Circulation pump problem

Recently the circuit breaker for the circulation pump circuit started tripping...the blown circuit also supported the domestic hot water recirc pump, which is how I noticed something was wrong (no immediate hot water for my morning shower).   

Fortunately I was able to get a service person from Northwest Mechanical out to the house on a Saturday (for a modest additional fee).   I was concerned that the tech might have difficulty with the complexity of our heating\cooling system, but that turned out not to be a problem - Joel knew exactly what he was looking at and figured out very quickly what the problem was.  The Grundfos pump for the buffer tank in our heating\cooling system, was oriented such that condensation was collecting in the cover plate (facing downwards); that small puddle of water eventually caused the short-circuit.   Took only half an hour to diagnose the problem, remove\replace the pump, and we were back in business.    It was a pleasure watching an experienced tradesman at work. 

One more quick note:   the original installer of our HVAC system (Mitchell Mechanical) appears to have gone out of business - I am glad we still have an experienced hydronic heating\cooling company here in the Pacific NW in case something goes wrong.   

Don't neglect your gutters

I hate gutters. Yes, they're a very important part of your house, keeping all that water drained away from your foundation, etc. It just seems they're so "cheap" when compared to the rest of the house (even considering what they do), and something always seems to go wrong with them. In addition, I really don't like climbing around on roofs.

The first year or so in our house, I never even looked at the gutters - they just worked. At some point I started noticing that during heavy rains, we were getting overflow leakage at several spots. I finally got my ladder out last weekend and checked it out. Oops - major cloggage! The amount of leaves didn't look bad at first glance, but I've discovered that it doesn't take many to block the flow. In addition, there was a buildup of shingle granules that wasn't helping either. I've read that new shingles will stop shedding so much after the first year (I hope so). Anyway, I unclogged and cleaned out all of the first story gutters using a ladder from the ground (avoiding that trip up to the roof :)). It's simply amazing how well gutters work when they're cleared out.

Thinking about this some more: the obvious reason I don't want to go on the roof is for fear of falling (duh). It turns out that there are safety systems that that use various roof brackets to allow you to better hold on, or better yet, securely attach yourself to a roof. I've looked into the permanent roof anchors from Miller Fall Protection and they look like a robust product (I'm sure there are others). You have to install many of them though (say, one every 4-6 feet), in order to avoid any sideways sheer loads, and there's always the worry about creating new leaks.

Anyway...this morning I got up up on the second story roof today with the best of intentions, thinking that I would just force myself to get the job done and save myself some bucks. After about five minutes I decided that such heights are not for me, and the savings aren't worth the risk - I'll be calling a contractor this next week some time. :-)

One year wrapup: yard and landscaping

Heh - this will be a short post, because basically we haven't yet DONE any landscaping or other yard work. Too busy with other stuff and also don't feel like spending any real money on cosmetics when we live way out here in the woods. But I do want to comment on a few things.

As you may recall, our yard was left as bare dirt with just a protective covering of straw around the perimeter of the house. That straw has worked great and has lasted much longer than I would have expected - I should get more. The rest of the yard has degenerated into a mess of tiny tree sprouts, moss, and weeds :(. We made a brief effort last fall to weed some of the yard and quickly gave it up as a back-killing effort. More advanced methods are called for, methinks. I don't want to get deep into it though until we finalize a full-up landscaping plan, which we're not ready to do just yet.

Our driveway developed some deep rutted areas after several months of use. Some were deep enough that low-slung cars might have bottomed out. We hired a local contractor to come in to grade\level the driveway and add recycled asphalt. Wow, huge difference! :)

Both Paul (our general contractor) and Brad (the clearing\grading guy) warned me not to landscape too soon, since the earth would need time to settle and this might disrupt any landscaping efforts. This was good advice, there have developed several low areas in the yard which tend to collect water during rainfalls. The driveway immediately in front of the garage also drains very poorly. I have begun to research French drains and am thinking of a summer project to install a system of them around the house to drain everything away to the low end (southwest corner).

With all of the damp areas around this house, bugs have been a bit of a problem. Sitting out on the back porch when it gets dark, on warm nights, is not a good idea. I researched around for bug control products and found a couple of basic ideas: bug zapper lights, and propane-powered bug traps. I went with a Blue Rhino SV 5100 mosquito trap and hooked it up directly to the house propane (no need to refill bottles :)). You can read about them on Amazon and other places, but basically they need to run continuously for weeks and weeks in order to cut into the population and birth rate of the bugs. Mine has only been running for a couple of weeks. So we will see how this thing does - the trap is full of tiny mosquitos, but I suspect\hope it will do better when the weather warms up.

