It's needless to say that there are many barns in various shapes and sizes all around. Many are in bad shape. Please don't make the mistake of buying one that is labeled a unique fixer upper opportunity. Don't fool yourself. If a barn has gotten into the shape where the boards are falling off the sides, unless you're buying it for parts, my suggestion is to leave it alone. By the time the boards start falling off, there's major flaws. The main trouble would probably be that the girts are rotting and the fasteners (nails) are turning loose.
When I build my home from an old centennial barn, there wasn't even a handful of books and reference websites available on the subject. And when I talked with contractors on the subject, the most common response I got was a blank stare. Fortunately I was able to talk to some barn builders that had been in the trade for decades and were willing to share ideas on how it could be done.
One of the most daunting tasks was to repair the weather damage and remove the layers of dirt that had accumulated over the years. My particular barn was used to shelter horses and a few milk cows.
There are two methods of converting a barn.
The first method is to use standard residential construction practices, essentially making the barn into a standard construction home. Nine times out of ten after this type of renovation takes place, the barn no longer looks like a barn but looks more like a stylized residence. And the cost with this method sometimes exceeds standard residential construction.
The second method and the one my wife and I chose to use, employed the same materials the barn was built with. I went to the local saw mill and bought rough sawn boards to make up the interior walls and floors. Even the doors and windows were hand built with this type of method. We just made sure the house was well insulated and all the cracks were closed. This method saved us thousands of dollars and kept the charm of the old barn intact.
Tim Davis is a veteran Architectural Designer who also teaches architecture and drafting over the internet http://houseplandrafting101.net. He is currently in the process of writing an Ebook entitled "How to Turn a Barn into a Home". The info page for updates on this ebook can be found at http://draftingservice.us/barnhomes
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( 2.9 / 196 )Have you ever been surfing around trying to find a piece of software, ebook, certain type of service you need to promote your site, or whatever? Sure you have. Or at least many of you have. So you find something on Google that looks interesting and click on it. So what do you find more times than not? You find some sales page that goes on and on and on with nothing really describing the thing your after but you read why you should buy this particular product or software.
You my friend, have found somebodies super duper SALES LANDING PAGE!
Check this out!
A. This page is so long that your scroll control on the right of the browser looks like a dash.
B. Many of the key words are double the size of the surrounding text, bolded, and colored red, green, or blue.
C. Entire paragraphs are center justified. Not that's just wrong and hard to read too!
D. Paragraphs or phrases are repeated over and over again.
E. One third of this 14 foot long page is testimonials that can't even be verified as real people.
F. Entire Sentences In Some Places Have Every Word Capitolized. EVEN WORSE IS A SENTENCE THAT IS SCREAMING AT ME IN ALL CAPITOL LETTERS!
G. And then there are more "quotation marks" than an interview transcript with president "Clinton" after the impeachment hearings. To me that's like someone speaking in a normal tone of voice, and then when they want to really get the point across, they grab a megaphone and yell it in my ear.
H. Finally when you get to the bottom of the page you don't even find a price until after you click on the "Buy It" button.
Holy Smokes, if you are planning to make this type of sales page, I'll have to be quite honest with you neighbor, I usually close the browser or hit the back button when they cross my path. My time is valuable and I really don't want to waste it having someone trying to sell me something that most likely isn't even one tenth as good as all the hype on the page. You guessed it, I even hang up on telemarketers after politely saying no thank you. For crying out loud, if I wanted to buy something, theres a department store just around the corner from me.
Why? Well for one thing, it's insulting to the average persons intelligence. When I buy something online, my interest is usually directed to the page that has a one or two paragraph description of the product and I can see the price within a small amount of scrolling down the page. When I'm looking for something, I usually have an idea of what I'm after and don't really need to sold on buying it. I even like maybe a nice picture of whatever it is I'm buying to give me a sense of substantiality.
