After realizing that the rolled-up plans would be impossible to flatten out by hand, I decided to put heavy books at the ends of the plans. With the flattened plans I was able to view the lines on the pages and the story of my house that they told. My hands had just let go of a book that was about as heavy as a brick when I heard the thud of 2 pairs of feet walking down the basement stairs. My parents walked over to me, and once they saw the plans, my mom said “wow, he found the plans to our house!”. At this point my parents must have known that I was totally obsessed with architecture. To my parents surprise, I then informed them of my next steps; I wanted to build a scale model of my house. Once they had processed my plan for a few moments, my dad said “that’s gonna be a very complicated project, with all of the walls and the roof line. Maybe you should first practice on something a little less complex.” I responded, “no dad, I think I can do it, trust me.” He wished me the best of luck, although I doubt he thought I could really put it all together.
For the rest of the day I pondered about how to go about constructing the model. This included choosing appropriate materials, tools, and most importantly, how to transfer the shapes of the walls on the paper plans into the same shape on a piece of foam board. I decided the best way to transfer the plans onto foam board was to cut out the shapes directly from the plans with an x-acto knife, and then to trace them onto the foam board. Lastly, I would cut out the foam board along the lines that I traced. Not seeing any major flaws in my scale model construction process, I placed the front elevation of my house on my work table, not forgetting to put books at the ends of the paper. I picked up the x-acto knife and was just about to sink the knife right through the paper when the sound of footsteps reached my ears. I turned my head to my right and saw my father approaching me. He was about to ask me something when he saw the razor-sharp x-acto blade that I was holding was just inches away from a valuable copy of our house plans. He chuckled a bit and then said “Lets go to Fedex and copy those plans so you don’t destroy the only copy.” Once I realized how illogical my original plan was of cutting the only copy of our house plans, I laughed it off, ready to get started on the first phase of the model’s construction.
Fig1. wikiHow. Books on paper
Fig2. CanStockPhoto.com. Knife cutting paper