Living in the forest, it's a good idea to be prepared for fallen trees as a result of windstorms. This past winter was no exception - a couple of trees over by the well were pushed over (nearly hit my son's car). Fortunately I bought myself a Stihl MS-290 Farm Boss chainsaw last fall. I've never had one of these before, but you better believe I'm careful with it. It came in handy for the two downed trees, and I've also been using it clear some other small areas. I gotta say, swinging a chainsaw is hard work for this poor desk jockey - a few hours of that and my arms want to fall off. :)

One year wrapup: contractor work items

You might expect this to be a negative post given the title, but I actually don't mean it that way. :) Our contractor Paul had naturally moved on to other jobs, but he did ask me after we moved in to send him our punchlist. I didn't mind this since it would give us a little bit of time to get familiar with the house which would make it easier to detect issues. I think we took about six weeks or so and ended up with a list of ~30 items. All of them were final-finish type items; here's a few for example:

1. Master bathroom door casing needs to be replaced with one piece (currently it is split and made of two pieces)
2. Casing for garage man-doors needs to be finished
3. Finish trim-out on front porch support posts
4. Shorten depth of bottom drawer under cooktop so it closes all the way (currently it hits the gas supply line)

(etc, etc - but you see what I mean, just finish type stuff)

I had all of these in a spreadsheet, to make it easy to keep track both for myself and for Paul. After I sent him the spreadsheet, he got his guys back out on a regular basis (one or two at a time, depending on what other jobs they had going on) and they slowly worked through the entire list until it was all done. It was nice - I didn't once feel like we had been forgotten :).

Finally, some of you may remember my ceiling mishap back in January 2010. At the time I felt sick about it, thinking I'd have to pay for a drywall repair after not even being here a month, but Paul went ahead and arranged for it to be fixed - and I didn't have to pay anything! Perhaps he felt bad that the subfloor in the attic had been left in an unsafe condition like that - but whatever his reasons I really, really appreciated it.

Things I'd do differently next time:

1. Nothing :)

One year wrapup: water

I look back now at all those posts I wrote when our well was getting drilled and just have to laugh at myself. I sure was having fun though. Our well and water system is overall doing fine, meaning we keep getting water whenever we open a tap. The taste of the water was overall just fine IMO, even though we were previously used to city tap water. My wife still prefers the water that goes through the refrigerator's builtin water filter.

After several months of living here however, I started to notice that:

1. We were getting some tan-colored scale buildup on several fixtures (not a lot, but definitely noticeable).
2. Toilet bowls were getting stained more quickly than we were used to.
3. When my wife used the bathtub in our master bath, the water showed a definite yellow-ish tinge, and left a ring after being drained (No I did NOT blame this on her...what you think I'm crazy??)

As it turns out one of my new neighbors owns a water filtration company (Clean Water Systems NW), so I asked him to come over and take a look. On his visit he checked out the ph of the water (fine), and did quick some iron and manganese tests using portable test equipment, and took away some samples for further testing. Bottom line after the results came in was that we had low-to-moderate hard water, plus some ferric iron, plus some manganese in our water.

He recommended a system that included:

1. A pre-filter for larger solids
2. An iron\manganese filter, with automatic backflushing, based on Pyrolox filter media.
3. A Scale Blaster for reducing hardness.

After my usual thorough (IMO) research, I decided to take his recommendations. The Scale Blaster product looked like snake oil at first, but they have a lot of testimonials to suggest otherwise; also a different neighbor has it installed with good results.

We did run into an issue on where to locate the iron\manganese filter. I didn't have room in the "mechanical alcove" in the garage, and I didn't want to lose any more floor space in the garage, so in the end I decided to put it up in the garage attic. (Before next winter I will need to insulate the piping a bit more to be safe, but I think it will be okay.)

The installation went smooth and easy. When the installer cut into the copper supply pipe (just downstream from the pressure tank), he showed me the inside of the pipe - wow was there a ton of sediment in there! Made me glad we decided to get this system - I don't want all of that dirt in our water, appliances, water heater, etc!

This is my garage attic, after fifteen months of living here:

I extended the lighting circuit to add the two new bulbs at the far end - huge improvement, it was such a cave before. Note, you can't see the new water system stuff in the above picture (it's behind the scaffolding supports). This isn't the best picture, but here it is:

The oval-shaped white thing is an automatic water-shutoff valve, hooked up a sensor "puck" sitting below the equipment on the subfloor. The Scale Blaster is the white box screwed into the board underneath the rafters. The computer-looking thing above the blue filter bottle is what controls the periodic backflushing (once per week) to keep the filter media clean and efficient.

After a few weeks the system seems to be working well (just took a few days for the dark tinge from the new filter media to flush out, as the installer warned us). The taste of the raw tap water has improved according to my palate, but my wife is still sticking to the fridge water :). When we fill up the bathtub now, the water is much, much clearer. Those are subjective opinions of course, so I decided to get some independent testing done at Edge Analytical, the same place that tested our initial well water quality (for permit purposes). (I know that lots of folks never bother getting their water tested, but I prefer to be conservative when it comes to our water supply. Plus getting periodic testing will help me identify changes that occur over time.) I dropped off the samples this morning and will followup with another post to record the results.

Things I'd do differently next time:
1. Have a dedicated mechanical room for all of the water and HVAC stuff.
2. Install a water filter system during construction (or at least reserve space for it).

