First Coat, Mega Fumes & Basement Drywall

As noted in the email-on-the-fly postings earlier today, the oak floor guys got the whole house sanded and filled, and the first coat of Swedish finish was put down near the end of the day. By the time I got there around 6:45, it was all but totally dry, and the toxic smell of whatever they use in that stuff was wafting through the open doors for ventilation.

My friend Darryl had his floors refinished just a few weeks ago. Shortly after they were finished, while they were waiting for the finish to cure before moving back in, he popped in to grab a couple clothing items. Only a few minutes. By the time he came out his wife said his face looked totally flushed and his head was spinning. It really is unfortunate there aren't any affordable options that are also as highly durable. It's the one thing about our project that is bleedingly non sustainable. But it sure looks good!

Here's a peek at the view when you come in the front door.

While all that was going on upstairs, Steve and Pete spent the day in the basement hanging drywall. Here's a shot of the Media Room looking at the recess where someday the big screen flat panel will go. The missing drywall piece is there because that's the place to which I need to run that pesky extra cat-5 cable. I have it all bundled now and I'm going there early in the morning to "Get 'er done!"

So I've been wondering how the boys were planning on handling all the pipes coming out of the ceiling and the walls in the Central Plant. That looked like a lot of fussy little drywall pieces all cut and fit carefully around little pipes in tight places. I know what it would look like if I did it - but I was pleasantly surprised to see how the pros were able to just totally nail it. It's like the raw drywall was drilled for the pipes after the fact. Those guys are awsome.

Entry Level

The Foyer looks like this now! The first coat goes on today, and the final two coats go on after all the work is done.

Another Spacious Shot

This is looking from Nana towards the front wall.

Wood Flooring Nears 90%

At lunchtime today, I stopped by to catch up with Steve (He of The Mongolian Adventure), and saw that the wood floor guys have made significant progress. It really gives the whole room that spaciousness to see the oak go all the way to the Nanawall now.

He's Baaa-aack

Steve returns to the project from Mongolia today- not sure what he'll be doing yet as he begins the ramp-down back to the daily grind. In my experience, I find many people returning from a long international trip get some type of illness immediately upon their return. Seems to be some combination of fatigue, jet lag, and exposure to who knows what types of organisms somewhere along the journey's path. I contracted lepto-spirosis on a 10 day trip to Hawaii in 1978 and came close to biting the big one (aka buying the farm) while in the hospital as they were trying to figure out what the heck was wrong with me. Let's hope Steve is just fine; he's certainly in fantastic shape.

I finally made it to Ikea to get the cabinet order squared away- it looks like everything is on the shelf there ready for pickup and assembly- there's just one glitsch. The wall where the wall-oven and pantry will go is an inch too short of being wide enough. Unfortunately Ikea's cabinet dimensions are a little less flexible, and I can't get a pull-out pantry any thinner than 15 inches. So I've asked Pete to see what he might come up with. It seems adding an inch of drywall to the end wall would be okay, and maybe we do it with a step in the wall so it doesn't mess up the switch plates. I'll let you know.

I'm on a train to Portland now, the project team from work is heading down to Oregon Health Sciences University to see the installation of a wastewater membrane bio-reactor, because we're considering it seriously for our project in Seattle. It takes the raw sewage from the building and through a series of filters and biological chambers, converts it to Class A potable water. Sort of like a large scale version of the Fremen's stillsuit. Only we're not going to make people drink it. Maybe.

What a great way to travel though- relaxed, spacious, scenic, and cheap. It's not that much slower than flying to Portland when you factor arrival time, security check, etc.

I sure hope the flooring guys don't puncture any of the hydronic heat lines today! Talk with ya'll later.

Sunny Backyard Photo

Hi; just testing out whether or not it works to send this photo by email and have it posted directly to the blog. If you're reading this, it worked. If there's a bunch of privacy notification stuff below, I'll edit that out later.

Five Bucks in One Day!

Went from just over $30 to $35.20 overnight. ====>>

You guys did some serious ad-clicking since I last posted. Sorry I don't have any photos yet - the changes have been pretty subtle, though I'll post one of the newel posts later. It'll be a post-post post-post.

September 5, 2008; Pipe Disaster!!!

