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December 11, 2015 By Rob Myers Leave a Comment

A little Something We’ve Been Doing

I often take snippets of bad movies that have made an impact on me, and use those as analogies for things that happen to us every day. One such snippet comes from an obscure Gene Hackman/Keanu Reeves movie called  The Replacements . There’s a scene where Hackman and Reeves are talking about outward calm vs. inner turmoil, and Hackman says that “we’re just ducks on a pond”- above the water, little to no movement, below the water line, where you don’t see anything, little duck feet moving furiously. Often, construction is like that. Seemingly little getting accomplished, and then all of a sudden massive progress. During that quiet time, though, the groundwork for later work is happening. Pipes being laid, ground being prepped,  foundations being readied. Then, BOOM, seemingly all at once a project is close to completion. This summer, we had many “ducks-on-a-pond” times and now, as projects are making great progress, BOOM, we’re getting close to finishing. Seems like all at once. Yet, all of us working know just how furiously our feet were moving all summer and fall to get us to this point-  check out one of these projects- Poolhouse Progress

Filed Under: Building a home, Financing, Home Values, Maintenance, Remodeling

December 7, 2015 By Rob Myers Leave a Comment

Home Technology Comes of Age

For at least 20 years that I can remember, the purveyors of technology have promised us thinking, automated homes. From the ’90’s until today we have been inundated with promises of automated thermostats, self stocking refrigerators, and an easy-to-use remote control that would allow us to easily select from about a thousand channels from multiple sources. Well, the truth has been that for every new control gadget we got, there were a ballooning number of sources that required yet another gadget to control. Sure, HVAC firms have remote control thermostats, but up until recently, you had to use a separate remote to use them. Smartphones and apps have helped a lot lately- at least now you can download an app for that thermostat or toaster that could allow you some degree of control, but the universe of controllable things  has, so far, dwarfed the the solar system of controllers.  And, most of these things require some degree of technology savvy on the part of the end user, who may be required to drill through a list of FAQs on a website, or, worse, an instruction manual folded into about 7 different languages shoved into the box. All, my friends, is not lost, though. Last fall one of the industry leaders in this sort of technology, Crestron, rolled out a game changing piece called Pyng. Pyng acts as a programming hub for pieces designed to be integrated into the technological landscape it creates, and that’s a lot of things. Lighting, Audio, HVAC, security, and as we move forward, video. Crestron is the gear that’s used in robust, automated buildings such as Apple’s headquarters, or the new Goodyear World Headquarters building in Akron. Brought into the home, Crestron finally created an easy-to-build infrastructure around its wireless gear, with Pyng as a hub, so companies like our sister company K+ Audio and Integration (www.k-integration.com ) can easily retrofit homes and install nearly any subset of sources and control for the family. Want sound on your back patio? That’s no problem at all. Best, the control is as simple as an IPhone app. Crestron is not a do-it-yourself system-like any other system with a simple interface, the gear and set up behind the scenes is fairly technical and complex. But the gear is bullet-proof. It just works.

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Filed Under: Audio Visual Systems, Building a home, Home Values, Maintenance, Remodeling

October 15, 2015 By Rob Myers 3 Comments

How we Build

I lost a friend last week. Truth is, I lost him several years ago when he contracted cancer and a rare brain disease and had to withdraw from working. Kenny Kassouf Jr. and his firm Permanent Floors have installed the floors for nearly everything I’ve ever built. When I first met Kenny I was in my early 20’s and knew absolutely nothing about building anything, and so nothing about flooring. Kenny patiently and over  a period of years and projects brought me up to speed on his industry and his trade. Different woods, different carpets, different tiles, vendors, grouts, underlayment, trim pieces. Things I came up with that he hadn’t seen, he researched and helped me to work with those vendors or materials. Kenny, like all my vendors, was a true expert in his craft, and was willing to share his knowledge and expertise with me. None of us are born knowing about butt-joints, binding machines, schluter moldings, or thinset. As a builder, I need to know a lot about a lot of things like this. I need to know about different kinds of insulation, roofing underlayments, plumbing materials and where and where not to use them, different fasteners, adhesives, wires, connectors, pipe, codes, integrated building systems, deflection coefficients, dew points, span charts, wood species, and much much more. I can learn these things only by asking someone who knows about them to share that knowledge with me, and I’ve been fortunate that those I’ve had the great chance to meet over the years have been willing to share that knowledge with me. It’s helped me to help them to move in and out of my jobs better, more efficiently, and with less waste, and it’s helped me provide my customers with much better finished projects. Each of these people is pretty darn hard to replace. In Kenny’s case he had brought his son-in-law on board and now I have a great relationship with Ryan. But I owe Kenny a debt that I can’t pay for all his help over almost 30 years of working together. My homes are a tribute to Kenny, and all the great people that work with me to build them. Thank you all! gibbons_master_bath  m_homes_8-7-08_216

