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.

Deck Framing

Today the crew completed the main deck and front porch beam layout and started filling in with joists.

Sun Dial

The crew hones its record keeping skills over lunch.

Hot, Cold and Primer Lines

Hookups for the hot and cold lines for the kitchen sink are in. The feed on the right is the primer line for the bathroom floor drain, which is about ten feet away. Floor drains require primer lines which periodically wash the drain out and help avoid sewer gas buildup. The primer line is here instead of the bathroom because of space issues.

Floor Fixtures

The floor fitting for the toilet (right) and the floor drain (left) are installed in the bathroom. The tiles will slope slightly toward the drain, which will catch overspray from the tub's hand shower.

Married Life as Opera Bouffe

A couple of weeks ago Michael and Jeff opened one of the kitchen walls and pulled out a section of The Weekly Oregonian, dated Thursday, December 29, 1904. We finally got around to browsing through the fragile pages, which crumble at a touch, and took a few snapshots. The snippets of articles, ads and stock analyses are a wild lens onto the year Justin's great grandmother was born.

Here's a sampling, taken from the above photo:

Married Life as Opera Bouffe
CHICAGO, Dec 5.--Degradation of the marriage tie, as illustrated in the life of Mrs. Grace Snell Layman, who has just been granted her fifth divorce, was denounced by judges today.
"This woman's career has been a rank travesty on marriage and the sacredness of its obligations," said Judge Brentano.
"Mrs. Snell, or Layman, or whatever her last name is at present, has turned the married life into opera bouffe," said Judge Mack.
Mrs. Layman was married first when she was 16 to Frank Coffin, a dancing master. She got a divorce from him and married him a second time. Again she got a divorce from him and again married him.
Mrs. Layman is under 40 and still pretty. She is said to be comtemplating a sixth marriage.

We put together a slide show of dozen or so clippings that feature ads for Chinese Herbs and male dysfunction remedies, and blurbs about criminal youth, the Lewis and Clark Centennial Exposition and an attempted rat-poison-and-beer suicide, all of which you can view by clicking here.

Closet Space

Part of the first floor stair well landing is a closet. To the left of the closet we'll have a bench (for puttin' on shoes) and a "mail sorting" table (more of a mini household-affairs organizational area) so that we can try to keep the kitchen relatively clutter-free of paperwork.

Pilings and Pads

Several 6x6 deck pressure treated posts have been fitted into the aluminum plint brackets. Concrete pads for the front, back and main decks went in this afternoon.

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.