Merry Christmas and Odds n' Ends

A belated Merry Christmas to all our readers! What I should be blogging about is the Christmas snow we received and the fun I had with my new snow blower at the house. With a driveway, there would have been a lot of shoveling, so it was time to step up and bring in some horsepower. We got a 28" two stage Craftsman and man, did it make easy work of the snow we got. I didn't think to snap any pictures, so I'll least have to take some of the snow covered house next time we're out.

Which was actually today, but didn't think to get that shot until after we left. Nothing's changed on the exterior after all. Ann and I made a trip to the house to do a little homework. We had to mark our final changes to the master shower, mark where we wanted dimmer switches, figure out the sizing of the cabinet pulls and look at the stone.

The cabinet pulls were the primary job. Not very exciting, but we've been looking at this pull from Top Knob, which comes in all sorts of lengths. It's was one thing to sit and look at plans and spec out the measurement, but once we actually got in front of the cabinets, we ended up changing quite a bit. Of course, we ended up going for longer pulls, which of course will mean more money, but hopefully we're talking a change of less than $100.

Figuring out the dimmer switch location turned more into an exercise of trying to remember what switches did what. We honestly couldn't figure out the kitchen...hopefully the electrician can!

The biggest pain was the stone work. Everytime I look at the stone, I see the gaps between the pieces. While it's natural stone, it come in rectangular pieces that are dry stacked, which means no mortar in between. Unfortunately, the mason just didn't get the pieces tight. Kathleen has asked us to mark every gap we'd like him to fill in, but honestly, I see every single seam, so I'm not sure how we're going to fix that. I'm a bit stumped and frustrated.

In the last post, I mentioned the house was all full of paper to protect finished surfaces from the coating being sprayed onto the wood. Here's some updated pics of that.



And these are from a few days later and during daylight

Poof! and cabinets appeared

It's a couple days before Christmas, I've got the day off and I'm stuck here waiting for the replacement dryer to be delivered. Oh well, I could be at work.

So, while I wait, let's talk about cabinets. They've started to go in and it's another one of those steps that gets the excitement level up. Sure, they don't have drawers or doors on them yet, but especially in the kitchen, you can start to see the rooms come together.

They're all Doug Fir wood with melamine interiors. The doors and drawers will be the Doug Fir as well. This will match all the Doug Fir we reclaimed from the paneling, which then got planed and cut down into trim pieces. (btw, it never occurred to me until picking out our xmas tree this year, but half the trees out there are firs and a bunch of those are Douglas Fir. So, I guess we've got xmas trees throughout the house!)

Let's have a look at the kitchen...


The middle two shots are kind of fun because they're the before and after. There's one uninterupted 15' run of granite that will go one side and then the rangetop and sink will go on the other. That last shot shows were the bartop will be, which is over and extending beyond the sink.

Here's the music room coming together.


This room will be fun with space for guitars (hanging above the desk), an amp (in the cabinet in the first pic) and then the bench sitting right in front of the tall windows. With the 10 foot ceilings, this room will look really nice once it comes together.

And here's just a quick, unexciting pic of the kids bath:


Overall, I think things are coming along really well. The painters have been at it for the past couple days coating, sanding and then second coating all the wood. It looks like a disaster zone in there with that varnish and saw dust soaked and stuck to all the tape and paper covering the floors, walls and ceilings.

Supposedly some of the granite counters went in today, but we'll see. I'll snap some pics of the mess if all the paper and stuff is still there. The cabinets in the mud room, which will be out of laminate are delayed, so it will be a while before those come through. We'll see what Kathleen and Mike can do to get those sped up.

Fireplace Door $election

In our latest round of negotiations, we selected and moved forward with fireplace doors today. I can tell... you're really, really excited about that. Well, we've got to blog about something, right?

There's all sorts of stuff going on at the house right now such as cabinets going in and woodwork getting stained. And tomorrow, some of our counter-tops get installed. Now, that's exciting.

Anyway, we had to put new fireplace doors in. In part because what was there was merely a screen and that both seemed unsafe and well, yucky. Also, apparently to get our LEED certification, we needed to close that opening. And to be honest, that matters more than just a certification. That's a big opening and the air flow has at least got to be significant.

I took a look back and amazingly, I don't have many picks of the fireplace. Here's a good one of what it started like and then where it stands just before the doors go in.



Apparently because of that L shape, we're immediately into a custom situation. MOC pointed us right to Fireside Hearth and Home and from there right into a single product with a few different style differences. Not much choice doesn't sound like a good situation for getting a good price.

