Trim and finish stuff starting

A busy week at work means I haven't been able to get out to the house much. Large piles of oak flooring, tile, and trim have been delivered, the garage attic stairs have been started, some of the tile flooring prep has begun, and we even have one window that's been trimmed out.

This is the living room with some materials:

In the above picture, we have (clockwise from left): oak trim for the stairs, oak strips for the flooring, and window\door trim pieces. Oak flooring has been stacked in every room in the house, for example:

On the left you can (kinda) see our blue-on-blue dining room. :-)

Kitchen\breakfast\laundry areas with backerboard (tile underlayment) cut and dryfitted in place; the red lines are obviously tracings to show where the underlying radiant heat tubes are located, to avoid accidents when they get screwed down later:

Window trim starting in the breakfast nook area:

All of the interior doors and the majority of the trim pieces have been staged in the garage:

The garage attic access stairs have been started:

You might think that that's too many stringers, but apparently it's due to the fact that we're using Trex for the decking and stair treads, and Trex has a smaller unsupported span distance than normal 2x4's.

Something not quite house-related: I'm loath to admit it, but my beloved BMW 3-series was never going to fare very well out here in the woods on all of these rough gravel roads - I really need something with 4x4 capabilities. I've been scanning the craiglist advertisements, and today we picked up a 2000 Ford Explorer:

It's a good running vehicle and according to the Carfax report, has spent most of its time in California and New Mexico. Which is good, means less chance for hidden rust eating away at things :). Obviously we drove it out to the house today and it did just fine.

The propane tank hole has continued to be problematic with respect to water. We had a lot of rain this past week and while I wasn't there to see it, apparently the "footing" drain tubes that Brad installed around the base of the tank were putting out a pretty good flow. This has lead to the creation of Lake Runoff (I was told this is half of what it once was):

It would not be a good idea to leave things like this (too much standing water, too close to the house), so Brad is looking into extending the drain off to the far (southwest) corner of the house clearing.

Garage doors installed

Here's what our new garage doors look like:

As mentioned previously, these are good quality, 2 1/2" thick insulated steel doors from Northwest Door. They look good as-is, but will look even better once the trim paint around them has been done.

The protective wrappings were taken off the rear porch door; it looks great:

The exterior doors will be "stained" to match the interior molding trim, and the exterior casings will be painted in white to match the rest of the exterior.The four rooms we did in custom paint colors were also finished up. I think it is fair to say that although we like the colors we chose, there was initially a "ohmigod" moment upon first seeing them. For instance, my wife started calling the game room, the "GI Joe" room:

She just doesn't understand that in order to bring out the true undertones of the green colors, we need some neon beer signs and some Budweiser girl posters...(just kidding, honey!). Seriously, I think it looks ok now...but it will look even better once the crown molding and chair rail are in place to really delineate the boundaries of each color.

Trim molding and hardwood flooring materials should be delivered tomorrow. Talking to Paul this morning, he told me that the hardwood flooring supplier upgraded our package to "Select" grade (from No. 1 Common) for free, since we had such a large order - cool! The flooring materials will sit in the house for at least two weeks to acclimate (temperature and moisture-wise) before getting installed.

With the interior of the house painted, the crew should be moving on to starting on tile flooring, along with trim installation where possible.

Draft drawings of tile murals

We've been working with Paul Lewing to come up with the designs for our tile murals. This is the current draft of the kitchen mural (located over the cooktop):

In the kitchen we're mainly looking for an old-style kitchen scene, hence the old-fasioned stove, plus small elements taken from our own lives: our much-missed boxer, a plant dangling down the side of the cabinet (my wife loves dangling plants), a pie on the kitchen table (my wife loves to bake pies, and I love to eat them), etc. The small squares in the upper right are intended to be accent tiles, but we've asked Paul to re-work those in food themes: another pie, milk and cookies, bread and butter, etc.

And this is the current shower design:

I was looking for a Seattle waterfront theme, no I don't mean cranes and container-ships but basically what you see above: mountains, Space Needle, orcas, ferries, and yes that's a trimaran in the middle there. I like the sunken ship too. For awhile I was considering having some Ivar's billboards on the sea-bottom as well (a local seafood restauranteur anchored some billboards on the bottom of Puget Sound as an advertising stunt back in the 50's) but decided that would be too specific and would get dated too quick. The accent tiles in the lower right will be located in a border row of tiles above the tub surround.