One year wrapup: heating and cooling

In general we love the radiant floor heating system, and the Warmboard definitely seems to be living up to its promises. The tile surfaces are especially consistently comfortable and toasty, while the hardwood areas seem "okay" due to the feeling that the floor temps in those areas have larger temperature swings. I knew beforehand that this was might be an issue, but wanted 3/4" hardwood flooring anyway, and would not change it now even if I could. The hardwood floors and their finish have so far stood up well - I had heard some horror stories about radiant heating ruining the finish.

I went with warmboard over a gypcrete-based solution mainly due to a lot of discussions I saw on the Internet regarding where do you want to store your buffer of heat. With gypcrete-based designs, you store a lot of that heat in the floor; some people advertise this as a good thing but my position is that it's better to keep that heat in your water reservoir until needed (or better yet, forego heating that water at all). Which leads to my next comment which is that our floors & heating system do respond quite rapidly to changes in the thermostat temperatures. Based on subjective feeling, I can sense the changes within ~15 minutes of turning the heat up or down. This was one of the key promises of Warmboard which has been fulfilled imo.

The zone heating is also more effective than I had dared to hope for - I love keeping our master bathroom at ~74-75 deg F, and the master bedroom itself at ~70 deg F - makes nightime bathroom trips quite comfortable. Despite this being "radiant heating", a lot of heat goes up the stairwell and I have only turned on the upstairs heat about three times in the past year (when visiting family came to stay with us). Makes me shake my head - I have a ton of money invested in that upstairs warmboard and the associated radiant plumbing system, and it's hardly getting used! :) Ah well, I still say better safe than sorry.

I have a lingering concern as to whether or not the Unico reverse-cycle chiller is really as economical as advertised - my monthly electric bills have been much higher than expected in cold months. (This may be because I was accustomed to our old house which was 1) smaller and 2) heated with natural gas.) In addition, although quiet the drone of the chiller can get annoying after awhile - a propane-fired primary boiler would have been 100% silent; I also wonder even if we keep the chiller, if a propane-fired backup boiler would have recovered heat more quickly than the electric backup we went with. (As I recall, I wanted to go electric for the most part to obviate the need for periodic propane tank refills.) Finally, I remember the heating company guys saying our chiller was going to be very efficient because it's just barely big enough for the job (3.5 tons). This was supposedly a good thin, but I wonder if that's why it runs so often when it's cold out. At some point I need to figure out how to do an exact cost analysis on my monthly costs.

Still - I'm not going to change out any of these heating system components anytime soon. I am thinking of swapping out the thermostats with some programmable units (normally folks don't bother with those with radiant heating, but I think they would work well with the fast-responding Warmboard).

The system works "pretty well" in air-conditioning mode. There is a huge amount of south-facing wall on this house that acts as a heat sink, and the system operates near continuously on hot summer days. On the hottest days I would have to say that the system is slightly overwhelmed. I think we could improve this by opening some upstairs windows late in the afternoon, to help the system remove much of hot air in the house. An attic-based whole-house fan looks appealing for that same purpose as well.

In retrospect I would have:
1. Located the chiller way over by the garage and far away from living spaces
2. Installed a whole-house attic fan.

3. Gotten more detailed about the system-sizing data to convince myself that the proposed system could handle the heating & cooling load with ease.

After one year (or so...)

So we've been living here in our new house for a little over a year. I wanted to comment on what's working well and what's not, now that we've had some time to settle in.

Overall our experience with the house has been wonderful. Everything is nice and shiny new, the appliances and mechanicals generally all work well, and there's no roof leaks (which was an issue with my old house - that improvement alone was a nice incentive to move), and there's lots more space.

My commute time has on average gotten worse by about five minutes. That seems bad, but the quality of the commute is so much better that I don't even notice. Nowadays, I spend ~7-8 minutes driving through the woods before I even hit blacktop. And I don't have to spend any time on I405 (a very, very busy/jammed North-South Seattle freeway for those not familiar with the area)! Yay!

Adjustment to rural life has been actually not too bad. Most shops are a bit far away, so there is always a moment of "do I really need that" before deciding to go out. We like the local pizza place and the mexican place down in Carnation. Carnation is a small town, but is now scheduled to get its first traffic light - we're moving up in the world! :)

Living life near rivers has turned out to be fun - every time we get several days of rain, I become keenly attuned to the flood state of the local Tolt and Snoqualmie rivers. So far it has not been too bad - I have about four or five ways to get home from work, and so far only three of them have been closed at a given time. If it got really bad, I'd just stay home from work.

Here's a picture of the house last November, looking from the driveway, when we got our first real snow:

Anyway - I plan to follow up with a few more posts about our experiences, plus some "what I'd do differently" type stuff.

A really nice shower

Last week the final finishing touches were put on our master bathroom shower. We had asked for a "bumpout" to be installed into the wall, which caused a delay while waiting for the special tile bullnose pieces in our chosen color to be ordered. No worries though - we've just been going upstairs to shower (and the upstairs bathrooom\shower is certainly no slouch either - far too nice for teenaged kids! :).

I've been waiting for final completion before posting the results. Finally then, here's the finished product (sorry for the reflection of the vanity light fixture, please ignore that):

I think the mural looks really nice through the glass. Our tile artist Paul Lewing came out last weekend and took some pictures of the final product; maybe we'll end up on his web site.

