The Night Job

Oceanographer by day, amateur homebuilder by night, and enough grace and stamina leftover to take a time-out and care for Natalie when she pulls her first fever (no worries- she's better now). The glow next door reflects the many nights spent working next door (and highlights the need for shades/curtains).

Sometime in the middle of the night

On Thursday most of our light fixtures were installed by the electricians. Apparently we had lost count of how many lights we actually had, as we ended up being short three fixtures...the master bedroom closet, the washer/dryer area, and the mudroom (after all the problems it's caused us, we just forgot all about it). A few others, like the ones over the island, were deferred until the island was actually secured in place with a countertop. Still, it was fun to see some of the rooms take shape with the trim work nearly complete and the lights up...some of the lights even have temporary bulbs.

Anthony and Natalie checking out the sconce in the bathroom.

We are striving for a Energy Star HERS rating that will require at least 80% of the lights to be something other than incandescent. As most electricians and 'lighting experts' abhor CF or similar energy efficient bulbs because of their un-incandescentness, most of our bulbs will be supplied by a energy rating company (the same people who will pressure test our whole house), and are yet to come in. So the electricians left a skeleton crew of bulbs in place, perhaps to show us that they all actually worked. Again, much of the house, really just the simple rooms, feels like it is almost there...and just waiting for the floor.

These little button lights are our go-to easy fix for many areas of the house.

Which brings me to the rest of the weekend - after another trip to our Swedish hardware/furniture/solution store - we came home with the three remaining lights as well as our temporary solution to a kitchen countertop. Sunday, Anthony finished putting together and securing the cabinets and placed the temporary countertop. There is still one piece of the temporary top that we'll have to pick up, but it was on back order until this coming week. We're using temporary tops in the kitchen and bathrooms so that we can complete the project enough to move in and then focus on making the real ones at our leisure.

Island with butcher block top

We also finalized our door hardware on Friday, which took a dramatic switcheroo right at the end. Many of our selection 'issues' seem to occur when we have some entrenched design preference or idea or concept fixed in our heads that, over time, becomes untenable. Of course once you've decided to go a certain direction, it takes so much longer and so much more effort to change to a direction you'd previously discounted for some, previously iron-clad reason. (Perhaps this is what our builder was going through with our stairs). We were originally heading in one direction with cool handlesets and deadbolts and fancy rectangular rosettes from Emtek, when it occurred to us we wouldn't be able to leave and lock our doors without a key (which in hindsight, everyone should be able to do). After a too-long struggle to find a workable option with Emtek, we ended up changing lock and lever style as well as manufacturers completely. Writing this, it sounds like trivial issue, which I totally agree with, but for 'frugal wafflers' this is a bad scene.

Finally, it's felt like we've been hemorrhaging monopoly money for the past few months, but we think we now have everything ordered, planned out, or waiting to be installed. Everything, that is, except the kitchen sink. We'll have to get on that.

-J

Something Under Our Feet

Our tile is in and finished: the mudroom floor, the wall around the tub, and the bathroom floor.

Mudroom tile- It's called "Ayers Rock Cobalto Blue", which I find funny. I've been to Ayers Rock (yes, I did just work that in) and nothing about it reminds me of this tile, nor do I think that the tile or Ayers Rock have much to do with "blue". Maybe that's why we got a sweet discount on it.

Upstairs bathroom: "Stoney Point Grigio" on the floor and white subway tile around the tub.

The floor in the rest of the house was scheduled to be installed Monday, but now that's pushed back until Wednesday. Why? It's complicated. It involves stair guys, floor guys, us, "experts" on the phone in Georgia and the whole-like. What it comes down to is that our people here have been doing things a certain way for thirty years and if we throw them even the smallest design curve ball they balk and spend their time and energy trying to get us to change our minds rather than spending their time and energy embracing the new challenge (even if we're trying to get them to do something that's actually pictured in their own catalog). You would also think stair guys and floor guys had worked with each other before. This does not seem to be the case. This is difficult for Anthony and I to deal with, and I think it's because we both work in professions where learning something new (and collaborating) is celebrated.

