Wood Grain

100 years after the wood on the right was harvested to build the original home, the wood on the left was harvested to do our remodel.

The other day Michael pulled us aside to show us how much tighter the grain on the original stuff is. Trees grown for construction today are selected for their rapid growth, which means that they are relatively sustainable (i.e., we don't have to chop down old growth to feed our building appetites--we just plant more fast-growing trees). On the other hand, the newer construction-grade stuff is not as strong, straight, or beautiful as the older tight grain lumber, hence the high prices folks are willing to pay for reclaimed, salvaged, and re-milled old growth wood.

Tube Migration

Our plumbing is a series of tubes, not too unlike the Internet. We are going to put different stuff into our tubes, of course. For the past few days, Dean, our master plumber, has been installing new plumbing and tidying up existing stuff--mainly to reconnect it to the main lines and to get it moved into the walls, chase, and closets.

One thing that strikes me about Dean is that he is a bit of a sculptor. He has a real intentionality for the aesthetics of his finished plumbing. No kidding.

Like any plumber, he's got about a dozen different shapes and angles of plastic to work with plus varying lengths of tube, and that's about the extent of the palette. The size of our house doesn't give him a whole lot of space to work in, especially considering he's now working around heat ducts and flues, electrical wiring and switch boxes, doorways and windows (inside and out).

The result is something you could put in a gallery or a bonsai garden: elegant, sweeping curves of plastic that hug the contours of the framing and cleverly placed junctions fitted into impossible corners without sacrificing function. Our plumbing, spreading and branching as it goes from basement to first floor to second, unfolds like a plastic tree into the house's cavities.

This is plumbing you look at and you just know is the best plumbing on the block.

In addition to the art installation, Michael soffited about 10 inches of the kitchen ceiling along the wall containing the window to accommodate the upstairs toilet trap, which incidentally, is an original installation, not a piece of Dean's work. It makes more sense for us to drop a strip of ceiling than to try to re-plumb that trap. We simply don't have any vertical play unless we do some massive changes to the plumbing and the way it's run in the house.

In this photo, the toilet trap is just to the left of the green spray-painted dot on the right.

The green dots on the soffit are where we're going to install the kitchen stereo speakers. The two green streaks of paint on the wall mark the locations of the room audio controls. More on home audio in a later post.

• 5/6 :: Eliza adds : But is that a kitty in the photo, too?

Evening Glow

The windows framed on the interior wall will allow sunlight to pass from the stair tower into the kitchen in the evenings. If you look directly through the foreground window, you can see the second window behind it, framed in the wall above the doorway opening to the stair well.

The metal column is a heating duct for the upstairs bathroom. It's rectangular in shape so that it fits comfortably inside normal 3.5" wide framing.

Take note of some of the details in this photo, which I took yesterday evening. The next photo was taken today, and there are a couple of changes.

Nude Scene

Not much here but asphalt and dirt. The form for the main deck stair pad is out to the right at the rear of the photo. In the foreground to the left we've dug footings for the back entry deck and recycling center. There's a half ton of sound proofing under the blue tarp. The driveway is its temporary home until we lay flooring in a few weeks.

Pad Form

Tomorrow we will pour concrete into this form. The long edge along the left of the form will be the landing point for the front deck stairs.

The southeast corner of the house foundation is on the right edge of the photo.

North Annex Wrap

The North Annex is sheathed and wrapped. The electrical meter is on. This part of the house is going to look a little different than what it used to look like. One significant improvement is that the lattice skirting is a thing of the past--it looked bad and wasn't doing anything to support the structure. The upper portion will have matching siding as before, but we'll probably cover the bottom three feet with something slightly more daring, like corrugated steel.