beausoleil architects

New Beausoleil designed home in Los Altos now on the market

Check out this YouTube video of our most recently completed project, a two story custom home, designed to suit the needs of the today's families.  Our client is a wonderful private developer in Los Altos, who goes to great lengths to build a quality home with sustainable features.

  

"This exquisite New England style new home combines classic East Coast exterior with an easy flowing floor plan that includes fabulous modern living amenities. Just minutes away from the village, its covered porch that wraps around the front and side, along with the beautifully landscaped yard and patio invite you to enjoy the California indoor-outdoor living. "The home features almost 3700 square feet of living area including four bedroom suites with bay windows and vaulted ceilings, a home office, family and living rooms, a formal dining room with a servery, and a hidden wine cellar nestled under the stair.

For more information, including open house dates, please contact Mansour Moussavian at Alain Pinel Realtors.

 

 

From outer space to a neighborhood near you

I recently accompanied a sustainable energy class from my daughter’s high school on a visit to the headquarters of Bloom Energy.  The son of the founder and CEO, Dr. K.R. Sridhar, is one of my daughter’s classmates and Dr. Sridhar was kind enough to open up his manufacturing facility to us and have his chief engineer give the class a tour.

Bloom Energy makes high performance, high capacity fuel cells – similar to the systems that were invented in the sixties to provide power for spacecraft. Bloom Energy’s version was actually developed by NASA to help power proposed visits to Mars, specifically to be part of a system to convert the Mars atmosphere and solar energy to oxygen and hydrogen fuel. Along the way Dr. Sridhar realized that the technology could be used effectively on Earth to create electricity from fuel – ideally hydrogen but also methane (natural gas), alcohol and bio-fuels.  The fuel isn’t combusted, in the ordinary sense of burning at high temperature (not a practical idea in outer space), but is chemically converted using catalysts and ionic filters.  Very high tech devises, fuel cells use some of the same manufacturing techniques used to make computer chips and employ metals and ceramics that are on the cutting edge of material science.

 Ten years of development and a good deal of venture capital later, Bloom is manufacturing ‘Bloom Boxes’, modularized units, roughly the size of a large freezer, which ganged together in groups of six generate 200 kilowatts of power, enough for about 100 homes. Although internal temperatures within the units are well in excess of 1000 degrees Fahrenheit, there is very little waste heat. The exhaust is mostly carbon dioxide and water. When losses from transmission are taken into account, their efficiency is higher than even modern natural gas fired power plants.

The installations are remotely monitored by Bloom on a 24/7 basis. Their modular nature makes it relatively easy to switch out a poorly functioning unit without shutting down the entire array.  Bloom gained quick acceptance from customers who need very reliable power (think server farms and wholesale refrigeration facilities).  The operations manager who showed us the monitoring control room was very proud that the eye of Hurricane Sandy passed directly over one of their big installations on the East coast – and the power output never even blinked.

Fuel cells aren’t exactly ‘green’ in that they typically use fossil fuels as their energy source. Dr. Sridhar ultimate vision, however, is to develop bio-fuel generators, fed by agricultural waste or low environmental impact crops (such as switchgrass) that when linked to his Bloom boxes will give both reliable and environmentally sustainable power. He is especially intent on doing this in third world settings, where such systems, distributing power locally instead of through centralized grids, will have the best efficiency while giving the owners control over their power sources. He would like to vault the third world right over the industrial era into post-industrial civilization, bypassing coal, oil, and, hopefully, global warming.

Maybe it's time to start thinking inside the Box.

While we’re on the subject, there is another local company making fuel cells, perhaps more directly pertinent to architecture. ClearEdge Power makes smaller capacity residential units with as little as 5 kilowatt generating capacity (enough for a single large house).  Running on natural gas, their ClearEdge 5 unit is quite efficient, acts as a de-facto back-up generator, and uses its waste energy to heat domestic water.  Thus electricity, hot water, and emergency power in one package the size of a refrigerator. They are expensive, but well within the budget of a typical McMansion. With current subsidies, and with cheap natural gas for at least the near future, they are actually cheaper than public utility power.  I can’t wait for them to come out with a unit half that size – maybe even one that converts yard waste into biofuels -- then we’re talking about a serious game changer.

