The Offudio Project Concludes

The Beginning

In case you didn't read The Offudio Project Begins—or in case it was too long ago to remember—please allow me to briefly recap:

The Offudio Project was a plan to convert my home “office” into a “studio.” The term “offudio” was just a temporary name for the transition. The hope was that giving the planned result a new title, that of “studio,” would give me new power to reconceive my use of the space. As I wrote in the first article:

“I want a space that invites me to be other than I am now, to reinvent myself. For example, art and music aren’t really central to what I am or do now. Maybe they will figure more prominently in the redesign. I don’t yet know.”

—me, October 19, 2012

The project took longer than I expected, in part because I live in a small New England house. I needed a workspace and usually use my driveway. But there was lots of rain and snow for a long time, and I didn't want to do the work indoors. So I waited for spring.

The Transition

Our story today begins with a junky room and a ratty old wall-to-wall carpet. You can barely see the floor at all in this original arrangement. Every bit of the room was used, but even as that was utilitarian, it was also stifling.

The picture at right is borrowed from the first article, and gives you a sense of how much clutter we're talking about.

For a room to feel like it has options, I felt, it must feature unused, outright wasted space. Such space might never be intended to be used, but it sends the visual signal that there are ways it could be used. It invites forward thinking. It isn't the dead end result of long-abandoned hopes.

So the first step was just to remove all of the junk, and the plan was to allow back in only those things that really needed to be there.

As an intermediate matter, of course, that meant cluttering the rest of the house somewhat. In computer lingo, we call that “intermediate expression swell,” the notion that the middle of a project may grow to take up more space than is needed in the end. I was trusting it would fold back down, even elsewhere in the house. Mostly it has.

But it was also an opportunity to go through things I don't use and decide what needed to be there and what could be thrown away or put away into less accessible storage, such as the basement.

The picture below shows the floor after removing a lot of junk. You can see here the place I where soon I'd be putting in some real energy to replace that icky old carpet with hardwood. The carpet was old, dusty, stained, hard to clean, and just unsightly. It needed to go.

I tentatively peeled back the carpet:

It had a liner underneath that was in bad shape. And the floor beneath that was in pretty sorry shape as well:

But after a good scrub and an undercoat of Kilz stainblocking sealer, it looked a lot better. At one point I actually kicked over the can of paint, which was quite exciting. I wish I'd gotten a picture of that. It was like herding cats, but I realized if I just pushed the paint in the right way I could pretty much still paint the floor as I'd intended. I just barely managed to do it without painting myself into a corner, and everything came out fine:

Though if you look carefully you'll see I wasn't yet brave enough to remove the carpet going up the wall. It covered something of unknown nature that I later learned was cinder blocks. But for now I had enough to deal with. It was time to start laying subfloor, and fortunately there was a nice modular solution, called DriCore, available from Home Depot:

DriCore is designed to solve various moisture problems that happen in basements, and this wasn't actually a basement, but it seemed prudent to do it anyway. Pretty much all I had to do was snap it into place, leaving spacers around the outside for it to breathe:

It didn't take long to cover the entire floor:

For a lot of uses, the DriCore would have been fine. Some people just use that as actual flooring. But I was determined to have hardwood, And hardwood needs a certain depth to nail into. Since DriCore is too thin, I added a layer of plywood on top of it. I figured that would make it nice and sturdy anyway. And the DriCore is ridiculously strong, so it doesn't mind the weight:

It was finally time to peel back the carpet on the wall and see what was underneath.

It was cinder block with some 2x4's on top to cap it. They stuck out a ways from the wall, creating a bit of a ledge on some but not all the walls. That came to be another big problem: Every wall had completely different structure along the bottom, so whatever kind of trim was going to be used would have to be custom-made for each wall, and yet would have to join at the corners. I resolved to worry about that later.

I'd done hardwood floors before and I was dying to get to the part where I was laying out individual strips of board. That's the fun part, even if it's also a bit painstaking. And it's what I wanted to do next.

Boards come in different lengths and you have to custom cut the last board on each row to make the length work out:

What I really like about this is that every board is unique. It's like a jigsaw puzzle with no key. If you have the time and patience, it's fun to get the wood patterns from board to board to match up in interesting ways. Here the large knot is actually four boards chosen to come together in a way that looks somewhat coordinated. It's not a perfect fit. But it never really can be. It's just fun to try. Jupiter has its great red spot, and my floor has this:

The individual hardwood boards are tongue and groove, so they sort of snap together. Eventually you'd nail them but they go together well enough that you can cut all the pieces and lay them into place to see how they look before doing that. I was pretty picky about this part, so it took longer than it needed to, but at last I got to the other end of the room:

It looked like a floor at this point, but wasn't nailed together:

Doing nailing by hand is hugely difficult, not just because you have to hit so many nails in so short a time, but because you don't want to make mistakes. A bent nail can be a pain. So there are nail guns that help you manage that, and you can rent them from Home Depot. There are automatic guns that do almost all of the work for you, but they seem like an opportunity to shoot yourself accidentally, so I prefer the semi-automatic ones. They make you do more but are harder to set off by accident.

