About a year ago, I stumbled upon a little plot of land in a great location and at a better price. I pinched pennies for a few months, sold some things, and did whatever I could to scrape together some dough. Before long, I had enough to make a reasonable offer and was thrilled when the owner accepted. Ever since, I’ve been on cloud nine.
See, this little piece of land came pre-equipped with a slightly creepy 30′ by 40′ metal building. I say creepy, because the building was used by the prior owners as a hunting lodge of sorts. They had kind of hap hazzardly built some living quarters inside and then written some anti-government messages on the walls and called it done. Now, it was all mine… and I thought it to be perfect for the new Atomic Industry World Headquarters.
However, my wife and I plan to someday build our home on the same piece of property. As much potential as the little building had, my wife wasn’t too excited about a metal building greeting her callers as they drove up the driveway. I had resigned to the idea of tearing the building down and starting over once I had a little extra green.
And then one day, I was browsing through an issue of Dwell Magazine and ran into a house that was remodeled by a youngster from Austin. It had a wonderful style mixing modern architecture ideas with a vintage industrial flair, but still seemed approachable and warm. I was charmed and decided to contact the designer. Before I knew it, Jarod and I were both standing outside my creepy little building discussing the possibilities.
To my surprise, he wasn’t put off by the metal structure. In fact, he wanted to take on the challenge of turning a run-of-the-mill metal building into a modern industrial space. The job was his… But I’m getting ahead of myself – Part 1 of this series is simply an introduction to the project.
The goal is simple. The end product will be a distinctive modern building that tips its hat at yesterday. And although this space will be used mostly as an office space, it will also be a showroom of sorts for one of my hot rods and we will be using all sorts of building techniques and materials that are relevant to those of you creating and building work shops. I think this is gonna be fun…
In any case, here is the meager beginnings:
And, of course, I would be amiss if I didn’t introduce a couple of the project’s sponsors as well:
More Soon.