Please vote for our middle school robotics team's invention

Voting is now open for the FLL Global Innovation Award, where middle school youth post ideas for their inventions, this year related to the theme of helping seniors stay independent, connected and engaged. The team we have been coaching for the past 6 months, the Awkward Turtles, has submitted their idea for the Turtle Tablet and Beach Band. You can find out more and  VOTE  here.   More information about our team and our amazing experience follows. Please vote early and often.  Voting ends March 1. Thanks!

 

Our family decided last summer to sponsor a F.L.L. robotics team for our 12 year old son, some of his classmates at West Portal Lutheran School, his friends, and kids from AimHigh, a San Francisco program which tutors low income youth. My wife Christine and I and several other parents were the coaches. Usually these teams are sponsored by schools or for-profit enterprises, so this was quite an operation for our household, which was crowded with lego parts, computers, and a four foot by eight foot game table for ten weeks. The team has an unusual background, coming from five schools and speaking about six languages between them, and it was interesting watching them come together to form a team.

F.L.L. (First Lego League) is the middle school league of the FIRST robotics group, which was devised by Dean Kaman (the inventor of the Segway) as a way to make science, technology, engineering and mathematics and as interesting and 'cool' for students as is sports and entertainment. The high school league was featured in the best selling book, The New Cool, by Neal Bascomb. The F.L.L. competition includes three facets: building and programming an autonomous robot to perform missions on a game table, inventing and presenting a device or technology to solve a real world problem, and demonstrating the team’s core values, including teamwork, gracious professionalism and having fun. Over 200,000 kids competed in this years league, whose theme was Senior Solutions -- making seniors more independent, engaged and connected.

Amazingly enough, our team, the Awkward Turtles, was declared Champion at the local tournament held at Notre Dame des Victoires school late last year, beating out fifteen other teams from all over the Bay Area. We scored second in the robot games (just five points behind the leader) and scored high in the other robot design, core values, and project categories. We were considered the best overall team and got an automatic pass-through to the regional tournament to be held early next year.

The project our young engineers conceived involves a 'simple' computer for seniors to use, essentially an iPad type tablet with an accessory wristband, controlled by a voice recognition system and software specifically designed for a senior's skill sets.  The wristband monitors vital health signs, accommodates verbal interface including reminders, allows for emergency signaling with GPS, and syncs with the tablet.

One of the requirements of the competition is that the kids have to interact with real engineers. We've already met with and gotten feedback from an industrial designer, a software engineer from Adobe, a nurse, and a mechanical engineer who works on medical devices, and had a field trip to the Google headquarters.  

There is also a related international competition where the kid's projects are judged for real-life feasibility, called the FLL Global Innovation Award. The three top finalists travel to the DC area to the US Patent Office and are awarded prizes to further develop their design invention with engineers and patent attorneys. Last year the theme involved food safety; one of the winning teams, for instance, devised a product bar code that erased itself when subject to high temperatures for a certain period of time -- a very useful invention to stop sale of spoiled prepackaged products.

If you are interested in looking at the FIRST programs, see http://www.usfirst.org/.

4 year Solar Anniversary!

What shall we do to celebrate our solar PV system's 4th birthday? While cake is always appropriate (usually chocolate in our family), we thought a blog to give you more details of it's performance would be even better.  We'd like to see solar arrays multiplying on everyone's roof after all!

According to Solar City, the company that installed our system and provides a very informative computerized monitoring, after four years, we have officially offset 21,593 pounds of CO2, the equivalent of planting 10.3 mature trees.  That's quite a forest on our little lot in San Francisco!

Here are some intersting graphs from Solar City:

The first shows a typical year, month by month starting in January. In all four years, May has been our best month, generating between 472 and 503 kWh. July and August take a little dip as we do live on the foggy side of town, but as you can see, there is still plenty of electricity being generated during those months as well.

The next graph, shows a beautiful curve of the path of the sun, this particular day being June 30, 2010, which has so far been our record day with 20.41 kWh generated.

Did we mention that we only paid $29 upfront for our system on a lease basis and that we've saved money from Day 1? Well, we did, but it's been a while.  You can see the details of our solar lease on our early blog post from 2008. Boles Solar Lease info

Our monthy cost for the lease is now a whopping $32 (and will rise to $36 over the 15 year term), and our net savings are about $60 per month, not counting the rise in PG&E rates over the past four years. GO SOLAR! Prices of panels have come down considerably in the past few years and there are great deals out there to save you money and save the planet some unnecesary CO2.

