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.