I remember long ago staring at the house plans and wondering "did we make the shower big enough?". Hah - that turned out not to be an issue. This is a huge shower with plenty of room to move around during the daily ablutions. And once you're done showering there is more than enough room to towel off while still in the shower, thus reducing the drip factor on the floor.

I was a bit iffy at the thought of having the shower walls and door made from glass, but now that they're in, I'm really glad. The panes are 3/8" thick - I think the door alone is more than a hundred pounds by itself. The hardware to hang them is correspondingly beefy. One nice feature is that the door opens in both directions, i.e. inwards and outwards. There is no special gaskets or rubber flanges around the door - instead, it is measured to have a very tight clearance so as to minimize leaks, i.e. about 1/8-1/4" on the sides and bottom of the door. So far leakage has not been a problem, and not having gaskets makes the cleaning job easier for sure.

Our builder Paul (or his plumbing consultant, I can't remember which) was the one who recommended we put in dual shower head fixtures. This was a good idea - two streams from different sides makes for a comfy shower.

In summary, even though we don't even have a week's worth of showers under our belts, we are happy with the results.

Demolition commences

Grrrr.... I was in the attic today, getting ready to cleanup the satellite dish wiring (everything was hooked up fine, but wasn't quite as "neat" looking as I'd like it), when I stepped on what looked like a randomly placed, leftover piece of batt insulation on the attic plywood decking. For some reason, a contractor had cut out a 2'x3' piece of the decking (it was laying in a dark corner, but for some reason I either didn't notice it or didn't put the dots together). I was fortunate enough to not fall through to the room below, but I did smash up the ceiling drywall pretty good:

Sigh - just what I needed.

I cannot tell why a contractor had to remove that section of the decking - the most likely candidate is the sprinker system guy, but for what?? A leak during final testing? Well, probably too late to figure it out; at this point it's best to just get it fixed. My son and I put in some bracing from above and replaced the deck piece, along with temporary screws into the drywall from below, to help hold up the insulation. I'll have to find a drywall contractor this week to come out and fix this.

Satellite TV installation

Out here in the sticks, we cannot get Comcast cable TV - not that I'm complaining too much. So we're left with either satellite TV, or erect your own big antenna. We chose satellite TV from the beginning, and our low-voltage contractor ran five (5) RG6 cables from the attic down to the wiring box in preparation for this. In addition, every TV drop in the house actually has two cables - one for live TV, and one for DVR recording.

A moderate concern of mine, was just how the satellite dish would be attached to the house. I didn't want some hamfisted oaf drilling screws into our brand-new siding, or roof! The installers will do the latter, by the way; after researching online, it turns out that most installers have great faith in a product called "bishop tape" to seal the holes in the shingles. Not sharing that faith, I kept looking for a better way. At some point during construction, I discovered the CommDeck dish mounting system. This seemed like a much more elegant (and leak-proof) way to mount the dish, as opposed to driving screws straight through the shingles.

Long story short, our satellite TV was installed yesterday. Fortunately the installer was a good guy and was more than willing to work with the CommDeck product (I had worked with Dan the previous week to get it installed on the roof, as a semi-punchlist item). So far the reception is awesome and the dish install was nice and clean:

We even have one of the hi-def packages, and for much less per month than what Comcast was costing us - sweet!

One last educational point: it turns out that how a satellite dish is grounded can be of great concern. Obviously you don't want static buildup or ground loops, of course. Based on my research, a strict interpretation of the electrical code shows that the dish must be directly grounded to a grounding rod or water pipe within 5' of electrical entrance. In other words, you're not supposed to just run the ground to the nearest light or receptacle. In the worst case, this might result in your installer wanting to run a ground wire through the siding to the outside, and then down to the the ground somewhere. Fortunately we had time during construction ask our electrician Joe to run a dedicated ground wire, tied off at the grounding rod then going all the way to the attic, and the installer had no problems with this. Something to keep in mind.

We are moved in!

Our first night in the new house was New Years Eve evening. I spent the first half of New Years Eve at the house working with Joe the electrician, and David the low-volt guy, to wrap up some last-minute details. After heading back to the old house around 1pm, we ended up hauling two truckloads (using a rented 14' box van from Del's Truck Rentals) over to the new house. Two truck loads per days is pretty good, given the transit time (1 hour each way) plus loading and unloading time. My wife and son had staged most of the first truckload in the garage to make things go faster, but even so we were really moving to get that much done. We setup our beds around 11pm and were quickly dead asleep - no welcoming the New Year for us!

Anyway, at this point we are 99.9% moved in (including moving my boat). There is a few odds and ends at the old house (a few tools, cleaning supplies, etc), but nothing that would take more than a carload or three to bring over. More importantly: we have food, water, a working stovetop and oven, and the washer and dryer are hooked up. The place is liveable now.

