Crystal Pacific Celebrates Grand Opening
Written on May 17, 2012 at 17:33
With more than 100 guests in attendance, Crystal Pacific Window Door Systems celebrated the grand opening of its Riverside, Calif.-factory and corporate headquarters with a ribbon-cutting event on May 2nd. The new company, which also operates sales and distribution offices in South El Monte and San Diego, produces vinyl windows and doors for markets in Southern California, Arizona and Nevada.
Ribon-cutting ceremonies at Crystal-Pacific
The grand opening event featured welcoming remarks on behalf of the Crystal family of companies by Steve Chen, executive vice president and son of company owner and founder Thomas Chen. Other speakers included Riverside City Councilmember Mike Gardner and Riverside Chamber of Commerce Chairman Brian Hawley, who respectively presented certificates on behalf of Riverside Mayor Ron Loveridge and U.S. Congressman Ken Calvert.
The new Crystal Pacific is “not just the opening of another run-of-the-mill business,” said Steve Chen, during his remarks. “A major new factory and business venture is especially significant in light of the continued poor national economy and the still-struggling fenestration industry. For this successful East Coast manufacturer to put a several million dollar stake in the ground to produce windows for the remodeling and new construction markets is a signal that the real estate, construction and building materials industries in the region are on the upswing.”
“While other window manufacturers continue to close factories and curtail operations, I’m extremely pleased that Crystal can announce expansion, growth and job creation,” added Thomas Chen.
Crystal’s Thomas Chen, left, was given a certificate of recognition from Riverside City Council Member Mike Gardner.
Housed in a 116,000-square-foot industrial building, the new Crystal Paficic factory currently employs about 30 workers. Guests at the opening event, including home improvement contractors, builders, building product distributors and suppliers, saw demonstrations of vinyl window production using the Crystal Pacific’s state-of-the-art automated welding, corner cleaning and IG fabrication equipment.
Crystal Pacific owner and founder Thomas Chen also owns Crystal Window Door Systems. Based in New York City, the company operates vinyl and aluminum window production and aluminum extrusion facilities in New York, Chicago and the St. Louis area. The affiliated companies now employ approximately 600 people nationally.
Article source: http://www.windowanddoor.com/news-item/companies/crystal-pacific-celebrates-grand-opening
Inline Adds Pultrusion Capacity
Written on May 17, 2012 at 17:33
Toronto-based Inline Fiberglass Ltd. reports it is increasing capacity in its pultrusion deparment by 30 percent. The move is designed to accommodate iincreased sales to existing customers, as well as additional manufacturer customers it will now be supplying.
“The additional business is attributed to several different reasons,” says Bernard Rokicki, Inline’s COO. “It is our advanced technology that allows Inline to engineer and deliver the highest performing fiberglass products.”
In addition to sales growth within Canada, “international companies are realizing the potential of fiberglass and Inline as the leader.” Rokicki also points out. “It is our continued commitment to RD that allows us to stay two steps ahead of our competition.”
Operating from two locations with 175,000 square feet of manufacturing space, Inline Fiberglass, supplies pultruded fiberglass reinforcements and profiles, in addition to producing its own line of finished windows and doors, The company also supplies pultrusion technology and equipment, as well as non-fenestration related products.
A Window Door Top 100 Manufacturer, Inline began operations in 1978, first focused on aluminum and switched fully to fiberglass in 1992. The company now says it is the largest and oldest all-fiberglass window manufacturer.
Article source: http://www.windowanddoor.com/news-item/companies/inline-adds-pultrusion-capacity
Inline Adds Pultrusion Capacity
Written on May 17, 2012 at 17:33
Toronto-based Inline Fiberglass Ltd. reports it is increasing capacity in its pultrusion deparment by 30 percent. The move is designed to accommodate iincreased sales to existing customers, as well as additional manufacturer customers it will now be supplying.
“The additional business is attributed to several different reasons,” says Bernard Rokicki, Inline’s COO. “It is our advanced technology that allows Inline to engineer and deliver the highest performing fiberglass products.”
In addition to sales growth within Canada, “international companies are realizing the potential of fiberglass and Inline as the leader.” Rokicki also points out. “It is our continued commitment to RD that allows us to stay two steps ahead of our competition.”
Operating from two locations with 175,000 square feet of manufacturing space, Inline Fiberglass, supplies pultruded fiberglass reinforcements and profiles, in addition to producing its own line of finished windows and doors, The company also supplies pultrusion technology and equipment, as well as non-fenestration related products.
