Design Challenges

2-Miles: Coquina

Up in the northeast, where I grew up, most houses are built with either wood or aluminum siding. Vinyl siding is a plastic exterior cladding for a house. Vinyl siding was introduced to the exterior cladding market in the late 1950s. At that time, blending of colors was done manually. Because of all the manual labor involved, the process made it difficult to produce and install a consistent, quality product. In 1970s, a transformation of the product began, with the industry engineering formulation changes. Because of these changes a lot of houses in the northeast where upgraded to the product.

In Florida, however, we have seen three distinct materials in used. Stucco, vinyl, and Coquina. The first I was familiar with, the latter however was new to me. Coquina is an incompletely consolidated sedimentary rock. Coquina is mainly composed of mineral calcite, often including some phosphate, in the form of seashells or coral. It has been used in building stone in Florida for over 400 years, coquina forms the walls of the Castillo de San Marcos in Saint Augustine, this country's oldest city. The stone makes a very good material for forts, particularly those built during the period of heavy cannon use. Because of coquina's softness, cannon balls would sink into, rather than shatter or puncture, the walls of the Castillo de San Marcos.

In my current community of Saw Mill Lakes where I perform most commonly my two miles I have noticed that about every fifth house is sided with Coquina. At first I was not fun of the material. Although it gives a very beachy atmosphere, it texture is very shelly, and looks very rough. When we were looking to buying a house we decided that this material just wasn't for us mainly because all the houses we saw that had coquina had a pink tone to them. Later we found out that coquina can be painted. Ever since I have noticed many shades of coquina in our community. We ended up buying a house in a different community, The Players Club at Sawgrass, but it is made of stucco siding. This is not because of our original dislike of coquina, but because we found the right house for us, just a coincidence that it did not have coquina. We actually grew fond of coquina over time.

The bottom line is that you can't a judge something until you have all the facts. We originally dislike Coquina because of the tones we had noticed, turns out that it can be painted just like any other material to any color that suits your taste. It is very durable and long lasting. To replace coquina for another material in a house is quite costly, but this is true for all materials. If you find the right house, don't worry about the exterior, remember you expend 99% of the time indoors.

Labels: 2-mile, biggest loser, Connecticut, Florida, Jacksonville, jax