Just a few observations after a few days living here:

• The water from our well tastes fine, and feels fine when showering, etc.
• Our Kohler "Pressure Lite" toilets work well, but sound like jet engines taking off when flushed. If I had known this in advance, I would have picked a less-efficient-but-quieter model.
• My wife was very disappointed to find that her Belgique line of pots and pans are non-magnetic, and therefore don't work on our induction stovetop. We'll have to go shopping for a new set (All-Clad seems like a good default choice). In the meantime, our trusty old cast-iron fry pans work great.
• Our internet bandwidth is great considering that we're on DSL: I'm seeing pretty consistent download speeds of 1+ Mb/sec, and upload speeds of .5 Mb/sec. This is a relief since I spend a lot of time on my computer.
• The stars are super-clear when you live in the middle of a forest and there's no lights around :).
• There is an annoying light flicker when the chiller (heat pump) kicks on....not sure what causes it, or what can be done about it, but I'm really disappointed by this.
• Radiant floor heating is great! Especially on the tiled surfaces - your toes stay toasty.
• Hardwood flooring is great, but it's, well - hard: I plan to buy some house slippers.

The blinds were also installed last week, and we are very happy with them. I will work on getting some pictures of them for the curious. The color match with the house millwork is darn near perfect - we got lucky on that.

So that's where we are. There will be a few more posts on final finishing details, including finishing the punchlist items with our builder, but otherwise expect to see the posting activity taper off. Writing this blog has been a lot of fun, but I need to get back to having a life :).

Elfa mania

I've mentioned the Elfa shelving product a few times before. We visited the Container Store on Christmas Eve to design and buy the Elfa arrangements for our closet spaces. This turned out to be a long process simply due to the need to work thru the design for each space, of which we have seven (four bedroom closets, upstairs bath closet, pantry, and my wife's small office). Some were simple, others huge. In the end we bought the hardware for every space but one. The Container store folks were great in that they pulled our order super fast, and even loaded it up for us. There's a LOT of metal and weight with this size of an order; my Explorer was squatting in the rear quite a bit:

We had three employees helping to load our car; a couple of them mentioned that they'd never seen such a large order before. I'm not sure whether to be flattered or nervous. :-)

This is a bit of what your house looks like after bringing so much Elfa stuff home; kind of a wire shelving explosion all over:

We've also been moving a lot of stuff over the last few days but aren't quite ready to move in. It's hard to utilize the closet space unless you have shelves, so we decided to use today to install the Elfa stuff. My wife and I spent close to nine solid hours on this, which was lots of "fun" (up the ladder, down the ladder, up the ladder, etc, etc - it wears you out after a while). This is a picture of me working on one side of my wife's closet:

As you can see, my wife opted for a lot of hanging rod space - the side under the window (not yet finished) will be "long hang", i.e. for long coats and other clothes.

This is the narrow side of the pantry:

This Elfa shelving really allowed us to reap the benefits of our nine foot high ceilings - a lot of the spaces have top shelves only a foot or so from the ceiling. (Ok, obviously you'd need a step ladder for those shelves, but everyone has seldom-used items which would store nicely up there.) The pantry especially has a huge amount of storage space - enough to feed an army if it was filled. Well we don't have an army to feed so I will have to keep tabs on my wife ("no honey, just because it's on sale doesn't mean we need to buy it...").

My closet is a bit harder to see into; this is the best I could do:

We finished all of the installation except for the third upstairs bedroom, which isn't critical since no-one's going to live in it for now (we'll install it later in January, before the Elfa sale ends). Otherwise now that the closet spaces are done, we'll get back to work on moving stuff over.

Granite sealing

Although I was late to the party on researching granite sealers, I always knew sealing was a necessary step in order to protect the slabs from stains. The traditional method (which works fine, as far as I can tell) is with a silicon\wax-based sealer, which you (the homeowner) apply yourself (wipe on, wipe off) every 6-12 months or so. The second option is a (hopefully) more advanced approach that actually bonds a teflon-like substance to the granite, and has the advantage of lasting much longer with little to no maintenance other than normal cleaning. I would not have known about the second option except that it was mentioned by our mirror guy, Jim from TLC Windows. Jim recommended that we pay a little bit extra to have our shower walls treated with Hydroshield, which we did, and he also mentioned a similar product for use on granite countertops.

Later on, I found that Stoneshield was the Pacific Northwest dealer for this product and I decided to contact them. Stoneshield is run by a couple named Jim and Kimberly, and their website says to call them 7 days a week, as late as 9pm. Half-thinking this was a joke, I called them a few days ago at 8:55pm - lo and behold, Kimberly answered and answered all of my questions for at least 15 minutes. Jim from Stoneshield met us at the house on Christmas Eve morning (which we greatly appreciated, being so busy right now). After some discussion, we went ahead and had him seal all of our granite. This method is more expensive than the traditional sealer treatment, but I hope it pays off in the long run.

My initial impression of the results is that the granite is much, much smoother than before (almost slippery). Time will tell as to the other benefits, but since having the treatment done, I have heard other positive feedback on the product (from a friend of a friend who works in the granite business).

Cleanup done

Over the weekend the last coats of floor sealer were done, and the cleanup crew finished doing the final cleanup. The cleanup guys did a nice job: all decals removed from windows, windows washed inside and out, walls and floors vacuumed, bathrooms cleaned, cabinets vacuumed, etc. The house feels just about ready to move in, and in fact we are planning to rent a truck to start hauling boxes the day after Christmas.