A Window Door Top 100 Manufacturer, Inline began operations in 1978, first focused on aluminum and switched fully to fiberglass in 1992. The company now says it is the largest and oldest all-fiberglass window manufacturer.
Article source: http://www.windowanddoor.com/news-item/companies/inline-adds-pultrusion-capacity
Builders FirstSource Adds Tennessee Location
Written on May 17, 2012 at 17:33
Scheduled to open in June, a new distribution facility is being added by Builders FirstSource Inc. in Clarksville, Tenn. Located about 40 miles from Nashville, the new operation will serve as the company’s primary distribution point for the fast-growing market.
“We are very excited about opening a location in the heart of Clarksville to better serve our growing customer base in the greater Montgomery County market, which continues to be one of the strongest housing markets in the South,” says Floyd Sherman, Builders FirstSource CEO. “Jim Long, our market manager for Middle Tennessee, and his team have done an outstanding job of preparing this facility and we look forward to expanding our footprint in Northern Tennessee and Southern Kentucky.”
The facility is situated on five acres and includes 25,000 square feet of warehouse space. Its product offerings will include windows, doors, and millwork, as well as lumber, engineered I-joist systems, roof and floor trusses and other building related products.
Headquartered in Dallas, Builders FirstSource operates 53 distribution centers and 44 manufacturing facilities in nine states, primarily in the South and East.
Article source: http://www.windowanddoor.com/news-item/companies/builders-firstsource-adds-tennessee-location
Builders FirstSource Adds Tennessee Location
Written on May 17, 2012 at 17:33
Scheduled to open in June, a new distribution facility is being added by Builders FirstSource Inc. in Clarksville, Tenn. Located about 40 miles from Nashville, the new operation will serve as the company’s primary distribution point for the fast-growing market.
“We are very excited about opening a location in the heart of Clarksville to better serve our growing customer base in the greater Montgomery County market, which continues to be one of the strongest housing markets in the South,” says Floyd Sherman, Builders FirstSource CEO. “Jim Long, our market manager for Middle Tennessee, and his team have done an outstanding job of preparing this facility and we look forward to expanding our footprint in Northern Tennessee and Southern Kentucky.”
The facility is situated on five acres and includes 25,000 square feet of warehouse space. Its product offerings will include windows, doors, and millwork, as well as lumber, engineered I-joist systems, roof and floor trusses and other building related products.
Headquartered in Dallas, Builders FirstSource operates 53 distribution centers and 44 manufacturing facilities in nine states, primarily in the South and East.
Article source: http://www.windowanddoor.com/news-item/companies/builders-firstsource-adds-tennessee-location
Couple lights up a home in a former cigarette warehouse
Written on May 17, 2012 at 11:33
SAN FRANCISCO — When it comes to life decisions, Clive McCarthy doesn’t shy away from grand leaps. The British-born electrical engineer was near the peak of a long career in Silicon Valley, where he directed chip and software design for the semiconductor company Altera, when he went in an entirely new direction.
In 1997, around the time he turned 51, he took a few years off and then enrolled in art school. Then he began staging public performances with live avant-garde music and teams of painters who executed the large images he envisioned, and later he started devising art-producing algorithms, using TVs and computer monitors as dynamic “canvases” for his work.
He also began dating Tricia Bell, a physician. In 2005, four months into their courtship, McCarthy showed her blueprints for his future home and studio in the city’s Mission district. When Bell, now 59, asked about a space labeled “Tricia’s Room,” he explained, “It’s a room you can transform however you please.” And if she ever became peeved with him, he told her, “it can be your little retreat.”
It was a bold move so early in their relationship. But, he recalls, “I was already certain how I felt about Tricia, and I needed to make my intentions known.”
Bell, who is now his wife, was charmed.
The gritty fringe neighborhood where he had bought a 10,000-square-foot structure wasn’t where he had first planned to settle, but his efforts to build a contemporary home on upscale Russian Hill had met opposition. So when he unexpectedly found this 1925 concrete building amid auto body shops, he took the leap, buying it for $2.3 million.
Originally a Lucky Strike cigarette warehouse, it had also been the home of Capp Street Project, an organization known for its experimental art installations in the basilica-like main hall, a vast concrete room rising 24 feet to a pitched skylighted roof. Ann Hamilton once blanketed the floor there with 750,000 honey-dipped pennies, Bill Viola installed an indoor redwood forest, and Carl Cheng flooded the room like a swimming pool.
The next owner had carved up the space, though, so McCarthy was unaware of the building’s art world provenance. But Stanley Saitowitz, the designer he hired to renovate it, remembered the warehouse from its Capp Street days and set about reclaiming it as a place for making art.
“Clive gave us a pretty open canvas,” Saitowitz said. “We wanted to create emptiness: a playground for his experiments, for all the different things he works on simultaneously.” The idea was to restore the openness and rawness of the space by peeling away dropped ceilings, paneling and partitions, and then to insert into that rough setting “little jewels or set pieces,” he said, meaning discrete rooms or objects with greater refinement and intimacy.
Now, where redwoods once soared, a spiral stairway encased in steel rods rises to a roof garden. McCarthy’s studio takes center stage in the big central space, where his “Electric Paintings” morph and regenerate on skeletal screens. One level up, on the original perimeter mezzanine, Saitowitz created pockets of domesticity, like a huge master bath lined in pristine white tile with a rain feature. In the open kitchen, a 39-foot silvery granite work island doubles as a dining table.
Bell said she has never needed to retreat, peeved, into “Tricia’s Room,” but she has transformed it with a green wall like the one in the bedroom that recalls Viola’s redwoods.
Meanwhile, the creative spirit of the building’s earlier days has spontaneously seeped back. Artist friends gather for group critiques, and when the couple invites avant-garde ensembles to rehearse or perform, the whole place resonates with music.
Article source: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/homegarden/2018225531_onlocationwarehouse17.html?syndication=rss
Are Window Dealers Making a Profit?
Written on May 17, 2012 at 11:33
Hopefully your window dealers’ hard work is paying off right now. Good weather has let them install product. Their phones are ringing from yard signs, they’ve canvassed neighborhoods and done proximity mailing to create leads. Estimates are coming in over the phone and the Internet. They’ve sold more jobs, received deposits and ordered more windows. They should have more money in their bank account than payables. But are they profitable? The sad fact is, they probably don’t know.
Yes, I think most contractors and dealers think they are selling for a “profit”… Oftentimes they are just using bad math…
Using a Tailgater’s math, profit is anything over the cost of the window.
Using a Contractor’s math, profit is anything over the cost of installation labor and material.
Using a Dealer’s math, profit is anything over the cost of installation labor, material and sales commission.
Too many business people never get a clear understanding of their cost of doing business. When they have extra money in the bank they think they have made a profit. That’s when they advertise, buy a new truck or take a vacation. All because they think they have made a profit…But is that extra money really profit?
No. Not yet.
You can certainly think you have made a profit and feel like you have made a profit in June when the income is bigger than the expenses, but if you don’t factor in the October real estate tax, or the quarterly income tax, or the Health Benefit bill, or the cost to replace that truck, or additional marketing efforts. UH-OH …. That extra money is not a profit at all. That extra money is simply a “Contribution to Overhead.”
Too many window contractors and dealers don’t calculate overhead into the equation in order to price for profit. You have to take into account all of your company’s cost of doing business to get a clear picture of your overhead and then cover all those costs. Once you have paid for all of your overhead costs you can consider yourself to have made a profit. You have now “Busted Your Nut” and, like a squirrel who works hard to get to the meat inside of the shell you can enjoy true profit. Until you know your annual overhead costs you don’t know when you make a profit–you are only guessing.
Calculating overhead based upon past experience is a logical way to budget for the coming year. Simply place all expenses into their appropriate category, create a budget for each of those categories and plan your budget for the next 12 months based on those figures and your plans to improve upon them. Create a budget and follow that budget. If the local school board raises taxes or the furnace needs replaced in your showroom the real estate budget needs to be adjusted. If you decide to invest more in advertising than originally planned the advertising budget needs adjusted, and so on. Each time the budget is adjusted the overhead number changes and the contribution required to pay for overhead changes, too.
Using this method you will have a dashboard that lets you see where you are during the course of the year on the road to profitability. At some point during the year you will have either contributed enough money to your overhead costs to allow you to make a profit or you will have not.
