So my buddy Jason Kujda had wanted me to take part in his wedding as an usher and thought he'd be clever about asking me.
He is always asking me to help him debug his web projects and this one particular morning he asked me if I could check on something. I loaded up a few different tools (namely Firebug) and started prodding away at his markup. Everything looked okay and I couldn't find any problems. He kept insisting there was a problem. Unfortunately I was late to get going and didn't really have time to be messing with his code. After getting frustrated, he asked if perhaps I could just take a look at the source and see if I noticed anything in particular.
I did. Ahh that Kujda, always full of tricks.
 My invitation to be an usher in the Kujda wedding.
The HTML comment read:
Ludlow,
I would have much preferred if I could do this in person. But, you didn't come in town last week.
Amanda and I would be honored if you could be a part of our wedding in December.
I would like for you to be one of our ushers. Which, for a single person, is ideal. As you will have opportunity to greet all guests and already be in fancy attire.
This will require some conformation to wedding standards on your part, but I think you can handle it for a day. =]
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So I’ve talked to a bunch of different people about various design ideas, and was fortunate enough to have a friend who works at Cotera-Reed in Austin. As of today, we’re going to be using them as the architectural firm in charge of designing and overseeing the construction of the Axel Warehouse.
They are a fantastic firm with a super impressive resume. Most people in Austin will recognize their work as they designed Austin City Hall (in addition to a number of other local landmarks). You can see some of their projects on their website: http://www.coterareed.com/
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As of today, we have selected Nobel Surveying and Engineering Works, LLC to be our civil engineer for the Axel project. This firm came highly recommended to Preston Graham (my general contractor and president of Fig & Co. Builders). We had a few different meetings with the founder of Nobel and had his firm run a few different site-plan ideas for us - really just to get an idea what we’re looking at.
To those not familiar with this process, the civil engineering firm is required by the City of Austin for commercial development projects. They will design and oversee dozens of city-required outlets such as water hookups, parking lots, erosion control, landscaping requirements, impervious cover laws, and on and on.
The civil engineering part of commercial development in Austin can unfortunately be a very expensive piece of the puzzle. The sad part as a resident of Austin and small-business owner, is that the civil engineering cost structure of a million dollar building is roughly the same as a small facility like ours. Nevertheless, it is a required component if we’re going to move forward.
We are hoping that they will be able to design our property in such a way that the City of Austin will not require us to have water retention ponds, but that remains to be seen.
The three images above show three different concepts for how a simple warehouse could be constructed on the land. In particular, they consider the amount and type of impervious cover that would be needed (given parking requirements, sidewalk requirements, and etc.) and figure how large the retention ponds theoretically would be.
The plan will now be to alter the building in such a way so that we can avoid those requirements.
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For the past 6 years, my good friend Jason Kujda has put together a marvelous ski trip to Breckenridge, Colorado for he and all of his friends. He handles every component of it and even lets people pay in installments. Since he has been busy this year building up his career (namely saving money so that he can finally get married), he decided that he was no longer going to do the ski trip.
After some discussion, I finally decided that I would go ahead and take it over and last October announced to everyone that I would be handling it this year. The following is the text that I sent out to everyone:
The rumors that you have no doubt heard by now are true. The annual SkiKujda trip has been successfully hijacked in a carefully planned and executed coup d'etat. 2011 promises to be bigger and better than all other years combined.
 Front of the skiludlow card everyone was given
The Basic Plan
 Back of the skiludlow card everyone was given
What the trip includes
For about $650 (probably less), you will be getting 4 nights in a condo, basic ski rentals for 3 days (upgraded skis and snowboards will be more), a 3 day lift ticket (also good for one day at A-Basin, Vail, Beaver Creek, and Keystone), and a rental car (with gas included) to get you to and from the mountain. There is a good chance of a few additional surprises too.
As always, any excess money will be refunded appropriately. There is no attempt to make any money off of this trip.
And since there has always been a t-shirt for the occasion, this is the outlined version that I sent off to the printer of the first skiludlow shirt.
 The periodic table of elements with some slight modifications
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Less than two months after the property was professionally leveled and cleared, we are already starting to see a layer of grass come in. In the evening sun, it really makes the property look warm and inviting. In my opinion, it looks much more like a public park than an industrial compound. I still have no idea just how we’ll be landscaping the property. I’m not particularly in love with the traditional grasses that are so common to the south and central Texas regions. On the other hand, it may prove to be far too expensive to cover the property in any type of greenery, regardless of how nice it is.
To put it into some perspective, an average suburban home sits about 1/4 acre piece of land. 1/4 acre of land is equivalent to a little less than 11,000 sq ft. If you figure that the footprint of the suburban home is roughly 1,500 sq ft, another 2,000 sq ft for a garage and driveway, and finally another 1,000 sq ft for exterior walkways, paved patios, and so on, you’re really only left to cover about 6,500 sq ft of property (and that doesn’t even account for mulching, tree beds, and other similar landscaping amenities).
By contrast, the Axel Project sits on roughly 62,000 sq ft of land. The footprint will take up about 5,000 sq ft, and the remaining paved areas taking up about 7,000, still leaving about 40,000 sq ft of land needing to be landscaped. That’s the equivalent of about SIX suburban lots.
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The Geotechnical Report was one of the reports that I was very nervous about. We hired Holt Engineering to carry out the work, and they definitely provided us with a quick turn-around.
Basically what these guys do are setup a giant pile-driver in select locations on the subject tract (namely where the building will be), and bore into the ground. Depending on what they find, they’ll go anywhere from 10-30 feet down. It might not sound like a big deal, but they collect this tube of soil (its length is equal to the depth they bore) and then they analyze it in a lab.
Basically they’re looking to see what kind of material the ground is comprised of. Because this property is situated in east Austin, there was a fear that it might be softer clay instead of solid bedrock. Thankfully that was not at all the case and as it turns out, Axel has a very solid and shallow bedrock formation below it.
This is FANTASTIC news because the ground composition could significantly impact the cost of the foundation. The softer the ground is, the more money that has to be invested into the foundation to keep it from shifting. Not only that, but because the warehouse will have the weight spread out with steel beams, a softer ground would mean that deep pilings could be necessary at all major load points. These two factors alone could change the foundation costs from say $4.00 / sq ft to $10.00+ / sq ft. That’s a pretty significant price difference when you’re talking about having a foundation of 5,000 sq ft.
Included below are the soil reports we were provided.
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