Click here to see what it looks like for someone who is used to it—this is not what it looked like for me doing it. I got pretty efficient at it after a while, but it still took a whole day. The guy in that video would have had it done in just a few minutes.

Basically, you have to go back and open up some space on one end so that you can nail in boards one at a time:

As each line is nailed in, the gap between what's done and what's yet to do slides across the floor:

And suddenly the floor part was done:

Next it was time to paint hat ugly cinder block. Of course, I had to be careful not to get paint all over, so I used the boxes the hardwood had come in to protect the floor, augmenting here and there where I needed extra width by repurposing some already-used Christmas gift wrap. Unfortunately, I had no substitute for using a lot of new, blue tape to cleanly mask the 2x4's:

Here I peeled all of that back up to see how the paint job came out and think about staining. I made a note that I'd also be needing to touch up the wall with a bit of patch to make sure it came all the way to 2x4. The bottom edge here is pretty messy where the two meet:

Now all that remained was the baseboard trim. This was a big puzzle for me, but I had all winter to think about it because it was clear I would need my driveway to do the work, and it just wasn't available. The hardwood instructions had said to leave a gutter around the edge for expansion due to moisture. I've used this room a long time, and it never has moisture, but I followed those instructions. Also, the gap was large, so conventional baseboard wouldn't cover it.

The cinder block itself was easy. I just painted that white. And I stained the 2x4 boards that sat on top of them. It was the gutter that continued to vex me.

I finally settled on the idea of using 2x3 and 2x8 boards. Not wanting to spend a lot, I went to the culled lumber section at Home Depot, where you can buy scrap lumber for pennies. I stained the wood, and then glued the boards to the cinder blocks with an adhesive that was designed to work on both wood and concrete. The gutter was also supposed to allow breathing for moisture from the concrete floor, so I didn't want to seal it in. I put the wood on felt spacers so that it didn't attach to the floor and the floor can slide back and forth if it needs to expand.

The overall look was exactly what I'd wanted. The baseboards are a bit more informal than you might want for some rooms, but this is a room off the garage of my house. This will never be a fine dining room. And yet even for its crude nature, it's got a certain elegance:

The baseboards stick out a bit from the wall and that makes it hard to put some furniture against it. But that has ultimately worked hugely in my favor because it's helped me resist the temptation to put heavy bookcases against the wall—things that would need something to lean against. Instead I've opted for lighter, more airy furniture, and that has contributed to the open look I was seeking for the room.

The Reveal

Finally I could move furniture back into the room.

Staples had chair mats made out of bamboo that were perfect for protecting the new floor from a rolling chair. A desk with a tempered glass top, an open riser to hold up a computer monitor, and a set of translucent stack trays contribute to the open look. I used an oversized cloth bag behind the desk to hide a lot of computer cords that otherwise would have had nowhere to go:

An old armchair, a door desk, and an open bookcase each have that open feel that contributes to the overall room look.

And out in the middle of the room, the floor is pretty and smooth and one can easily slide around in sock feet. It's a pleasant and inviting space where I can sit and read, play music, or even get up to dance when no one is looking, all in a studio that was, start to finish, my own creation.†

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† In the end, it was my own creation, but nothing in the world ever really happens in isolation. Critical ideas and support that led to the creation of this space came from my wife and several dear friends. My wife also patiently suffered a lot of intrusion into other parts of the house by wayward furniture elements that had no home for a while. And, last but not least, my daughter contributed critical construction assistance at a key point in the process. I'm really happy for all of their participation. It wouldn't be the great new space that it has become without all of these inputs.

Originally published September 23, 2013 at Open Salon, where I wrote under my own name, Kent Pitman.

