The Deck's Decked!!

Even though it rained most of the day, apparently Steve was able to get enough dry moments to finish the main surface of the back deck today! It looks totally awesome, and I had to open the Nanawall to get the full effect of the inside/outside union. I think H will be very happy.

I also picked up the cork flooring for the kitchen today on my lunch break, from Ecohaus. They gave me a nice professional discount with it, and was able to walk away with the last 5 boxes they had on site. So maybe Pete can get cranking on that soon.

It's exactly four weeks to October 31 today. That's four more weekends. Tomorrow and Sunday will be all about painting. I think Pete will finish off the woodwork upstairs tomorrow, and then will shift into building the kitchen cabinets. I need to get moving on the electrical work with Darren (he hasn't called this week), and Steve will be doing siding outside probably most of the week. It's going to be very busy here soon, and I may have to do the full week off work in a week or two just to focus on making it all happen.

Stay tuned; this is where it gets interesting.

After the VEEPs; The Blog Report

Steve put about half the decking on today, in addition to finishing up the taping and mudding of "his rooms" in the basement so H and I can finish the painting the weekend. The decking looks awesome; though it's a little darker than I thought it would be, he's countersinking each screw neatly and all in all crafting a very nicely built surface. It's that recycled plastic material called "Trex", and instead of the extremely fake wood-look surface, we special ordered the smooth material. Steve says no one he works for ever wants that fake wood stuff, but it's the only thing Home Despot carries, so you see it pretty much everywhere else. The same is true for the Hardi-plank siding. It's easy to get the wood-look stuff, but all the projects Steve does use the smooth surface stuff. Go figure. He also made sure I ordered the Trex in "Winchester Gray", and not the usual brown, which he said always fades. This stuff still looks dark to me, but I'll take his word for it.
And, as is the case in this Tale of Two Brothers adventure, while Steve's outside, Pete's inside doing finish carpentry around the windows, adding the casings and sills. It looks like he almost has enough of the old stuff saved to do the entire upper floor, and we'll switch to a more modern look in the basement I think. I'll have to check that out with the boss to be sure.

I can also go ahead and order the remaining basement doors; a 5 foot french door for Danny's closet, a 6 foot french door for Kian's closet (biggest closet in the house thank you), and two single doors for the central plant and Danny's room. All on one of my two new Home Despot cards.

And this being Thursday night, it was Tempero do Brasil again, this time I finally got to see Antonio and Bryant do "Mas Que Nada", and H even got up to samba a little for that one. It's actually 1:30 in the morning right now on Friday; for some reason I couldn't sleep. Maybe all that spicy but yummy food.

Tuesday, September 30; One More Month!

First, be advised that I am still sick, pretty much as a dog, but our landlord insisted on showing the place today, so I had to leave for that, and I had to be at Danny's doctor's office at 2PM for a joint meeting with his mom. So on the way, I dropped by the house. Of course.

This first shot was from last Saturday; just wanted to get you a pic of the jerry-rigged contraption I tried to describe to paint the ceiling above the stairs. Watch that last step on the way down - or "Mind the Gap" as they say in London.

This next pair of pics might strike you funny if you remember way back when in June when Sparky moved the panel to its new location, which was great, but in so doing he just cut through the existing siding and slammed on the unitstrut and conduit for the mast without much coordination with Steve. One of those sequencing things that didn't really happen. I guess Steve's just used to that, and what he's come up with to deal with it is just a big fat piece of wood (in this case a 2x12), carefully scribed and cut and routed out in back for the unistrut, to conceal all of Sparky's handiwork. If you look carefully at the closeup photo, Steve was pretty accurate with the cutting along the scribe - he even accounted for the metal bands and escutcheon plate. The left side 2x12 will go on tomorrow, and it'll all be caulked nice and neat when he's done. So at the end of the day, it'll look like it's embedded neatly in the exterior skin of the house. Maybe that was intentional and I should just hush!!

And in the interior, Pete was working on the window sills, using - get this - the window sills from the old windows, run through the planer so they're bare wood again instead of paint. Clear fir. Looks great. (Less filling.) He got the windows where the countertop will be first, since they'll be so hard to get to later.

