Tag: Home Life

We had a change recently in the little community where I now live. One of my immediate neighbours – who had been there for over two years – decided it was time to move on. As a result, her little island was up for grabs, and this being a popular location, it was long before it was snapped up.

My new neighbours – whom I’ve admittedly let to meet – set about re-working the land, and as a result got me thinking about my place.

As regular readers might know, I recently revised things at home in order to get a better fit for my burgeoning interest in SL flying and boating and to give friends room to moor their boats when visiting. While I was pleased with what I had, things still didn’t feel entirely “right”. That’s where the new neighbours come in: as a part of landscaping there island, they utilised cliff-like rock forms to assist in giving the land an elevation change, and that set a little light bulb off in my head.

Axel Bergan produces some low LI materials-enabled cliffs which are sold through Novocaine Islay under the InVerse brand. At 30×13 metres, copyable, resizeable and re-linkable and at an LI of 4 (8 if you want added vegetation on them) they represent great value. So, with my box of cliffs tucked under one arm, I set about fiddling with things.

Without wibbling on at great length, the outcome (which has taken the last couple of days to get sorted), is to flip the overall layout of the island around – boasts and planes now sit at the north end, the house at the southern end, elevated on a rocky plateau of cliffs. As my garden is important to me (I’m not at all green-fingered in the physical world, so I compensate for things in-world), that now sits between house and moorings, also slightly elevated above the latter, but sitting below the former, with a further small elevation sitting between it and the moorings, where I have a broad lawn and the helipad (the lawn allows me to indulge in a little SL skydiving).

The garden retains the terrace and gezebo, but the reworking has allowed me to add further flowers and wild plants. To link it with the other sections of the island “above” and “below” it, I picked up Alex Bader’s Mesh boardwalk set, and used that to create steps linking everything. As an added bonus, this also allowed me to add a little cliff top walk over a rocky promontory I added to the east side of the island, and include some additional piers for mooring the float ‘planes.

As a result of stunting things around, I also decided to retire the “frame house” I’ve occupied since moving to the USS regions. While I like the build and got the entire structure down to just 24 LI, I felt the repositioning of things warranted a change. So I pulled the Guest House out of my Fallingwater inspired build out of its box and set about re-purposing it. For some reason, the version I found dated from 2012, so needed a fair amount of work. Thanks to a little trimming and the used of convex hull, I reduced the initial LI from 109 to 44. With a little help refurnishing the house from Cory Edo,

All told, the LI for the “new” place is 885. When you consider that precisely 300 of that is boats and ‘planes, you can probably guess why I’m pleased with things. I might even leave it like this for a while!

As a result of expanding my selection of SL aircraft with a Beechcraft C90 and C33, both from DSA (I’ve really got this SL flying bug rather bad!), I decided I wanted to have one or other of them rezzed and ready to go at my little home island; after all, what’s the point of having something like an aeroplane (or a boat – or two for that matter) if you’ve constantly got to pull it out of your purse / suitcase / handbag / attaché case (or however you think of your inventory) to use it, when you have the space to show it off?

Truth be told, I’ve actually had an on-and-off nagging issue with the design of my little island for a while now. As regular readers may know, part of the island has been laid out to provide a stand for my PBY-6A Catalina, with a south-facing ramp to provide access to the water for take-offs. The problem here has been that the ramp led into what is pretty much a main navigation channel, while at the same time made the southern end of the parcel pretty much unusable.

Given this, I’d been thinking of re-arranging things for a while, but until the arrival of my new toys, I didn’t really have the motivation to get on with it. However, that I had been thinking of things did give me a loose idea of what I wanted to do before I started pulling things apart and gluing them back together.

First off, the Catalina stand and ramp got rotated through 90-degrees. This required a certain amount of fiddling, as the parcel is fairly narrow, so I had to spend time cutting and rotating and generally faffing with a prim to get a ramp that fit within the parcel boundary, didn’t cut too deeply into the land and which wasn’t so ridiculously steep the Catalina wouldn’t be able to climb it without grounding the hull and getting stuck.

Once done, this freed-up the southern end of the island so I could make better use of that end of the parcel. As a result, and without dragging this all out, I’ve been able to add moorings for one of the additional ‘planes (which will be the C33  Debonair by default) and a place where visitors can moor their boats without a lot of additional faffing around on my part and hanging things in the air to make space for them. The move gave also me the opportunity to widen the water basin between the north and south sides of the island, providing additional mooring space there, if needed.

An unexpected outcome of this work was a reduction in the overall LI of all the structural elements on the south end of the island; not by a lot, but enough to allow me to add to the garden while still keeping a very decent ceiling of “free” capacity on the land. At the moment I’m thinking of adding a screen of small trees to visibly separate house & gardens from my budding “airport”, to give the former a greater feeling of privacy on those days when flying and boating aren’t that important.

So am I happy with the outcome? Overall, yes. At least until the next time the urge to glue prims together and play with mesh comes over me :).

