Including the Kitchen Sink

While we're on the subject of houses a friend of mine recently saw and fell in love with one of Nikki Brennan's lovely homes, the Terra. The house was duly purchased and set up at my friend's property and now has ensued the great fun of furnishing and fitting it up.

This particular house had a perfect-sized nook near the curving staircase to set up a kitchen, which my friend decided she wanted. We tried out both my Full and Compact sized kitchens (you can get the floor templates for 0L at my store on the third floor where the kitchens are displayed), and we discovered the Compact size was a near perfect fit, with just a few upgrades.


Our upgrades included adding the pantry/broom cupboard to fill the remaining corner on the right, stretching the floor tile to fit perfectly plus selecting a new grey flagstone texture, and I did up a new color of beautiful tawny oak cabinetry to complement the colors present in the stone, stucco and flooring of the house.

The result was a very pleasing, warm corner of the house for socializing with friends!

This kitchen includes a working sink, dishwasher and fridge doors and the new pantry/cupboard doors open and close with appropriate sounds too. Perfect place to store the broom! As well, there is a drinks server behind the stained glass cabinet door, just Touch and order. The kitchen provides both an overhead pendant light plus smaller versions of the same over the eating bar.
My friend decided to round out her kitchen with four stools and we applied the tawny wood texture to those too. The stools feature a menu control from which one can select 4 sits.

I'll be doing up both my Full and Compact Kitchens in this beautiful tawny oak wood for general sale and they'll be available up on the third floor of my Home Furnishings building in Goun. These kitchens are provided with Mod/Copy permissions too so textures and sizing can be adjusted for a custom fit that looks built to order.

Barefoot and Busy in or rather, at, Barefoot!

One of the things that has had my attention during the past two months has been participating in getting the homes/commercial buildings platform of my friend Jeremey Ryan up and going. I got detailed to furnish the show homes that Jer has been getting ready for sale, plus, he very kindly allowed me to rez up and show two of my own houses.

Please do come and visit. Barefoot Homes & Designs is a very neat place, well designed and built never mind the great houses and commercial builds which are available. It's just like a little town itself with street lamps and signs, welcome area, golf carts to drive around in as you tour around checking out the different displays.(no public toilets yet but I'll keep working on Jer on that one!)

Here's one of my houses, the West Coast Classic:



Isn't that slick with the street signs showing exactly where the house is on the corner of Residential Lane and Snafu Avenue?

The West Coast Classic is a contemporary 1 1/2 story design with living room/kitchen and patio/verandah areas down and a bedroom loft with built in shower up the ramp stair case. It comes with some built in lighting features in the front hall and a dome light outside the front door. There are privacy window features and door locking included.


I've furnished this house with some laid back funky style texture change furniture featuring light pine wood supports and rails and there is bedroom as well as living room furnishings available in this design. I'm still working on a couple cuddle chaise to go with the bedroom furniture. Right now, you can buy the living room furniture and the bed on site at the house display or it's also available at my main True North Designs store in Goun in the home furnishings building. On site you'll also notice a curved front oak and stone fireplace and a custom fitted kitchen are available if you are interested in having those to put in your West Coast Classic house!

Next time I'll talk about my Kobe asian bungalow and also show some peeks at some of Jer's wonderful houses that are also open for display and available for purchase.

Has it been that long already?!

Wow, it's been a couple months since I posted! Sorry bout that, it's been a crazy busy two months, both in 2nd life and 1st life as well.

I've made a LOT of new stuff but before I get to catching you up on that, I'm going to show you a collaborative effort I'm working on right now with one of my great SL building buddy friends. If you've never tried doing a collaborative product, you should! It's great fun and the flow of creativity and ideas is very stimulated by this approach to dreaming up new and interesting things.

Here's a whimsical pic:



The chair is Billy's concept and construction. This chair is GREAT! It's very to scale. You can actually walk right up the front ladder affair to stand on the foot platform which is fantastic in SL. Much more realistic than having to fly up to sit in the guard's seat.

My primary job of course is to animate it and to that end I designed a set of animated sits. There are five Touch cycled sits in the guard's seat, plus a perch in one of the arms, a cute loungey sit on the foot platform and as you can see in the picture, I got a little carried away and decided one just had to be able to goof off and swing by the knees on one of the supports! So, even if the guard is bored out of his skull, at least he won't be lonely and a few friends can hang out with him while they all shoot the tropical breeze together :-)

We've added some sculpted bits with a beach umbrella attached right to the chair, a nice striped towel draped over the back and a lifeguard's float. Also, there's a nice, authentic looking Duty sign, mildly rusted, attached. 25 prims..not bad eh?

I'm also going to round out our package with some water animations, float ball, inner tube and I'm still working on a very special animation ball for out on the water, hehe, but you will see this product out there and available very soon!

If you'd like to have a peek before then, do stop by True North Beach&Patio.

Back soon with more True North doings.

Got Your Irish Up?

Wow, another couple of weeks have fled past. I've been one busy SLer. Have completed a decorating project for Prim Perfect and you'll see some articles about that in this month's Prim Perfect magazine. This involved a cozy little townhouse set in Dublin2. If you've never visited the original Dublin and this Dublin2, do search it on Map and hop over, a GREAT place to walk around and enjoy the ambience.