I had just left Pete at the house, stopping by after work to check in and let him know that Heather was real happy with how things are looking, when I got a voice message from him that said he had an accident while starting the installation of the newel posts for the stair railing. He forgot about the pipes. Water from the heating system started bubbling out where he was saw-cutting, and spewed over much of the basement. He wasn't sure where or how exactly to turn off all the water, so he went to the manifold in the master bedroom closet and shut all those off, but water was still coming out. So he went to the central plant and electrical panel and shut everything off at the source. Oy! Finally it stopped.

Evan Conkilin, the hydronic heat guy, says it's no big deal to fix the leak, and he'll send someone out tomorrow (Saturday) morning at 9:00 to fix it. Good thing all the ceiling wasn't installed in the basement yet, and only a small amount of the insulation got wet. And it's still pretty much bare concrete floors down there. All in all, it could have been much much worse.

Off to Ikea this morning to chase down the kitchen cabinets and some shelves, then BottleRockit has a gig in Vancouver at the big Sausagefest event at St. Joseph's Catholic Church; I guess it's a pretty big event according to Darren the Drummer who used to live there. They pay well, too - second biggest take for BottleRockit yet. What is it about Catholic churches and tubular meats? St. John's in Wallingford has the Wurst festival going on in a few weeks too. I grew up Catholic and the only tubular meat we had on a regular basis was the sliced up hot dogs in the beanie-weenies if you went for the hot lunch. Maybe it's a Vatican 3 thing.

Prime Space

We've reached the part of the project during which there isn't a great amount of visible change anywhere. Pete's been doing the drywall work for about two and a half weeks, and he just primed most of the new walls on the main floor. The man is a master of smoothwall and crisp corners. Heather even commented on how good the work looks, particularly at the entry skylight, where there's an oblique corner that came out laser straight and baby bottom smooth. One of the more amazing spots is at the joint between the old living room ceiling and the new addition ceiling. You can't see any difference between the old and the new. Actually, you can't see anything at all, because I didn't take any photos for you. Perhaps tomorrow?

The bad news is that I looked over my notes on the stereo system wiring, and I see that I didn't put in enough cat 5 cable. I was supposed to run a pair of cat 5s to each box, and I had only put in a single. Damn! So this weekend, Sunday afternoon I guess, I will try to get the extra cables run. It'll require some attic work (yuk), and drilling a couple extra holes here and there.

We got a postcard from Steve all the way from Mongolia!! He apparently wrote it shortly after he arrived there, and he mentions the Olympic games, but it only just arrived day before yesterday. Great picture of a yak pulling a cart with four little Mongolian kids in front of a yurt. Can't wait to hear about his adventure, which included some type of mountain trek.

Speaking of adventure, my friend Martin from work just sent me some photos of his evening activity today; paragliding on Cougar Mountain. He just started recently, but he's totally into it. Now that looks awesome!

That's it for tonight - I think I'll have the band members over before rehearsal at my place tomorrow night.

Keep clickin'!!

We Just Broke $30!!

We're rolling now, baby. CLICK ON THIS AD!! ====>>>>

What Else? Labor on Labor Day

Two days of labor is how we celebrated Labor Day. Even though the weather wasn't all that bad, I checked with Brandon & Tracy next door and he wasn't feeling well and needed to sleep, so that kept me from doing the jack hammering (Owhrr, owhrr, owhrr!) on the driveway slab. So instead, I spent the day inside just picking up trash and sweeping up big time, even though the forecast calls for about 2 more inches of drywall dust in the next couple weeks. At least it would be clean for a day or so, in case company stopped by.
Here's a couple quick shots of the living/dining room; it's starting to look like a house again. And the heat! The heat! It's so warm in there now, and the water temp on the boiler appears to only be somewhere around 105 degrees. This is really going to be interesting to see how this works out. As I'm cleaning up, any spare insulation I find I throw it into the attic. I figure it never hurts to have more insulation up there, especially with all that heat we're generating with electricity. I still haven't heard "Boo" from the insulation sub since he returned from his vacation and after I left a couple messages. I should try him tomorrow just to close the loop. A guy could get a full time job being a Construction Manager for a single family home, I swear.

Today, I got the 40 pound demo hammer instead of the 60 pounder, and it made all the difference in the world. I could actually manage it without feeling like I had to do the clean and jerk every time it poked through the slab. It was exhausting. But with the 40 pounder, that the guy said wasn't going to be effective for breaking up a slab, I was able to get the whole rest of the driveway chunked up in less than two hours. Record time.