References

We view our clients as our key partners in the design process and many become our friends in the process.  It is with great joy and humility that we share these kind words. Bob and Christine Boles

I highly recommend Beausoleil Architects. As a custom home builder in Silicon Valley, I work with a lot of architects. I hired Bob and Christine to design the remodel of my own home. They are that good!

I have worked on a half dozen projects with them over the years, and they have always come through for us with creative ideas and solutions. I have brought them in to rescue design projects several times when the project architect did not provide enough details. I have worked with them on whole house, extremely energy efficient remodels. Every time they have come thru and given us both great design, and great details from which to build.

If you want great design you can be proud of, and plans your builder can actually build from, hire them. They will take care of you and deliver what they promise.

Paul Conrado, The Conrado Company  Saratoga, California

I have known Bob and Christine Boles for many years and they have drawn up plans for multiple residential remodeling projects for our home.

You can read further if you must, but let me just say that I have absolutely no hesitancy in recommending them for any architectural project. Period.

But, okay, if you must know why, here you go . . .

CREATIVITY - The best part about meeting with Bob and Christine is that they think of creative space use like no one else. With each project my wife and I thought, "Damn, that is an awesome idea, we would have NEVER thought about doing that."  Bob and Christine make a great team, able to both dream about the possibilities as well as think through the realistic nature of those dreams.

SUSTAINABILITY - I can't wait until the next project that will utilize their deep commitment to and expertise in green technology. If you are in search of architects who can help you to think through ways to preserve energy, conserve natural resources and basically help save the planet, Bob and Christine are your people!

INTEGRITY - Being one who knows absolutely nothing about the technicalities of the architecture process, I have found working with Bob and Christine to be one of great attention and integrity. They are patient with the questions, thorough in their answers and never did we simply feel like clients who were paying for services. On more than one occasion we needed to scale down a project or get multiple estimates and we always felt like were given a wide breadth from which to choose. Bob and Christine not only care about the project and but they also care about the people involved.  

Seriously folks . . . if you are looking for someone to help you think through the entire process of a remodel, dare I say that you would be foolish NOT to give them a call and explore the possibilities.

Bruce Reyes-Chow and Robin Pugh, San Francisco, California

 

We have worked with Beausoleil Architects in the last 6 years to design eight houses for our family-owned home building business in Silicon Valley. Their designs have obviously been popular with a broad range of people as we have received countless compliments on our houses and have sold the houses quickly and at close to our target prices.  They have always been very responsive to our needs and have helped bring to life our collective visions for the homes. We sincerely value their willingness to work collaboratively with the clients.
They are very resourceful in designing different styles of homes and using different materials. Their knowledge and familiarity with Green Building requirements brings an additional dimension to their design concepts and services they provide. It has truly been a pleasure working with Bob and Christine Boles over the years.

Kathy and Mansour Moussavian, MKM Builders, Inc, Los ALtos Hills, California

I have worked with Bob and Christine on two very different projects.  The first was a tear down and new build.  After listening to my wants and needs, they provided 5 floor plans; we ended up combining two for a 6th floor plan. They  then advised through to completion.  Bob explored unique finish treatments; he was very creative through the whole process.  The second project was a complete interior  renovation of a 100+ yr. old house on the coast. Bob and Christine creatively  improved the flow of the floor plan by moving doorways and removing a wall.  Their attention to detail is unsurpassed.  Bob and Christine are a joy to work with--very knowledgeable, professional, reasonable, calm and timely.  Bob met with the planning and building depts. to effectively resolve any issues.  I have interviewed 10+ architects and I will only use Beausoleil.

Jackie Gachina, Los Altos, California

We are delighted with the way our Redwood Shores home turned out!    Beausoleil Architects did a fantastic job working with us to create a beautiful Mediterranean home on the water. Many realtors and neighbors alike say it is the most beautiful home in Redwood Shores.

Bob and Christine are extremely talented and creative. They work with you to provide fresh ideas and then deliver on the architectural details so your builder can make your home come to life. They are true professional and have the highest integrity. We highly recommend them for your projects.

Rick and Barbara Urrutia, Redwood Shores, California

 

 I couldn't have been more pleased with my experience with Beausoleil Architects.  Bob and Christine are warm, extremely knowledgeable, and very patient.  They listened to my concerns for my interior remodel and drew up multiple solutions in a very short time, exceeding all my expectations.  They both addressed my original ideas and provided creative alternatives for the space, including floor plans, elevations and an initial base budget.  They interfaced with the planning department about permits and regulations to insure feasibility and kept me in the loop as needed.  Highly recommended!