So I'm holding my breath until Wednesday now.

-J

Anthony the Scandinavian Carpenter

Cost-saving measures require that we acquire new personas. Ikea requires that we find some freetime in the middle of the night for a few weeks and can understand diagrams with little quizzical cartoon guys.

Anthony has been putting cabinets together whenever he has a "bit" of time since we picked them up flatpacked back in April. Last weekend we also started to install them so that they'll be in place before the floor goes in. There was some initial worry about making sure we were certain where the studs and a pipe were hidden, but the purchase of a stud finder confirmed our measurements and we were set to drill into our new walls and start hanging.

Cabinet One (note the daylight)

Two

Three

Four... right side uppers all hung (while the rest of the world sleeps)

Of course, even with all the planning and measuring and wall moving, Anthony discovered that the architect had not accounted for picky little things like the width of the window trim, or at least the window trim that the builder had put on, and so we had to rethink how we were going to handle our new odd-sized space on the left side of the window. I think we've figured out a new plan that should work. We shall see as the installation continues...

-J

Shim the Trim, Paint the Shelf

The past week or so, John's workers have been busy finishing up the trim around the window, doors, and closets. Painters have been appearing randomly to prime the trim that is done, and returning again later to prime others. I think it is safe to say that we are starting to get close to the end...of what seems like the long, twisty path to completion. It's been interesting to see each of our decisions come to fruition.

Basement trim completed. We love the shelves that resulted from our thick walls.

Along the way we have turned to various people for advice. Sometimes it just happens to be an innocent friend/family member/acquaintance/random person on the street who was unfortunate to offer us a polite, "hey, how's your house coming along?" and sometimes it's people we actively seek out in the middle of decision-making panic attacks. I guess we figure that if we follow their advice and don't like it we can blame someone besides ourselves. However, in other cases we have to give credit where credit is due.

Windows at the top of the stairwell

Jamey got the window trim phone call late one night. He has art degrees and Urban Outfitters cred so we figured he knew what he was doing. His design input was to look at white like the matte of a framed picture. Now that the white (which is way cheaper) trim is in we can really see what he means. Especially when that "picture" is of the pond or the trees. Bright, clean, pretty...

Living room windows

There are other parts of the house that have turned out surprisingly nice, especially those that we didn't really think about ahead of time. Along the edges of the thick basement walls, we let the sash of the window extend and create a shelf. For many of these items, it's been a struggle to get our builder to find the joy in doing something creative and unique, so when we end up with something like this it's extra exciting.

Checking out the view from the room in the basement

In addition to the trim, the carpenter has been busy installing shelves and rods in the closets and pantry. We had to peer into the crystal ball of our future lives and try to figure out what belongings we were going to put where and what the arrangement of shelves and rods should be. We won't really know how we did on that until we move back in.

Upstairs linen closet with shelves

I guess if it doesn't all fit we can always store our extra stuff in my parents' barn or my in-laws' basement (just trying to see who's reading all the way to the end...).

-J

Anthony the Plumber

Putting together manifolds...or voguing

This past week I've been spending a bit of time installing the tubing for the radiant floor heating system. When I say 'a bit' you should know that I'm actually modestly understating the vast amount of time I've sunken into this aspect of our house 'project'. This system was one of the core items we wanted to have in our new house. However we knew that to do it and stay within our budget, sweat equity would be required.

A lot of measuring and a lot of cutting to finish the tube returns.

We were most plumber's worst nightmare: unsatisfied with both the cost of full systems they were quoting us and the energy efficiency of their options, and armed with a neighbor across the street who is a local expert on radiant heating after doing this for his house. It took some time to find a plumber who was willing to cut the job in half: I would handled the tubing and manifold installation (significant labor, low skill) and he'd handle the supply lines from the mani's to the boiler itself (significantly higher skill).

