Senior Projects

I’ve missed a few posts so here’s what I did for the last two weeks. I went out to Sullivan Missouri and stayed with my grandparents for two weeks. My grandpa owns 17 renal properties and does as much work on them as he can himself. While I was there our main project was to put up siding on a house. He got the siding from a neighbor who was redoing his own house, so we got the siding for free.

The first thing we did was measure out all the windows and the dimensions of the house, and then I sketched it with the dimensions so that we could select the pieces of siding that would fit the best. What we actually ended up doing though, was putting most of the siding on a trailer and the getting pieces as we needed them. The first thing you have to do when doing siding is putting of J channel. The J channel goes around all the windows, doors, and vents and the edge of the siding goes into it so that it looks finished and not exposed. The next step is to do put in place all the corners, which can be either inside corners of outside corners. Once the corners and the J channel are all in place you are ready to start actually putting up the siding.

The siding fits together and slides back and forth. It is important to make sure that all the siding is snapped together before you start hammering nails. When it is snapped in, make sure you put the nails in the very center of the slots, so that is can slide back and forth. Something else we had to do before we put the siding was take down the old awnings over the windows. We cut these off, and then I removed the brackets after they were gone. I mostly cut the siding to the right lengths with the chop saw, while my grandpa put it up. We got a lot done, and my grandpa said it will have increased the value of the house by at least 5 grand.

This week was really good for live sketching, since the weather was so nice. I went to the Saint Louis Art Museum on Wednesday and to Faust Park today. Every other day this week I spent on the Riverfront Trail in Washington. I don’t have any pictures of what I did at the Art Museum, since I’m not really proud of how they turned out. I’ll be going there again next week, so hopefully it’ll go a little smoother. I was really pleased with what I painted at Faust Park, though, so I attached it down below. I think I did a decent job on the composition and values. The picture below it is something I did at the Riverfront, which was a lot of fun. I wanted to make the river look more interesting, so I added someone poking their head out of the water. One of my favorite graphic artists, Tillie Walden, has a book called I Love This Part, where she plays a lot with scale and puts characters in nature scenes and city sky scapes, and I was inspired a lot by that.

This week, I was able to finish Chapter 1 of the Arlys stories. I attached a couple pictures that I finished today down below. I have 16 pages total, including the introduction. My plan for next week is to clean up the pages and add speech bubbles. I don’t plan on inking or coloring the pages, just sharpening some details, fixing my mistakes, and redrawing a couple panels.

This week, I started to memorize another Shakespeare sonnet, but I may not finish it. I will probably get deeper into the first sonnet and try to understand the language a bit more. I finished up Good Poems, which took me the whole week, since it’s a thick book. It’s been my favorite one so far.

For Arabic, I’ve started memorizing another set of vocabulary words and phrases. Tomorrow, Mrs. Hassan and I will have a lesson, and we’re going to start a section about how to negate verbs.

I am learning a lot about sales through both of my internships. I think I really hit all the important stuff in life with these internships. I learned a lot of tax avoidance tricks at the bank and now I am learning about business (how to make the money). I know how to make money and keep money. I believe this car dealership deal will turn into a summer job. I got “promoted” to motorcycle sales. Since I have the Rp Exotics Instagram account, I get all the Dms and someone wants to sell their Ducati. I have never driven one so I am looking forward to that. We also have 4 Ferraris in inventory and we have another Lamborghini Huracan Performante coming in. We also bought a Porsche today.

The real estate internship is going great. Id rather be an investor than an agent; however investing is more costly. The agent that I am shadowing had a tree fall over on one of his trailers and he is in the middle of a flip. The tree incident alone is in the ball park of $30,000. I do learn how to sell through this internship. My first day, he had me sell him a case for sunglasses. Knowing how to sell is important, especially if I am going to be selling motorcycles.

Friday was filled of office work. In the morning I made some phone calls and then looked for some houses to clip in Colorado. In the afternoon we worked on the monthly filling.