The deco project of course generated a LOT of new things, and for the month of March, I've got that all set up in a neat display on the main floor of my Home Furnishings building at True North Designs. There are several MLP animated pieces of furniture to try out so come on down and play! You'll especially enjoy the bedjumping animation :)

Also, as Paddy's day approaches, I've produced some new jewelry just for the occasion, and that's available at the Dellybeams outlet at True North as well. You'll see that as you head in the door of the Dellybeams/DellyciousWear building, to the left of the big court clock. Dellybeams has undergone a little reconstruction too as I've made some new men's jewelry items and needed just a bit more room to squeeze stuff in. I know how men love to run in, get what they want, and run out of stores too, so I've made a little section just for them, then they don't have to hunt through that girlie stuff to find it! The new stuff for guys is just awaiting some box art which a friend is doing up for me and it'll be ready to go!

During March, when you come down to the store in Goun, please take a minute to do my store survey. Answer just the one question, and the big green question mark will give you a cute black shamrock ottoman gratis!

Getting from Here.. to There!

Eeeek! Nearly 10 days since I last posted, very naughty. Okay. I've been busy puttering around the homestead at True North, fixing stuff and some new construction.


First, we have a new store teleport system installed at True North. For awhile I've had some thoughts about improving signage, traffic flow and such at the main store and thought this would help. There are about 10 of these things located around at the various areas.

Now, I really did build True North to be a pleasant walkabout, so I have also provided a Site Map that people can Touch and get a copy of. So for those who still prefer to walk around the place, they have a little pictorial guidance.


Hopefully, navigating around and finding stuff is going to be a piece of cake now for True North visitors.

~*~

There's nothing like a new building project to get me absorbed and forgetting all about this blog and just about everything else!

As of now, we have an expansion to the Fountain Court, in the form of a 100 meter square upper platform - henceforth to be designated the Upper Fountain Court. I've been busy setting up some of my larger fountains there, along with the waterfalls and high water jets in their own long marble pool. It's still under construction, and I'll be adding things as time goes along, but perfectly safe to go up and explore :)

The smaller, more compact fountains/water features will remain on the ground level Fountain Court. So...how to get from here to there.. a long distance teleport of course. And those are now installed as well. The up version is sitting right beside the store teleporter at the Fountain Court - it's a little birdbath type affair with a water ball in it. Touch the water ball and awwaaaay we go!

This was hilarious - started off sitting on the thing at an impossible angle, but finally figured out the sit rotation so one is actually sitting at a dignified angle upon landing at the destination. There's a duplicate up on the Upper Fountain Court platform for returning to the ground, both suitably signed so hopefully people can figure out how to use them!

Oh, and along the way, there's a brand new fountain offering, the Stone Angel Fountain, which features a sculpted praying, kneeling angel. I've set that out on the lower Fountain Court for its SL debut!

Bagged!

Well, the lion is bagged, the fountain is done, the customer is happy with it!
Can't be more satisfied than that.

Here's the neat crouching lion I made. I did this in SculptStudio, what a fantastic tool and whoever made that is a genius!










Here it is full view at night. Very stunning.

Speaking of stunning, I got bagged from the Xstreet Forums today! LOL. I think I've posted to those Forums maybe 50 times total in over two years..if that:-) heh, never had time to post incessant commentary there or participate in the usual gab and whine, but today I posted a parcel for sale and for the second time, forgot to put FOR SALE right in the title - so since it's the second time and that means I..'repeatedly' contravened their Forum posting rules, I got suspended for seven days from their Forum. Some people really do have their heads in dark places don't you agree? Now, I can't relate this to LL recently buying out Xstreet because before the merger, old SLX was just as silly and childish as this. Maybe the merger will improve the moronism we see there that passes for posting rules in that forum.. or maybe not.

No problem I got plenty to do in the next week and am sure I will live through it!

Lion Hunting in SL

See? Told you I was a bit of a lazy one when it comes to keeping up this sort of stuff. I've been busy the past few days doing RL (sigh), and then also, I have a new project! Some guy investigates my Fountain Court and decides I'm the one to build him a fountain to decorate his shopping sim. So, I go and look. This place is ENORMOUS, with this huge main building that looks something like the palace of Versailles and a whole mall of shops and underground stores and BIG. EMPTY.SPACE.. right in front of his main store. That's where the fountain is going to be. And not just any fountain. I got shown a variety of photographs and samples. This is going to be a B.I.G fountain, with lots of water streams, critters, human figures if possible, lights! heh, maybe.




Here's a shot of the work-in-progress.

Did I mention, it's going to be BIG?! There's little bitty me standing on the rim to give you an idea of scale.



I decided to go for gargoyles spitting the water spouts as they are a pretty classic figure on these old world type fountains and here is a shot of the cutie I got from a sculpty-maker friend, Bethi Cattaneo (great gargoyle Bethi!)

Isn't he great? However, middle of job consultation with the prospective owner reveals he wasn't greatly keen on gargoyles, so I'm on the hunt for a decent looking lion to incorporate into this fountain, then I'll script up a menu so the owner can adjust all the water particles and sound and that should do it!

I'll try to check in regularly during my safari!