We were recommended to go to with Stiletto style. It seemed fine, but I couldn't resist the opportunity to talk with the sales guy about price. We had a good conversation and after a couple back and forths, he claimed he put the wrong labor code in the original estimate. Hmmm, really!? Anyway, he adjusted and saved us ~$300. Not a ton, but it's something.

And guess what, that only took us a week to figure all that out! OK, not as good as a few days, but it's done and for that to be off the list, I'm relieved. Up next, the master shower doors and granite.

Second Floor Flooring Is In

A quick post here while Ann and I are in transit back to Minny from Fresno. I was just checking out the pics we haven't posted and while the process of putting the floor down on the second floor isn't that exciting, the pics have got the kids in them, so why not.

As seems to be consistent with the process so far, nothing is done without some level of struggle. As you know, I pulled up all the wood floor from the house prior to demo. It came up pretty well and I didn't have to throw away much of it.

We figured we would put it upstairs and since the area it came out of was slightly bigger than where it was going back into, it seemed like a good fit. After a slight delay in getting the flooring guys out (apparently there was too much humidity upstairs to lay it out... love the fact that the flooring guys care that much, but how far do you take that?), they came a couple weeks back and started with the "play" area outside the kids bedrooms. We then got a call from Kathleen saying that we would be short of wood by half a room. I found this hard to believe, but what are you going to do? I explained that we should have more than enough. She said the extra would cost $1200 (for half a room?!?!?). Well, remember the post from a couple days ago talking about winning some battles and losing some battles? In this case, we kept pressing and sure enough, the flooring guys tried a little harder in their guestimate and lo and behold, they had enough. Barely, but there was enough.

Enough with the story I guess...

A Stoop, Showers and some Paint

So, what's been going on of late?

A couple weeks back, we started to put some finished paint up. Nothing terribly interesting, but since we had the time, we painted the ceilings in all the bedrooms, the mud room and exercise room. We also did some of the closet walls and the mud room walls too. And, we even managed to recruit a helping hand...



Yep, that's Lauren applying her skills.

On the more frustrating side of things, we discovered the plumbers roughed in plumbing in the master shower and guest shower for a typical setup, which would of course be fine if we had a typical setup. But, instead of doing just a shower head and handle, we're doing a wall bar that will hold a hand shower. The part of this that makes this a real pain is that no one discovered it until after the tile went up. We've made our case and of course the plumber thinks he did it right. I have no idea how he can think that, but supposedly we're going to meet with him to discuss this week. Sounds like a frustrating discussion.

We also had a temporary front stoop built. Since we never built out a landscape plan and instead are allowing our house to a be a (landscaping) class project, we've been creeping along with no stoop or steps to the front door. Apparently you need one for an occupany permit. So, rather than adding the design of a permanent one (which has implications over other landscaping issues for the front yard), we had MOC build up what will essentially be temporary. It's nothing fancy as you can see from the pics, but it gets the job done.



Ann followed that up by creating a walkway with some cheap pavers from Mendards, but it snowed quickly there after and I didn't get a picture of it. The point is that we're (or you, really) aren't walking through mud to the front of the house.

Speaking of the front, no that's not our permanent front door. Lovely, isn't it? The real one is coming, but is still a couple weeks out.

Death by Bleeding.. a response

Ah, my dear Ann. Does that make me the pessimist? I'd like to think I'm neither and merely a realist. But, I'm sure there's a gaggle of psychologists out there willing to tell me to get off the fence and pick a side.

Ann's right though. The changes are getting annoying and the bleeding is making us weary. But, as frustrating as it can be, there's a small part of me that likes arguing with these people over money. I've won some and lost some, and through it, I seem to have found my place in the process. Ann's much better at managing the to-do list and I guess I'm responsible for managing the piggy bank.

I'm not as skeptical over the contractor earning his money back. Only a few of these changes have been misquotes or oversights. We did after-all agree to the more expensive windows and stone. But, when the contractor completely misses the specs for cabinetry or the chimney, he's definitely taking it on the chin.

The end is near though. More and more of the finished products are going in and that's exiting. I'll get some more of those pics up soon. I'm off to brave the snow on the way to look at granite over lunch. Ah, good times....

Stop the bleeding!

No, we haven't had a bad encounter with a power tool, we've just hit a spot in this project where we feel like we're bleeding money. On top of the expected costs of buying new furniture, draperies, etc. we've been getting "dinged" with what feels like a bunch of little up-charges.