This week has been very informative. I have learned a lot of interesting things and most of all how you need to interact with people. Since they work on very expensive houses the costumers want everything perfect. When I say perfect I mean PERFECT. There is a very fine line you have to walk while talking to them.

The ride to work this morning was a little rough. It’s no Lamborghini but it has a 6.0 12 cylinder engine. We picked up a client’s car for window tint. This client just purchased a Lamborghini Gallardo Performante last weekend and he wants the windshield to be tinted. I also took listing photos of a Ferrari 458 Spyder. Inventory photos are a huge learning curve. I am taking about 60 photos for 15-20 to be put on the website. I also run the Rp Exotics Instagram account. Today was rough but tomorrow I know what to do for listing photos. We got another 458 in today so that will be tomorrow’s project.

For the last couple of days I have been doing some office work for the agent I shadow. I sent out and created Docusign contracts. I have been uploading documents to BackAgent. I have read over a bunch of seller disclosures. The real estate agent gig is fun but I never realized how much work actually goes into it. It’s nothing like how it is on television. A lot of it is paper work.

Wednesday was filled with a lot of office work. This included writing more invoices and estimates, and writing the rough draft of my recommendation for two homes I was pricing out. We also had to go prep a basement that was going to be painted on Thursday.

Thursday morning I cut cardboard out of diffrent sized furniture so the client could get a visual example before they bought it. I then dropped a few things off at houses that they were working on. In the afternoon we had to go check on a house that was getting new windows and painted. To wrap up the day I finished my recommendations.

Monday morning I drove around with Garrison (the owner) to look at some houses he wanted me to find comps for. This includes looking for houses that sold or on the market near this house with the same specs. With this information you can make an estimate for selling the property. In the afternoon I started researching and pricing the homes out.

Tuesday I showed my research to Garrison he helped me with some questions and gave me some more information to look up. I then made a template for their invoice and estimate’s. After this I wrote up several invoice’s and template’s. At the end of the day he sent me the Harvard School of Business executive recommendation template. This is how he wants me to write my recommendation for the clients looking to sell their homes. The recommendation will outline how much they should sell it for, and the benefits/risks if they take our advice.

This week was my final week working at Marc Christian Fine Cabinetry. I started out in the shop learning about how things are done there and messing around with the software they use to design cabinets. After that I helped out with the CNC machine and other smaller projects. As time went on I was given more responsibility and had tasks that I got to do on my own. I even got to the point where I had a couple of projects of my own, and I even got to completely assemble a few cabinets. After working in the shop for 4 weeks I spent my final week in the show room and job sites learning the business and design side of the company. It was a fantastic experience and I learned a lot about woodworking, design, and the task of managing a business and creating pieces suitable for clients. Next week I will be starting a new internship working at the Country Club at Saint Albans working on the course management crew for the final 3 weeks of the project.

I had the day off on Wednesday, but on Thursday I was again meeting with the designer form the show room, Sadie, but this time she was showing me an actual job site. We met at a house in Ladue, where we went inside and she showed me around and told me about a bunch of different aspects of design and planning that they use in every project. She told me things like how important it is to make sure the design of the cabinets they’re putting in matches that of the house, how lines and corners need to match up perfectly, and how planning out every little detail to make the addition to the house that much more special. She also showed me how important and valuable it was to maximize the usage of the space they were in so that there was no wasted space. After that she showed me around the rest of the house and showed me some other aspects of the business that she is in. Below is a rendering for a dog shower that the owners of the house are having installed.

Today instead of starting in the shop, I headed to the show room to get a tour of the place, and learn about how the designs for cabinets are actually made. The show room is the place where people go to see all of the different options they have and look at things like finishes, paint colors, styles, hardware etc. When I got there, one of the designers for the company met with me and gave me a tour and showed me some of the reasons why show rooms are important and what they have to offer. After that we went to her desk and she showed me how some of the drawings and renderings are made using a program called Chief Architect. I talked about using this before when I was at the shop, but she showed me a real design and blue print for a job she was working on. After that she showed me some other business and career related things. Below are some images of the renderings and blue prints she made.