TASB/TASA Convention

Like I said in the last post, I was in Houston last week for the TASB/TASA Convention. Every year my company has a booth at the convention since we specialize in school Architecture and Interior Design. I am the first full time Interior Designer for the company, so the partners wanted me to go along with them this year seeing as I meet with the clients on a very regular basis. It was funny to me that while I was in Houston, I read my sister's blog and she had just been to a convention and posted pictures of their booth. Christy, I promise I'm not trying to make our booth look more intense.. you should have seen our competition..

A few of the LARGE architectural firms from the area were there, and let's just say the cost of their booth could buy about 3 brand new cars. They were huge, came with a "road crew" and were packed into frieght boxes and loaded into an 18-wheeler after the show.

If I would have been feeling better, I may have taken more pictures, but this is what you get!

This was the first morning before the show began, I'm on the left drinking hot chocolate to soothe my throat. Richard (one of the partners) is sipping his coffee in the middle, and the man to the right is Tim Yaggi. Tim is an Electrical Engineer and is one of our consultants. He owns Yaggi Engineering out of Dallas, and he's my new BFF.

The shoulder to the left belongs to Steve (the other partner) and the guy in the middle is David Perry. David is one of our most recent clients, he came by to say hi. To the right is Richard.

Here is a view from the side. Tim is writing something down on a piece of paper, but what he's using as a table is something that CADCO is known for at these conventions. That is a 1/16" scale model of the PK-12 building that is being built in Robert Lee I.S.D. We build the models in the office for some of our clients. This one inparticular is the one I helped with. I did all of the trees, cars, and people (even though you can't see them in this picture). Back behind Tim (on the wall) is another model of a competition gym in Coleman we did a few years back.

This picture is just of the guys talking, but you can see the scoreboard in the background. When the show was about to start the first day, the buzzer on that thing just went off. Those buzzers are SO loud when they aren't mounted on the wall way above your head! I was really afraid that was going to be a reoccuring thing during the show, but thankfully it only went off when the show was closing.

Here is the other side of our booth and another model. This one is Bosqueville Elementary (near Waco) and this one is actually the first job site I had to wear a hard hat on. On top you can see our business cards and someone's bag--the models work out to be the perfect height to stand and rest your hands on, which is what we did a lot of.

Here is one of the side panels of the booth. To the left you can see a blue hard hat, next year I will be replacing it with my new PINK one courtesy of my dad! There will be a picture of that soon too!

Overall the show was a success, we talked with many current and past clients and got some good leads on some upcoming projects for some other school districts!

I think the funniest thing to me was seeing the trailor we pulled all of the stuff in being pulled by the small Honda Pilot we have for a company car. The trailor was nearly twice the length of the car, and since it's front wheel drive, there were times when you started to go uphill and didn't have enough weight in the front for the right amount of traction and it would give all kinds of warning lights. Not safe, I know, but that only happend if we were sitting at a standstill on a hill and had to then go!