Another issue the Bros have been trying to deal with is that there's a big bump in the concrete floor where the old garage floor was sloped up for drainage and we took out the wall between the garage and the rest of the basement. It's right in front of Daniel's bedroom door and the basement bathroom door. The wood flooring just won't go on there well without maybe trying to bend it, but it'll either crack or flex all the time, and in general be a problem. Grinding it all down right now would be a real difficult and troublesome thing, take a long time (read $$$), and something the Bros don't want to do very much. So we have to do something else there than the bamboo floor. That's all there is to it. It is what it is, as they say. After the doctor appointment, I tried Seattle Tile to see if there's any good rectangular floor tile with a bamboo like color or texture that could work. That would be better than carpet or vinyl or marmoleum, that's for sure. Jury's still out.

On my way back home, I couldn't help but sneak by Home Depot again (I really AM sick!!!), just to browse for a couple things we still need to get. (Planter wall blocks - which to use; exterior lighting - gosh they've got nothing but uglystuff at HD; and bamboo flooring among other things). My eye caught glimpse of some rolls of what looked like red rubber with little bits of what looked like the leftover flecks of that cheap styrofoam packing material - the crap that gets all static-electrified and you can't seem to shake it off into the trash. The little white balls are attached permanently to a red rubber vapor barrier, and it's an underlayment for wood floors being placed over concrete. Hallelujah - I've been looking for something like this ever since the guy at the wood-floor-over-concrete-seminar I went to said you need this kind of thing if you're putting wood floor in a basement. I got 700 square feet of it. Yee ha. No light fixtures though. They hurt my eyes.

By then, I felt like last week's sausage sandwich left on the counter. But at least I don't seem to be sniffling as much. I wonder what that means....

And as I dropped off those rolls of red and white underlayment, I saw Richard (yes- "thumbs up Richard" doing a little home improvement himself across the street. Looks like he's prepping for a paint job here pretty soon. I wonder if they'll ask us over to view brush-outs of the various colors they're thinking of using like we did with them last year.

Move-in date is only a month away now. So many more little things to do, and only five more weeks to do them all. I can't wait.

Quick Stop While Sick

I got myself out of bed long enough to head over to The Black Pearl for some of their fabulous won-ton soup, and stopped by the house on the way to see what got done. Took the opportunity to shoot maybe the last pic of the back of the house before the siding and the decking go on - they arrive tomorrow.

Sure enough, Steve finished the installation of the Kayak Storage Facility door, with the same key as the basement door. How convenient. Next step in that crawlspace is to put the insulation layer underneath the joists. I bought it a couple weeks ago but have been too focused on painting to do that work so far. After that, I'll put in a duplex outlet, two three-way switches, and plug in my halogen light. And then Kian's old go-kart's wheels will wind up being the kayak guides. That's a project unto itself.

It didn't look like Pete had stopped by today, until I poked around in the basement and noticed that yet one more layer of Duram's Fix-All had been layed down on the floor again in various patches in preparation for the bamboo floor that we need to order soon.

All this stuff here and there that no one will ever see, but takes time and extraordinary effort. This simple little 96 square foot addition really has had a lot of hidden required efforts.

But it's all good. And soon - five weeks from now - we should be back in the old homestead. That'll be here before we know it. Well, I'll just keep on telling myself that anyway.

Some Before & After Fun Shots

It's Monday, September 29, and I'm home sick today. Got a bad cold, probably from working too hard on the house and letting myself get all worn out. I went in for a while, didn't feel too bad, but also felt like there was something about to get worse, so I left, stopped by the house, and Steve was building the Kayak Storage Facility door, so I popped over to Frank's and got the same lockset that's on the basement door with matching keys. Then I came home to rest up.

So I thought it would be fun to do some of that before/after comparison thing. Here are a couple from the construction phase to now.

This first shot is looking at what used to be the dining room on the left and the old kitchen to the right.

The "After" shot is looking roughly in the same direction, but what used to be the dining area is now closed off with a wall that will soon have bookshelves, defining the living room as separate from the entry.

The next one up is what Kian's man cave looked like back on May 22, then on June 12, after the furnace was taken out, and then what it looks like today. The flooring is going to be in by mid October. It'll be bamboo - very sustainable, and very light colored to keep it bright. After the floor goes down, the hydronic baseboard heater that's in that box below the window will get installed by Evan Conklin.

That's it from now. Live from Sick Bay; have a great evening.

What The ....

What is that little collection of stuff on the ground?!?

That's the little front yard model that Heather and I collaborated over yesterday morning, trying to figure out what the sidewalk looks like, if it's straight, zig zagged, or meandering, and what the experience is as you walk to the front door. Was it helpful? Kind of. Still a lot to figure out though.