In the food business a general rule of thumb to calculate expenses compared to profitability in order to set price is “a third, a third and a third.” Thirty-three percent is the cost of food, 33 percent is the cost of labor and overhead and 33 percent is profit. This also used to be the rule of thumb in the window industry and that math is more likely to allow you to end up in the black, but it is still all based on projections for annual expenses and sales income that may or may not happen. If your sales are sluggish and you can’t get the percentages you projected you might cut price and then you are doomed to sell below a profitability. If expenses for labor or materials escalate due to poor time management or mismeasured windows your expenses will crush profits.
Sorry to say, but for most businesses it really does come back to “Nothing Happens Until Somebody Sells Something.” But don’t forget the end of that warning: “From there anything can happen. Good, Bad or Indifferent.” So, a lot of the ability to profit has to do with the quality of the sale, not just the quantity. The rest of the ability to profit involves good accounting practices, budget discipline, management skills and good work habits.
Article source: http://www.dwmmag.com/index.php/are-window-dealers-making-a-profit/
ICC Approves Skylight Code Change
Written on May 17, 2012 at 11:33
The International Code Council (ICC) approved a proposal related to unit skylights during its recent code development hearings in Dallas. The proposal, S176-12, sought to add a reference to “tubular daylighting devices” to section 2405.5.5 of the code.
The proposal, put forth by Julie Ruth of JRuth Code Consulting, representing the American Architectural Manufacturers Association (AAMA), will require that tubular daylight devices “be tested and labeled as complying with AAMA/WDMA/CSA 101.I.S./A440.” Previously, the section of the code only referenced unit skylights.
“The overall intent of this proposal is to clarify the requirements for tubular daylighting devices, within the context of skylights and sloped glazing in the IBC,” Ruth wrote in the proposal.
The committee approved the proposal with a slight modification that replaces the words “design pressure” with the words “performance grade rating” in the exception to Section 2404.2, according to AAMA.
Article source: http://www.dwmmag.com/index.php/icc-approves-skylight-code-change/
Nido is a Finnish Micro Cabin on the Lake
Written on May 17, 2012 at 05:31
News of this 96-square-foot micro cabin was first published at Tiny House Listings a few months back, though you may start seeing it on sites all over the web. The tiny house was conceived and built in Finland by Robin Falck with a footprint purposely small enough to not need permits. Falck enlisted the help of architects to vet the technical aspects and built the tiny house in two weeks for about $10,500 (just the materials). That includes views, a 50-square-foot loft, kitchen, bathroom, and a living room.
[+] More about Robin Falck’s build of Nido Micro Cabin.
Credits: Robin Falck.
Article tags: international, residential, tiny house
Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/jetson_green/~3/FcqSSmAObu0/nido-robin-falck-micro-cabin-finland.html
Rediscovering a shortcut to an hourglass figure
Written on May 16, 2012 at 23:27
NEW YORK — Blanca Murillo’s morning routine, for the most part, would seem unremarkable to any woman: She washes her face, brushes her teeth, runs a comb through her blond bob and daubs on makeup. Then, as she has for the past seven years, she tugs on her girdle.
Known as a faja, from the Spanish word for wrap, it was imported from Colombia, one of the world’s cosmetic surgery centers, where until recently it was used mostly for postoperative wear by recovering liposuction patients to keep swelling to a minimum and ensure that the skin tightens properly. But it has been embraced by young Latinas — and increasingly by other women — as a shortcut to a curvaceous body.
For more than 50 years, U.S. women have largely cast off such constrictive undergarments, which feminists criticized as symbols of repression. The nylon and Lycra underwear brand Spanx has been credited with reintroducing, and reacclimating, women to the concept of extra help for figure problems, but it may have also opened the door to a new generation of young women embracing the faja, which is far closer to the real thing — in all its organ-shifting, curve-exaggerating strength.
Such girdles are a resurgent fashion phenomenon to a growing number of women who wriggle into them each day without a thought of what Gloria Steinem might say. Their newfound popularity is very much in evidence — or at least, the results are — on the streets of Queens, where Reggaeton music accompanies the rumble of the elevated subway, which is largely populated by immigrants from Colombia.
“You see the love handles?” asked Murillo, 33, a trim hairdresser who stands a doll-like 4 feet 3 inches tall, as she pinched a small fold of flesh at her midsection and lifted her shirt to reveal a well-worn faja. “With this, you hide it.”
The comeback of fajas has surprised even those in the business of selling them; they had fallen out of favor before they were adopted for medical use.
