Posted by esp on Friday, 25 February 2011
Tags: Garage Door, Garage Doors, Garage Door Opener, Garage Door Repair, Garage Door Replacement, Garage Door Installation, Garage Door Service, garage door prices
Gaudí’s first commission from the City of Barcelona was for a lamppost. With meticulous care and extra funding from his own pocket, he produced ornate candelabra that satisfied his professional dignity on his first public project, small as it was.
His first major works included the Casa Vicens, and Casa Milá, both commissioned by wealthy industrialists. The designs for both were reminiscent of the Arabic style, featuring repeating ceramic patterns and organic, cheap stone, and a slender minaret rising aloft. A garage door copying this style would be beautiful.
In 1882 Gaudí received the initial commission from Count Eusebi Güell, a man who would later become the architect’s close friend and life-long patron. It was the first commission, la Casa Güell that boosted the young architect from anonymity, with its Moorish influences but also its hints of Art Nouveau in the ironwork and the bizarre chimney forest on the roof.
The ambitious Güell Park blended wildly colored ceramics on undulating, bending shapes with living rock built right into the landscape. It was with this project that he perfected the slanting pillar that became his trademark. This trademark look can be echoed in a home by using wavelike facades, free-flowing windows, frosted glass garage doors, and curving balconies. Together, they caused an uproar.
Almost since the beginning of his career, Gaudí had been working on a project he had inherited back in 1883 from his ex-mentor Francisco Villar. He worked on the Sagrada Familia for 43 years. The soaring Cathedral was a synthesis of all of his styles, ranging from the ceramic, brightly adorned and whimsical tower tops to the austere, primitive style of the Death façade, from the sculpture-architecture of the Birth façade to the tilted, tree-like columns. His life-long affinity with nature is evident in the building that stands yet unfinished in the heart of Barcelona.
One afternoon, Gaudí was talking one of his customary walks when he was struck by a trolley car. No one recognized him in his shabby clothes, and he was transported to a local charity ward. By the time he was recognized, it was too late. After three days of lingering, Antoni Gaudí died on June 10, 1926. He was buried in the crypt of the Sagrada Familia, where he had toiled for so long, and brought to life his free-flowing naturalistic dreams of architectural creativity, in a style all his own that left a mark on he streets of Barcelona and in the hearts of her people.
Posted by ESP on Thursday, 24 February 2011
Tags: Garage Door, Garage Doors, Garage Door Opener, Garage Door Repair, Garage Door Replacement, Garage Door Installation, Garage Door Service, garage door prices
The little burb is a middle-class neighborhood where the lawns are green, the facades are uniform, and the driveways are filled with family sedans and soccer-mom minivans. A neighborhood in which toe-headed children run up and down the street, howling, and fathers push strollers filled with pink-faced infants, wrapped in blue blankets. Dacmen Avenue, lined with barely varying garage doors shimmers green in the spring and summer, gold and brown in the fall, and settles down with a grey haze for winter.
The pinkish house near the end of the block has a yellow garage door to match the bent, yellow hula hoop stuck in the big magnolia tree out front. In previous years, a home characterized by chalk art on the cement and rollerblades on the front walk, more recently by a bike left out and lights left on all night. There’s still a stack of old skates on the front porch rack, underneath the new layer of softball gloves and ping pong paddles. In the back there lives a knobby fig tree, fragrant in July, who loses her leaves and becomes and intimidating old hag in December.
This is a typical neighborhood, with typical home and very normal families. Little boxes on a hillside, little boxes full of ticky tacky. It's the definition of suburbia, seemingly all the same. But just one block over, zoning and ordinance rules change and suddenly there is a little bit of creativity, expression.
But things can be spiced up with a little originality. The house across the street from the hula hoop house has frosted windows on its garage door, a sleek futuristic metallic look. A house down the street has a front garden like a lush jungle, all pops of color and winding mosaic fences. There is room for expression here, and room for improvement.
Posted by ESP on Wednesday, 23 February 2011
Tags: Garage Door, Garage Doors, Garage Door Opener, Garage Door Repair, Garage Door Replacement, Garage Door Installation, Garage Door Service, garage door prices
We like to spend a lot of time finding and gathering pictures of amazing garage doors. Some amazing for their class or unique style, some for their clever use of windows, or boldly crass color choice, or classic fit with a home. Some we put up for their bold paint jobs, or cute decorations, or interesting choice of material.
