We asked Daryl Hood, the energy behind a recent and super fun project in the salt marsh off North Carolina’s Outer Banks, to tell us his story. Here’s what he had to say:
“When you mention telling a story, this is one hell of a story , my whole life is one hell of a story. This project and the relationships built are at the top of my list, I will cherish forever.
From the very beginning when I called you with this problem I had I just felt right dealing with you, there was something in our initial conversations that made me feel good about where it might go, never called another company which isn’t my normal way, I’ve often wondered what were your thoughts about this and with a knucklehead like me to boot. The idea that together from all the way across the country people who have never met and we’re all in uncharted territory could come together and pull off a project like this seamlessly is good stuff.
To be completely honest, due to repeated disappointments and complete lack of confidence in people doing good work much less pulling off miraculous stuff like this, I had my doubts pretty much all the way up to the time I put the girder together at which point I knew we were golden.
This project for me was a lifesaver as I had been feeling like all the fun of building the really cool stuff was over and I was just cutting boards and driving screws or nails just for money. My wife knows what this project did for me, it was a revival of sorts in that the people that had forgotten about the shit I have done and the people that weren’t around here back then to see it for themselves put me back in the conversations around this small island town and gave me that feeling of pride again. My wife’s proud of me.
Well, this shit, they pulled it off, man. And it's beautiful. It is beautiful. And the tongue and groove that came out of New York, that's just badass, too. It was the collaboration between the two of us again, me and what my specialties are and Jonathan and what his specialties are.
I want to thank you Jonathan from the bottom of my heart for everything, I don’t know if we will ever do another project together, I hope we do, these memories and feelings of accomplishment together will last my lifetime.”
From Jonathan: “Daryl is a madman of the highest order. The newest inductee into my “Get Shit Done Club.” What he did to install our very challenging and mathematically complex conical pavilion, with just one helper still inspires me.”
Here’s the project specs:
40’ diameter pavilion, built and raised over 8 feet of salt water at the end of a long-raised walkway.
16 40’ Southern Pine pressure treated poles driven deep into the salt march mud
Douglas-fir roof structure treated with Kleargard-25 (Kleargard-25.com)
400 individually milled trapezoid-shaped planks with 8000 feet of ½”x 1 ½” splines for the planking.
60 hours of phone conversations and a hundred emails between us and Daryl to be sure everything went together just right.
Fun detail: “Each of the roof planks had to be cut as a trapezoid so that they could fit with the cone shape of the roof. Our NEWwoodworks team cut each one exact per pre-laid out plan, put a groove on each side so instead of the typical tongue and groove pattern, we used groove and groove, with custom splines. Worked well. More props to Evan, our Project engineer, our team in the NEWBeamery here in Oregon, the NEWwoodworks team in New York, and Joel at Gebau Engineering in Colorado."
