Senior Projects

This week I am building a website for the makerspace business club using wix. All sales will be able to be made through the website and it will keep track of all the orders. Today I got the basic design finished along with most of the page outlines. Tomorrow I will start entering products. It will have a home page, store, FAQ, Contact Us, and About Us pages.

The car dealership is a fun internship. I get to drive the cars and move them around. Today some highlighted vehicles I got to drive were the Porsche Taycan, Lamborghini Aventador, Harley-Davidson, and I got to drive a Jeep Wrangler. It is nothing but making YouTube videos for my personal account and Parker’s account. Between the two accounts I have made 19 videos, over an hour and a half worth of film. I do a few office jobs. Nothing is really new at this internship besides driving a new car everyday.

The real estate internship is crazy. The person that I am shadowing is a real estate agent on the side. Weekends are when he is free so he dedicates weekends to this side hustle. Unfortunately (in this case), the market is hot. There are more agents then there are homes for sale. The housing market inventory is low but the demand for a home is high. We lost some offers today because other people had better offers. One of our clients offered $10k over asking price and it got rejected. I sat in on a listing on Sunday. I got to hear what brings a house value and what does not. I also learned about the money behind it. Pro Tip: if you take out loans to buy rental properties do not put it into your personal name. If anyone is looking for a single-family home near Chippewa and Hampton, we are hosting a open house this Sunday 10am -12 pm.

Today was a shorter day that most. The main guy I’m working with wasn’t here and I still didn’t have the materials for the dance floors so I continued with the edge banding for awhile. I started to figure out some easier ways of doing things, along with some advice from one of the guys here. The more I work here the more I am learning about how there are ways to do thinks faster, more efficiently, and with less effort. It’s really cool getting to see what they do and do it along with them. I finished up two more discs and left for the day.

Today I was in the shop again. I still didn’t have the materials I needed to continue my project, so they had me start on another side project. For this one I was doing more edge banding, but this time by hand because it was on circular pieces of wood. These pieces are for lazy Susan’s to sit on and they needed to be finished off for the job. The process basically involves cutting the edge band to the length of the circumference of the circle, then coating both the wood and the edge banding in a glue and then sticking them together. After that I sand off the extra glue and edge until smooth. Below are pictures of the process.

I’m still working in the shop for the company I am at, but today I started a new project. The company has a job that their doing for a small dance studio nearby which is making them small portable dance floors, and they assigned the task of making them to me. All I really had to do was take the precut wood and edge band it, which is the thing I did during the first week where I put the laminate on the unfinished parts of the wood. After that I basically just took the 3×4 sheets of wood and glued cut up foam flooring pads to the bottom. I ran out of foam flooring pads and am still waiting on more so I have not completed the project yet. I’m really enjoying working on it and an excited to have a project to myself.

Week 3 was a success. I finally got to drive a Lamborghini Aventador. This is my fourth post this week so I will keep it short. Biggest takeaway from this week is time is money. You hear it all the time but seeing it is different. Today we “wasted” over an hour (between both places). The McLaren’s tire was punctured 4 miles out from a clients house so he won’t get the car until Monday. Another client forgot about a listing appointment. These things don’t disappear so now we have to schedule another time to go and fix/show these cars and houses. What can we do better for next week? Be more resourceful. Real world doesn’t limit sources.

This week, I made an outline for the story about Arlys. I spent about two hours at the Washington Public Library working on it each morning. I went through my list of highlights, copied-and-pasted the sections of each transcription I wanted into a new document, edited them, and sorted them into five chapters and an introduction. I’m anticipating that each chapter will be between five and ten pages, if not more (the introduction’s only three), which may take me a while. I’m hoping to get at least three chapters done, because expecting to finish it before the end of the quarter is a little ambitious.

In the afternoons, I either went to Washington Community Arts Studio (WCAS) or Lion’s Lake Park in Washington. I have a time slot at WCAS on Mondays, Thursdays, and Fridays. When I was there, I made basic character sketches of Arlys and her husband John at different ages. They’ll be good as references, but they were also helpful to get my thoughts sorted out and visualized. They were done straight from my head, so that’s why they’re a bit messy. I attached a couple of them down below. Today, I drafted the introduction while I was there (and got to use the stencil!).

When I was at Lion’s Lake, I spent time doing live sketches of things in nature. I used pencil, watercolors, and ink pens. The pencil was for sketching, the watercolors for blocking in color, and the ink pens for detailing. I went through a bit of a learning curve with these sketches. The first two were incredibly frustrating because I wanted to get everything perfect, and I spent a lot of time agonizing over small details, proportions, and shades of color. I wasn’t very satisfied with those pieces. On the third day, I realized that focusing on overall shapes and values would be a much better use of my time. Instead of scrutinizing the scene I wanted to draw, I squinted my eyes and tried to get a general idea of the scene. Drawings became much more fun after that, and I was much more pleased with how they looked.

I had a lot more time for poetry this week, which I really enjoyed. I went further in the Kay Ryan book, and started on Shakespeare’s Sonnets this morning. I’ve been trying to memorize “How Birds Sing” from the Kay Ryan book, because even though it’s written in free verse, it has a lot of rhymes and slant rhymes, and it’s short. I think I’ve got the majority of it committed to memory now! I was feeling a bit intimidated by Shakespeare, so this poem was a good warm-up to that.

I wasn’t able to have an Arabic lesson last Saturday, but my next one will be tomorrow.

The last two weeks have been very productive and informative. I have learned about a lot of things I am interested in doing and not doing. The job is very fast paced and always evolving which I like. I do not want to sit at a desk or have the same job everyday. You might have your entire day planned out but you will get calls from clients or have problems with properties that you have to deal with immediately. Out of the Box Properties was started about 3 months ago so they are just getting started. They want to have multiple diffrent outlets. This includes traditional real estate agent services (supporting a seller or buyer), flipping houses, non-tradtional housing (tiny houses, container houses), and more. After shadowing them around for the past 2 weeks I have learned I am not interested in the traditional real estate agent job. This is more showing houses and writing contracts. I was very interested in looking for distressed houses, going to look at them and possible flipping them. This still includes writing contracts and buying/selling but it is for your properties. When you are dealing with clients you can get caught up into legal battles and lots of diffrent road blocks. Overall it was a very productive time.

Thursday was filled with meetings. In the morning we had a meeting discussing how they could make their adulting 101 seminars better. Adulting 101 is a free seminar they have once a month to explain the process of buying a house to first time buyers. In the afternoon we had another meeting with a local flipper and friend wanting to get into it. I found this meeting very informative because I want to get into the business of flipping houses some time.

On Tuesday I walked through a couple houses that were in the process of being renovated. Some had just started and others all the dry wall was up and painted and just needed to be furnished. It was interesting to see the renovation side after I had seen houses before that stage. In the afternoon we had a meeting with their broker. A broker is the person who legally holds your real estate license and is legally responsible for all your deals. Anytime you write a contract, officially it is the broker’s contract.