Michele Freed, San Francisco, California

Bob and Christine were attentive to the expectations we outlined for the project and offered great suggestions for improvements or alternatives within those guidelines without contradicting them.  The level of detail and thoroughness of the plans was commended by the City Planning Commission members, as well as by multiple contractors that were preparing bids on the project.  Coordination with other parties (eg. Engineering) has been smooth and advice on construction contract negotiations has been very helpful.  We've been very pleased with the level of professionalism of Beausoleil Architects. 

Robert and Raquel Rebres, San Bruno, California

We have been more than satisfied with Beausoleil's skills and ability to create architectural masterpieces with complete and detailed plans for all our architectural requirements.  We are also pleased with Bob and Christine's help and guidance in solving planning and design issues brought by the planning bodies in a very time efficient and constructive manner.

Rudi and Annette Koppl, Quinta Properties, Woodside, California

 

Hamptons by the Bay

In post-civil war New York and Boston, the nouveau riche and soon-to-be robber barons of industrial America began a tradition of moving out of the blistering heat of summer in the city for cooler climes by the beach. Summer colonies at Newport, Rhode Island, the Hamptons on Long Island, New York, and other waterfront locals began to spring up.  Many of these vacation colonies were close enough by railroad or ferry that the head of the family could commute to them on the weekends, while the family stayed all summer.

The summer ‘cottages’ they built, more appropriately termed mansions, were in a variety of styles. Indeed, it was in this era that it became clear one could select a ‘style’, build something that evoked an era of history, a mood, rather than build what pretty much everyone else was building.  One of the styles developed on Long Island was a more informal, but still grandiose version of classical design – columns, arcades, pediments, classical moldings but clothed in more mundane shingles or lapped siding instead of brick or stone. The houses tended to be less formal than the colonial or Georgian buildings from the past century (with which they shared some elements), but were, at the same time, grander -- a three piece white linen suit with the pants legs rolled up for playing in the surf. 

At roughly the same time, the newly convenient San Francisco peninsula, reachable easily from the city via railroad after 1869, was starting to serve the same purpose for the gold and silver barons of the west coast. Although in this case, it was probably the summer fog they were escaping for the greater heat of the south bay. Country estates were built for this purpose in the new suburbs of San Mateo and Santa Clara Counties, and they often mimicked the designs made fashionable on the east coast.

It is thus appropriate, in this new age of post-industrial dot.com wealth, to bring back that Long Island beach front style for a new mansion in Atherton, Beausoleil’s most recent construction start. This project for Quinta Properties, being built by George Adair, promises to be a fine family home in the country, full of light, close to the ground for ease of indoor-outdoor living, and both comfortable and luxurious.  

 

 

 

Incroyable! Tres Grande Vitesse…

The French Chateau style house which we designed towards the end of 2010 for Quinta Properties (see “New French chateau in the Bay Area” below) was recently completed by builder George Adair (finishwithstyle@sbcglobal.net) after less than a year of construction – very rapid progress for an almost seven thousand square foot house on three levels. After completing the landscaping and other sitework, the house was staged and introduced to the market with a broker’s tour last week. 

The house reportedly remained on the market for quite some time before a buyer was found: a whole two hours! Perhaps the new owners will have to name the house Tres Grande Vitesse,  TGV for short, like the high speed trains of France. 

A French name would be appropriate, after all, as the house is a fairly authentic example of a ‘Chartreuse’, a traditional type of house found in the countryside of Gascony. A chartreuse can be large or small, formal or quaint, but it typically has one story, though often with attic rooms.  This example sits quite compact on its lot, so even with a half acre lot full of mature trees the grounds seem quite spacious. The house also has very high ceilings, and the combination of tall floor to floor heights, steep roofs and gabled walls, chimneys and finials, and a compact plan makes for a very vertical profile.  It’s a very distinct look from the more usual horizontal style seen in the U.S., and this distinctness might have added to its sales appeal

The front yard is also European -- the front door opens directly onto a motor court, with a detached garage flanking the house. The structure of the house, and its amenities, are entirely modern, of course. Truss framed roofs and engineered lumber helped speed the erection. George Adair is a master finish carpenter though, and the quality of the woodwork is evident. We wish the owners many happy years of enjoyment.

