4x Quonset home-studio: 40 years of artistic simple living

i moved here on a quest for affordable space so i was in la and finally i just said you know i'm done with the road rage the craziness the traffic i'm just going to come to the desert and see what happens so for the first two years i was here i basically you know spent six to 16 hours a day seven days a week working on this space the good thing about these steel quonset hut buildings is that they won't burn rodents won't eat through it there's zero maintenance and they'll last you know a hundred years probably are we at a dead end here should we go around no okay no dead ends here only the beginning wow that's a great gate too well these are actually these panels were interlocking sections of billboards and when i got them they had anywhere from two to eight layers of billboard paper on them so we had to scrape off layer by layer so we recycle i try to recycle everything i bought the structures of the quonset huts knew the first one i got their end was after that i made my own end walls this is actually copper recycled from a local recycler you put a standard garage door on it yeah i got opaque glass because if you're in here in the winter it stays warmer so it's like a giant soji screen you know letting in this really wonderful diffused light okay i have to quickly open the door to this one to open the door to that one i'm a carpenter by trade and i do assemblage art so i came out here basically on a quest for affordable space right now it's cluttered because we're storing theater seats and things because we had live performances and film screenings and things here so the the good thing about these steel quonset hut buildings is that each one of these arches is a structural entity so you don't need structural walls holding up the middle it's huge yeah i know it's huge yeah it's got 20 just under 21 foot ceilings because i i wanted a loft but i didn't want it to feel closed in you should go up there and because it's there's a surprise here i'm sorry i just came up before you guys this is a recycled rolling staircase that's osha proved to be a rolling staircase but not approved to be a home staircase but you know i figured hey rules are rules if it works for this it can work for that wow you have enough space to loft a bedroom yeah this is like over 2 000 square feet and you know you could you could have you know loft spaces on either side and still have space in the middle oh no it's wonderful you know when it's not this hot the arches you can insulate with this eco insulation but it's super labor intensive i've built not only these four i've built close to 10 for other people in this high desert community originally there were takeoff on a military quonset hut kind of developed in world war one you know back then it was metal arches and pieces of steel but it was all nuts and bolts so in the military you've got a thousand guys available and you can have them put these buildings together you can use them and when you're moving or done you can unbolt them pack them up and take them with you so they became after world war ii they started using them mainly for you know military agriculture industrial uses at this time period people are using them to build homes out of each you put up your first arch and the next arch has this shape to it so it overlaps and waterproofs you know between them and then the bolts that come through have a rubber washer that you tighten down so that makes each bolt head basically waterproof you can do sometimes four to five arches in a day but that's kind of pushing it from experience we basically you can erect like the shell of a 30 foot building in about a week once the base plates are attached this is a metal base plate that has got a welded piece on the back that raises up so this goes over it and it bolts to it but eat this is in what they call an anchor bolt a j bolt that goes down into the concrete we're trying to get 30 feet of anchor bolts and there's one here there's one every foot so you know getting these precisely lined up is challenging but i tend to over build everything because you know next time there's an earthquake they're going to change everything and new rules so i try to be ahead of the game i actually installed all these beams and posts by myself with a hand crank genie lift the beams actually i got it at an auction at the military base and then treated them to kind of match the tone of the ones that are 100 years old using vinegar and rusty nails then you can take a brand new 2x4 and make it look 100 years old in a matter of minutes maybe accent and this is the best kitchen oh my gosh so the back is part of the quantity hat no that's uh some corrugated aluminum and then all of this is sort of industrial yeah restaurant you know stainless restaurant materials these two stainless steel were medical cabinets from the military base this looks like a piece of art actually this material which is the same as these walls are the insides of solar hot water heating panels i left the water connection on one and then because it's really kind of wafer thin i took a piece of abs plastic pipe and created a crown molding out of it and then this wacky door came from a wow probably a restaurant recycled restaurant door yeah no it's it's really weird it was hydraulic and it would automatically stay shut and you you'd push it and then you'd let go and it would really slowly soft and then the hydraulics went bad and you'd