So, with this arrangement I have ended up spending 'a bit' of time planning for the installation, ordering parts, convincing the plumber to do 'research' on the best boiler for our house and explain to me the efficiencies of everything from mixing values to indirect water heaters. Personally, I'm surprised that he hasn't walked away from the job yet. Our first plumber did.

As you may remember, a few weeks ago, we brought in some slave labor to help me install the wood strips used to separate the runs of tubing. Later in the week, while I went to a meeting in Santa Barbara, my mother-in-law continued to work on the system, screwing down some 400 aluminum heat transfer plates (about half of the total amount used). Personally, I'm surprised that she didn't walk away from the job. Our daughter must be really cute.

So, this past week the time came to install the tubing into the tracks, attach everything to the manifolds, and pressurize the system so that we'd know if the tile installers, or someone else punctured a tube while working. I spent Wednesday evening (5pm to 2am) installing the 5 tubes that will heat the top floor (each floor has ~950 ft of tubing on it). Aside from the first one when I was quite nervous about cracking, breaking, bending, or stepping too hard on the tubing, actually laying it went really well and only took ~2 hours. Cleaning the floor beforehand took about 5 hours. The same was true this weekend for the main floor, cleaning 5 hours, tube install 2 hours.

Upstairs tubes in place

Installing and pressurizing the manifolds, what was to be the final step for me task-wise, has become a grey area. We'd like the tubes pressurized before proceeding, but it turns out that I'm a terrible plumber. For the life of me I can't get all the manifold fittings taped and on such that the systems hold a constant pressure overnight.

Upstairs manifold, or "mani" as Jody likes to call it. Once the plumber installs the supply lines, the mani will actually move down and the tubes will fit in their respective slots.

After a night of spraying soapy water on the manifolds, looking for bubbles and tightening and retightening, I'm fairly certain that it is a manifold problem and not a tube problem. But I finally had to give up and call the real plumber in early. I'll try to not ask too many questions this time, and hopefully, he'll spend a bit of time finalizing the installation.

- A

Resolved

In a flurry we were able to metaphorically nail down our floor. It's going to float, of course, so by that I mean we picked it out, half-paid for it, and arranged for it to be delivered and installed.

After the Great Floor Fiasco of last week we re-explored a couple more of our options until they either fell apart or panned out. In the end there was one business in town left standing when we told them our budget and our wishes. Now our only wonder is if we had told them a lower budget, would they have met us at that price-point as well?

The important thing is that we got the floor we want at a price we're comfortable with (as comfortable as two cheapskates can be...) and in the timeline we need.

Meanwhile, kitchen cabinets are beginning to take shape in the living room of our rental house, the trim and doors are being hung over at our new house, and our minds have moved on to trying to figure out what we want the stair railings and balusters to look like (or how to get them to look the way we want and still meet code).

A busy place

- J

Gas, Trim & the Great Floor Fiasco

I have to be honest. It's May and I'm starting to really feel the timeline slipping away. I think I'm nervous about it because of a few slightly major decisions that are still left in the "to do" column. One of these is the real floor that will go over the radiant panels . To our credit, we've been attempting to figure this out for months, but have been dancing in a "two steps forward- three steps back" kind of routine. Flooring people have either been decidedly unhelpful, unknowledgeable or just plain full of misinformation. For example, we thought we were close to choosing a certain floor this week. All along the representative had assured us it was okay to float over radiant. Today we learned that the company says that it's not. And so we start again.

As far as things that are getting done, we picked up the bathroom and mudroom tile and ordered two of our toilets on Saturday. Anthony also completed the rest of the radiant floor panel lay-out over the weekend.

Anthony's weekend project: Grand Central Station

The indoor trim is being installed and is really classing up the place.

This trimmed-out window currently has a view of the porta-potty.

Our gas line was also put in on Tuesday.

Things are happening, but figuring out that floor piece would really move everything along and make me feel like it would be possible to finish before the summer.

- J