Another Exhausting Weekend

You may have noticed that I haven't been blogging every day. It's not because I'm tired of blogging, I'm just plain tired. Virtually every waking moment of the last two weekends has been focused on painting and priming and painting and buying and designing the last remaining things to settle, so there's been no quality time on the computer for anything. But there's been lots of progress on the house. Check out this first photo; it's a composite showing the living room - note the green paint on the left walls where the bookshelves will go. Notice also that great looking ceiling and the recessed lighting trims that are now installed. And that big stack of cardboard in the middle of the room? The new kitchen cabinets. They're in Ikea Flat Mode right now.

I actually have about a dozen pics I want to upload here now, but for some reason the blackberry isn't able to send them all. This next shot is of the new entry closet. The same "Ivy League" green as the bookshelf walls in the living room, and the closet is "Honey Harbor". That niche to the left of the closet is where we hope to someday have a Reverend Tom Fisher furniture item with four drawers, one for each of us residents, to hold our cell phones, wallets, etc. Not to mention some type of handsome thing on the top - maybe Heather's Buddha.

Other pictures that are yet to be posted include the new Toto Eco-UltraMax, installed in the basement bathroom by Ray the Plumber yesterday in about an hour. Really a good flushing toilet, yet it hardly uses any water. The basement is completely primed now, ready for the ceiling paint next. "Ivory White" flat latex. Jonni wanted us to go with eggshell, but there's just the windows at the end of the long room and it'll show every little imperfection, so I overuled.

And if you've been reading this blog regularly since it started, you might remember how I fussed over the stair opening and how to trim it all out so it looks neat and simple. I figured it out - it's all done with drywall with simple shapes. Given that Pete is the Super Smoothwall King, what better way to handle all that trickiness than to let him put simple drywall shapes to receive paint. So Pics of that are due on the site soon.

I crossed the line into painting dangerland too - in order to get the walls and ceilings above the stairs, I had to prop an eight foot stepladder up against the tall wall and lay in a flat 2x12 plank as a scaffold, then had to stand on a short ladder sitting on the plank. Quite the risky thing.

This morning, Heather and I were discussing the front yard and garden design while we sat on Steve's carpentry step extravaganza in the sunshine sipping tea on a short break. I didn't have anything to draw with, but there was a huge stack of wood scraps of all shapes and sizes, so I started using what was handy to build a little front yard model. That's another photo I really need to put up soon - as soon as I get the dang bberry to work.

And lastly, here's a peek at Steve's carpentry for the big stair thing. It's pretty cool

The siding and probably the decking will be arriving Tuesday; that's put Steve totally busy on the outside of the house. Meanwhile, I'm guessing Pete will either finish the drywall work that Steve started in Danny's room and the basement bathroom, or he'll start on the kitchen. I'm hoping for the kitchen. That would be good.

I'll upload more pics soon. Thanks for stopping by and make sure you click on the ad. Maybe it's higher now; I don't know.

Better Pic of Heather's Office

It came to my attention through a vocal spouse that the quality of my photograhs taken with that pesky blackberry is pretty darn bad. I tried going at the hard to reach lens with a q-tip and immediately saw better results. Here then is another shot of the blue in H's office. Still have to cut in the corners- that's not because of the lens quality. Ciao 4 now!

It's Almost Flushable!

At least it's out of the box! I'm hoping Ray will be there tomorrow, and the portapottie will be gone. Keep your fingers crossed.

More Inching, While The Themometer Drops

As expected, Steve put all his efforts today into the tile installation in the main floor bathroom. The photo gives the impression that he finished, but he's still got the left wall of the tub and about half the door wall to go. But it sure looks good in this photo, doesn't it?

Meanwhile, Pete was mudding away again when H and I dropped by in the evening, and it's all getting very very smooth right now. Hopefully, this weekend, we'll be painting away down there. That would be awsome.

And it's really getting cold lately. H had the little space heater on this morning, with the toaster on and the electric tea kettle when all of a sudden it all stopped working. She was really tempted to get serious about getting some fuel oil for the heating system here in teh rental house. A moment of weakness no doubt. So far she's convinced to remain steadfast, and we've got sweaters on tonight. Makes us that much more motivated to get the house finished, and that would be a very good thing.

Inching Visibly Closer To Home in the Bathrooms

That Honey Bucket out front is not long for this world. Pretty soon, maybe by Thursday, I think Steve's going to have Ray the Plumber come down and hook up the Toto toilet, the tub, and the sink in the basement bathroom. With the floor tile installed yesterday, Steve put all the yellow tile on the walls today, so it'll all be ready for grouting tomorrow. It's looking more and more like a real house again. I'll have to get the wall sconces for the kids' bathroom quickly.

