02 Sep May 2010
Willis Sinclair Homes
“The Lowcountry’s Premier Custom Home Builder”
Personalized Full-Service Construction
Fixed Price and Cost Plus Contracts
24 Gabriel Road
Lodge, South Carolina 29082
843 846 2500
May 2010
From the desk
of Bill Burdick …
Back in the spring of 1962, I was finishing up my sophomore year in high school. My science teacher worked as a Park Ranger at Yellowstone National Park during the summers. He invited me to come see the park. We were living in the St. Louis area at that time.
I spent the next few weeks plotting a trip to Yellowstone. That was before calculators, computers and all sorts of things we take for granted today. I poured over a well worn road atlas figuring the best way to go, where to stop and all sorts of other details. I had a little mechanical adding machine and a pad of yellow paper.
After about a month of spending every waking hour working on this trip, I finally had the details ironed out. I knew how far we would have to drive every day, where we would stay, how much gasoline would cost (this was important because gas was up to about $0.35 a gallon in 1962).
As it turns out, we did not make the trip and I pretty much forgot about visiting Yellowstone for the past 48 years.
Last summer, my son called and asked if I still wanted to go to Yellowstone. It caught me flatfooted because I had not given it any thought. He said he and his wife wanted to send Kandy and me.
I did not really know what to say, but before he changed his mind, I agreed it would be a great trip. Once again, I have been spending a great deal of time planning. This time it has been very different.
I have an agenda, with stops, items to see. What fun!
It turns out my brother lives in Denver and he is going to loan us a car, so we will save rental fees. Being the frugal person that I have been called (actually, that is one of the nicer things I have been called), I have managed to stretch my son’s budget into two weeks.
My brother will accompany Kandy and I for the first four or five days and fly back to his home in Denver from Jackson, Wyoming. We will spend a few days at Yellowstone and head east to Nebraska and South Dakota.
It turns out 2010 is the 150th anniversary of the Pony Express. Kandy and I will watch a Pony Express rider in Henry, Nebraska (right on the Nebraska/Wyoming state line). The rider is carrying a few personal letters from Sacramento to St. Joseph where they will be mailed to the addressees. Kandy has a letter from me in the Express rider’s pouch.
We will also visit Mt. Rushmore and several sites in Nebraska and South Dakota. Chimney Rock, Independence Rock and other sites on the Oregon Trail and Pony Express routes are on our agenda.
We will also see the Minuteman Missile Silo National Historic Site and the South Dakota Air and Space Museum.
If you want to follow our trip, check out www.billburdick.com. Click on “Travel” and “2010 Trip West”. I plan to keep it up to date with our travels. We are departing June 5 and returning June 20 if all goes according to plan.
Bill
Vice President, Willis Sinclair, Inc.
Professional Engineer, Retired
P. S. Henry had the pins removed from his arms on May 7. His casts should come off by May 12. He is doing well and headed for a complete recovery.
843 846 2500
Computer Graphics …
What if you have difficulty visualizing how a remodel or addition will look? A builder might make a sketch on a napkin for you. Maybe he would tell you to trust him.
We are different. We use computer graphics to show you what your addition or remodel will look like before we do anything. It is much easier to change something on a computer instead of a building.
We enlarged the master suite in this home to make it more accessible. The enlarged bedroom utilized the existing screened porch.
In order to give the local ARB and the owner a feel for how the enlarged bedroom would look on the exterior, we used computer graphics to generate this photo.
Our computer graphic rendering of the remodel. Check it against the actual finished job on the front of this brochure.
The actual photo of the completed job is on the cover of this brochure. (The ladder was on the roof to do some flashing.)
Another customer was trying to decide what their garage – soon to become a playroom – would look like with a black and white checkered floor, white walls and white, black or red window casing. Here is what we did. First we took a photo of one wall of the garage.
This is a photo of the garage before we did any work. How would a checkered floor and different color window trim look?
How about white trim? We “emptied” the garage, added checkered floor and then white trim. Keep in mind all of this is done on our computers. The customer cost is $0. The editing is not perfect by any means, but it gives a good feel for the final look.
A checkered floor with white trim.
Black window casing? No problem.
Now the window casing is black!
What about red casing?
Red casing!
Total customer cost: $0. (The customer chose red.)
Can you guess where the garage doors were?
Another builder (not Willis Sinclair Homes) closed in a garage and put windows where the doors were. They did not remove the casing from the big garage doors and this is how it looked.
After a little computer graphics work, this customer was able to see roughly what the garage would look like if the large door casing was removed.
Using computer graphics, we “removed” the casing that was around the original garage door.
If Willis Sinclair Homes is your builder, you don’t have to guess what changes will look like. We will show you. We want our clients to be very happy with our work. If you have us do something you don’t like in the end, that is bad.
Our goal is to give you the resources to make the best decision up front. We don’t like surprises and don’t like our clients to have to deal with them either.
Call us if you are building or remodeling. We can help.
Willis Sinclair Homes, where ‘Built Right’ is the only ‘good enough’ we understand.
Call 843 846 2500
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