 

I’ve been a tad quiet on the blogging front as I’ve been in the process of moving house. This wasn’t actually something I’d planned, having been more than happy living on a corner parcel of a region in the United Sailing Sims; but there’s this Catalina flying boat I recently came across, and have, quite frankly, fallen in love with.

I had been content to simply pull the Cat out of inventory when wanting to fly it, but then Terag Ershtan pointed me towards Josh Noonan, who produces paint kits for a number of aircraft, including the Catalina, one of which represents the aircraft in Cousteau Society colours, which I had to have. And the plane looks so good in the colours, I wanted a place I could leave it parked out and visible … and the house move grew from that … !

I’m still within the United Sailing Sims and not far from Blake Sea, but I now have my own little island. This came to me by chance; I had actually looked at it prior to it becoming available, and thought it might be perfect; however it was at that time already rented. Then Nber informed me it was about to become available, so talk about serendipity!

The move hasn’t seen me change the house very much – I’ve kept to the same design I re-worked recently, and simply added a few more trees and plants around the garden and the land. The layout of the island leads itself perfectly to my having a parking area for the Catalina, and also provided the ideal spot to re-position the main mooring area for a boat. Admittedly, the Lady of Calas 2 was too big for the latter, but the land was perfect for cutting to make a space for Lady Of Calas, my E-Tech Sparrow, and without really altering the shape of the island too much in the process.

Alex Bader’s rustic wall came in handy for creating retaining walls around parts of the island, helping to give additional form (I think) to the place, their aged look hopefully suggesting the house has been situated on an island once given over to an older stone build of some description, the foundations now having been put to new use.

The south side of the island is given over to the parking area and ramp for the Catalina. This has footpaths and flower beds (Kayle Matzerath’s brilliant Lumenaria mesh flowers again) running around it, and a large sort-of terrace area which might come in handy for something at some point. I’ve just no idea what… The Catalina handles the ramp very well, and I’m getting used to the relatively small area in which to turn it around following a flight.

The total LI for the house, grounds and wildlife is 501, with the boat, Catalina and helicopter accounting for another 233 and my cat & his accoutrements claiming for a further 35. All of which, if I say so myself, isn’t bad, and leaves me with a comfortable buffer of additional land capacity should I need it.

I just hope the neighbours don’t object to the noise from the Catalina when I’m coming and going by air!

Seeing Liara’s materials-enabled build of Le Botanique made me realise that, push comes to shove, I’ve not been entirely satisfied with the current layout of my little corner of Second Life I call home since the last time I messed around with it. In particular, I’ve had a feeling for quite a while that the garden lacks something.

While I didn’t want to try to emulate Liara’s work – I’m under no illusions that my creative skills could ever extend that far – there is no denying that the layout of Le Botanique went a fair way in inspiring me to re-vamp my parcel (well, as much as the need to keep with the overall theme of the estate would allow!).

The first thing I wanted to do was re-arrange the house so that it made better use of the land. While I’ve always liked the stepped design of the place, the fact is that on so small a parcel it leaves a reasonable chunk of land going to waste behind the lounge area, and which is really only good for plonking down a tree, as anything else would be all but obscured. Fortunately, due to the modular approach I’d taken to designing the house, updating it only required a couple of minutes. All I had to do was slide the lounge back behind the bedroom, remove a pillar and two wooden sections, and then lengthen a wall. Simples.

Next came a shameless bout of “borrowing” from Liara in the form of sitting the house on its own little “island” bounded on two sides by water and the other two by the wall along the parcel boundaries.

This allowed for the splitting of the huge terrace which lay to the front of the house (and which saw little use anyway), so I can have a smaller, more functional terrace acting as a jetty for boats, linked to the house by a wooden bridge. On the west side of the house, in another shameless bout of borrowing from Liara, three stepping-stones offer the means to cross the water and reach the revamped garden.

These stepping-stones lead directly to my Piano Terrace which, oddly enough given the name, is the new home for my faithful piano. This sits under a wood lattice supported by four stout beams hung with lanterns, sharing the space with a patio seat, a set of wrought iron chairs and a table offering a place to play backgammon (a game I very much enjoy in the physical world, alongside carrom, which I started playing as a result of our many visits to Sri Lanka), and a large mesh fireplace (my apologies to Cory Edo for tearing apart a copy of her lovely mesh Rustic Pavilion in order to create this!).

Beyond the walls surrounding the terrace is the rest of the garden, a mix of flowerbeds, wild flowers, shrubs and ferns, through which a couple of grassy paths wind. One of these links the terrace to the wooden helipad (no home should ever be without a helipad and helicopter!), and the other linking the helipad to the jetty. Lilies and cattails help finish things up, floating on the water around the house and hugging it edge.

I’m not going to pretend the finished result comes anywhere near Le Botanique in terms of beauty or appearance; that really isn’t my intent. But as something which has more of a natural look as feel to it, and which (to me at least) looks a far more inviting environment in which my little collection of Morgan Garret’s marvellous birds seem more at home, I’m pretty happy with the “finished” look. Because helicopter blades and trees tend not to get on together very well, I perhaps haven’t added quite as many trees as might otherwise have been the case, but I’ve included enough to provide some shade over and around the house and close to the piano terrace.

