Power Up

The first new light fixture.

Remodel Exhaustion

A tired owner takes a thirty second breather. We're nine days from move-in and getting tantalizingly close to the end of the project. The siding is nearly all on. Only the living room remains for painting. Trim out electrical and tiling both start tomorrow.

Urban Panda

Very rare. Spotted on our garage roof this evening, angling to get at the bowl of cat food sitting in the back yard.

Porch Progress

The rafters and sheathing are on the front porch.

Porchsign

At last, the ghost of a front porch appears. The structural timbers are 4x4 Ipe, which is the same material we're using for the handrail posts on the rest of the deck.

Rear Deck Prep

The concrete footings for the back deck, poured yesterday, are hard to see in this photo. The pressure treated ledger went on today. The inside corners created by the stair tower have slowed things down from time to time, mostly because of runoff water management. We don't want water getting in the cracks and causing damage inside the structure or behind the siding, so getting the flashing cut right and in place correctly is somewhat tedious work.

Construction on the rear deck should begin on Friday or early next week.

The 90 Degree Shot

It reached (or got very close to) 90 degrees F today. Rachael brought in lemonade for the crew at 10:30 this morning to help cool things down. Despite the heat, more of the Tyvek wrap disappeared under the steadily growing field of cedar siding.

• 5/31 :: Daniel adds : That cedar siding is so good looking, are you going to paint it?

• 5/31 :: We add : It's paint-grade cedar, so because of the glue that helps keep it together, we're obligated to put some kind of protective coating on it. We were initially thinking we'd stain and seal it, but we think the UV will still pass through whatever clear sealer we use and compromise the glue. We've also been cutting and mounting it with gaps along trim to allow room for caulk, which we wouldn't do if we were hanging stain-grade cedar. This bare cedar does look good, but we're pretty confident we'll have an equally good look once the paint is on.
  

Kitchen Paint

The Jackson Tan is creeping into the kitchen from the hallway (at left behind ladders). Those are paint spots on the walls, not a dirty lens. Rachael and I did some finger painting this evening to color code the walls for the painters.

Red Room Reborn

Now that the carpet is in (thanks Dave!), the second floor bedroom is starting to look a lot like our bedroom at the Liebe Street house.

Salsa Dancing

Leo and Chano finished painting the second floor bedroom and the entire basement on Sunday. We're using Low-VOC Aura paints by Benjamin Moore. Powell Paint, our supplier, has been helpful and super friendly. The upstairs bedroom is Salsa Dancing red. The basement is done in Jackson Tan and Valley Forge Brown.

• 5/31 :: Denise adds : Great color!

Paint Grade Cedar Siding

On Saturday Peter and Justin hung siding on two sides of the first floor. Peter spent over 12 hours with us to help us move the project along. Thanks Peter!

2nd Floor Bedroom Texture

The second floor bedrom windows and closet doors were covered to protect from texture overspray. The texture is drying overnight. Tomorrow, this bedroom goes from white to Salsa Dancing Red, which is the color of the test swatch on the wall in the corner.

Orange Peel

You can't really see it in this photo, but the basement rooms got a texture coating today that looks like orange peel once it's been applied. Texture helps hide imperfections in sheet rock installations. Smooth finishes take a lot more work whereas textured finish jobs wrap up fairly quickly. The basement and second floor bedrooms got texture. The first floor and stair well are done smooth.

First Floor, First Coat of Paint

The smooth walls took on a coat of primer today. Compare to what this room looked like yesterday.

First Floor, Last Coat of Mud

This photo was taken yesterday evening. This is the last coat of mud. Tomorrow the drywall company will prime the walls so that imperfections are more readily visible. The mudders will return Tuesday to do any necessary touch ups.

Four by Four

The 4x4 deck posts and structural timber for the front porch arrived yesterday. They're made of Ipe, the same material we'll be using to surface the decks. Imagine that these pieces of wood are made of steel. That's how heavy they are.