First, we needed to build a temporary front stoop to get our occupancy permit. Then we needed to pay for an extra half dumpster after we tore down the deck. Then, we got an up charge for our carpet selection even though we didn't know that our selection was above our allowance. And we're still struggling to make our lighting selections fit within an allowance that was developed without any room for exterior lights.

While none of the expenses are huge (at least relatively), they keep adding up and have started me wondering why we worked so hard to bring the budget down when we initially bid the project out. The cynic in me starts to think that our contractor is just trying to earn back at least part of the budget they lost when we were negotiating hard.

Can you tell I'm frustrated?

As the optimist in the family, I've been pretty positive throughout this whole process. But at this point, I just want it to be done. Ironically, the process has worn me down enough that I have little energy to haggle over the costs. Emotionally, I just want to write the check and get it over with. But rationally, I don't want to pay another penny over budget.

So, I'm a bit of a tormented soul these days. Thankfully it looks like we should only have 6 to 8 weeks left. Yeah! (There goes the optimist in me again...)

My, That Redwood Looks Nice

Way back in March when I posted my first entry, I kicked off my contribution to our story by talking about pulling down the wood paneling that covered just about every wall in the house. As wood lovers, the original owners hadn't messed around with drywall. And why would you when your family is in the lumber business and you've got access to great quality wood. I can't say Ann or I shared that love quite to the extent of full coverage, but we did recognize the quality of the stuff and that there was an opportunity in those walls.

With the help of my dad, we pulled every panel off the walls. Then, working with the architect, we worked the paneling back into the new house. The most impressive of the wood was the redwood that surrounded the entry way and great room/living room/dining room (i.e. room with all the windows). The bedrooms were all covered in Doug Fir and that strange room coming in from the garage was full of knotty pine.

Working with Ryan, we decided to selectively place the wood in only three places in the house. There was symmentry in this as the walls with wood would only be on the North/South axis. The walls that we would add stone to, including the front of the house would all run the East/West axis. Pretty cool, I thought.

The showpiece of the wood application would be the staircase. We would place the redwood there as well as at the end of the hall, and hopefully if we had enough, on a wall in the guest bathroom.

All the wood was sent off to a mill to be planed down. Essentially that just means it was sanded down on one side to remove all the stain. We got all that back a few weeks back and the carpenters worked their magic. Early last week, the staircase started going up...



Pretty cool application, I think. We turned the paneling on its side and went horizontally. Ryan drew in the fins on each side of that front wall, which turned out well. We'll eventually do a final sanding and put a clear coat on top.

Up next was the wall at the end of the hall. Not as impressive in size, but does bookend the staircase nicely.



The challenge we're now faced with is that we're most likely going to run short of redwood. It doesn't look like we'll be able to carry the redwood up the staircase and do the wall on the second level. We'll also probably have to use the Doug Fir in the bathroom. But, we haven't gotten there yet.

These pics serve a couple pursposes....



They show all the wood that's left. The biggest pile is the knotty pine, which we really don't intend on using. Closer to the fireplace is what's left of the redwood. Not much, but we'll see if we can make any thing of it. And remember that Doug Fir? We'll, 50% of that got milled down to be used as trim throughout the house. So, if you look at the windows in that room, all the trim around them is the Doug Fir paneling from the original house. The baseboards and trim around the doors in the other pics are that Doug Fir as well.

So, we're not quite finished yet, but it's fun to see the re-use come into play and how good it looks. Hopefully we'll get the rest of the walls finished up this week, but as usual, we'll see.

Next post will be back in the cold of home. That's it from warm and sunny So Cal. Ah, warm and sunny....

A Welcome Respite

With just about 8 weeks left until our scheduled completion date, all four of us were able to escape to San Diego for the Thanksgiving holiday. Not only has it been a great time spent with family eating too much good food, it's also been a good rest from the hustle and bustle of work, school and home building.

Stuart has been using the "down time" to update the blog and keep you all abreast of our progress. I, on the other hand, have been enjoying not thinking about the house for a few days.

We're definitely in the home stretch. But, it's a little like a time vortex. Our estimated completion date of January 13 feels like a long way away, while at the same time we know it will be here in a flash. With all the activities around the holidays, I know that time will fly by.

The major decisions we have left to make are finalizing selections for lighting, interior door handles and cabinet hardware. We also need to decide what new furniture do we want to order now and what we want to put off for awhile. And of course we need to keep track of the cabinets being installed as well as the appliances and plumbing fixtures. We probably won't pick paint colors until we're in the house and we can see everything with the lights on and the floors installed and uncovered.