So that left most of the day - from noon until about 5:30 for Heather and me to pull up the chunks and pile them up for the new patio. It was a full day of hauling chunks up hill, and double wheelbarrow loads from the back yard, taking bites out of the orca pile of dirt and moving them to the front yard. Labor, labor labor. Working in the front yard makes it possible for all the curious neighbors to stop by and make jokes about laboring on Labor Day. Of course, we laughed each time.

At the end of the day today, this is what the future patio looked like. Almost all the way to the same floor level as the living room, and we're pretty much out of big old concrete chunks now; only a few more left that we're using to hold down the cardboard on the "grass." I guess you'd call it yardboard, not cardboard.

And we were able to build up the ground in front of the main entrance too, so the concrete stoop won't require 16 yards of concrete. Just 4 maybe. Here's a 'Before & After" shot, the left one taken on Saturday after I put on the waterproofing and protection board, and the right one taked this morning. Pete put in a full day today too, more coats of mud on the drywall, making it smoother and smoother. He really is a craftsman - and the corners are all crisp and true. Having done my share of D.I.Y drywall in the past, I have much appreciation for his work. It's looking real good.

Tomorrow it's back to work - more labor after all the laboring over the weekend.

Movin' Dirt & Waterproofing

It was a hard work kind of day today. It started out with installing a layer of Tremco Paraseal, a Bentonite waterproofing product on all the front concrete walls. To fasten it to the concrete, I got to use a Hilti powder activated fastening gun, firing small explosive charges with inch and a quarter nails, about six inches on center all over the dang place. Pow, pow, pow all day long. (Owhrr, owhrr, owhrr!) After that, I put a layer of drainage mat/protection board over it to keep the backfill from damaging the Bentonite and to let water wick away from the wall. The photo below shows both condtions; on the left is the Bentonite with the fasteners all over it holding it to the wall; on the right it's been covered with the drainage mat. That's a chunk of concrete in the middle of it all.

So after all the bang bang bang, Heather and I spent the rest of the day hauling dirt and chunks of concrete from all over the back yard to pile it all up against the house for the patio and entry stoop. The ground level is getting up there slowly but surely, tomorrow we'll be doing it again.

I was also able to get the same two-layer waterproofing system installed on outer wall of Daniel's room where he garage door used to be. By then, Pete had shown up and was slapping up more mud on the drywall. He had never seen these high falootin' products before, so it was all new to him.

Tomorrow I'll probably get the demo hammer again too, so I can finish breaking up the old driveway into chunks that we can use to build up the patio higher too. It's going to be another hard working kind of day again.

W00-H00!!! Warm as Toast!!!

Adam Sandler got the puppy running about 3:30 yesterday afternoon, fixing whatever it was that wasn't allowing the boiler to -uh - boil. By the time I showed up, the water temperature was a balmy 150 degrees F, and Pete was working with the programmable thermostat to see if he could make it stay at a certain temperature until he came back in the morning, instead of going to the lower night time temperature.

This morning, I popped in for a moment and it was toasty warm; if the floor wasn't so dusty I wouldn've taken off my shoes to warm my toes. Where there is bare subfloor and a few holes, you can feel the warmth emanating from the joist cavity. I'd say it's very cool but it's very warm indeed.

Drywall work on the main floor is looking awsome; Pete starts in the basement today!

We Got Heat!

Just called Pete; Adam Sandler came out today and got 'er all fired up and the heat is emanating off the floor like the embers of a braai. Only not as hot. Can't wait to check it out - going to leave the office in a few minutes.

Wednesday, August 27; Fire 'Er Up, Boys!

Pete wondered if we could turn on the heat system and get her going today so the drywall could start drying faster. Too much humidity and cool temperatures are slowing down his progres.

So I put the thermostat wires together, flipped the pump breaker on, heard everything click into gear, and flipped on the boiler breaker and switches, and waited for the water temperature to start climbing.

And I waited. And waited. Nothing. Called Even Conklin; he said it could be an electrical issue. Called Sparky; we agreed it wasn't an electrical issue. Called Evan back, and he was going to send out Anthony (the Adam Sandler look-alike) to come out on Thursday.

