Details vs. Altitude

If you ask my team what 90% right is, they know to answer "wrong!".  In our work, the details are actually pretty big.  The problem this causes an entrepreneur is that there are potentially infinite details to consider.
Attention to detail in the technical work is easy to get in the habit of and set standards for.  After all, when you are done, it's there to look at.  Things get trickier when you start considering creating customer experience, establishing stewardships for you people, creating a brand, and manifesting a social change.  The magnifying glass that made you the the great studier-of/wrathful-god-of the anthill gives you a very distorted view of your dog.  The elephant is incomprehensible through it.
  
Altitude is clearly the answer.  Backing up, zooming out, getting the Google Earth view, that is clearly paramount to orientating ourselves to lead.  But we know broad strokes alone will never do.  Some areas clearly need to be cut in with the smallest brush and detailed.  Challenge is, we have about 17 waking hours today (tops), families that need us, bills to pay, and obligations to meet.  We can't possibly do it all.

The answer is simple and brutal.  The only thing to do is to blueprint the day and then stick to the plan.  This means there are many things we will have to say "no" to if we are to say "yes" to things that are truly more important.  The three options you have are:
1.)Take the time to make a list of all the things that could possibly be done, grouping them ala David Allen's GTD, and then have the discipline to stick to our commitments of working in uninterrupted blocks of time to knock it out.
2.) Lower your standard and quit caring
3.) Go insane.
Now, go. (not insane - choose #1 for goodness' sake)  

Faith in Education

I have read a lot of useless crap in my 20-some-odd years of literacy. I have also read a few things that have positively touched my soul.

Steven Pressfield wrote an amazing little book called "The War of Art" about how Resitence tries to keep us from bringing the best within us to the world. The incredible lessons of that book came in terribly handy this week as my faith in the mental and spiritual side of my work was tested.

Our year started off a bit slow and expensive, and we have been just flooded with great projects lately. Our internal systems of job expense tracking, material management, and project notes are really evolving now, but are nowhere near what they out to be for me to leave town amid 4 big projects. Nevertheless, spring break and the second annual Concrete Decor show came up, and Shelly and I had planned to attend for months. I knew I had to go. I have always known the real value creation in our work comes from our specialized knowledge and our network of fellow artisans, but knowing that and stepping away from business for a week when things are finally really cranking are two different things.

So we kept our faith and went. Did things run perfectly in my absence? Of course not. However my team did rally to make some raving fans, and nothing was really ruined. Most importantly, I was able to have amazing conversations with guys I have looked up to in my industry (Mike Miller, Tom Ralston, Rocky Geans, etc.) and meet some new people to really learn from (Dru Blair, Nathan Giffin, Thom Hunt, etc.). Back to the Pressfield reference, I found that that just before I found some real nuclear fuel in a conversation, I would be confronted with a fire to put out back home. When I pressed through Resistence's efforts to keep me from growing and contributing at the highest level, I would then be rewarded with a pearl of wisdom, or a real reason to run the good race. In the words of the good prophet Greg Graffin "I seek a thousand answers, I find but one or two/I maintain no discomfiture, my path again renewed!"

How to really get free.

The good prophet Henry Rollins once said "It feels pretty good to know without a doubt, that I am what I am without a doubt".  I bet it does.  This is a break from the "making consturction errors remarkable" series to explore the driving force behind our work and virtually all work.

All work is done for one of six reasons:  Habit, Hunger, Boredom, a need for Significance, Love, or Inspiration, and probably in that order or liklihood.  The first four of those will spur nearly anyone into action.  What is worth discussing is aligning Love and Inspiration with those so there is no friction within. 

The question one must ask themselves is what they would do, if knowing what they know now they had to start all over.  I really think human beings start off like the bulbs of flowers, all looking similiarly dark and crude, until they grow into the various flowers they were meant to be.  Though instead of water, air, sunlight, and nutrients from the soil, human beings need their basic physical and psycologocal needs met to have the confidence to be the weird flower they were meant to be.  I say "weird flower" because to your cohort of bulbs, any flower you grow to be will be "weird".  Continuing with the flower metaphor, the rocks and soil you will need to push through are habit and peer group. 

Habits are incredibly hard to change at first.  Doubtful?   Try fasting tomorrow if you have never done it.  What is inspiring is the knowledge that they get easier with time.  In fact, nearly every hard thing gets easier, and most easy things were once hard.  Persist.  You may do so for no reason than for the sake of persistence itself, or you may find your true calling and cling to that.  Either way, persist.