Filed Under: Building a home, Home Values, Maintenance, Remodeling

September 11, 2015 By Rob Myers Leave a Comment

9-11. A Remembrance

It’s almost cliche now- where were you on 9/11? But, every year since, today that’s what I think about. Where were we? I, and my crew, were installing the finishes on a new home in Pepper Pike. The work we were doing that day was high craftsmanship- marble floor installation and trim carpentry. I bring that up because, in the years since, the juxtaposition between a culture of craftsmanship and customer service and a culture of primitive mass destruction and murder seems to define our new century. A Western culture that has developed a sense of tolerance, playfulness, scholarship and achievement is being attacked by a culture that values might and a single book alone. The irony is  that our culture of technology and thought couldn’t have developed without Islam. Rolling the clock back about a thousand years, it was the Christian west that relied solely on one book and burned and tortured non-believers. Then, it was Islam that kept the fires of Greek and Roman scholarship burning, to be re-discovered by the West in the Renaissance. Islamic scholars  worked on mathematics and astronomy, explored the reach of medicine, valued libraries and art, and built on the architectural achievements of the Greeks and Romans, extending their styles and creating their own. Craftsmanship, then, was something that, at that time, Islam highly prized. It could be no other way for them to have built what they did. Now, a thousand years later, the roles are reversed. Islam has fallen under the spell of a Dark Age puritanical scholarless side, while the West has created a technologically based wonderland that has really no limits. As the brutes running Isis murder masses of people and destroy architectural and cultural masterpieces that have survived every other flavor of religion since they were built, I can only think that with the swings we’ve seen already in history that it’s possible that this too shall pass, and that the other side of Islam may one day rise up out of what we see today, so that Muslims can claim back their craftsman-like heritage. Until then, the fight between the West and this brutish malevolent and maximally violent horde will continue. More innocent people will be murdered, and more of our cultural edifices will be attacked. How sad that the human psyche can house both the lofty, striving, curious scholar and that dark murderous side that destroys everything that the latter would create. Today is the day, every year, that I think about these things, remembering the destruction of the Twin Towers and the murder of our people, remembering the people we’ve lost defending our country, and hope that, someday, the dark, brutish, destructive side of our humanity will be less fixed on destroying what our craftsmanship scholarly side may build.

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Filed Under: Building a home, Home Values, Maintenance, Remodeling

August 13, 2015 By Rob Myers Leave a Comment

The Art of Building

Yes, Art. Capital A. Sure, there’s a lot of homes that aren’t that artistic. And more than a few that are downright homely. But, when designed and built by people that care, homes can have a true artistic quality about them. On the drawing board, under construction, or finished, these homes just seem to hit the high notes. Creating these for our customers is the fun part of my work. Working with great tradesmen, building something unique and one-of-a-kind- fun times. Sure, the weather can be a bummer, and not everything goes the way we want it to go, but, some days, when the lighting is right, you can see things in a different way, and all of a sudden, what we are crafting goes from the practical to the artistic, and, BOOM!, we just made some magic. Of course, the true magic comes later. When our customers move in and breathe life into what we built- when their families make our home their own, and make their memories in what we created, the magic is really complete. Still, well before that, when the light hits just right, the magic is there in a million other ways, and those are days that make all the harder, colder, wetter days melt away, and I remember why I started doing this.

Framing Artwork

Framing Artwork

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Filed Under: Building a home, Home Values, Remodeling

August 6, 2015 By Rob Myers Leave a Comment

Trusting your Team

We’re building a swimming pool. No, not for me, but for a customer. If there is ever a specialized trade, pool construction would be it. They use their own vocabulary, have issues I don’t know that much about, use parts I don’t know the name of, and have a perspective on their work that wraps only around enhancing  people’s leisure time. In the end, though, pool construction, like other sub-trades, is all about expertise and experience. From my end, it’s all about bringing their team into alignment with the overall goals of our team, and making sure that all the players work as a cohesive group. But, trusting them to do what they are good at is the underpinning of our relationship. Pools in NE Ohio can have myriad issues after the fact, and they’re all bad, so hiring a great sub is paramount. Even so, everyone makes mistakes, and ours did. The kitchenette is no place for pool pumps! An easy matter-now!- to move those pipes into the right place. So, trusting your team, but verifying that things are in the right places is critical. And given the labyrinthine tangle of piping that goes under a pool, keeping all the lines straight is an artform unto itself. I’m just glad I don’t have to do it!

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Filed Under: Building a home, Financing, Home Values

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