John, I definitely have a "thing" for copper, and I think that's going to be amazing!

Annie

Yep.....that'll do!!

Pretty! You do very nice work.

I thought of you this morning as I was watching a PBS show "10 Towns that Changed America", and the portion I saw was on the Pearl District of Portland. When I visited Portland in the late 1970s and early 1980s, that district had not yet been redeveloped, and so I guess I have only seen the "before" neighborhood, which I liked anyway. Portland is one of my favorite cities, and I always preferred it to Seattle, but it does not have great air connections - back then I could not fly direct from Portland to San Francisco, but perhaps that has changed. I did take the train, however, which used to go all the way to Vancouver BC until they closed the bridge.

I like your steps - I have also used cedar for outdoors. I do not have a copper fetish, but I have worked with coppersmiths - one in particular from Armenia, who has made signage for downtown L.A. skyscapers but who has also made lighting products for us.

I've got some copper leftover and SWMBO wants a fountain/water feature in the backyard, but it has to be noisy because we have a lot of street noise to soften. Perhaps I can use the copper bits to make some details for a fountain.

Lars, Portland is a very interesting place.

It is a fairly small city that has traditionally been overlooked. Away from the attention focused on San Francisco, LA, and Seattle, this city developed its own culture that is a mix of blue collar, hippie, foodie, beery, bikey, creative, and artsy. There was always some techie here too, and plenty of plain old normal. The economy was never very strong, with waves of recession and not too much boom following the bust. Living was pleasant and inexpensive, but not that many people moved here because there weren't that many jobs. We were known as "the city where young people came to retire."

I used to tell people that you could drive all the way across the city during rush hour in 20 minutes. And that you could find anything you wanted here, but there might be only one (one ballet company, one off-Broadway venue, etc) and it would be good but not necessarily great.

About five years ago, Portland got noticed. It might have been the TV shows (Portlandia, Grimm), the growing national obsession with microbrew beer, maybe simply that the other West Coast cities had grown so big and expensive.

The tech companies noticed that office space cost a third of Bay Area prices and young techies were willing to be located here, where houses were cheap (relatively).

And Portland began to grow at an accelerated pace. Young people started coming in floods. One summer evening a friend and I walked to an area a few blocks from my house, looked at the hundreds of people at the brewpub, the Cuban place, the other eating and watering holes, and realized that practically everyone was under 30.

Now there are tower cranes everywhere you look, smaller apartment buildings are popping up overnight, dreary commercial streets are being transformed into hip, funky destinations, the supply of houses for sale is less than a month's sales, rental vacancy rates are negligible and rents are rising 15% a year.

I've never lived in a city that was changing so fast. I suppose the Bay Area is undergoing a similar change, but when I lived there it was fairly static. This much change so fast is both good and bad.

The good is that it is exciting as run down neighborhoods become fun, lively, full of busy restaurants and interesting shops, and new bridges and big buildings appear. The energy is remarkable.

The bad is that some of the blue collar families, the lower income people, and the starving artists are being rapidly priced out of the core of the city they helped create. Some are moving to farther flung areas of Portland, which are thus undergoing their own transformation. But that means more traffic. Driving across the city in rush hour now takes 40 minutes.

Still, I love it here and this city has decades of growth ahead, before it becomes too big to be welcoming.

Catherine Deneuve doesn't need Botox.

You have the best way with words. And the work you've done looks great too.

My son is a coppersmith/artist and, I believe, has mentioned that spraying copper with MiracleGro will give a green-blue color.

The picture does not tell the whole story.

You need a good brake press and workmanship to produce those sharp and straight edges. Then you need to solder from the inside to fortify those sharp corners.

I used to have a bottle of liquid to put on copper to give that years of aged patina of copper.

dcarch

Your project looks great! I love the patina of copper, and an accelerating the process sounds good. I always admire the copper gutters that people have put up --- but nowadays around here they just become targets for theft.

Portland sounds like it has become hipster chic. The public transit used to be so good there. Our neighbors have a 2nd place there.

(I like copper but don't have a fetish)

Turns out my neighbor does a lot of copper patina as part of his art work. He'll give me some advice and instruction, and let me use some of his patina chemicals. If my initial attempt doesn't please me.

dcarch, I don't own a sheet metal brake, although I'm thinking of buying one. The bends were made by clamping scrap wood on either side of the sheet and bending by hand. I'm going to do the remaining pediments on the porch later, and hope to have a brake by then. The results would be better.

Public transportation is still very good in Portland. The light rail system has been expanded, a street car runs to certain areas, buses are pretty good, and Uber / Lyft have added another option. Personally, I mostly drive or bicycle. I can get from my house to downtown on a bike in 15 minutes of relaxed pedaling, or 11 minutes of fast riding. In traffic, cycling can be faster than other options. During rush hour, I can ride from downtown to my house faster than the bus makes the trip.

However, we need to keep improving the public transportation, because the city continues to grow and the roads won't keep up with the increased traffic if all those people drive cars everywhere.

The city has made a fairly conscious decision to not invest in wider roads. The way this city was built, the right of way for the roads is narrow, so there is no room to expand anyway. Indeed, many of the arterial roads are being put on diets (fewer lanes, adding bike lanes).

At one point we made a copper arbor. Well, he did, and it was awesome. Seems like heat (torch) also caused it to turn color? But not the verdigris type, so be careful using that method should you choose.

John, the copper's gorgeous. And I love your Foo dog, and the amazing clematis blooms!

There was an article here in the local SF paper on how people wanted to move to Seattle because home prices were cheaper there. I thought to myself, "Wow, you people must not know Seattle very well?!?"

I love Seattle, it's my favorite vacation city, but the traffic on I-5 is hideous. My aunt lives on Beacon Hill and you can just watch the morning northbound traffic grind to halt trying to drive into downtown and further parts North.

And "cheaper" is relative. You can buy a lovely 2bd 2ba new condo in the Lake Union district for less than $250K, but the commute over the bridge to Boeing every day is definitely no picnic.

My mom had a small home in the NW end of Portland for a while, well before it became popular. She sold it within a couple of years and left Portland. I wished we had the money then to buy it from her, but couldn't swing it at the time. Nothing fancy, in fact more a tear-down, with 2 tiny bedrooms and 1 bath. But when you live in CA, a home for $42K is simply mind-bogglng. The neighborhood was lovely - modest, but mixed residential (homes of all sizes) and very quiet.

Our city here in the SF Bay Area is now popular too, and much noise about anti-gentrification is heard. Personally, I'm all for it. Empty storefronts and rowdy cheap late-night bars are not a good thing for cities.