Tim Davis is a Baptist pastor, trained Architectural Designer, and Web builder/programmer who has been building Architectural and Christian websites since 1995. He also has several ebooks published: "House Plan Drafting 101, Learning to Draw House Plans in a No Nonsense Way" at http://homedesign.8m.com/101ebook/ and "The Almost Forgotten Church" at http://parsonscorner.org/almost/
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( 3 / 202 )Depending on how much detail your builder or local building inspector requires, the minimum set of plans should include the floor plan, exterior elevations, foundation or basement plan, and a roof plan drawn to scale.
Just so you'll know, a scale is nothing more than a shrunken ruler so that 1' -0" (12 inches) is now 1/4 inch long as far as your drawing is concerned. So here then is an example. If we use a scale to draw an 8' line. in reality the line is only 2 inches long on the paper in real life.
So let's see what's included in a set of plans:
A Floor Plan is a view of a house that would be seen if you were to take a knife and slice the house to see the walls, windows, doors, etc. from the top about mid ways down the walls. This is also called the dimensional plan. Most all floor plans are drawn at the scale of 1/4" = 1'- 0". It should include all the dimensions (measurements) of the wall, window, and door locations, door and window sizes, stair locations, room labels, locations of exposed beams, cased opening sizes and locations, bathroom layout showing sink vanity, tub, and toilet, kitchen cabinets with appliances & sink fixtures, and construction notes.
Some floor plans include the electrical symbols showing the receptacles, light switches, light fixtures, ceiling fans, cable connections, telephone jacks, and meter base locations. These can be included in the dimensional plan but many opt to have it on a separate drawing.
The Exterior Elevations include all four (4) views of the home which are front, left, rear, & right drawn also at 1/4" = 1' - 0" scale. The are some plans that have the front elevation drawn at 1/4" scale and then the left, rear & right at 1/8" = 1' - 0" On these views are notes about what type of siding or veneer, the roof pitches (angles), grade locations, finished floor & ceiling locations, and a roof plan showing the house from the top view. The roof plan is usually drawn at 1/8" = 1' - 0" scale or 1/16" = 1' - 0".
The Foundation or Basement Plan is the same type as the floor plan showing wall types, footing sizes, floor joist or truss locations, support beams, pilasters or piers, and ventilation vents & openings. The foundation or basement plan is also a dimensional type drawing. Most of these plans are drawn at the scale of 1/4" = 1'- 0".
If the plan is more detailed, then we would see sectional details showing the wall and roof construction of the home, HVAC plan, plumbing plan, and cabinet elevations. Even more involved plans would show the types of mouldings, pediments, & trims in greater detail.
Tim Davis is a veteran Architectural Designer who teaches a full course in Residential Drafting with his new Ebook, "Learning to Draw House Plans in a No Nonsense Way" at http://homedesign.8m.com/101ebook/ . He also has several ebooks out on similar subjects that can be found at http://receivedtext.org including a free ebook on Drawing a Simple Floor Plan on the Drafting Board.
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Tim_J._Davis
http://pcimunity.blogspot.com/
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( 3 / 186 )Practice makes perfect. Maybe you would want to start off easy. One of my first ebooks was on notes I had made about bible versions. I had already written an article on the subject and also had lots of research notes with sources. Article + Notes + Sources = A New Reference Ebook. On the same token, after that I had compiled a whole heap of jokes which, after I built a HTML frame set, became a joke book in ebook format.
I tried an experiment last year with an ebook. I was an architectural designer by trade before I went into the ministry full time and had quite a bit of knowledge in the house plan drafting field. Aside from a full blown drafting course I had created some years back I made a course in drawing a simple house plan on the drafting board complete with illistrations. I compiled it into an ebook and gave it away as freeware. Man did it ever get downloaded. So much so that it overwhelmed the bandwidth on that particular website. I may even put that rascal back online now that I have a bigger site with more bandwidth.
One of my best sellers is an ebook on how to draw house plans, called House Plan Drafting 101, How to Draw House Plans in a No Nonsense way. I'd already had this online in HTML format for years as I mentioned in the previous paragraph. I spent hours and hours proofing, checking, and refining it until it became a complete course. The website became massive with all the downloads and navigation needed to complete the course and the drawback to it was the amount of time needed online to complete the course. The solution? Compile it in ebook format so that there was one download for the student and all the resources were contained in the book. This way the student didn't have to be online all the time to learn.
