my samples upon arrival at Aspex.

photo from Aspex Corp.

Here they are relaxing in front of the PSEM eXpress, Aspex Corporation's bench top model.

The degree of magnification in the following examples is expressed with a scale in each image. The scale is in microns and a micron is another word for a micrometer. A micro meter is a millionth of a meter, put another way, a micron is 1/1000th of a millimeter. Microns are abbreviated as µm. To give you a little more perspective, a human air is 100µm wide and a red blood cell is 8µm in diameter. Salmonella bacteria are 2µm in length and 0.5µm wide.

So here's what my sample of Santa Cecilia looks like.

In this image, the scale at the top reads 200µm. So if you took two human hairs and set them side by side, they would be as wide as the scale.

In this image the scale reads 1000µm. So if you took ten human hairs and set they side by side, they would be as wide as the scale.

Here's another Santa Cecilia granite image at 1000µm.

Now it's quartz composite's turn.

Here's my quartz composite sample with a scale that reads 200µm.

Here is is at a higher magnification, 1000µm

And another shot of it at 1000µm.

Pretty cool, huh? Now, I will grant the quartz composite people an acknowledgement that this sample is smoother than this sample of granite, but I would hardly call it "perfectly smooth and non porous."

So what I take away from this is that I won't be swayed by claims that I should specify quartz composites over natural stone because they are smoother and non-porous (and more hygienic by implication) and I will continue to use composites where they would look best and natural stone where it would look best.

What do you think?

In the meantime, poke around on Aspex Corp's website. You can even send in something of your own with this form. They have a pretty cool contest every week where they invite people to guess what a scan is. Here's last week's:

Care to hazard a guess?

Why it's a Post-it note being pulled back from the pad of course.

Thanks Aspex!