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.