This Week's Cover of "Backyard Today"

Well, here's where we stand. We're just a few weeks away from moving in. The perimeter trim is finishing up this week (note all the primed gray trim boards around the windows, doors and wall edges). The roofing for the lower roof is just about done. The mudders are still working almost around the clock; they're somewhere between 2 and 2.5 coats of mud; they are pushing hard for a Friday completion, but it'll be tight. Meanwhile, the furnace is hot wired without a thermostat and is blasting hot air into the whole house so the mud dries faster.

This weekend we plan to put a dent in siding installation with our good friend Peter. Our painter, Chano, will be here with his crew over the weekend to get started on the interior. Next week we start laying floors with our good friend Dave, starting with soundproofing underlay and rubber carpet cushion. If we stay on schedule, we'll begin tiling next Friday with co-founder of Portland Cement Co. and professor of concrete arts and sciences, Dr. Rude Graves.

So, yeah, things are starting to heat up. Deep breath. We can do this!

100% Certified

To continue a previous train of thought (i.e., What's sustainable about your house anyway?!)...

This is a shot of some FSC (Forest Stewardship Council) certified lumber. This stamp assures us that the wood we use in our project conforms to FSC standards. To directly quote from the FSC website:

Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) is a non-profit organization devoted to encouraging the responsible management of the world’s forests. FSC sets high standards that ensure forestry is practiced in an environmentally responsible, socially beneficial, and economically viable way.

Landowners and companies that sell timber or forest products seek certification as a way to verify to consumers that they have practiced forestry consistent with FSC standards. Independent, certification organizations are accredited by FSC to carry out assessments of forest management to determine if standards have been met. These certifiers also verify that companies claiming to sell FSC certified products have tracked their supply back to FSC certified sources. This chain of custody certification assures that consumers can trust the FSC label.

Trusted environmental organizations including Greenpeace, National Wildlife Federation, The Nature Conservancy, Sierra Club, and World Wildlife Fund all support and encourage FSC certification. Consumers wishing to support healthy forests and communities should look and ask for the FSC label when purchasing wood or paper products.

FSC-US, based in Washington, DC, is the U.S. “chapter” of FSC International, based in Bonn Germany. For more information about FSC at the International level, please visit http://www.fsc.org.

Possessed by Evil

Right about now you may be thinking, "Pazuzu!" Actually, it's only Satsuma trying to yawn and meow at the same time. Creepy, though. Really creepy.

Mud / Brown

Here's the first floor landing as of this evening. The cream colored borders around the windows and wall edges are wet joint compound, also known as mud. This is a finishing step for drywall to make all the tape lines, dents and screw holes disappear.

The brown swatches on the wall are not mud. They're paint tests Rachael and I did this past weekend. The color on the right is officially named Jackson Tan, but we're calling it Jackson Browne. We'll use that color for the stairwell and hallway and we'll also use it in the kitchen and in the basement utility room. Valley Forge Brown is on the left and we're going to use that in the basement bedroom. The colors don't come out quite right in the photo, but we love them on the wall.

Interior painting starts this Friday and should be done by Tuesday, so it's going to be exciting to watch as our array of colors goes up.

Truaxed Doors

Our basement door (shown here) and back door are back from Truax Builders Supply, who fitted the doors with new hinges and jambs. The back door came with the house, but the old basement door had to go--it's only 1" thick and it's an interior door, not an exterior door which is more appropriate here. The new door you see in the photo is a discard from a commercial building that we picked up at the ReBuilding Center. It's a solid core door with a thick tempered glass light (pane of glass).

We have the plywood mounted over all the house doors for security until we install the door hardware, including lever handles and deadbolts, which we'll do after we finish painting this coming weekend. We can't wait to secure the place further since someone broke into the house last week and took a cartload of new light fixtures and our acoustic guitar. The stuff was in a locked room, but interior doors make for poor security. That, plus nothing begs burgling like a construction site.

Cool Metal

We're installing a standing seam galvalume metal roof painted with Cool Color paint, which has increased light and heat reflectivity over non-Cool Color paints. This roof is constructed of steel, which will resist dents and wear. The standing seams allow the roof to be assembled in overlapping pieces while maintaining water proofing and adding structural rigidity.

