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.