The land capacity for the parcel is 800, of which I’ve used 635 – 159 of which belong to the boat and helicopter. Take these out along with the helipad (5 LI), and there’s obviously a lot more scope for flora to be added should I want to go further (no spinning rotors to worry about for a start!). As it is, mesh and the use of convex hull helped keep down the overall LI, and as two of the great pleasures of living on Blake Sea is the amount of space it offers for boating and flying, I’d rather have the boat and helicopter in-world than garaged in inventory awaiting use; so I’m reasonably happy with things as they are for now.

Which is not to say I won’t still be fiddling with things this time next week!

I recently blogged about changes to my parcel on Blake Sea and doing more to landscape it decently. Turns out that post was a little premature; at the time I wrote it, I still wasn’t really happy with things, but the creative muse had decided to the take a few days off, leaving me bereft of ideas.

Since then, I’ve had time to play and re-work things a little more – which is part of the reason blog posts have been a little sporadic of late (the other being RL and sorting out things for Christmas and New Year with family and all). The place still isn’t entirely finished, but I’m approaching a point where I’ll be reasonably comfortable with it and happy to let the rest fall into place over time.

The main bits of additional work have been to add a decent mesh river course (from a kit by Flea Yatsenko), move the bridge and wooden deck, and lay some new paths which in turn allowed me to do more with the flower beds.

The river now more naturally splits the parcel into two – or at least, that’s the way I look at it 🙂 – which has allowed me to improve the look and feel of the river bank alongside the house with new paths and flowerbeds. The far side of the river is a little less organised, with trees and few ruined walls. It’s not quite as I’d like it to be, and could benefit from ferns or long grass, but I’ve yet to find anything that has sufficient caught my eye.

With a total land capacity of 800 prims, I set myself a ceiling of 500 for the work, of which some 246 was already accounted for by the house, furnishings and decor and also by my cruiser, Lady of Calas (157 prims on its own), leaving me 254 with which to play. Right now, the total count stands ay 491, so I’m feeling a little pleased with myself. A couple of things which have really helped along the way: the convex hull physics shape and mesh, both of which can help greatly reduce the land impact of a build.

I’ve written in the past about the ability of convex hull physics to help reduce LI / prim count by up to a half, depending on the complexity of the build in  question. Coincidentally, when I wrote that piece, I was using convex hull on the house I have now, reducing part of the structure from a LI of 32 to just 18.

Continue reading “Home and garden … again” →

I decided to take time off from blogging & exploring for a day and focus on things at my home on Blake Sea. Having seen a number of outstanding home and garden designs recently, I felt more could be done with my own place, so I took the day off for more involved blogging to see what I could do both within the constraints of the parcel size (2688 sq m), capacity (800 prims) and the requirements of the estate covenant (which limits things like terraforming, build types, etc).

The first thing I knew I needed to do was to re-work the house; when I moved in, the orientation of the build was such that the bedroom faced out over the sea, and the lounge sat towards the back of the land and faced into the parcel, something I’ve wanted to revise for a good while now, so the lounge would be more forward and facing the sea.

Once this was done, it was time to get to work on sorting out what else I wanted. This was actually a case of trial and error, as it turned out to be another of those situations where I hadn’t the foggiest notion of what I actually wanted; just a vague idea of paths, trees, flowers and water all somehow mixed together. Inspiration finally hit when I decided to take out the wooden dock I’d built for the Lady of Calas, my little E-Tech Sparrow cruiser. With that out of the way, I could re-work the house further and introduce a couple of stepped terraces down to the water’s edge, the lowermost of which could also form the quay for Lady of Calas?

It was a pretty simple idea, but one which let me get around the issue of terraforming, as it meant I could add walls and planters to the terraces, offering lots of opportunity to display flowers and add colour and have to worry about tweaking the land in order for things to look right. A shopping spree also saw me splurge a little as I picked-up some items from some of my favourite designers: Alex Bader, Cory Edo, Eko Zhong and Kayle Matzerath (I still love Kayle’s Luminaria build for Fantasy Fayre).

I don’t pretend the finished article matches up to anything like Crystal Oak Falls. I’m not even sure it is finished; I still have some capacity I might yet use; at the very least, there are some Koi Carp boxed somewhere in my inventory which may end-up in the pond, and I’m having further ideas about making the gardens somewhat more “formal”. But is it is, I’m pretty happy with what I’ve managed to achieve, hopefully without bending the estate rules *too* much in the process.  As it is, the house is now decently oriented, and I’ve given myself a little more organised space around the house through the use of the terraces, including finding a nice new home for my piano. I’ve also gained a new outdoor seating area out over the water on the far side of the parcel.

There are a few more things I might do over the next few days in order to refine things further, but for now, methinks it is time to get back to blogging!