This is a picture of my foot (in a comfy SmartWool sock - highly recommended by yours truly) which is pretty cool by itself, but the closeup also gives you a nice closeup look of the stair risers:

Here's a nice view through the dining room toward my office:

Looking into my office:

Living room and some of the kitchen:

In the above picture, you can see we took our shoes off in the kitchen since the wood floors are just so nice. I hope we can make that a habit, but you know how this stuff goes...

One funny note: it is a long drive from our current house to the new house, and I've gotten in the habit of using the porta-potty upon arrival. Went to go do that today and did a double-take - no porta-potty! Guess we'll have to use the inside toilets (or find a convienent tree) from here on out! :-)

As I mentioned before, Paul and his crew will be doing punch-list items through Tuesday, and we plan to start hauling stuff over next Saturday. We're not quite able to move in yet though; one key item is that the master bath doesn't have shower walls yet! I hope that gets done before Christmas though, so that the week afterward we have the house to ourselves.

We have started packing up our old house though, and I can tell it's going to be a big job. In my old office, I have already filled over 30 small (1.5 ft^3) boxes, and I'm only about 3/4 done. Not to mention how much boat stuff I need to move, along with the floats and boat hull itself!

It's our house now

I was in intensive all-day training classes at work from Tuesday through Thursday, which left no time to get out to the house to check things out. Despite not having my services available, our builder was able to press on and kept everything on schedule. All of the final inspections have passed and the occupancy certificate was granted - yay! (This is the piece of paper from the government that declares the house to be a human-habitable dwelling - you're not allowed to live there until you get that.) The bank also did their post-build appraisal inspection, which means they have the appraiser take a final look to ensure that the actual house matches the one that was described in the specs and plans. No problem there for us.

This morning marked a big project transition - my wife and I went to the bank and signed the final draw check. Our builder gets a big final payout, and we get to settle down to the joy of a new (and larger) mortgage (oh yeah, plus we get to live in a new house). Our construction loan is of the type where upon completion, it automatically converts into a traditional mortgage at the agreed upon rate. So the bank visit was simple - sign a form, sign the check, and then done. How anticlimactic - not even a single trumpet was played. So the most visible change now will be that the monthly mortgage statements from here on out will be principal and interest (and hence, bigger).

The house is looking great and the crew is working through "punchlist" items. Our builder plans to work until Tuesday to fix the known issues, then we'll move in.

In case you're wondering, minor cosmetic details do not block the bank or government inspectors from signing off, only major stuff. The floor crew was putting the second coat on the stairs when we showed up:

Their plan apparently is to do both stair coats, wait a few hours for it to dry, then come back later this afternoon to do the coats on the upstairs and downstairs. So the house will be stinky tomorrow, but it will look great. :)

Here's a nice picture of the entryway, you can see the downstairs newel post and its bannisters, along with my very cool office door (there are two such doors to my office):

The crawlspace door has been hung and trimmed out, but still needs to be stained (punchlist item):

The large gray box is for the septic pump controls.

This next picture bums me out a bit:

Why you ask? Well, see the two steel-gray posts bolted to the garage floor? Apparently it is a code requirement that such equipment (water heater, well\water stuff) have a vehicle barrier to prevent a car from sliding into them. I'm not real happy to have more holes drilled in the floor but ah well.

After six months of construction, we finally have a small step to make it easy to enter the house from the garage:

We also stopped by Home Depot after visiting the bank and placed the final blind order. This was a pretty expensive item, but as mentioned before a 20%-off sale makes it quite attractive. Every single window in the house (including the garage windows) is going to get blinds. Holidays will slow things down, but I hope to have them installed in about three weeks.

Our builder also told me that the double-doors for the upstairs game room are now installed, but due to the stairs being wet we could not get up there to see. Tomorrow we'll make another trip - I am looking forward to it.

Some minor updates

A few more doors have been hung since Thursday. These double-doors are for the under-stairs closet:

I still need to figure out how we are going to get a clothes rod hung in that closet - it is a very wide space.

Our big master bathroom tub has been installed and looks great:

Otherwise, not much else happening. We stopped by the Elfa showroom and my wife and I both liked their stuff. Pricey, but as I mentioned they have a 30% off sale starting on December 24th - great timing for us! :)

More tile and trim work

Master bathroom grouting has begun:

We met Wednesday morning with the mirror and shower glass rep. The shower surrounds will be of solid 3/8" tempered glass, with really nice heavy-duty hardware. The door will open both inwards and outwards. There will be a nice handle plus a towel-bar attached to the door, and another towel-bar attached to a side-panel.

The kitchen backsplash tile has been placed, but not yet grouted (check out the mural :)):

Hot water heater is in (the plumbing looks complicated, I think due to the red recirc pump?):

Here's the two interior doors for my office being stained:

Most light fixtures have been installed, but several have not yet been delivered. The downstairs newel post and bannister work has started, but I'm saving the picture for when it's all done. I also changed my mind at the last minute and asked Joe our electrician to add under-cabinet lighting, which he got done really quickly. I have postponed any replacement of the side-porch door (as discussed in previous posts), since it's non-critical for getting the house done and I want to save the money for now.

