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My Colouring Pencils

July 10, 2014 / barros / 7 Comments

This is not JUST about an ordinary colouring pencil set.

This is the colouring pencil set I waited 6 years for.

How many children these days have to wait 6 years to get a set like this?

Well, back in 1986 that is what happened to me. I was in secondary school when the need to have ‘proper’ colouring pencils started.

My mother couldn’t afford to buy what I needed. So I had to manage to work with rubbish colouring pencils, most of them leftovers from primary school.

Sometimes I would borrow one or two pencils from the colleagues that had nice big sets.

It was tough.

But the years went by and that didn’t stop me to be creative and have good marks.

It was much later in the Christmas of 1992 that I got this Caran D’Ache metal box set.

It was all I had wished for! …It came too late but it felt like a dream come true. I am not sure if my brother realised how important his present was to me.

I recently got reunited with this set after some 12 years without seeing it. It still holds a special meaning. Just as in life, we cannot always have everything we want when we want or need but it’s important to BELIEVE that dreams can be made true and on the way to pursuing them we will grow and learn a lot about ourselves. We just cannot give up!

When was the last time you waited 6 years for a dream to come true?

Isabel

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Useless facts about my colouring pencils:

13 of these pencils were hardly used and never sharpened. As I said, they came too late when I was using less colours and more graphite, charcoal and ink pens.

There were 2 pencils missing in this set and one that was not the original. I was able to retrieve all the originals (I had brought them with me when I came to Ireland in 2002) and the set is now as it was originally.

I don’t colour that much these days but in the last few years I was able to survive with a set of 12 Faber- Castell pencils and a set of 24 Derwent pencils. I am now the proud owner of some 76 decent colouring pencils 🙂

The colours I most use are blue, red, yellow, white and black. Mondrian style… But I use them to convey my ideas and differentiate volumes, materials or textures, nothing too exciting…

I found the original white colour pencil in my sewing box. I guess I don’t use it that much, AH!

I told you these were useless facts!

Extension to House Over 100 years Old in New Ross, Wexford

June 30, 2014 / barros / 2 Comments

Note: This post was previously titled ‘Extension to 1950’s House in New Ross, Wexford – SketchUp Animation’. During works we discovered the walls were not what we expected and some investigation confirmed the original house was built between 1888-1913! (The owners were not aware of this.)

We feel that our proposal is like the missing piece to complete this house puzzle.

The original house used to be a Council house and it was built in the 1950s. The owners had already built different extensions to the house but they left a big problem unsolved: the entrance and the circulation and flow of space within the house.

They approached us to get a bigger kitchen more suitable to their lifestyle. We listened and we were sensitive to all energies we could capture. We proposed a holistic approach that embraced the existing house, respecting it and making the all space a much better place to live in.

We like to think the new entrance works like the “spinal column” of the house, supporting it, organizing it and allowing the spaces to flow naturally from there.

From the entrance a new wall – the “shoulders” – is built to hold the two new extensions – the “arms” – that will hug and embrace the existing house respecting it in a complacent manner.

We felt the existing black and white palette needed a different material/texture to make it more interesting and with a warmer feeling. We propose to cover the two “arms” with timber cladding. This is a type of cladding found elsewhere on this site and it has the beauty of being a natural and environmentally friendly material that easily blends with the landscape.

Working with an existing house with a number of (more recent) extensions is always a challenge. We are often restricted by a number of factors and it requires years of experience to turn them around in our favour. We are delighted with the result and we cannot wait to see it built.

See what our clients had to say: