In the 1-Red suite of the Communications Residential College, a pile of sawdust and a circular saw sit on a curtain in the middle of the lounge floor. The door to Communication junior Nate Bartlett’s dorm room is propped open by a trash bin with an electric drill in it.
Inside, two four-by-fours, nailed together, rest on the closet shelf and window frame. A NERF gun and a leather shoe are mounted on them. A rack of nail hooks holds jackets. On the desk, a tall wooden shelf that Bartlett built holds four bicycle tires, a frying pan and an electric toothbrush.
“I discovered that by rotating the cabinet on its side I could flip out the door and use it as a desk,” Bartlett says. “Now I have all this extra space to work on it.”
Bartlett pushed his bed into the closet, adding 26 inches. He says the room is more “functional” than about aesthetics, though his fading pink Mohawk and the three glow-in-the-dark stars on his ceiling argue otherwise.
Student Affairs has been lenient in letting him do his thing.
“One day I had my door open,” says Bartlett. “The CA on duty came in and was like, ‘cool.’”
Bartlett enjoys residential college community living and has lived in the same single for three years. Last summer, he was able to measure its dimensions with future projects in mind.
Combining craftsmanship with his passion for performance arts, Bartlett helped to construct the set of this year’s Dolphin Show, Ragtime. He says he foresees himself in a career in set carpentry.
“The Dolphin Show buys a couple thousand dollars worth of lumber and at the end of the show they put most of it in a big dumpster,” says Bartlett, touching his homemade shelf. “These were some of the four-by-fours we used to hold up the catwalk.”
Bartlett’s resourcefulness has helped him derive handy scraps from other hobbies. He loves panoramic photography, and he has found ways to combine it with recycling and construction.
“Over the summer we were working on building some sort of raft for his camera out of old Vitaminwater bottles,” says Jai Broome, Medill sophomore and CRC resident. “We were going to float it by the Lakefill, but we just ended up floating it in a flooded parking lot after a thunderstorm.”
Bartlett’s ability to apply his creative brain to any task has also manifested itself through yet another hobby: cycling. In high school, Bartlett pedaled 30 miles roundtrip to school three times a week – a negotiation to fulfill a physical education requirement. In late summer 2008, prior to Bartlett’s freshman year, he and his dad, both avid cyclists, biked 1,100 miles to Northwestern to continue the tradition. He chronicled the trip on biketoschool.wordpress.com.
Those spare wheels in the corner of his dorm room are part storage, part sentiment. But with biking comes the opportunity to build, and he has used some Dolphin Show leftovers to create jumps. He also saves old bicycle inner tubes, out of which he has not only fashioned a vest for a sculpture class, but also suspended some speakers from his ceiling pipes to create surround sound.
“Great acoustics in here,” says Bartlett, cranking up the volume on his desktop PC. Some of the artists in his iTunes library are Thievery Corporation, a DJ pair, and Ulrich Schnauss, a German electronica artist.
Bartlett’s collections of Halo graphic novels, fictional journals and action figures are part of his identity too, according to Shaina Coogan, Weinberg sophomore and CRC resident. Coogan has helped Bartlett build some furniture, and she says he is always looking for new projects.
“One day he was like, ‘Hey, do you want to help me saw some wood?’” says Coogan. “I’m never really surprised if I hear banging coming from 1-Red.”