If the designs above seem a bit "sparse", i.e. they don't cover every square inch of tile, keep in mind that the tiles are all 6"x6" in size so the total square footage is more than you would think; also, the price is based per square foot and we're limited budget-wise. I think Paul does a nice job of trying to "suggest" a broader view without actually painting all of the tiles.

Oh yes, forgot one thing: last weekend we went (with my mother who was visiting - hi Mom!) down to the DalTile showroom in Seattle to pick out tiles. We took along tile samples for our master bathroom, and the granite countertop sample for the kitchen. We ended up selecting their "Matte Urban Putty" (code 0761) for the kitchen backsplash tile, and "Matte Desert Gray" (code X714) for the shower surround tile. These will be the colors/tiles that Paul will paint these murals onto. He says he's never had a tile or color that he couldn't work with, but I suspect we made his life a bit difficult with the gray colored tile in the shower. I'm sure it will look great when finished though.

Lastly: I've never commissioned a work of art before, and I have to say the experience is very fun, and at the same time gives you a heady feeling of power: all you have to do is come up with some vague ideas, and a creative and experienced artist turns them into real-life for you. Pretty cool! :-)

Interior paint choices

Given the amount of time we spent at the paint store staring at samples, I wanted to have a separate post to capture our choices. Or maybe I'm making a bet with myself to see if we either love or hate these a year from now... :-)

Our basic color choice throughout the house is Benjamin Moore "Linen White" - it's a nice, safe color that's hard to make a mistake on. In four specific rooms though, we have also decided to add crown molding (at the ceiling\wall line) and a chair rub rail. In those four rooms is where we are going with custom color choices, to try to jazz things up a bit. We're going with a three-part scheme in each: below the chair rub rail, above the chair rub rail, and on the ceiling. Well the ceilings are mostly staying linen white just to keep costs down...

Anyway, here are the choices with their Benjamin Moore paint codes:

My office (a brown theme):
Below chair rail: AF-180 “Wenge”
Above chair rail: 1039 “Stonehouse”

Dining room (a blue theme - blue has been a favorite color of ours for years):
Below chair rail: HC-154 “Hale Navy”
Above chair rail: also HC-154, but mixed at 50%

My wife's office (a beige-ish theme):
Below chair rail: HC-47 “Brookline Beige”
Above chair rail: HC-48 “Bradstreet Beige”

And finally, in the upstairs game room (a green theme):
Below chair rail: AF480 “Boreal Forest”
Above chair rail: AF460 “Jojoba”
Ceiling: AF435 “Spa”

All of these will be in an "eggshell" sheen.

I have mentioned previously that we are not very good at selecting colors. That hasn't changed - we still suck at it. Fortunately the nice folks at the Benjamin Moore store are more than happy to help the clueless, so they get the credit for providing us with lots of ideas to choose from. :)

Almost forgot: the garage is being done in an entirely separate color: "Thundercloud Gray", paint code 2124-40, also in eggshell. If you look thru previous posts, you can see that the mechanical corner was pre-painted in this color before stuff started getting installed.

Interior priming\painting begins

The texture was sprayed yesterday apparently, and now the crew is working on priming out the interior of the house. Lots of stuff to mask off and cover, especially in the garage:

Here they're priming the dining room:

Rebecca is holding the spray wand in the picture above; she is the owner of the company that is building our house. I've also mentioned Paul several times before; he is the chief job site manager. Here's Rebecca after several hours of spraying primer:

They mentioned they had already gone through 20 gallons of primer, and still had 1/4 of the downstairs plus the garage left, so Paul had just arrived with an additional 10 gallons.

It's still raining today unfortunately, so not much more progress has been made on the final trim details on the outside of the house:

This is the ceiling of the rear porch area, done in clear pine:

It looks really nice; the plan is to finish it in a clear semi-gloss stain.

The propane tank has been partially covered up and will sit like this until it has passed inspection:

See the white drain pipe in the foreground? Brad laid some "footing drains" around the propane tank, to allow excess water to drain away. I'm very glad about this, given the puddling I'm seeing.