Tags (from Open Salon): aesthetic, recreation, creation, transition, building, hardwood flooring, hardwood floor, flooring, floor, hardwood, reconstruction, construction, retreat, escape, personal space, rethink, redesign, design, not politics, music, art, offudio, studio, office, home office

The first part of this two-part series is here:
The Offudio Project Begins

Hawking God

Stephen Hawking (and co-author Leonard Mlodinow) made a lot of news this week with the new book, The Grand Design, in which there are apparently provocative statements made about the proving there is no need for God. I've downloaded it on unabridged audio from audible.com but haven't yet listened to it. I'll get to it in due time, but presently listening to the very important book Storms of My Grandchildren: The Truth About the Coming Climate Catastrophe and Our Last Chance to Save Humanity. Still, I've wanted to make some remarks on religion anyway, and the fuss over this new book gives me an occasion to make them.

I often refer to myself as “not religious” at this point in my life, although as you'll see later in this article, that's not quite a proper description. I use the phrase because it works for other people, not because it works for me. It answers a complex question in very few words, adequate to many casual social situations, which is often good in such contexts. But it leaves me feeling that I have papered over some underlying issues that are more complex. So I hope you'll indulge me a longer answer here.

A Brief History of Religion

Religion is probably as old as man, probably long-predating written word. And so your guess is probably as good as mine about how it arose. Even if you showed me a document that told me what day it arose, I wouldn't believe the document. So I'm going to offer a theory that is simply my personal theory. You can subscribe to it or not, it doesn't matter. I don't offer it to get you to agree, only to allow you to understand where I'm coming from.

I think religion was invented by businesspeople. No, not modern businesspeople. I don't mean it's part of some modern corporate conspiracy, although there are probably people who think that. Not even some two thousand year old conspiracy, even though I'm sure some people believe that. I mean something much older, dating back to a time before any civilization we now recognize, when mankind was probably already organized into communities and had been communicating non-verbally, and was finally starting to share ideas using this amazing new technology: spoken language.

I imagine this to have been long, long before eras like ancient Greece, where people had gotten so organized that there could perhaps be a legitimate leisure class. I don't know if there were people in charge of others or if people were just collaborating as equal. Probably the former, but who knows? What I imagine is that there was a lot of opportunity to use language when people needed to be working, and that this could have been dangerous. It was probably important to focus on food and protection. And yet, the questions of life are staggering and must surely have occupied much of early man's thoughts.

Certainly the surviving records of later times show religion as central to nearly everything. How could a species new to linguistic thought and the exchange of ideas not feel overwhelmed by concerns about “why”? I think it could legitimately have occupied a lot of time. And yet surely most of the time of early man needed to be focused on work—feeding and protecting communities. Some clever person surely figured out early on that people had a lot of questions and, like Farmville today, it was sapping everyone's time to spend hours a day fussing. So they just offered answers. The actual answers don't matter, in my view. They didn't have to be the best answers. What mattered was that there were answers. And so, having answers, people were able to get back to work at feeding and protecting their families.

That's the odd thing about antique writings. We can no longer question them and so we must either take them at face value or dismiss them. But the quality of being dead is that you can no longer engage in conversation, you cannot be persuaded or asked to compromise. Somehow here I'm reminded of a remark by Rene Belloq in the movie Raiders of the lost Ark, where, while trying to bury Indiana Jones alive, he says to Indiana: “Who knows? In a thousand years, even you may be worth something.” So, if you believe my hypothetical history of religion, someone once a long time ago “just made something up.” Just like if you or I did. But his words being buried a couple thousand years make them something people have to either embrace or ignore, with very little middle ground.

So, I allege, and you can believe it or not, that the function of religion is to stop people from going around and around in an infinite loop, asking questions for which no answer was likely to be forthcoming. “Where did we come from? Why are we here? Is there life after death?” We all have must face these questions. Our answers differ, but really the questions do not. Fussing over such questions overly is and always has been a drain to productivity. And so we set aside time to think about these things, and that leaves the rest of our time free to do other things.

What Counts as Religion

I have often said, “there are no political answers, only political questions.” That is, it can't be the case that you can ask a question to which one answer is a “political answer” and another answer is “not political.” Politicians often try to disguise political outcomes by claiming they are “just” the status quo, for example, as if the status quo were not a political result. People often try to persuade, or even coerce, others into a different choice by suggesting their response is political, and somehow could be otherwise. In my view, if a question is political, all possible answers to that question are by definition political; they do not subdivide into political answers and non-political answers. If you find someone suggesting otherwise, it's time to stop the conversation and point at the question and identify that as political.

I feel the same about religion and so hereby announce a corrolary: “There are no religious answers, only religious questions.” That is, having asked a question, you can't point to one answer as religious and another as not. If the question provokes a religious answer in some, it provokes a religious answer in all.

Using this newly coined rule of reasoning, I can observe that if the question “Is there a God?” results in a religious answer by saying “yes,” it must by my definition result in a religious answer if you say “no.” Likewise, if you ask the question “How do you characterize God?” then if the answers by some people go on to describe religious thought, the answer even by atheists of “I characterize God as non-existent.” must, by definition, describe religious thought.