He must've taken most of the day to do that, plus put the wall mounted electrical boxes in for the upstairs bathroom for those sconces, because the only tile up there is just the ones directly centered on the sink, which as you can see he carefully lined up precisely on the center. Being an architect you know, that whole centered thing is critical.

In other developments, the plastic laminate sample came today, and my initial reaction was not one of overwhelming acceptance. So I pulled a few more swatches just to see if anything else would stick, and we'll go by the house tonight to see. I ordered larger samples of each one just in case. No progress has been made on the kitchen, Pete's been diligently plugging away at the basement drywall mudding, and it's inching closer and closer, sometimes asymtotically it seems, to being finished.

Chillin'

I've mentioned a number of times that we've been staying in a rental house while the gut job's been going on at our real house, but I haven't shown you any pics of it yet. You can't say that anymore- here's a shot of my feet as they relax on the ottoman in the living room. I'll shoot up another view of it soon for ya'll.

Steve the Tile Layer

Ya see that tile on the floor? Steve put that in himself 'e did. Every piece cut to fit. Every joint carefully set. You think people would call him Steve the tile layer. But nooooo...

_________________________________________________
This message is private or privileged. If
you are not the person for whom this message
is intended, please delete it, notify me
immediately, and do not copy or send this
message to anyone else.

At Solstice; The Four Month Mark

Hooboy. What a weekend. It's now been a full four months of our lives that Steve and Pete have been rebuilding our house, pretty much from the ground up. I'm fatigued. Largely because it's been a very busy weekend, but also largely because four months is a long time. At least we're living in a comfortable rental house and not having to deal with the dust and noise and intrusions and heaven knows what all else. Actually, I do know - I've lived through remodels before. But Heather hasn't, so I'm really glad we're in this house. If only it had something other than an oil furnace. We refuse steadfastly to fill the oil tank, so we're going to be pretty darn chilly here pretty soon I think. Sweaters, blankets, slippers, snuggling; we'll have to pull out all the stops soon to avoid frostbite and popsicle toes.

I opened a line of credit at Home Depot to cover a chunk of stuff that we still need to buy, everything from the Trex decking to the garbage disposal and miscellaneous light fixtures. And at the start of it all, neither H nor I were interested in doing any of the work ourselves, but we just spent the past three days painting until almost midnight and doing more most of the day today. you already know about all the dirt we've been moving. It' a good thing we like the progress that we're seeing; everything is starting to come together pretty well right now, especially all the colors that Jonni and H picked out; it'll be a very nice composition of colors when we move in.

Steve should be starting the tile in the basement bathroom tomorrow morning, (Finally! - we can get rid of the Honey Bucket as soon as the toilet is up and running.) And yesterday, H and Picked out towel bars, shelves, TP holders, soap dispensers, toothbrush shelves, etc. So the bathrooms will start looking like a lot more than just cement board and drywall mud soon.

That big stepped thing that H and I came up with on Monday evening last week is looking very cool, and as I was cleaning up this evening before coming home, I thought I'd take a few moments to catch my breath on the partially framed deck. The sunshine that occasionally punctuated the day that I could see through our new windows as I painted had given way to a high overcast, and the air had a freshness from the scattered showers. As I settled down to sit on the deck, thankful for the wide overhang and dry are in front of the Nanawall, I could start to see how the stepped platforms fit into the landscape. And it was good. ;-)

Meanwhile, what Heather and I did in the house all weekend can be seen in the upcoming photos. Again, they're just from the blackberry, but they're here to show you the color. Jonni and Heather's creation in progress.

These first couple of photos is of the Living Room and Dining Room. The wall color is "Flowering Herbs", and it's got an eggshell sheen. It's fabulous.

The ceiling is "Honey Harbor", and after two full coats trying to do it in eggshell, and highlighting 60 years of ceiling repairs, varying textures, including Pete's fantastic smoothwall, but next to some original sand textured plaster, I gave up and switched to flat, and it looks fabulous too.

These other photos show you some additional placements of "Flowering Herbs", but also a small taste of the other smorgasbord of color that H and Jonni have selected.

Colorful Saturday

I took yesterday off to paint and get a bunch of things ordered from Home Depot. More on that later- on Saturday, H and I spent the better part of the afternoon buying paint, ordering Hansgrohe faucets and Valsan bathroom accessories, picking the cork and bamboo flooring materials, then starting about 5:00 we painted and painte until about 11:30 last night. Here's Heather throwing some new bedroom color on the wall. More paint today!