push as hard as you could to get in but then it would like slam and shake the wall so i finally took the whole thing apart and just made it so it wouldn't like grab somebody's leg and break their ankle but this is the bathroom this was a restaurant dough mixing container and then this is my this is my nightlight this is great the tub it was too expensive to get a stainless steel shower enclosure so my friend had this tub sitting in his yard so i talked him out of it and we threw it in here just so the inspector would sign off the whole building and then you know i still you know he was just walked in and was wow you know so he just like where's the [Music] thing so then over here you can see the possibilities here with the glass yeah with the plexiglass yeah i acquired the plexiglass lexan and said oh well let's because it faces north it doesn't get direct sunlight so it won't yellow or age in time so you know you just got to use materials efficiently and you know you can do wonderful things with it it's amazing how the industrial look works so well with the landscape here yeah you know that's why i'm a fan of rust so here this siding which is metal almost looks like a stone is so sweet yeah well this i found at the recycler as well and in 2006 there was a big fire up in pioneer town area well this was probably somebody's beige painted metal outbuilding that burned up the insurance company took sometimes up to a year before they'd settle and it would just sit out there and the rain once it got burned through would rust it and this is the patina that it came with but it's never changed so it's it is what it is and now this is kind of an outdoor dining room yeah right yeah these are just old tables well at one point they had like a formica top but in the sun they finally started peeling up the edges and then one of them blew up in the wind and cracked and so i just peeled them off just you know so then over here it keeps going yeah you have another living room over here yeah you like all the same materials i mean the airstream yeah well it just blended in with what's going on here so it just kind of made sense both architecturally and you know no maintenance [Laughter] so this little trailer is called gitmo rips the paint off of the whole interior it was originally painted this kind of olive green and then somebody had it and decided they wanted it sky blue so they took house painting rollers painted it and every pop rivet was a drip and i realized no matter what color i painted it was going to look horrible so i stripped one little section and it was like oh this is too cool so i ended up i had to use chemical stripping 46 hours worth to strip the interior but i had to do it and now it's kind of like jules verne on the inside you know it's like a submarine or something yeah i got a shipping container for storage uh i've just filled it up and so i was at one point thinking i might make this the library but i have to have a excess sale because i've accumulated so much i really don't have the time or the desire to build more buildings this one's big it's lower so i didn't notice how big it was yeah well it's same width as the big one but not as high it's five feet shorter so it looks a little more squat and wider almost okay yeah did you put this up oh how yeah you do this it's huge how did you build this with just help these are huge yeah well i have this thing called a genie lift that will raise 16 feet in the air yeah it's it's got you know it cranks and you lay the arch sideways on it and then you crank the thing it's got little bars down there that raise the thing up and it'll you can go up to you know where you can actually lift an arch above the one that's already there and drop it down on there we basically you can erect like the shell of a 30-foot building in you know about a week this is your art chat yeah this is my work shed that's actually that thing that says art i found it at the recycler it had two-thirds of an m and it was a walmart sign cut in half and i stripped this thing so i actually turned walmart into art done a lot of art pieces in the past using these antique wooden printing block letters this is actually a 131 line poem by a vietnam vet called first tour the bullet shells are representative of people who went to war what was i in vietnam yes i was lucky i came home what was it like i remember i remember the cold the rain and how it intensified the horror of being alone i remember relief relief that the day had come and the fear of no tomorrow older than most at 21 but less afraid i boarded the plane for my first tour on the bird we all sat in a quiet anxious old separateness my mind raced with visions of firefights friends pain girls fear laughter do you like this landscape oh yeah no i love it you know i can't imagine living anywhere else you

Channel: Kirsten Dirksen

Views: 384,762

Rating: 4.9333487 out of 5

Keywords: quonset hut, quonset hut home, joshua tree, simple living, desert living, quonset hut construction, prefab construction, DIY home construction, work live space, industrial construction, art residence, container construction, airstream home, recycled materials, recycled metal, recycled windows, salvaged bathtub, salvaged restaurant sink, bobby furst, furstwurld, creative wonderland, quonsetopia, genie lift, quonset compound, villa quonset, joshua tree quonset, art

Id: hgQlvJ2cNBo

Length: 15min 27sec (927 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 25 2021