Free money for Energy Upgrades for San Francisco Homes!

We just found out about a terrific program through SFEnvironment for energy upgrades to single family homes.  They have cobbled together grants from a federal stimulus bill, PG&E and other rebate sources to help put contractors to work and help homeowners improve their home’s performance. The catch is that the money has to be spent before June of 2012, and they are behind in getting the word out about the program.

The basic process is as follows:  You have your home audited for energy use by one of their approved contractors.  They will look at things such as your insulation, furnace, water heater, etc., do a blower door test to measure your air flow changes per hour as is (to see how leaky your house is now) and give you a list of suggested improvements.  The fees for this audit are partially paid by the program – you should be out of pocket no more than $100-200.   You then decide on the upgrades you want to do based on expected performance improvement as a percentage.  The contractor coordinates the paperwork with the city and based on the amount of energy use reduced, you can earn from $5500 for 15% reduction, up to $8000 for 40% reduction (typical in San Francisco is about 35%).  If you earn less than 120% of San Francisco’s median income, ($121,900 for a family of 4) then you can qualify for an additional $3000.  In the end many families who have participated have only been out of pocket a few hundred dollars.  They not only reduce their gas and electric bills, but also greatly improve the comfort of their homes.

Here is the website with more information. www.sfenvironment.org/SFHIP

We will embark on the process for our own home with David and Scott of Building Efficiency  performing our audit this Friday and we would be happy to share our experience as the project progresses.  Keep an eye on our blog for more information!

It's hard work to create a Passive House

One of the projects currently on Beausoleil’s drafting boards (i.e., on our computer screens) is a modest remodel of and addition to a typical 1950’s ranch house in San Carlos.  Besides creation of a master suite, a guest suite and a better relationship to the back yard, the owners desired to go well beyond normal practice in remodeling the building envelope. They wanted to approach, and possibly meet, the rigorous requirements of the Passive House Institute and reduce the building’s energy use by as much as 90%.

‘Passive House’ (Passiv Haus in German) is an idea that was formalized in recent years in Germany, though the basic concepts have been around at least since the 1973 energy crisis started people thinking about curbing energy use in buildings.  ‘Passive House’ is related to the broader concept of passive design in architecture, where the environmental comfort within buildings relies on local environmental forces, rather than utilizing complicated mechanical and electrical systems. In classic passive design, a building is designed to allow windows to admit solar heat in the winter, and to be shaded in the summer; occupants open windows for ventilation and cooling; heat is regulated through good insulation and air sealing; daily temperature cycling is smoothed by providing thermal mass within the building envelope. Space heating is minimized and people are expected to live with a bit of minor discomfort – putting on a sweater when the temperature swings a bit low, wearing shorts when its hot, getting up off the couch to adjust shades and windows – instead of cranking the thermostat.

The Passive House Institute standards require very heavy duty insulation (typically double to triple the insulation value most homes have), triple glazing on the windows, very tight air sealing, and (not so passive) ventilation using a heat recovery exchanger to retain the heat in air being exhausted. Very good detailing and supervision of construction is necessary to make these houses meet the standards, as it is very easy for air and heat to escape through a poorly conceived, or a poorly made, building shell. With excellent insulation and air control, most of the heat for the house can come from the building occupants and their electrical appliances. The need for air conditioning is eliminated.  With good natural lighting and photovoltaic panels on the roof generating power, very little energy input from outside is required.

Getting back to the project on our drafting board, the owners hired Allen Gilliland of OneSkyHomes, a Passive House Institute certified consultant and builder, to analyze the design of the house using the Passive House Planning Package and make recommendations. The PHPP is a software tool that comprehensively models the energy use of a building, including its skin, insulation, windows and doors, air sealing, ventilation, and mechanical systems.  Allen thought he had an easy task ahead of him, but it turns out that modifying an existing ranch house is a tougher challenge than designing a new house. 
The ranch house in question has typical 2x4 stud walls, and their thickness didn’t provide enough space even if high performance sprayed foam insulation was used.  Luckily, the owner wanted to remove the existing stucco wall finish and replace it, so amending the wall thickness was conceivable. 
Likewise the roof is framed with 2x4 rafters, and even though the attic provides a large space for insulation, the edges where the roof comes down to meet the walls are inconveniently slender. And, as it happened, the house’s roof had been replaced recently so the owners were naturally disinclined to rip the roofing off to add more insulation on top.

