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What's Going On At Concord Carpenter:
This week was strange to say the least. I've never worked outdoors in shorts and a t-shirt in March with 85 degree temperatures. Weird!
I have agreed to mentor two high school seniors at Concord Carlisle Regional High School on their Senior Project. The Senior Project is a dedicated class in which seniors build or create a project on their own with the help of a mentor. The project has to be finished before the end of the school year.
These two seniors decided to build a small geodesic biodome. Inside this biodome will be a system called aquaponics which is where fish and plants can self sufficiently survive without the help of humans.
Aquaponics is a sustainable food production system that combines a traditional aquaculture (raising aquatic animals such as snails, fish, crayfish or prawns in tanks) with hydroponics (cultivating plants in water) in a symbiotic environment.
In the aquaculture, effluents accumulate in the water, increasing toxicity for the fish. This water is led to a hydroponic system where the by-products from the aquaculture are filtered out by the plants as vital nutrients, after which the cleansed water is re-circulated back to the fish.
the boys need my help creating the structure and originally wanted to build it on school property.
After meeting with these boys I suggested that they build it off site to protect it from vandalism. I suggested that they approach for permission and possibly build this biodome at Gaining Grounds in Concord MA.
Gaining Ground grows organic vegetables and fruit with the help of hundreds of community volunteers and donates all of this fresh food to area meal programs and food pantries.
Gaining Ground raises and distributes approximately 20,000 pounds of produce each growing season.
Once they are graded for the project the biodome can be used by Gaining Ground to extend the grow season for their vegetables.
As this project progresses I will post more.
Current Project: Garage Makeover
On my most current project I am working on a garage makeover. The client is having me install cedar clapboards over concrete block walls and then installing a Clopay Coachman Collection garage doors.
In order to install the trim and cedar clapboards we needed a backer to nail the clapboards and trim to. For these nailers we ripped lengths of 2x4s down to 1" strips and then attached them to the cincerblock wall with five to six 2-3/4" long Tapcon screws.
The vertical nailing stips had to be one inch in order to use a 3 penny nail for the siding and a 4 penny nail for the trim.
The vertical nailing stips were 1" and the trim we were adding was 3/4" which meant that the lower section of this garage was going to stick out 1-3/4" from the existing clapboards.
I would have preferred a longer fastener but we did not want to build out the wall to far.
The challenge for us was how to transition the front of the garage that already had existing clapboards flush with the cinder block.
We addressed this issues by continuing the bed molding, which is under the sofit on the side of the building, across the front of the garage doors. Then ae installed a slanted [pitched] roof over the molding.
The final product from the street looks seemless. You'd never know the lower portion is built out futher than the upper yellow clapboards.
In a few weeks we will be adding Clopay doors to this garage - then the transformation will really pop!
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