This photo shows the North roof slope. The hedge in the foreground runs along our driveway and separates our yard from the adjacent property.

Soffit Detail

Tim, Carlos and Fernando have been working many long days on getting all the fascia board and soffit details just right. This is a shot of where the kitchen bump out meets the house. We're going to stain the soffit and paint the fascia, the latter which ships already primed.

Water Table Siding Test

Alex mocked up a water table and some siding so we'd see what it looks like. The water table, which is a trim board that joins the skirting with the siding, is ripped down Ipe. Ipe is the same tropical ironwood we're using for our decking boards. The siding is cedar (look closely at the profile and you'll notice the water repellent design). The skirting isn't shown here, but we're going to use vertically oriented corrugated steel sheeting.

Seam Tape

The tapers went through the house today and applied sheet rock seam tape wherever two pieces of sheet rock butt up against one another.

Sheet Rock, Pt. 6

Here's our first filled-in preview of the stair tower as viewed from the kitchen.

Sheet Rock, Pt. 5

The kitchen is on the right, the hallway to the back entry and stairwell is dead ahead, and the living room is to the left. The window in the wall helps funnel western light into the East side of the house (the side I'm standing in to take this photo).

The brown paper is on all the floors so that mud cleanup is quick and easy.

Sheet Rock, Pt. 4

The kitchen wall sheet rock and corner bead is in.

Sheet Rock, Pt. 3

A visual feast of sheet rock geometry and architectural lines, taken from the second floor landing. To the left is the second floor bedroom. The stairs drop between the cats.

Tomorrow the sheet rock crew (the "rockers" who hang the stuff) will finish up the first floor and complete most of, if not entirely finish, the basement. They'll be followed by the tapers and mudders who'll take a full week and a half to two weeks to get a smooth finish on the first and second floors. Since the second floor and basement bedrooms already have sheet rock with textured finishes, we'll complete patching in both of those rooms with matching texture.

Texture is sprayed on and conceals imperfections in sheet rocked walls and is less time consuming than a surface with a smooth finish. We don't mind a low profile texture, but sometimes it can get out of hand. One of the bedrooms at our last house had a textured finish so severe that a knuckle drag across the wall got you bloody fingers.

Black is the New Tub

The tub was an abstract mix of forest green, sky blue and primer white before Rach attacked it with a satin black can of paint. We don't have any good pictures, though it is in the background here.

This is the second of three steps in the restoration of our original clawfoot.
The first was refinishing the porcelain interior. The next step is getting the feet sandblasted and coated with clear gloss so as to avoid oxidation. The tub should be returned to its original grandeur late next week.

Alex, our project lead, suggested painting giant shark teeth on the front. Hmmm.

Sheet Rock, Pt. 2

Ceilings and partial walls in the lower stair well rockity rocked. This one's from the landing between the first and second floors, looking into the first floor landing toward the kitchen.

Sheet Rock, Pt. 1

The ceilings over the kitchen island, in the bump out and in the kitchen are rocked.

Stacked Siding

The siding has been one of the greater debates of our remodel. We initially were trying to salvage all removed siding, patching only where necessary. Much of the removed siding was damaged beyond repair, and patching it would have been a expensive proposition. We ended up with, essentially, two sides of the downstairs portion of the house entirely without siding, and the other two sides needing some minor patching (these sides had not been removed.) The second floor had siding from when it was built 15 years ago and, while that siding is cheap particle board, it has been mostly untouched by the remodel. The stair tower was a new addition and thus had no existing siding.

Our options were:
a. Custom-match the new siding so that it matched the two walls we hadn't touched (East and North)
b. Remove all downstairs siding and purchase new, standard-sized siding

As I mentioned above, we had wanted to keep all exterior walls intact and simply patch up the siding. The design made this impossible on the west due to the stair tower and french doors, but we had thought that this was feasible for the other three. We changed our minds on the South side after realizing both the wear and the lack of insulation.