Peer group can be a tough thing to overcome, too.  Your friends want the best for you, so long as it doesn't threaten their self esteem.  If you already have big-thinking friends, than little you do will threaten them.  Most of us end up alienating a few if we grow though.  It hurts, but not as much as a regrettable life. 

Sooner or later though, it would be a good idea to find that true calling to pull you through.  It will probably be weird.  Mine was to make shiny pieces of concrete, and create jobs for others to do the same.  That's admittedly weird.  But lining up with the unique voice within you is one of the sweetest things I've known.  I can't recommend finding that highly enough.  One practical way to find that is to practice breathing deeply and sitting completely still for an hour at a time.  If you try it, and it's not really remarkable, please let me know.  I've never heard that before. 

Making Construction Errors Remarkable - episode 3 (really a prelude to 4)

I love good architecture and design for the same reasons that I like concrete flooring.  It's efficient, timeless, minimal, elegant and it tickles my sense of aesthetic.  What's fun about being at element7concrete is that we get referred to and referred by people that "get it".  Architect Rick Burleson is one of those guys.  We met through The Loftis Home built by Dauphine Homes, and from outset I knew by the hand-drawn renderings and use of repurposed materials this was going to be special.  What nobody knew was how the live oak tree would riddle the slab with leaf prints out of season or how the stamped concrete would be bombarded with hail a few hours after placement.  Nobody knew how these mishaps would become great serendipity, either.  We'll make that another story, though.

The picture below was from another project of his.  He had a cool design of wood inlaid in stained concrete, but with proportions opposite of what you would expect.  It was a remodel and the wood would finish out around 3/4", and according to the Minnick's builder and his decorative concrete guy, that just wasn't possible.  Not possible?!  Some things are harder to do out of concrete than others, but precious little is not possible.   Rick recommended meeting me to discuss it, and though it was a small project more than an hour away, I really like the design.  Finally, after a few more exhibitions of questionable competence, the owners asked me if I knew a builder I would recommend in their area.  Cody Schmidt from Sierra Builders took over and the project sailed to completion.  The photo below shows the small field of concrete installed to wood.  The larger field received a simple scoring design and the same green and dark walnut acid stain. 

Today I found myself on another project being built by Cody Schmidt and designed by Rick Burleson in the hills outside of Wimberly, TX.  Thankfully, the homeowners chose a clear paste wax after the floor had been wet sanded, chemically etched, and treated with an amazing penetrating stain blocker.  The honest highlighting of the material fits the home extremely well.  I love the way the house fits the hillside, is orientated to the sun and common winds, and draws you out into the strikingly rugged landscape.  I also love the way the sand in the concrete was occasionally exposed by the chemical etching and the nuances from the finishing happen to match the rock of the home better than and stain or pigment know to man.  I only wish I had the language to describe the rhythm of the spaces and the rightness of the proportions.  I know I am gushing a bit here, but the point is there is just nothing like good design.  It brings out the best in the workmen on site, and next week I will show how we used the badly "honeycombed" steps to make the best part of the floor.

Making Construction Errors Remarkable - Episode 2

I've had the opportunity to meet more than my share of celebrities. Though Hollywood types don't impress me much, I gush a little when I meet a great architect.  I think it might be because of Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead.  Or maybe it's just because I love great design and know how hard it would be to bring a great building completely into existence.  In any event when I have had opportunities to meet my personal heroes of design, I really got keyed up.

Most recently, my path has crossed with the work of Dick Clark Architecture.  His client, Jon Luce, builds some of the finest custom homes in Austin, and for his Hill Country Retreat, the design is minimal, honest, and just excellent.  I really don't know how to put into words the economy of space and how well the land is showcased. (Language fails there:  It's like trying to describe what a mushroom tastes like.)  But if one has even a modicum of sense of aesthetic, walking through the bones of this house is just delightful.

Problem is, the house was to have sealed concrete flooring, and the slab turned out really bad.  Often we score grids or patterns into floors using saws with diamond blades, but this one could've been cut with a pocket knife!  Crappy weather and who-knows-what-else made for a slab that wore like it was made of gypsum.  When I looked at it for the first time, I really didn't see a clear way to fix it.  An overlay here would've been a bit wrong as the rawness of the land and elegance of the design would abhor a veneer of any sort.  Grinding seemed risky as sometimes a poor piece of concrete will just disintegrate beneath our equipment and burn up a lot of diamond tooling in the process.  I just didn't see a clear means to create value.