The crew will be working through the weekend to get the house interior fully painted. Our garage doors are scheduled for installation on Monday, and the millwork and oak flooring will also be delivered on Monday - busy times as usual! I'm looking forward to seeing how some of our custom color choices look in real life.

USS Propane arrives at the dock

Our 1000 gallon propane tank was installed this morning. The propane company specified a hole of 5' wide by 6' deep by 18' long - huge! Trouble is, the hole was deep enough to get about 8-10" of standing water in the bottom:

Brad (excavation contractor, or as he calls himself, "the dirt guy") used a small pump to get the hole mostly dry, but there was some serious concerns about what this much water would mean for the propane tank. Propane is lighter than water, and it is not unknown for an underground propane tank to abruptly emerge from the ground if the soil is saturated, water table is high, rains are heavy, etc. Luckily when the propane tank installer showed up, he said it'd be fine to add another foot or so of dirt to the bottom of the hole, so that's what we did. The dirt was then further capped off with a layer of sand - sand is specified for backfilling under, around, and on top of the tank. This is because corrosion is the enemy of an underground tank, and regular dirt, pebbles, and rocks can lead to scratches which can lead to corrosion.

With all that prep work done, it was time to install the tank:

The tank installer used his truck-mounted crane to get the tank on the ground, then it was moved the rest of the way with the track hoe:

And thar she blows:

I had to leave at that point, unfortunately. The tank installer guy called me later and said that everything was ready for inspection (supply line hooked up to the tank and routed to the house, but not connected to the house). The tank must be inspected before it can be connected to the house, and before it can be covered up with sand.

Forgot to mention: the permit fee to install a propane tank in King County is $800. Ouch!

The septic designer was also on-site this morning to test the septic system, and to measure the dimensions and location of the septic field so he can create the "as-built" drawing, which (I think) needs to be filed with the county. We should have the county septic inspection pretty soon as well, at which point Brad will be covering up the drain field with dirt (the rock "paths" containing the PVC pipes will get covered with a landscape fabric material to prevent clogging). He warned me that in five years the drain field will be overgrown as bad as the surrounding forest, and advised me to use steel fence post stakes to mark the important points in the field (shutoff valve box, cleanout connections, etc) while I can still see them.

Slab shopping

We went down to the Pental showroom in Seattle today to pick out some granite slabs. This turned out to be a pretty fun experience actually. Which is ironic, because I've had always been somewhat dismissive of the whole idea of granite countertops in a house, believing them to be an overpriced, frou-frou cosmetic material that only really vain people would spend money on. Well, I still think they're overpriced, but OTOH I guess I've become vain - the materials are really pretty to look at (which of course is the whole point). A good friend (hi Dan!) had helped us narrow down our style choices, so the next step was to go down to the slab warehouse and pick out the specific slabs we wanted.

There are several slab suppliers in downtown Seattle, but Pental was the first one we went to. They have a large warehouse with (I'm guessing) several thousand slabs, all arranged by color\style:

There were several such aisles of slabs like you see in the picture above. You can walk around by yourself looking them over (being careful to dodge forklifts), or if you want to look more closely at a specific slab, you can ask the warehouse crew for help. The workers have forklift-mounted cranes so they can pick up individual slabs and place them onto heavy-duty dollies:

Once you have decided on a particular slab, you give them your credit card and the warehouse crew loads the slab onto the roof of your Honda Civic....just kidding! The way the process works, you reserve your specific slab(s) (each slab is bar-coded for identification, so there's no chance of mixup) and your fabricator will come by later and pick them up (and he'll have a good, heavy-duty truck for hauling these things around). Our fabricator (recommended by our builder Paul) is ProGranite.

The slab in the picture above is a style called "Sapphire Blue", and it and the slab immediately behind it will eventually become the countertops and island top in our kitchen. I am really disappointed in how the pictures of these slabs turned out, because they are much nicer looking in real life. We also picked out a slab of "Blue Pearl" for our master bathroom vanity top, and for some reason I don't have a good picture of that one. Ah well - next time you see them, they'll likely be getting installed. :)

Drywall taping started

We stopped by the house yesterday to see how things are going. The drywall guys have started taping and mudding. Nothing too interesting to see here if you've ever seen drywall done before. This is from the kitchen looking toward the garage:

Those stilt things look cool, I want a pair for Christmas. :)

Kitchen, looking toward dining room (on left) and living room (on right):

I like how they put brown paper down and tape it together, to protect the floor.