We removed the siding from the South and West walls, salvaging all good siding as we went. We began looking into buying siding to match the still-intact East and North walls. Unfortunately, this style of siding is no longer in production so, to match it, we were going to have to pay someone to create a custom-knife with which to shape the boards. On top of purchasing the custom knife we would then have to provide the pre-cut standard siding. Last but not least, we'd have to pay by the linear foot for the custom milling.

The costs of custom-milling siding for 1/2 of the house was comparable to the cost of purchasing certified lumber siding for the entire house. Thus, we decided to take option b and purchase stock siding. This resulted in us removing all remaining siding - that on the East and North sides of the house. This allowed us to further stabilize the exterior structure and, most importantly, insulate the the highest of standards. We figure we'll replace the shoddy particleboard-esque insulation in 15 years or so...next time we paint.

The original siding is not all lost. We hope to plane some of it down and use it in our salvage construction crafts like hand made furniture, shelving and wood accents where we need them.

Inspection Snafu

Inspectors came through and flagged our basement utility room for non-insulation. It sits below the kitchen, so they told us to either insulate the basement walls or ceiling to separate the livable from non-livable space. By framing and insulating the concrete foundation walls, our livable square footage increases. Nicer still is that the utility room now has a more defined 'indoor' feel to it. We opted against insulating the ceiling because there's a little too much mechanical stuff between the joists to cover over.

The crew re-plumbed, framed and insulated this wall in just a few hours this morning. Quite impressive.

Disregard the vile blue-green post and its easter-purple concrete base. Those aren't anything we can't banish with a bit of paint.

In the far corner we'll have the utility sink. Moving left along the wall we'll have the washer and dryer. The side access door to the driveway is off to the left of the photo. Off the right of the photo is the mechanical room and past that the basement bedroom/office/movie space.

Foam Home

Just about every wall and ceiling cavity in the house is filled with yellow medium density foam insulation. It feels and squeezes like those water soluble packing peanuts you sometimes get in Amazon.com shipments.

Walking around inside today was an altogether new spatial experience. It was like being muffled under a comforter or having cotton stuffed in your ear canals. Sound died instantly. From the living room we could barely hear the skill saws humming in the driveway, and the back door was wide open. As we stood and stared at (what must be) the NASA technology surrounding us we could vividly imagine the coziness this place will have in winter. We were nearly hallucinating our tiny heating bills.

This photo stitch was shot from the landing between the first and second floors.

• 5/9 :: Daniel adds : That stuff is awesome. The brand new Mayflower Inn Spa filled every single wall in the new building with the stuff, mostly for its sound proofing ability. You are going to have one quiet (and cozy) house. I just wish we'd had the foresight to fill our ceilings with the stuff when we did our original construction, our biggest complaint is our upstairs neighbors clomping around.

Roofing Off

The old 3-tab composite asphalt shingle on the lower roof is off. We found five layers of this stuff, and the recommended maximum is two before you're supposed to strip it all and start over. One layer or a dozen, it doesn't matter for this project because we're installing metal roofing and we need a bare roof on which to mount it. Metal has a much longer life, is lighter, and has better heat reflectivity than asphalt.

Ganging Up

Justin spent well over 24 hours this past weekend working with the rockin' electricians. They ate, drank and slept wiring, and didn't leave until nearly midnight on Sunday. Their time was well spent as they passed inspections with flying colors on the first round.

Here's a great example of what J and the guys from Statewide Electrical put together. You'll notice the switchbox above has room for 5 switches. We're trying to minimize the "wall acne" (a term coined by Susan Susanka in our remodel bible, The Not So Big House) by ganging as many of the switches together as logical. Furthermore, we're trying to order the switches in a sensible manner. This is to decrease the flicking on and off of lights trying to find the correct one. Few things bugged me more with our last house than trying to turn on the outdoor light and instead starting our 90-decibel garbage disposal. Our friend Shawn M. once did it late at night while visiting. I think it nearly killed him.

