Card Mansion

Last week, we were able to host two of Trisha's siblings on Wednesday and Thursday. Her brother, Tyler is transferring to SUU and attended orientation. We were able to go to Roberto's Mexican Restaurant and Wednesday Tennis. Tyler was probably the best one at tennis. He was doing really great! He was putting some good spin on the ball which impressed everyone there that I talked to. After tennis, we came home and watched some White Collar. We all love that show, it is so good! While Trisha was at work and Tyler was at orientation on Wednesday, Kamri and I got to hang out! Kamri and I are not very familiar with what there is to do in Cedar, so we decided to spend the afternoon playing cards and Jenga. After a few rounds of Jenga, we started building structures with the blocks. This was a blast! All of this engineering sparked my imagination. I remember building card houses with Dan and Becky when we were younger. How cool would it be to bring blocks and cards together? So Kamri and I started Phase I of our construction. The base of the building was to be made solely of cards. Our goal was to make the foundation strong enough to support a tall tower of Jenga blocks. While this seemed impossible, we pressed on. During phase one, Kamri found the strongest way to form the cards; each formation she tested was put to a weight test. After this testing, we found that a triangular grid would be the best base to hold the additional weight of the blocks.

During Phase II we finished construction of the lobby area and began to work on the pool area of the card mansion. To add monetary value to this mansion, we had to make this aesthetically pleasing. Our pool area was to be in the middle of the home and be surrounded by bedrooms. A second story veranda wrapped around a portion of the pool area.

Phase III consisted of building the tower over the main lobby. Our biggest concern was that the weight of the tower would be too great for the card rooftop. Our construction was delayed by a cave-in while we were trying to install more roofing to spread the weight of the tower. After this delay, we began construction of the tower. This was a very risky job; one wrong move and the entire home could be demolished. We had previously designed a mockup of the proposed tower, so construction went quickly. Here is the finished product:

Although the wise man probably shouldn't build his house upon some cards, our mansion goes to show what some good imagination and a lot of free time can accomplish.