At the top of the stairs, looking down:

The heating guys came out and looked at the heating system, and said it was doing fine (90+ deg F water output from the chiller). They said reasons for the poor performance so-far were lack of under-floor insulation in the crawl space, and the fact that the garage floor loops had been turned on; since there was no garage doors installed yet, that was just a losing battle. They turned off the garage floor and the house did feel a little bit warmer last time we were out there.

Last but not least, exterior painting is continuing and is just about complete except for trim details. I was going to wait on the frontal shots until all the trim was done, but this is just looking too good:

We'll visit the site again on Sunday morning to see how far they got today.

Exterior painting started

We're enjoying the final gasp of a very nice summer here in the Northwest, and our builder had his guys pushing to get the last of the siding installed, so he could get going on the exterior painting. (While I'm sure painting is possible in less-than-ideal weather, I'd rather they get it on now while the weather is good.) The siding is just about (98%) done - only some covered areas left, like underneath the rear and side porches. That cleared the way for some painting to start:

Ready for a blast of red? Here ya go:

And from the back:

It will look even better once the trim is painted; only a little bit of the side of the house has that done:

Apparently the color we chose (Benjamin Moore Cottage Red) doesn't come in five gallon buckets:

The white trim will be in Chantilly Lace.

In other news, our electrical power was hooked up, so everyone is running their tools off of temporary receptacles in the house. The heating guys also came on Saturday and energized the radiant heating system for the first time. For now it's a temporary job, with the whole house controlled from a single thermostat in the living room, intended to just get the house warmed up enough for the drywall guys to be able tape and mud the joints. So far though I wasn't too impressed - we were out there this morning and the house just didn't feel that warm yet - not what I was expecting from a mega-dollar system like this. Paul called them and asked them about it and they said the system was probably in "limp mode" (?), so hopefully it gets sorted out soon. We did get to hear the reverse-cycle chiller actually running for the first time, and it is very quiet - even w/o drywall in the master bathroom\bedroom, it cannot be heard from inside.

The drywall hangers worked through the weekend but the job is still not quite done, at least as of this morning. Lots of progress, but the house is a real mess at the moment:

The septic system is installed and is now waiting for inspection. I suspect this is a pretty standard setup:

See the PVC pipe coming from the house (underneath the bagged electrical outlet on the wall) - that leads into the left-hand tank, where a couple of baffles separate the #1 stuff from the #2 stuff; the #1 stuff then runs into the right hand tank, via the white pipe in the left foreground. So far everything has been powered by gravity all the way from the house. In the right hand tank though, there is a pump which is float-activated; it is responsible for pumping the #1 over to the drain field, via the white pipe running across the top of the left-hand tank. There you are, more than you ever wanted to know about disposal of #1 stuff and #2 stuff. :-)

We have finalized our tile choices (in fact I need to finish this blog entry and send Paul the list) and are nearly done with the interior paint as well. Most of the interior will be basic linen white, but we're going to put some color in the dining room and my office, just for fun. Both of those room will have some crown molding, and the dining room will get a chair rub rail as well. I'd like to put crown molding in several other rooms as well, but money won't allow at the moment. Overall all things are moving good.

Drywall started

I wasn't around for it, but the drywall guys had previously "loaded" the house with drywall and were able to start working today since the insulation was done. For the upstairs, the drywall was boomed in thru a temporarily removed window. This window, in fact:

I started looking at the progress upstairs, and at first it didn't seem like much progress had been made; mostly just the ceiling board in two of the bedrooms...

...but then I finally got out to the garage and realized it was already all done:

Wow - huge difference! :-) Oh yeah, that pallet of stuff in the middle is pretty much 100% boxes of joint taping compound, but I asked one of the drywall guys about it and he said it probably wouldn't be enough to finish the house.

I think that just about catches things up all the way to today. The only other things going on is that we gave final approval for our cabinet layout (our cabinets are coming from a well-known local supplier, Canyon Creek Cabinets), have been working hard to nail down final choices on tile, and are starting to think about interior wall paint colors.