On a green note. The metal recycling guy stopped by this morning, as he does every Monday. We're usually pretty good about leaving all scraps out for him, but, in the haze that was this weekend, managed to dump some of the wiring. I walked up to the house as he was fishing it out of the dumpster. Though we've never met, I can tell that he's good people. He only takes what's on the street or in the dumpster, and never comes on site. I think he has his regular rounds, and seems to know the construction crew. What a great mutualism.

Foam Prep

The spray foam insulation crew was in today to prep the windows, doors and inside walls with protective plastic and plastic backing. Click on the image for better detail of the first floor, which presently looks like something out of the movie E.T. Here's another photo from a different angle.

We're insulating the interior walls and first floor ceiling as much for energy efficiency as we are for sound proofing. Icynene spray foam has good sound dampening qualities and it can be applied quickly. And since it doesn't have to be cut into polygons like batt insulation, we can fill in all the little nooks and crannies around electrical fixtures, wiring, plumbing, ventilation ducts, windows and doors that would otherwise be escape holes for heat and sound.

• 5/7 :: Mark adds : When I see the shots from the other angle I think Flight of the Navigator, but ET works too . . .

Deck Update!

Okay, maybe not too much to get excited about here, but the remaining stringers are in and the corner stringer is nearly finished. The decking material hasn't arrived yet, but when it does this part of the project will quickly roll forward. In the meantime, we've been finishing up some porch design details, such as identifying which brackets to use. We've also been planning the deck rail post positions and how we want to run the cable guardrail system through them.

As Seen From Above

Taken while hanging out the second floor bedroom window. Just beyond the top edge of the photo is the back yard. Yes, we are obsessed with the deck.

Systems, Revisited

This is the furnace and hot water closet in the basement. All this ductwork and plumbing are new and are attached to the heater and furnace that came with the house (both of which are energy efficient). Compare to the systems photo we took before dismantling the existing ducts and pipes.

Mmm, Decky Decky

More joists and stringers. These stair treads are temporary until the decking material arrives, which should be any day now.

• 5/2 :: Denise adds : Can't wait to hang out on that nice decky decky. Looks like things are coming along. I can't believe you'll (hopefully) be moving in next month. Time flies huh?

• 5/8 :: We add: We're still on target for an early June move-in. It's hard to believe, but Alex, our project manager and scheduling master, says it can be done. We're ready when they are!
  

More Deck

The main deck got a bunch more joists today and got what appears to be the first stringer. It's held in place with a single nail, so it may only be a template. Either way, seeing it hang there gets my mind a step closer (har har) to visualizing the finished house.

We asked Green Hammer about the project time line yesterday and they assure us that we're still on target for a mid- or end-of-May an early June move in. It's hard to believe, but over the next week we're going to see the next phase of major changes hit the house: finished decking, siding, insulation, and sheet rock

After that it's painting and flooring and that's all we'll really need to live in it. By mid-June we'll be finishing the kitchen and tying off the bigger loose ends.

PEX

Today Dean installed the supply plumbing for the main floor bathroom tub. The tub spout will be mounted to the wall (not the tub) and we'll have a hand shower (a shower head and handle mounted to a hose) for rinsing, um, whatever one may feel like rinsing.

The "last inch" of plumbing throughout the house is copper, but the long runs are Wirsbo Aquapex, which is a brand of PEX (high-density polyethylene) supply line tubing. This kind of plumbing is easy to work with because it's flexible and it installs quickly. It's also resistant to damage caused by freezing. The tubing simply expands and then when the ice melts it collapses back to its original shape. That kind of malleability is good for high pressure points, too. Fine Homebuilding did an unofficial test last year and tested a bunch of different PEX configurations under pressure. Their tests consistently pumped about 900 PSI into the tubes before they burst. Considering water comes in from the street between 40 and 80 PSI (ours measures at 65 PSI), there's a lot of headroom before it'll blow.

Plastic plumbing got a bad rap in the 60s and 70s due to faulty materials and joint leak problems. It's taken a long time for its reputation to recover, and some plumbers still refuse to use it. Just like with copper plumbing, it's important to make sure the joints are good. When the city inspectors come through, they'll apply high pressure to the supply lines and do a gravity leak test on the drains before they pass the installation.