And so, by this reasoning, my remark “I am not religious.” is not really true, and probably not even meaningful, being itself paradoxical. One cannot usefully say “I answer religious questions with non-religious answers.” I am also not atheist or agnostic, however. Those terms each have implications that don't describe me. Coming up with a good descriptive term is hard!

And yet, though the terminology is hard, expanding the notion of what a religion is to cover even things like atheism and agnosticism creates a useful simplification that ought to be seen as important even by atheists and agnostics, since it suggests a philosophical and legal foundation for claiming atheism must be offered First Amendment religious protection. I don't see any reason that atheists should be threatened by that classification.

Hawking his Book

According to some media reports, Hawking has said there is no need for God, although other reports say this summary is somewhat sensationalizing. It probably won't hurt his book sales any. The Telegraph quotes him as saying specifically, “Because there is a law such as gravity, the Universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the Universe exists, why we exist. ... It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the Universe going.” It seems to me he's just saying that his personal theory does not require any entity that he would call God.

That seems a reasonable claim to me, though still a religious one. It answers the questions that religions answer. And it's okay with me to have a religion that has no God. Certainly there are religions that have more than one God. Once you're into the realm of “other than one,” the number zero presents itself as an obvious “non-one” option. I think that's a place is where people get confused.

Even if Hawking's theory doesn't need a God to explain Creation, that says nothing about other theories of Creation. So people who are worried that he's proven there is no God can rest easy. All he's done is provide one more way to conceive The Great Unknowable, one more choice among religions.

And I've heard no claim that Hawking's theory explains how any initial set of conditions came into existence—if “initial” is a good word for a system with no beginning and no end. Even if the Universe was here for all time, that dodges the question since there has to be a context in which time exists, especially if you believe Einstein that it's just another dimension like the three dimensions of space. It begs the alternative question “Where did that context come from?”

René Descartes offered us the useful observation “Cogito ergo sum.” It follows from our very existence and ability to ask religious questions that we do exist. In my personal philosophical belief, our Universe's origin is the only observable that cannot be explained by physics. It seems to me a simple matter of fact that the Universe did not create itself. And yet it is here. We must accept as fact that Creation happened, but any sense of why or how is outside of our own frame of reference and cannot be known.

The Universal Question

I sometimes refer to the circumstance or situation that put our Universe into play or that offers it a context in which to exist as “God.” God, in my view, is that which is outside, that which explains Creation. It's impossible to say whether that's active process or entity, or whether perhaps it just is or was an enabling circumstance. So I don't try. Hawking's apparent goal was to find a minimal set of initial conditions. I'll look forward to reading about how he worked through it. it sounds like an approach that would be emotionally satisfying to me.

I most certainly don't believe in any God who created the Universe while muttering “let there be light” under his breath. I don't believe in any God who keeps tabs on the world, like a baby-sitter, or who answer requests or prayers, like Santa Claus. It makes no sense to me to conceive of God in so complex a way. It really doesn't match the data, and it's far from being a simple hypothesis, so it runs afoul of Occam's razor.

For God to watch over us would be like me having an ant farm where I meddled in the lives of the ants—except that we here on Earth are much smaller to any such God than ants are to people. And already ants are so inconsquentially small even to me that I can't imagine following their lives closely enough to be opining on questions of whether they kill each other for moral reasons, whether they use my name in vain, or whether they violate any of the other Commandments. If there were a thinking God, I'm sure we'd be too small to be of interest. He'd probably be thinking about much bigger problems instead—like “Is there a God?”

No matter what the power of any extant entity in whatever frame of reference, the question would still recursively present itself: “In what frame of context do I exist?” The question is, if you'll pardon the pun, truly universal. And whether God were religious or an atheist, that would be a matter of his personal faith, not a proof he was right.

Maybe Hawking's contribution will be to have found God not in some omniscient superbeing but in something small, like a set of physical laws. Reducing the size of the initial conditions needed to kickstart the Universe might be a step in the right direction, like trying to find how life began. Can one reduce and reduce the necessary conditions of creating the universe until they simply vanish? Or will there always be a question remaining, however trivial? It feels a bit like Zeno's Paradox of the Tortoise and Achilles and it's hard to say for sure.

I may have more to say when I've listened to Hawking's book.

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Originally published September 12, 2010 at Open Salon, where I wrote under my own name, Kent Pitman.

Tags (from Open Salon): politics, God, religion, philosophy, creation, hawking, book, stephen hawking