“I’m from the ’70s; we rejected it,” said Lisa Cipriani, 57, the proprietor of Caralinda Mis Fajas, one of the dozens of stores in Queens that specialize in the garment.
“This is the new generation, and this is an option,” she said.
The demand has been soaring. Colfajas, which manufactures fajas in Colombia and exports them, raised its production by 47 percent last year and exported 60,000 items, thousands more than in past years, said Jean Pierre Velez, who helps run the family-owned company.
YK, a small shop in Queens, regularly sells out the roughly 4,000 fajas it ships in each year.
The fajas comes in a variety of shapes and sizes, from full-body jumpsuits to tight belly bands, for women as well as men. The effects depend on the fabric heft of the fajas; they come in Lycra, cotton, nylon and latex. The less forgiving the material, the more flattering the effect. Prices typically run from $20 to more than $70, depending on the fabric and how much of the body it covers.
“There is a Spanish saying, you want to look ‘like a Coke bottle,’ ” said Lilliana Rios, 33, who reflects on the faja on her blog ThingsLatinosLoveorHate.com. “A lot of Spanish songs talk about women with shapes like a guitar, so that’s the curved look that Latina women want.”
Getting the look requires some grit. Tugging on a faja can become a desperate bout of woman versus fabric. Flesh must be coaxed into the garment and then battened down by hooks and, finally, sealed with a zipper that can force the air out of your lungs.
“The first day you can’t stand it,” Murillo said. “But then it loosens it up.”
Hidden under clothes the results may be sexy, but fajas are not. Most are the color of an Ace bandage and resemble body casts. Some are configured to squeeze certain areas and leave others to jiggle.
Juan Lopez and his partner, Monica Arias, import the PonteBella brand of fajas from Colombia to Valley Stream, N.Y., on Long Island. Although they started out selling to medical spas and plastic surgeons, orders from the fashion market overtook medical sales about five years ago, Lopez said.
More recently, calls have been pouring in from unexpected places: retailers in Great Neck and Garden City, also on Long Island, where the Latino populations are small.
“In the beginning, it was almost only for Latinos,” Arias said. “Now the white people are asking for fajas.”
Recognizing the changing market, Arias said, the company began selling softer versions to appeal to a wider audience: Some women’s ideal body might not involve the roller-coaster curves favored in Latin America.
Girdles, once de rigueur, mostly disappeared during the 1960s, said Valerie Steele, the author of “The Corset: A Cultural History” and the director and chief curator of the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology.
“Clothing was showing more of the body, so it wasn’t good enough to just push the fat around,” she said. “The other reason was the thought that you shouldn’t have to rely on it, you were supposed to be healthy and in good shape already.”
The feminist movement, Steele added, rejected the girdle as a symbol of repression, even as it fell out of fashion. The newfound popularity of fajas comes at a time when skyrocketing obesity rates crash into a body ideal that seems skinnier than ever.
“There’s this radical disjunction between an ideal, which is slender and muscular, and a reality that more and more people are dramatically overweight,” Steele said.
At Aishti, his store in Queens, Moussa Balaghi has begun carrying girdles in size “extra small,” because, to his shock, so many teenagers and even younger girls were coming in to request them.
“Only chubby fat girls used to use this; now, everybody is,” he said shaking his head. “If she has the smallest little thing at her waist, she wants to use this.”
Rios, the blogger, said new fabrics had replaced the rubberized material of the rigid corsets of yesteryear, which were often reinforced with stiff struts called boning. And implicit celebrity endorsements helped popularize the new version for a new generation.
“Fajas to me were something my mother would wear,” Rios said. “Now Spanx came along and you see Eva Longoria wearing it, Jennifer Lopez wearing it. Now it’s at a comfort level that women at any size and any age are wearing them.”
At Caralinda Mis Fajas, clients ease their way into tighter and tighter fajas. A seamstress will resize the faja once or twice as a customer’s weight shifts downward. And it often does: A faja can hold the stomach so tight, Cipriani said, the wearer loses her appetite.
Not every young woman, even from a culture in which girdles are the norm, is willing to strap in. Although her 16-year-old cousin wears a faja to high school every day, Onelia Rodriguez, 20, said she never had and never would.
“If you want to look skinny, go to the gym, eat healthier,” she said.
“Your body is the way it is,” she added. “When you take it off, your body is still the same. It’s like false advertising.”
Article source: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/living/2018215569_girdle16.html?syndication=rss