We went to Home Depot earlier this week to check out the Levelor blinds that are on sale, and really liked them. We plan to get real wood blinds throughout the house, in the 2 1/2" slat size. We may go with the fake wood stuff for the window over the master bathroom tub, since that area will likely see a lot of moisture. The blinds measurement appointment is scheduled for Monday. There are ~30 windows in the house that need blinds, and I really like Home Depot's $118 whole-house installation price (ok, plus another ~$100 for measurement).

I mentioned closet shelving in my last post. My wife and I are going down to the Bellevue Container Store on Saturday morning to check out the Elfa closet stuff. From reading stuff on the Internet, I learned that there is usually a huge Elfa sale every January, so if we like their stuff we will likely wait until then to order everything. I will likely do the pantry immediately though.

We're also meeting this Saturday with a realtor to discuss putting our current house up for sale (after the New Year, obviously).

All things considered, we are now in serious final count-down mode. Our builder is trying very hard to wrap the house up before Christmas, and there is a lot scheduled over this next week:

• Final low-volt work (minor remaining trim and some intercom installations) is scheduled for Tuesday.
• Health and safety inspection on Tuesday (includes a interior sprinkler test - I hope they're careful!)
• Final hardwood floor coat on Friday
• Cleanup on Saturday (this is cleanup of all the construction dust and debris, vacuuming out of cabinets, etc)

(I'm sure there's more left to do, I'm missing stuff for sure in that list)

In theory we might get the keys Monday December 21st. Wow - doesn't seem possible, but things are indeed moving quickly. Of course, there will be a punch-list of remaining repair items and jobs that we won't notice until after we move in, but that's normal for a new house.

Last but not least, we're meeting this Saturday with a realtor to discuss putting our current house up for sale (after the New Year, obviously).

Weekend tidbits

Our kitchen faucets were installed; we chose Kohler "Clairette" model K-692-VS (VS is for "Vibrant Stainless"):

The stream can be switched between the multi-stream mode (seen in the picture above) and a more singular "solid stream" mode, with the press of a button on the back of the faucet head. The head of the faucet is detachable as well, so it can be used as a flexible spray hose. And yes, that's genuine well water coming from the faucet. :)

Here's another shower-mural-in-progress picture:

The bannisters have been installed on the upstairs newel railings:

Garbage disposal is installed:

The refrigerator has been slid into its hole:

Yeah, I know: the fridge protrudes from its cubby by quite a bit. It's a bit jarring at first glance to be honest, and I feel stupid for not anticipating/planning this better. Although I am not sure I would have done much different, since I like having a big fridge. We're stuck with it now.

The double-oven is getting close to being installed as well:

Here's the work crew dining area:

One item not included in our builder's bid (due to our cost-cutting efforts at the beginning of the project) is closet hardware\shelving. Although it may seem like a minor omission, I think it is important that we have these done before move-in, since it's hard to unpack your stuff w/o shelves and clothes hangers. I spent a lot of time this weekend researching many of the different closet organizer systems. The basic categories are:

• Wire-based shelving
• Particle-board-based shelving
• Solid wood shelving

My starting inclination was to go with solid-wood shelving, but after reviewing several different brands I am not very happy with their value proposition: they seem like far too much money for what is invariably just cheap pine boards that have been sanded and stained. So to get solid-wood shelving for a reasonable cost, I would have to build the shelving myself and I just don't have the time. I'm not interested in particle-board systems, so that put me back to wire-shelving. We have some Rubbermaid wire shelving in our current house; while it definitely works well, it has an "industrial" look and feel to it which I was trying to avoid. Long story short, the current front-runner is Elfa; although it is wire-based shelving, the Elfa system has a myriad of accessories and decorative trims to dress it up. We'll probably stop by their showroom this week for some design consultations (they help you design the closet(s), and you install it).

We need to think about blinds to cover the windows. In case we had run out of money, my backup plan was to tack up used bedsheets from thriftstores over the windows (I've always said that a Winnie the Pooh bedsheet makes for an elegant window treatment), but it doesn't appear that we'll be driven to that extremis. :) I started looking at Levelor brand wood blinds which are very nice, but very expensive; then I discovered that Home Depot has a 20% off sale on them right now :) so maybe we can get them after all.

I spent a lot of time this weekend researching security camera systems. Beyond the house's security system, I plan to have several exterior IP (network-based instead of CCTV-based) cameras to cover strategic points in case any issues arise. For obvious reasons I do not plan to go into great detail on this blog regarding the security systems I'm installing into this house. I will say this: it is absolutely amazing how approachable these IP cameras have become. A rank amateur such as myself can put together a compelling surveillance system without much work. Costs are still somewhat high for IP-based cameras; I've been looking at Vivotek who seems like one of the best value-for-the-money manufacturers.

Last but not least, we purchased a bunch of cardboard moving boxes yesterday and will start doing some packing over the next few weeks. Fun, fun, fun (not!).

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(Having a hard time trying to think of a summarizing yet catchy title...maybe next time.)