To sum this up, you probably already have some of the material needed to write your first ebook. You just need to remember what you did with it and polish it up.
Tim Davis is a Baptist pastor and a trained Architectural Designer & Web builder/programmer who has been building Architectural and Christian websites since 1995. He also has several ebooks published: "House Plan Drafting 101, Learning to Draw House Plans in a No Nonsense Way" at http://homedesign.8m.com/101ebook/ - "The Almost Forgotten Church" at http://parsonscorner.org/almost/ - "Humor on the Christian Side of the Fence" at http://receivedtext.org/humor.htm and "Bible Version Comparision" at http://receivedtext.org/bible.htm
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( 3 / 225 )This article wasn't written to tell you how to write or compile your ebook. Shoot, there are more ebook cover & compiler programs out there than you can shake a stick at on the net. What I'm hoping to do here is get you on the right road to letting folks know you have an ebook.
Here's the deal. There are some of the so called guru's out there telling you that you really must start with a publisher. Well, I don't disagree except that reviews take a long time to complete and you probably aren't getting any younger. You're most likely wanting to get your information out there and start earning a dollar or two in the process.
So here's what I suggest:
Get yourself some web space. If you haven't got two pennies to rub together, start with a free web hosting service like Freeservers.com or Freewebs.com. If banner advertising bugs you and you have a couple of bucks to pay every month, they'll remove the banners so you don't have to look at them.
Most all of these types of services have a member control panel that you can edit your site with if you haven't a clue how to do it yourself. Build a one page website. If you don't know how to build one yourself, there are plenty of hosting companies that offer a website builder with their package. Also, if you have a program like Microsoft FrontPage or know how to use a word processor, you're a step ahead.
Make sure you have a gif or jpg book cover on the page. It'll give the potential customer a feeling of substance. Get one of those ebook cover makers I mentioned earlier and build one. Or if you are good using a paint program, go for it. This is important.
Along with the image, place your ebook title right next to the book image. Make the title at least double the size or make it bolder than the rest of the text on the page. Then a brief description of your ebook. Maybe even a sample chapter to give them an idea of what they're getting with the entire ebook.
If it's a free ebook, emphasis should be placed on the word Free. Just don't make it too bold. If the book has a price, place it plainly on the page along with a method of payment like a PayPal button. PayPal and services like them are as handy as a hay rake in a freshly cut field. They offer an instant payment option that makes life simple.
On your page, make sure there is an email link so folks can ask questions. Not doing this makes customers uneasy. Would you want to buy something from someone who didn't want you to even know how to email them? No, you want your customers to trust you and see you're willing to communicate with them. I often times even put a postal address on the page along with a phone number.
Meta Tags are another important feature of your page. Do a search for META TAG builders on your friendly neighborhood search engine. Along with tools to build these very important tags, you'll probably find helpful hints on how to add them to the code of your page. Just to be sure, look up a free website optimizer on the web to see if they have any suggestions that would improve your pages appeal to the search engines and directories.
So once your site is up, you'll want to start advertising. First place to go is to the free search engine submission sites like submitexpress.com or freewebsubmission.com. Also manually submit your site to ebook directories like OnlineEbookDirectory.com or ReceivedText.org who will link directly to your ebooks website.
Once this is done, then you can start the task of submitting your ebook to all the other ebook sites. Try submitting your ebook to software sites if your book is an executable file. Make sure you also get a Google Blog and post some short articles pertaining to your ebook. That'll really get you some exposure.
Tim Davis is a trained architectural designer and web builder/programmer who has been building Architectural and Christian websites since 1995. He also has several ebooks published, including architectural drafting courses called "House Plan Drafting 101, Learning to Draw House Plans in a No Nonsense Way" that you can find at http://homedesign.8m.com/101ebook/
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