_________________________________________________
This message is private or privileged. If
you are not the person for whom this message
is intended, please delete it, notify me
immediately, and do not copy or send this
message to anyone else.

Zigurat; From Concept to Reality

So Steve's been trying to build the little zigurraty stepped thing that Heather and I came up with on Monday night. He and I had a good session yesterday just discussing how the whole thing should be proportioned and framed, and I traced over yesterday's photo this morning to show Heather a little more clearly what we were trying to build. That sketch is below.

By the time I got home in the evening, Steve had done quite a bit. He's fast.

And tonight being Thursday, the newly established tradition of the weekly visit to Tempero do Brasil occurred again, much to my personal delight. I'm working my way through the menu, and tonight it was Camarao Alho Oleo, which actually has tildees all over it so it's not really spelled corrctly here, but it's shrimp with garlic and olive oil, and it was fabulous. Heather had what's become the "Heather Plate", consisting of Bolinho de Bacalhau, collard greens, rice, beans, and manioc flour with *bacon*, and you know how I feel about bacon. Yum.

We're going to try to bring all our friends there, not all at the same time, but over the coming weeks and months and years, introduce them to the Brazilian cuisine and our friends Bryant, Antonio and Graca, the owners of the restaurant. And Thursdaysis live music night (I have a hunch every night is live music night there actually.)

Ciao for now

Let's Click.

Our blog's economic performance is slipping. At the moment it's only about $36. That's not much higher than it was 2 weeks ago. C'mon guys. Let's click.

Meanwhile, Steve's been framing the stairs and getting a start on that little stepping platform thing that Heather and I came up with the other night. Lots of ziguratting going on in this phot.

Productive Tuesday

So Steve was Mr. Busy today. He cut and framed all the stair stringers, those zig-zaggy pieces of wood underneath the stairs that hold them up. And he framed in the privacy wall on the north end of the deck that'll give us a good level of visual screening from and to our neighbor to the north. Check it out in the photo below.

Regarding the stairs, Heather and I had one of those discussions last night as she finally started to understand the nature of the deck and stairs that I had designed. She took issue with their proximity and what would be between them. I, in my architecture focused brain, just thought we could do a Monty Python shrubbery between them. Once Heather saw the installation, she thought it would be better to make one of those big wide stairs that turn the corner. They look like the plinth at the Parthenon or Temple of Zeus; in this case there'd be seven steps. So to further the discussion (we needed to get to a conclusion on this), I started drawing what that would look like on the butcher paper on the floor that's covering the wood floor, and a second sketch showing what I had planned. (Click on photo left.) We ended up concluding that the conjoined stairs would be good, but instead of standard width stair treads, we'd skip every other riser and make wider treads, so they'd be a good size to hold potted plants and also serve as a bench. I left Steve a note on the plans "STEVE; LOOK AT THE DRAWING ON THE FLOOR!" It actually took him a couple hours to notice it; I got his voicemail that he understood it fine sometime around 10:30AM.

Here's a shot of that privacy wall from the yard looking back at the house, showing clearly the stair that goes down towards the basement stairs - you can almost see the other stair going to the west, towards the future garage.

And this thing that looks like a tall doghouse is the dishwasher that was finally delivered today. And this last photo is the little extra piece of sheetrock that Steve put around the opening to the stairs that I asked for - it allows the wall paint to turn the corner and stop so the ceiling color can start. He worked a lot on the drywall around the stair today, and there you have it.

Heather had dinner with her friend Ulricha from work; I guess we're invited to her house for dinner on Friday night. I'm looking forward to it!

Ciao!

Deck Started!!!!

I actually posted these photos last night, but didn't get a chance to write about them until just now, a day later. Steve framed the deck today! It's ten feet from the Nanawall opening to the edge of the framing, and I was a little concerned that it wouldn't be big enough. It's big enough. It's a good size for this house. Here it is with Nanawall open. Viewing from the side, you can see that the eave projection covers the Nanawall well. The elongated posts will support the trellis that will extend the roof line out over the deck.

And here it is straight on from the back. You can really see how the spaciousness extends all the way through the house now, front to back.

And that's the way it looked at the end of the day on Monday, September 15, 2008.

A Ghost

I don't know how I did it, but somehow I told my Facebook page to import the old blog. I found that out as I visited the Facebook page that I never visit anymore, and saw something called a "Minifeed". I was minifeeding Facebook starting when Steve was demoing the old roof, up until the old blog up and died. What a pleasant surprise! You can visit all those old posts, including pictures and text, at http://www.facebook.com/minifeed.php?id=686174706.