So, once we return from this little holiday, we'll certainly have enough to keep us busy. While it's certainly exciting to see everything coming together, we are definitely looking forward to being done. But then what will we do with our time?

The Rotting Deck Comes Down at the Hands of some Manly Men

OK, maybe that's an exaggeration. Although, we really didn't use much for tools! And I guess Ann did help a bunch. Anyway, let's talk about this deck.

We new it was rotting from underneath. The inspector told us that much after we bought that place last year. It was always hard to tell exactly how much if you're just standing on it or walking across it. The top boards always seemed steady and fine.

Well, Ann finally convinced me that we really should take advantage of the dumpster on site, the nice weather (50+ degrees late in Nov) and just get this done now. I relented and boy, was that the right decision.

I asked my dad to come help. He's sort of turned into my go-to guy for demo. Maybe it's a little low skilled for a skilled guy, but he does really like it.

We went at it, starting by pulling the top boards off. He was using a crowbar and they were coming off pretty easy. Frighteningly, I figured out pretty quick that I could simply grab one end of the board with my hands, lift up and pull the whole board off. These are long 15' boards nailed into the joists several times mind you. So, this wasn't just a couple spots that were going, but the whole support system.



Anyway, this was only a preview of things to come. Whoever built the deck laid a screen across the top of the joists, which you can see in the pic above. Maybe they anticipated a screened in porch someday. Instead, what this meant was that all the junk coming down from the trees didn't fall down to the ground, but got caught in that screen and just sat there wet, accelerating the rot.

As we pulled the top boards off and started to roll the screen back, we found all the support joists underneath to be even more rotten.



You can get a sense of how rotten this stuff was from the above. The only thing that really made us take out the tools were the joist hangers and the several nails going perpendicular to each other. Ah, nothing a crowbar or a 20# sledgehammer won't help take care of.

From here on out it was pretty must destroy and walk over to the bin. Having the bin right there was huge. It was so easy to just carry stuff in, beside not having to worry about dealing with getting it there and having it picked up myself. And at the end of the day, it was absolutely the right time to take the deck down. Now when spring comes, we can get right to building a new one. It may be a bit of an inconvenience for a couple months after moving in and not having anywhere to put the grill or the deck furniture, but hey, it'll be frigid and snowy anyway.

Appliances and my new freiend, Google Shopper

It occurred to me that lost in all the activity lately has been the issues revolving around the appliances. It had been a forgotten issue for quite a while because we had picked them out quite a while back. In fact, it was probably one of the first decision points we made and ended up be a sign of things to come in terms of the time spent trying to make that decision.

Well, several months after making those decisions, it came time to put everything on order. Except, whoops...we had those pesky cost issues again. It seems that when MOC quoted out the appliances to include in the the contract, no one included sales tax. Well, ~7% on thousands of dollars adds up to a big enough number, especially when one is trying to not spend anymore than necessary.

I expressed my displeasure and MOC clearly knowing that they made a mistake came back with an offer of something like splitting the additional cost 50/50. I'd been thinking about this for a couple days and after doing some searches online (hello Google), I was getting pretty confident that I could get the appliances myself and actually do better than the original quote price.

So, off I went. Doing Google product search after Google product search, I got my list. I found all our appliances at several different places for a price that put money back in our pocket. Now, I'm sure you could ask if the savings was really worth my time, but in the grand scheme of time spent on the project, it really wasn't that big of a deal. I suppose I could have called a couple places and negotiated a discount by placing all this through one place, but isn't that what MOC did (through Warners Stallion)?

Anyway, I placed my orders. I created a spreadsheet with vendors, order numbers and as they came in, tracking numbers. Things were going along quite well. Kathleen was even very supportive of accepting deliveries. The fridge came, as did the rangetop. Then the washer and dryer pedestals. Next was the dryer, which is where things got interesting. It arrived damaged, although no one discovered it until opening the box the next day.



I got a little worried at this point, especially after discovering a sticker saying something to the affect of "you open it, you own it". Well, before I could even worry much, Kathleen had placed a call to the carrier, who then contacted Abe's of Maine (where I ordered it from) and got everything going. They asked for pictures, like the above, and said everything would be taken care. Whew!

We've got the rest of the appliances arriving next Thursday and fingers crossed that things go smoothly. Hopefully the next update on appliances will be something along the lines of "they're installed and they look great".