Keep your fingers crossed; we're going into the cool season and there ain't no backup to this system,..... I'm sure it'll be fine. :-)

It's Wednesday and It's $28.15

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:-)

Wetness Outside, & Some Inside

I know what you're thinking: "What the heck is that?" Don't blame ya. Looks like a wet streak on the basement floor. It is, sort of - it's a drying wet streak, where Pete put down the self-levelling concrete, a very viscous cementitious mixture that seeks its own level so that the floor is nice and flat. Problem is, there's flatness and there's levelness. Stuff can be flat without being level. We're going for flatness here since the floor is all catywompus and it's really the best we can reasonably hope for. When the cementitious stuff seeks its own level, it flows into areas Pete wasn't thinking it would flow into, so he's having to use more stuff than he anticipated.
And more drywall work big time upstairs, including mudding in the bathroom. Pete's really sticking to the mission to get the upstairs ready for us as soon as possible.

Since it was raining like a cow peeing on a flat rock tonight, we decided to check out a movie at The Crest; "Mongol", the story of how Genghis Kahn became who he was from the ripe old age of nine when he selected his bride, to the beginnings of the most powerful army of all time. Check it out.

Monday, August 25.

We are so not going to get a payoff from the ads on this site unless something drastically different happens. We're still holding at $24.58, which is where it was before my fatal blog deletion. So click away, guys.

Pete almost finished leveling out the basement floor today, and was cranking away on the drywall mudding around the new main entrance when I came by the house this evening. To my surprise, the recessed ceiling lights were in operation for the first time! You could see them through the front patio door (see top photo). Sparky had put in one light switch for those fixtures just before he left apparently, and Pete was taking advantage of it. Odd that I didn't notice it earlier.

And in case you hadn't heard, it was pouring rain pretty much all day. All that cardboard that we cleverly laid out to kill the grass and weeds on the front lawn was pretty well soaked, and fortunately Danny and I put down the biggest concrete chunks on top of it all to keep any of it from blowing away in all the strormy conditions.

Kian, home from summer camp after three weeks in the deep woods, saw the house for the first time in about a month, and for a guy who's pretty typically non-plussed about everything, he let on just a little bit of surprise at the big old Nanawall and some satisfaction with the Man-Cave. I think he's really looking forward mostly to the idea of the media room and the speakers around the house. It's a guy thing, I'm sure.

That's it for tonight. Pretty quiet except for Pete's drywall cranking; hope to see more tomorrow!

Sunday Sunday Sunday!

It was pretty quiet on the homestead front today; though it again started early with a quick trip to dump the clean wood, which Heather had loaded into my Matrix yesterday quickly without taking the time to shake off all the bugs and creepy crawlies before placing it in the car. She knows that I (and our two sons) get "somewhat" creeped out by spiders, but it didn't matter. She just crammed it all in there (bless her heart, there was a boatload of it - or a Matrix load anyway), and let the bugs crawl where they may! Which is fine if she's driving, but not me! So I had to dump the wood first thing this morning and completely vacuum out the interior just in case and critters thought they found a new home.

After that, I worked up a little Sketchup model for the bathroom, since we're trying to decide how much tile to put on the walls and if there needs to be any additional color striping. I think we agreed on some things using the model, but we still have a little more work to do this week. Soon, too, because Pete's really cranking on the drywall work. He'll be ready for finishes soon.

Which takes me to the next photo; it's the floor edge at the stairwell, and there are a number of odd things coming together here. The railing needs to be mounted soon so the flooring detail there needs to be designed and drawn. The concrete basement wall sticks out a little further than the framed wall above, and then there's the slope of the ceiling that angles down, and the joists that need to be covered up with wallboard or wood trim, and the opening I want to keep into Kian's "Man Cave" from the stairs, and the handrail that needs to go down the stairs. Oy! Just listing all the stuff to do makes me want to stay up all night and work on it. Not.

I heard Karin and Phyl made it all the way to Klamath Falls yesterday on their trek to Burning Man. Today they should have pulled into their campsite at the big event sometime late this afternoon.

Kian is back from three weeks at summer camp; Heather's so glad to have him back.

And lastly, it was Heather's dear friend Grassa's birthday today (29!!); she is one of the owners of Tempero do Brasil, the awsome Brazilian restaurant in the U District by Ravenna Avenue. H and I joined them briefly for a wonderful get-together including Pam and Tim from Tacoma, Antonio (of course), and so many other I cant' remember off hand. Maybe H will log in now and add detail and photos!