However, no garage door style can hold a candle to this one.
Batman garage. It's classic, not trying too hard, like with a lot of other decoration or cutesy design attempts. It's simple, straightforward, and no-nonsense. BATMAN, it says, without the words. The garage door itself is a simple metal rollup, nothing fancy. But instead of breaking out the cash on something shmansy, this store-front owner decided to take a different route. This route requires a lot of guts, but can sometimes be pulled off. (Not recommended for homeowners!)
So what lies behind this door? Can it just be a regular store? Is it a cute, dorky comic book shop, or something completely unrelated? Is it a bat cave, full of instruments of crime fighting and tiny technological marvels? Is it a Marvel world filled with characters and heroes, villains and sidekicks, with revenge and lust and justice? If you open this door, what will you find?
Is this a call for help, a beacon out into the night, for someone to please come save us? Is this the Bat Signal? Or is it just a declaration? Batman here. Or: I like Batman. Or: I like bats. Or: come here, Batman. Let's tango. I'll fight you.
It is that sense of mystique and interest that really makes this door a success. A hello-kitty symbol just wouldn't do it. Even Superman doesn't have that low-down, angsty grit that Batman has, that inherent sense of mystery. We know how superman works. What we don't understand is the bat signal. That's what this is.
Posted by ESP on Tuesday, 22 February 2011
Tags: Garage Door, Garage Doors, Garage Door Opener, Garage Door Repair, Garage Door Replacement, Garage Door Installation, Garage Door Service, garage door prices
She looks up at the cold blue sky with one star, a planet maybe. She thinks, this sky is so huge it can lift you off your feet, sail off into it, oh God if only. This is the predawn sky that can’t be contained in the square of a broken window in a garage door, it seeps into everything, covers you in gloaming blue. This blue inkwashes your pale hands indigo, it gets in your hair, phosphorescent; it eats you it owns you it gets inside you where all the slitherling things live, where bright things and dark things are and turns them all watercolor blue. You breathe it in and out and taste your whole world and you say okay. Lungs still breathe. Things are okay.
This is the incandescent jejune bluenight that kisses you and is only flit-fleeting. This is the transitory sky that makes all the spindly building remnants go black black, black citadel spires, almost like the old skylines used to look; and in the cracks between the buildings along the horizon, across sleek garage doors, the white where the sun is going to come back soon.
She used to look forward to that part, used to like the odious crass pinks and oranges and even the reds, and the sunlight that smelts your eyelids to your cheeks.
Now she looks up and counts, ten minutes, maybe. Ten minutes until twilight welken dies, until that last shimmerwink planet star burns and turns its way out, leaves for the rest of the universe, out in the nebula cloud strings and Hubble-bright fairy lights of space, oh little planet star. What you do to me.
And when she says goodnight to the planet star, when the last of the blue unpaints itself from her skin, she says good morning to the undead. They have to move south, but that means leaving their safe-house at dawn. Goodnight, blue. Good morning, zombie fuckers.
Posted by ESP on Monday, 21 February 2011
Tags: Garage Door, Garage Doors, Garage Door Opener, Garage Door Repair, Garage Door Replacement, Garage Door Installation, Garage Door Service, garage door prices
Blackouts happen even in the nicest of neighborhoods. It's pretty much a foregone conclusion that your home will lose power at least once in the next few years. What if there is some sort of an emergency and you really have to leave, but you can't open your garage door to get your car because the power is out?
You should know that, even if power fails, you can open your garage door by hand. It only requires a little bit of knowledge and elbow grease.
Every garage door opener system comes with a manual open option, the key is to know where it is. Normally, it is a string or some sort of cord that dangles down from the metal tracks that run between the opener motor and the door itself. If you yank on that hard, you will likely hear a large popping or cracking sound, which is a signal that you have released the door from the electric opener and it is now free to be manipulated manually. Just take the door and force it open with your hands- it should move fairly easily. You are then free to pull out.
However, don't forget to reconnect your poor door to the electric mechanism when the power is back on, because when its not attached anyone can open it and steal the stuff in your garage. To re attach it, hit your garage door opener button, and wait for the track to begin to run. When that sound is over, pull the door open again, slowly, re-engaging with the system of pulleys that keep it in place. It will click when it is properly re attached.