More finished looking flooring and tile

I'm sitting at home here on a Sunday night after a long weekend of painting and deck destroying. Yeah, the latter is probably the most interesting, but, you'll have to wait. :)

First, let's catch up on some finished surfaces over the past week. In the last post, I talked about getting the hardwood floor in and some tile. Since that time, they've finished all of that and at least on the hardwood, they've applied a top coat. I can't tell you what that top coat is because, well, I forgot. We had three choices and best I can recall it went something like oil based, water based or oil/water mix. We went with the oil/water mix, which brought out the natural colors in the wood while giving the wood a nice, tough coating. Unfortunately, by the time I got over to snap pictures, Kathleen (our PM) had covered the floor to protect it. So, you'll have to do with partial views....



The next steps in the bathrooms were not only finishing the tile, but also putting in grout. I don't have a shot of the kids bathroom, which isn't quite there yet, but here's the other two. Once again, the floor protector got there ahead of me.



The first shot is the guest bath. What's cool about the tile is that the pattern continues onto the floor, so those lines start at the doorway and run right up the wall. The second shot is the shower in the master bathroom. To the left of the half wall will be the toilet. We'll eventually get a frameless glass wall and door in place to close the shower in. We're really happy about how the thin slate turned out as well as the river rock on the shower flow.

Door Hardware

At first it was all about picking out the big things. Appliances or faucets, then doors or flooring and on and on. You get through all of that, are wiping the sweat off your brow and feeling pretty good about things. But no no my friend... there's still more to go.

In this episode of "selections never stop", we look at door hardware. Door Hardware!? Well, of course! How else would you open or shut or secure a door?!

Our hope was this would be simple. We made an appointment at a place called Knob Hill to sit down and look at different handles for our various doors. Sounds like it could be simple, right? No.

Actually, being led around the show room and having someone direct you right to what's in your budget while still retaining quality was pretty effective. But, that's where it stopped. As we learned, we didn't have much of a budget, and of course making quick decisions isn't exactly a strong suit of ours...or maybe that's just me.

Our first priority was finding something for the front door. We went through the showroom and decided on a contemporary looking handle from Ashley Norton:

It was a good mix of the simple, straight lined look we wanted, with a touch of uniqueness. Now, ideally, we could re-use this through the entire house.

So, this is where the first problem comes up. Apparently, we have a budget of $1200 for door hardware throughout the entire house. That may sound like a decent amount, but it's really not after you add up all your room doors, front door, garage door, closet doors, etc.

Actually, we know this because after finding that nice handle, we looked through the entire plan figuring out which way the doors swung open, figuring out if we wanted a lock on the door or not and even thinking about if we needed stoppers to prevent the door from dinging the wall. So, what starts as excitement as your looking at handles, becomes a chore as you're counting while going through the plans.

Anyway, at a list price of something like $130 a pop, that handle wasn't going to fit in our budget. As it turned out, that handle put us over our budget by almost $1000. No thanks.

While at the showroom, we picked out choice number two. We found a cheaper handle from Emtek that still had the clean lines, but wasn't much with respect to being unique in any way.


Even with that choice, we were still $200 over our budget and at least personally, I'm not enamored with that handle. So, what to do? Just say screw and move on? It's just a handle after all? Or spend some extra time trying to find a better option and stay w/in our budget? I don't know...I haven't figured it out yet. Ann's probably annoyed.

Oh, during this trip, we also picked out cabinet pulls and knobs. That was even more of a chore since we had to go through the plans door by door, drawer by drawer and room by room figuring out how long of a pull to put in place. I can't remember what type of pulls we picked out, so I can't post a pic yet. In the end, I'm in the same spot at the door handles. I'm not totally excited about what we picked out. I like the idea of pulls that are of various lengths and can be quite long on a long drawer, but I don't want what's become the over used Home Depot style...

Floors, floors, FlOOrs!!

One of the exciting things that's happened over the past week is flooring. Although we new it was coming, it was still pretty cool to walk in and see a first floor full of wood flooring. Up to this point, it's been studwalls and drywall...part of the process for sure, but we're now getting into finishes.

The back story on the first floor was that we initially were going to go with Elm flooring on the first floor, but after digging into the hardness of wood and contemplating cost, no matter how much we wanted to go after the responsibility factor, at the end of the end day, practicality won out. Check out Wood From the Hood for the original spec. Guess I might have to settle for a cutting board.

So, in the end, we went with a 3" Red Oak. Here's some photos of the floor before the finish was applied.



And a couple more, but with people included this time!...



The other flooring that we're starting to see is tile. It's only partly there and yet to be grouted, but still fun to start seeing.