We happened to be out at the house today when the very first tiles of our shower mural were set into place:

Dan said he was only going to do the inside corner pieces for today, since that's a tricky area that's best to let cure before moving on. The remaining flat areas will go fast, I bet it will all be done by end of the week.

Plumbing work has started, and most of our bathroom sinks have arrived. We chose the Kohler "Ladena" K2214 model sink for all bathrooms, with the master bathroom sinks in "Ice Gray", and the other bathroom sinks in plain Almond. This is one of the master bathroom sinks:

I like the rectangular look - it's a nice change from your traditional basic oval.

The upstairs has been almost entirely trimmed out; here's an area behind (obv) a toilet:

I was surprised to see water in the toilet, actually, but I guess there wasn't any reason not to hook them up. (Darn, I forgot to ask that the First Ceremonial Pee be reserved for me. :)) Oh yeah, almost forgot: I'm sure that close family members will recognize the toilet model above as a Kohler Wellworth Pressure Lite K3505 model (aka a "big ****" toilet). You didn't think I'd fail to carry on that tradition, did you? (Note to brother Bill: no vulgar comments on my blog! :)

Regarding the "Pressure Lite" aspect of this toilet model: this is a nod to water efficiency, in order to try to keep a reasonable load on our well.

Here's our 85 gallon water heater:

I think water heater size guidelines are usually based on # of bedrooms, but the plumbers had told us we needed a larger model due to the size of our master bathroom tub:

We have never really been into the hot-tub thing, so choosing the above model was done mainly through online research, etc (no sitting in some showroom tub in our bathing suits, thanks but no thanks). This particular tub is a Kohler 6' Seadream model, with heater. Seeing it in real life has made us both go "wow" - it's really big.

The stairs have been all trimmed out, and work has begun on the newel posts as well:

Just like the floors, the stairs have only had two coats of sealer. They will get buffed and sealed one more time near the end of the job. Here's the bottom of the stairs:

In the picture above, you can also see the entryway tile has been started.

While they are very pretty, we've learned that super-fancy newel posts, bannisters, and handrails can be very expensive. In order to cut costs (a novel idea for me, my wife would say) we chose relatively simple items. Here's the current shape of our upstairs newel posts:

In that same picture, you can see a lot of the casing has been installed upstairs. Not only does it look great, but this is one step that really starts to transform the rooms from a "work in progress" look to a "ready to move in" look.

All of the exterior doors have been getting removed for staining. They are all made of fiberglass with a raised wood grain imprint. Fiberglass doors are stronger than wood, and eliminate any chance of warping which eliminates a big concern in our drizzly climate. This is the rear porch door:

It looks better in real-life; the picture makes it seem more reddish than it really is.

In other news, our DSL internet was finally hooked up by CenturyTel, and I've asked our data guy to schedule one last trip to do the final trim work and test that everything is working.

The propane tank was filled up for the first time. Our thousand gallon tank was only able to hold ~800 gallons - bummer, I was hoping it would take at least 900, but oh well.

One item I think we made a mistake on is the side porch door. For some reason, I think I thought it would add either cutness or uniqueness to have this door open outwards. That was dumb - the side porch itself is not big enough to stand to the side to get out of the way of the door swing, so you end up backing up down the steps to give the door room. I would hate to have the door torn out so it can be replaced with an inward-swinging door, but I'd also hate to live with it this way. Paul is getting an estimate on a new door and he is going to let me know what the labor costs will be - we'll see on this one.

We are also getting a quote on a double-door set for the upstairs game room. This is something we are definitely going to do. Each door will be relatively narrow (2' wide), but there will be a transom with glass panes above them. It should look great.

Various things

Here's a summary of the latest progress this past week (in addition to the granite slab installation, that is - see previous post).

The hose-nick that occured in the smaller downstairs office (as mentioned in some comments to the previous post) has been repaired:

I wish things like this wouldn't happen, but the repair job looks pretty durable to me. The hardwood guys have replaced the hardwood planks and given the office floor its two coats of sealer.

The garage attic access stairs are done:

The puddle in the foreground is actually on the exact spot I had intended to relocate my boat building tent to - clearly I will need a better base than that! I plan to buy a few dump-truck loads of rock and gravel to firm things up.

Covering the stairs with hardwood in in progress:

The stairs will be sanded and finished exactly the same as the hardwood floors were. And obviously, hand-rails and newel posts will be added as well.

Lots of progress is being made on tile, both in laying tile and in grouting the earlier areas. This is the floor of the upstairs guest bathroom:

I've come to realize that the master bathroom, especially the shower, comprises a huge amount of tile work. Dan is making good progress on things though:

The kitchen area is the largest tile area to be done, but steady progress is being made:

The kitchen is the only place we are doing that simple "offset" pattern, but I'm glad we did it there - it breaks things up a bit.

Interior doors have started getting installed:

Some minor issues have arisen: the Kitchen-Aid range hood we selected is nowhere in stock, and will require a 30+ day lead time to order it from the factory. I'm in the process of selecting an alternative brand so we don't have to wait on that. Also, it appears that nobody was aware that we wanted double-doors for the upstairs game room. Lots of little details to keep track of as we get closer to the finish line.