To humor Jon, I showed up on a cold, rainy, Friday morning expecting to grind a sample for a set price, pack-up and go.  The sample seemed better than the floor that hadn't been ground, but I wasn't sold.  The more I talked to Jon, the more I realized that we really had to roll the dice and go for it, though.  We came up with a strategy of multiple passes with a 150 grit metal bond diamonds and a methyl-methacrylate sealer with a matte finish additive to sort of glue the slab together. 8 hours and 240 gallons of water-turned-slurry later, we surprisingly had a really neat looking floor.  Though we ran out of diamonds and pads for our scrubber, the outcome is clear now, and I am STOKED.  The floor is rough in spots, and it couldn't be re-created on a bet, but somehow it's just right.  It is perfectly imperfect.  It is the bridge between the rustic site and the modern lines of the home.  It is the serendipity that makes element7concrete floors worthwhile.

Check out the architects renderings on JonLuceBuilder.com:
 http://www.jonlucebuilder.com/current-projects/
Check out Dick Clark Architecture's site to see why I'm so thankful to work on one of his projects:
http://www.dcarch.com/
Then, check out of your internet browser and go make something!
Thanks for reading.

Making construction errors remarkable

A customer of mine (an architect from Brazil), reminded me recently of how concrete flooring is an element of "honest architecture".  Sure, some decorative concrete contractors base their businesses on faux rocks of all sorts, but the real point to working as hard as we do is to make something timeless and simple.

Therein lies the rub. The foundation is never perfect.  The other trades working on it aren't either. Plumbers miss the mark and have to cut trenches in the slab. Framers oil their nail guns right in the entryway and inadvertently apply an irremovable "resist" to acid stain. A family of raccoons pissed away the lime in the concrete and ran through it (literally: this has happened on a floor we stained) leaving ghost puddles of white in the dark walnut floor. The point is, these mishaps can ruin the project, or make it the coolest part of the house.

I guess if I have one story to tell here, it ought to be the raccoon-pee story.  After wet-scrubbing/honing the slab, it looked great and we turned around and stained it the same day. The next day when we came to rinse residue, there were puddles and tracks throughout. What we did, was design and saw-cut a pattern of golden rectangles, sectors of circles, and other such shapes that minimally complemented the architecture of the house in the places with the puddles and tracks and to balance. Then, we ground away the concrete within the shapes, exposing the stones and polished it as shiny ass possible (3000 grit) while the rest of the floor was at about 150. We used a solvent based dye to penetrate and color the concrete without regard to the lime content. The end result was a rough-and-dusty-half-day for my team and I, a really cool floor, a very happy customer, and a builder who became a raving fan of element7concrete.

So, the take-away is study the geometry and rhythm of good design and be a pro. When things go wrong (I promise they will) use the opportunity to make it better than you could have without the "inspiration of Nature".  At the risk of sounding weird, I urge you to know that Nature is for you (not against you) and if you dance with it through the process everything will work out for the best.  Go make something today!

Why do you do it?

I once heard that people ask kids what they want to do when they grow up because they are looking for ideas. Have you ever asked yourself where your work fits into the grand scheme of things? I'll tell you here what we are all about, and I would love for you to post a comment as to what you are all about.

Good design tickles my sense of aesthetic, but what I really love about it is how it serves the greater good. Housing is a basic human need, and the need to meet it sustainably builds every year. The most important aspect of "Green Building" isn't VOC's, "carbon footprint" or LEED points. It is timeless design.

The remodeling construction market is purportedly 3 times the size of the new construction market, and I would be willing to bet most of those houses are functionally fine. But, they are ugly, dated and funky smelling. However, the oldest stained concrete project I know of is the Awahnee Hotel, and it looks as good as ever:

http://www.yosemitepark.com/Accommodations_TheAhwahnee_PhotoGallery.aspx

Moreover, stained concrete is the cleanest most serviceable type of flooring I know of. Even hardwood, though equally timeless, can collect "schmutz" through the gaps. So in my mind, the greatest gift I can give the world is to devise the ultimate concrete overlay that can be installed in older homes and ages as gracefully as a well placed slab of real concrete. This doesn't exist outside of my workshop yet, and I want to make sure it's everything it needs to be before I really roll it out. But that's what I am working on and why.

What are you up to? Is it what you were born to do? What would you do if you couldn't fail?