The other inconvenience is that the existing house is oriented to face east and west, just the opposite of ideal north-south orientation.  East and west glazing is hard to shade for summer cooling, and doesn’t face the warming sun of winter, so the project had a strike against it from the start. 

Triple glazing in our mild climate seemed silly to me (and to the window suppliers who laughed at the owner when he asked for triple glazed windows to be priced), but Allen explained that it wasn’t just energy control, it was comfort.  Triple glazing ensures that the interior surface of the glass stays within a comfortable temperature range – one doesn’t feel cold radiating out and therefore feels more comfortable.

Allen’s creative powers were challenged but he came up with several good alternative packages for balancing insulation value, cost, and constructablity.  We are looking at combinations of spray foam and densely packed cellulose insulation within framing spaces, extra layers of polystyrene foam on the outside of the shell, and taped plywood sheathing for air control. We are now awaiting pricing of these options before completing our construction drawings.  The owner is prepared for a certain amount of sticker shock (these improvements may not pay for themselves in a strictly economic sense for a long time), so we may end up with a very good but not certifiable Passive House design.

 

Architectural Magic

How do you turn a bay window into gold?  Simple, just make it disappear.

 

Corey and Ben McMills of McMills Construction had a problem.  Their investment property on Oak Street, near Ashbury and facing the Panhandle of Golden Gate Park, needed to have a garage built to enhance his tenant’s use of the building and maximize their rent.  Parking, as is true in much of San Francisco, is hard to find in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood and is almost more valuable than living space.  They turned to Beausoleil Architects for help.

The bottom floor of the building, a historic Victorian apartment house, had a hodgepodge of storage rooms, utility spaces and an ancient studio apartment shoehorned between a dozen wood posts.  The original brick foundations were underfoot.  The project structural engineer, Don David of Double D Engineering determined that as part of upgrading the seismic strength of the structure they could get rid of the columns and the partitions, build new concrete footings, and create a clean open garage space.  The problem, as Corey found out when he asked the planning department to review the project, was how to get a car in.

The front wall of the ground floor had a three sided bay window, with windows on each face, matching the bays on the levels above, and the city planning department had recently started enforcing its mandate to limit changes to the character of historic building’s front facades – including conversion of bay windows into garage doors. Their design guidelines require that fronts of buildings, front yards, fencing, and similar relics of historic design be left largely intact, and that changes must be made in accordance with the Secretary of the Interior’s Standards for Rehabilitation of Historic Buildings. Replacement of the bay window with a garage door, a common practice for many years, was no longer an option.

Corey, a mechanical engineer by education and a problem solver by nature, conceived the idea of converting the walls of the bay window into door panels that would fold into the garage space to allow cars to enter, and then fold back into place, keeping the historic appearance intact.  The planning department agreed that this concept was provisionally acceptable.  To help him realize this concept, Corey hired fellow problem solver Robert Boles of Beausoleil Architects to devise the details and keep the project in-line with the Secretary of the Interior’s Standards.  One of the goals of the standards is to keep not only the historical appearance, but to keep the ‘historic fabric’ – the original wood and glass building materials – intact wherever possible.

Beausoleil carefully measured the elements of the existing façade and drew them up, then determined how the bay window sides could be split apart from the rest of the building with almost invisible seams.  They envisioned a steel framework that would be secured to the back of the walls before they were cut away from the structure – allowing the fabric of the building to remain virtually intact, studs, siding, windows all moving in concert. The front yard, which had a possibly original wrought iron fence, also had to be redesigned to incorporate a driveway and a percentage of planting areas in accordance with the zoning code. Beausoleil prepared a supplementary set of construction drawings to complement the structural set previously approved.

To make the doors work mechanically, there are two floor mounted hydraulic activators, which rotate the doors on pivot hinges. Further details, including control and security hardware, were worked out in the field by the installer, Rick Dentoni of Automatic Gate Installations.

The new garage will provide four parking spaces, while eliminating only ten feet of parking space on the street.  While not entirely pleasing to the city planners, who consider cars to be the spawn of the devil, the new parking will no doubt be very useful to the tenants, at least until we can devise our next trick – teleportation!

The project still needs a little finish carpentry and painting, but you can get the idea in the photos and video below.

    

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Garage door closed                                             Garage door open