And that's all that's happening tonight in Lake Wedgbegone, where all the women are beautiful, all men are handsome, and all the children are above average.

Ciao!

Hot, Sweaty, Exhausted

It was going to be a working kind of Saturday today; H and I are trying to keep Pete and Steve on schedule, so we need to do what we can to keep the ball rolling. I started early by going in to check all of the perimeter insulation in the floor joist cavity - my earlier investigations gave me little confidence things were okay. Sure enough, the first area I looked at had the heat tubes up against the rim joist with no insulation separating them (see first photo). That means if you had an infrared goggles this winter and you looked at the house, there'd be a bright red spot right at the floor line where lots of precious heat would be emanating through the wood. There were a couple of spots like that, and a couple spots where I was looking out through small holes to the inside face of the Tyvek (that stuff that Nascar prefers), so I foamed them up real good and put the batts lovingly back into place.

One thing I did find that surprised me; it's a Sparky thing. It looks like he must've ran out of ground wire that had to run back to the main water line because when I took off some of the insulation to inspect, I saw that he had a line of grounding wire running diagonally through the ceiling of the Man Cave, and one of the holes drilled in the joist was made in a way that separated the diagonal bridging from the joist on both sides! (See next photo, showing copper cable and dangling bridging) I nailed the bridging back into place; don't know why it wasn't done earlier. I started all the insulation inspecting at 6:00 and finished the "repairs" by 10:30 pretty much on schedule.

That's when Heather arrived on her bicycle to begin the process of using all the concrete rubble stacked up in the front yard as filler, on which that giant orca-sized dirt pile in the back will provide additional fill, to build up for the front yard patio (a.k.a. "Breakfast Deck"). Daniel joined in the fun about noonish, and together the three of us worked on stacking alternate layers of dirt and rubble to make an earthwork lasagne (without the cheese).

And I had a hare-brained scheme to get a concrete saw to cut up the old basement driveway into chunks that could be neatly stacked too. That turned out to be about the slowest process in the history of Wedgwood, so I switched to a (gasp) 60 pound demo hammer (aka The Breaker) and "Owhrrr, owhrrr, owhrrr!!!") , and let me tell you, the tool only does part of the work. That was hard labor - I remember why I like working in an office again.

By about 3:30 the three of us were all just dragging our heinies because of the heat, but Judy (of the Jack & Judy hip roof and large windowed house down the street) came in for a brief tour (mostly to see the Nanawall of course). When she left, she was able to join the Thumbs Up Crowd too. Check out that shirt. We seem to be providing a pretty fair amount of entertainment for some of the neighbors. Richard came by while I was using the 60 pound mother of all demo hammers, sticky sweaty and barely able to lift the thing out of the pavement after it drilled through it like a hot knife through butter. He was talking about using it in the basement to lower the slab height someday. Oy! The worst thing is, we wouldn't get to watch him if he's in the basement.

Just a tip; if you're under six feet tall, get someone else to use this demo hammer thing. I'm just under 5'-10" and it was a chore to keep lifting it- a couple inches would have helped. But everyone needs to find things out in their own way, eh?

Meanwhile, Pete put in more than a full day, mostly leveling out the troublesome basement floors (Danny's room on the left and the Media Room on the right). My architect friend Jon was recommending some high tech cementitious self leveling stuff, so I almost bought some yesterday, but I called Pete to find out how many bags to get. He said "How much are they?" "Forty bucks a bag." "Oy! Ya know - I am positive I can do it with good old fashioned concrete and that's only three bucks a bag." "You're the boss!" Amazing. So he was in the nice cool basement all day, mixing and pouring thin layers of concrete while the rest of us were out in the hot sun entertaining the neighbors.

At the end of the day, we are just totally exhausted from moving dirt and rubble, amazed at how Pete and Steve can just bang out this kind of work day after day, and on weekends they go on thousand mile long bicycle rides - or hundreds of miles anyway. They are amazing. Danny and I drove by the house about 8:00 and Pete was still finishing up a few things. Long weekend day for the wicked, huh?

The original blog is still toast; it must be forever. Ah well.....this'll do. Ciao.