We've also been talking to a local tile and glazing artist, Paul Lewing, about creating some decorative murals for the kitchen and the master bathroom shower. In the kitchen we're going for some, well, kitchen scenes :). (Well, we also might have a small portrait somewhere of our boxer dog Beau who regrettably got sick and had to be put down recently; "Bo-bo", you are still missed every single day!) In the shower, we're looking for a larger scene, something like the Seattle waterfront, with trees, mountains, the Space Needle, ferries, and maybe even a trimaran or two :). We also asked to include some underwater elements - my wife wouldn't let allow me to have any mermaids (even ones with seashells covering the, um, soft parts), so it'll have to be something else, say, a sunken ship maybe, and some fish or something. Clearly this sort of thing is a 100% decorative luxury, but I think it will add a nice touch to our house. More on this later. If you like this sort of thing, I would encourage you to check out Paul's web site - he has done some simply amazing work.

Finally, not to end on a down note or anything, but I do have to admit that I'm starting to feel a slight amount of "house fatigue"...while the progress is exciting, I'm looking forward to actually being able to just live in the house, and not having to spend so much time thinking about details, driving back and forth (some of the road ruts should have our name on them), and deciding on detail after detail. We're getting there though.

Catch-up post

It's been awhile since I posted. Progress did seem to slow for awhile, mainly due to the need to wait for inspections and the fact that the siding is still not done. At this point though, the electrical, plumbing, fire-sprinkler, low-voltage, gas-piping, heating, and framing inspections have all passed. Phew! With that stuff out of the way, it has freed the project up to move on to insulation and drywall - but more on that in a bit.

Here's a cool picture of the main house attic, showing all of the high-velocity A/C air-exchanger in place and all of the ducting. I asked the installers to not string any ducts across the main storage area and they did a nice job:

Did I mention before that there is a total of around 55 A/C ducts in the house? The number is a bit mind-boggling.

One of the more modern code requirements (I think, just guessing) is that every single wall cavity must be sealed tight so that in case of a fire in the cavity, the fire will either starve for lack of oxygen or at least move so slowly that it's easy for people to get out. One day we were out there and there was a guy going around with a huge can of spray foam sealing every single penetration. He was being quite fastidious about it too; I bet it was an all day job. Here's an example:

Note how the side-ways penetrations are sealed too; you can also see a line of white caulk along the corner seam: every exterior corner in the house got that.

The "mechanical corner" has gotten more and more complicated looking:

Here's the generator (on the left) and the reverse-cycle chiller on the right, not hooked up just yet:

Due to some equipment troubles, the hole for the propane tank wasn't due in time and we to postpone that to 21st. So no pictures of the SS Propane Tank yet. :-)

On Monday and Tuesday of this week, the insulation was installed. As mentioned before, I chose a fiberglass blow-in style of insulation throughout the house, including the garage. I wasn't able to be there, but in essence the installers stretch a thin netting over the studs, poke a small hole in it, then stick a hose in the hole and fill up the cavity. Looking at the results today, I was very impressed! The insulation completely fills up the wall cavity and actually bulges out slightly against the netting. Here's a shot of the garage:

Usually in an attic they use 100% loose, blown-in style insulation, but were unable to do that here in our house because of the plywood floors going down the middle of the attic trusses. So that's why you see the more traditional batting installed under the attic floor above. The blown-in stuff will still be installed off to either side of the attic floors.

Here's another insulation picture, looking from a master bedroom closet into the master bathroom:

If you look to the left in the picture above, you can see a little bit how the insulation bulges out. I'm very glad I went with this insulation style! I am convinced that it will be far more energy efficient than the batt-style insulation, since there's almost zero chance of air-leaks this way.

The backside of the house has been almost completely sided, except for the porch area:

Actually this next picture kinda shows the same thing, except that you can see that the garage storage door is installed:

The crew has also finished off the siding on the far side of the house:

I'm sure this wasn't the most enjoyable job on the house; everything has to be done 20-30' in the air on scaffolding which is always a pain. The main part that's left to side is the upper-half of the front, then siding will be done! We are getting very excited to see some more paint on the exterior as well.

Paul made up some decorative dentils for all three porches; here's how it looks on the front porch, I think it will be a very nice touch:

Off to the side of the house, the two septic tanks have been installed but not yet hooked up: