Up To Date Update Posted on 08/10/08 It's been a little while since I posted any pictures of the 388 house. More than a month. Well, I've been busy. After the ceilings there were a million little details to get done before the party, and then there was the party, and now I'm just trying to get as much done as possible before the new one arrives. Anyway, since I probably won't get back here for a few weeks, I found a few minutes to shoot a few photos as a record of my progress and to post here. We'll start with the basic shot that you've seen before, now with 100% more kitchen than last time. if you look up you can see that I still have some strips of ceiling to fill in up near the beam soffit. Here's another shot of the kitchen and then the bathroom. Without going back and checking, i'm not sure if I posted any shots of the long completed bathroom. I did however finally get around to painting the trim. You can't see much of it in this shot, just a little behind the toilet. Was originally going to be white, but I really like the slightly darker mustard color much more. Here are the two smaller bedrooms. The carpeting was installed a few days before the party and looks great. Before the carpet guys came in I had to trim out the opening for the crawlspace, which is in the lower photo. After they left I installed the handles. This past week I installed the baseboard trim in all three bedrooms. This is my old bedroom, you can see the heater in the closet. I'll be making a cover for that soon. You can also see the track lighting i installed in this room as opposed to the soffit lighting in the other tow rooms. This past week I completed the trim around the windows. Most of it was constructed of inexpensive laminated shelving lumber trimmed down to size on the table saw. It's a little rougher than I'd hoped, I should have spent more time sanding it, but it'll do. Actually, I think it looks pretty good. And two last shots of the livingroom/kitchen again (click for larger views). Still lots ot do, but it's really coming together. You can see my biggest 'to-do' in the shot of the livingroom, the trim around the skylight. Soon. Permalink Harvest Time Posted on 07/05/08 Yes, that's right, we finally got something to show for the raised beds we put in a few months back. Some banana peppers, jalapenos, and some zucchini. I harvested the jalapenos a little early because I'm making veggie chili today. Oh, and we also got a bunch of spinach, and a little lettuce, but I never took any photos of those. A couple of things we learned, that we'll have to remember for next year. Zucchini is uncontrollable. Our zukes have killed a few pepper plants, some spinach, and all of the lettuce. We simply didn't expect a few seeds to become the five foot wide monster we've got now. Lesson learned. You should harvest lettuce and spinach as soon as it looks edible. We waited too long on the lettuce and the zuke killed it. The spinach on the other hand was a foot and a half high before we started eating it. D'oh! We learned online that you start picking leaves as soon as they're a few inches across. Tomatoes need lots of sun and warm soil. We planted our tomatoes too early, and in spots that get only 5-6 hours of sun every day. Next year we'll put them in the hottest part of the garden. The ones in the back are still growing, so maybe we'll get some fruit from them. The ones I planted in the bed on the porch though, didn't grow it all. We gave up on them last week and replaced them with some lettuce seeds. Peppers are well behaved, but cucumbers will try to choke their neighbors. Next year we'll expand the garden. We don't actually have a lot of space in the yard that gets full sun, but i think every inch of it will be planted next year. We'll see. Permalink Ceilings... Almost Done Posted on 06/08/08 Well, here they are, corrugated ceilings. It was a lot of work, but my brother Danny and I finally hung the ceilings. Other than a few adjustments, a filler panel or two, and possibly some kind of trim, they're done. We cut the 12' x 26" panels using an abrasive blade in my old circular saw.It worked. The sparks where so dense that they melted a new hole in the back end of the saw's plastic housing. We attached 2x4's to the ceiling beams, and simply screwed the panels up. Simply is a big understatement though, it wasn't easy. One of the problems was that in the bedrooms the pieces were as wide as the room, and fitting these flimsy, sharp-edged panels into the room, let alone getting them in place, was rough. Required a lot of touch ups to the paint afterwards. I'd also recommend snapping a chalk line for your screws too, we didn't, and it's pretty obvious in a lot of places. Here's my old bedroom. The bedrooms came out really well. In this shot you can see that I added a box for a ceiling fan. The standard shot of my living room/kitchen. You can see one of the areas that still need filler pieces along the soffit on the left. Another shot of the kitchen, looking towards the northeast corner of the house, we'll call this the dining nook. It's so strange, there used to be a wall here, anda scary, dark closet. The kitchen will go there. You can see the cabinets all built up sitting in the middle of the room. And below? that's what the kitchen will look like when it's done, more or less. One of these days, maybe I'll even install that window I framed out in the blank space above the sink. Permalink Snake! Posted on 06/07/08 Just let me grab this extensio... eek! Found this little guy living in the shed up in PA this week. I have no idea what kind of snake it is, but it was definitely more afraid of me than i was of it, so I'll make the assumption it wasn't poisonous. Permalink Floors Posted on 06/01/08 I went through so many many mental gyrations trying to figure out what to do with the floors. Unlike a lot of people, I actually prefer carpeting to hard floors for comfort in living rooms and bedrooms. Unfortunately, with the house being right on grade as it is, and in the woods, anything but the darkest, most wear-resistant carpeting would be destroyed inside a week. Additionally, the kitchen is a part of the main room, and I would never carpet a kitchen... so what kind of hard flooring would work? I love the look of polished concrete, and its toughness would be perfect for this house. Long ago, I'd hoped to find a way to do concrete with embedded tubing for radiant heat. Unfortunately, concrete is simply too heavy for my floors. Someday I'll build a house with concrete floors, but this isn't the one. The photo above is a fantastic application of polished concrete with an amazing floral design worked into the surface. Plywood (or even OSB) tiles are also gaining popularity, and I considered it. Both of them allow for a really nice result but require a few things I was lacking. First, I had no easy way of getting the 4x8 sheets from Lowes to the house. Second, and more importantly, the cuts which transform the sheets into tiles need to be perfect, and my tablesaw and skills aren't up to the job. Additionally, the finishing would have added a lot of time. From The Ground Up is a great blog which follows the building of a gorgeous modern house outside of Chicago. Jason, who's building the house, made some amazing floors from birch plywood. Some other options that I'd considered? Ceramic tile would have been really nice, something dark, similar to slate maybe? Very expensive though, at least for the stuff I liked. Additionally, I would have had to spend a fair amount just prepping the floors and installing another layer of plywood or tile backer to reduce flex in the floors. Cork is nice, but again, expensive. And of course, real wood is wonderful. You can get real wood at decent prices, especially unfinished, but that gets into a whole 'nother ball of wax. My finishing skills simply aren't where they need to be to comfortably finish a floor. Prefinished engineered wood is an option, but I don't think it's forgiving enough for the rough condistion of the existing floors. Along the same lines is the idea of sanding and refinishing those existing floors. While there are parts of the house where using the existing floors is an option, almost every room has one or two areas where the floors are simply too far gone to make this conceivable. So, we find ourselves with but one choice... laminate. And it turns out that it's probably the best choice. Inexpensive, durable, forgiving, relatively easy to install, and everything I needed fit right into the back of the Element. I bought 22 boxes of "Just-clic" laminate at Builders Surplus , in a rough walnut finish,for a paltry $1.49 a square foot. Each piece has an integral rubber backing, so there's no need to lay down a foam underlayment beneath it. Just open the box and lay the flooring. It went down really quickly. I drove up to the house on Saturday, bought the flooring, and spent the rest of the day clearing out my tools, cleaning out the shed and doing other light prep work. Sunday morning I woke up early and got to work. By 6pm I was finished. I still need to install the baseboard trim before I can call it complete, but I'm happy with the result, and really happy that it's done. Permalink Livingroom/Kitchen Painted Posted on 05/27/08 Permalink Finally... Time For Paint! Posted on 05/16/08 You have no idea how excited I was heading up to the house this week. FInally, I can paint. It took a week or two longer than expected, but the taping and spackling is done, and all of the sheetrock is tied together into neat, smooth, seamless walls. Ahhh... gorgeous. There are definitely some things the handyman did that I'm not happy with, but I can work with it. Even now, just a day after getting back, those things are fading in my memory. The biggest issue (beyond the time I'm going to have to spend scraping the spackle off of the floors) is the fact that he seemed to think I would be using 6" molding around everything. If a screw head was less than 4" from a window or floor, it was ignored. Unfortunately that means a lot of touch up work for me, since the window molding will probably cover only about an inch of sheetrock at most. I'm being picky though, and I'm sure if I'd have explained that to him he would have done it differently, so it's not really his fault. He was actually a really nice guy and I was pretty lucky to have run into him and ask for his card at the gas station so many months back. Seriously, that's how I found him. Anyway on to the paint. I picked up five gallons of Olympic D68-2, Plantation Moss in "Enamel Flat" latex paint at Lowes. Enamel Flat, which is a confusing term in my opinion, is a slightly less flat flat. Does it actually contain enamel? If not it's pretty irresponsible of paint companies to use the term 'enamel' in the name of a latex paint. It's just confusing. The color's great though. I also had the guy tint five gallons of Valspar High Hide primer in the same color. I started the primer coat at around 3pm on tuesday and finished late the following after noon. I went right into the second coat that evening. The next morning I was moving pretty well. The bedrooms were done and I was working in the hallway when the extension roller snapped. Damn. In the end I finished all three bedrooms, all the closets, and the hallway, even to the point of installing all of the new outlets, switches and plates. Then I cut in all the corners in the kitchen/livingroom. All that remains is to roll the final coat in the big room, which should take an hour or so when I head back next week. In these two photos of the back bedroom you can see the way I dropped the ceiling above the doorway in the back bedroom, creating a small entry alcove. I think it squares the room off nicely, and I find the angles of the walls really pleasing, especially in the upper photo. This is the back bedroom again. I'm really liking this little soffit I installed in two of the bedrooms, with these 3" halogen can lights. They actually throw a lot of light and give the rooms a nice warm feel. My old bedroom will actually be getting some track lighting installed on the tall wall which will serve the same purpose. This is the smallest bedroom, and the other one to have the new soffit and lighting. To create space for the soffit the wall was moved back around 9". Ahhh luxuries. Heat, real honest-to-goodness, propane-fired, thermostatically-controlled heat! Damn. I had the furnace installed in an extension I built off to the side of the closet in my old bedroom. I'm going try to rig up some kind of cover for that too, which isn't a problem since combustion air comes in through one of those PVC pipes you see in the top of the furnace. One thing that I really like is the location of the furnace filter. It's hidden behind the return grate at the end of the hallway. in every other house I've owned the filter was part of the furnace itself. In this case you simply pop two little latches, pull back the louvered grill and pop in a new filter. Very elegant. Permalink Random Bits in M'town Posted on 04/27/08 Yesterday we stopped at the local Habitat for Humanity ReStore. After spending time at the exceedingly excellent Construction Junction in Pittsburgh, I wondered if anything similar existed down here, and found ReStore online. They take donations of old or reusable construction materials and fixtures and sell them to support Habitat's construction projects. For me, moreso than supporting habitat for Humanity's work, which is great, it's really about the recycle/reuse aspect of the whole thing. While I just wanted to stop in and check the place out, A ended up finding an old light fixture which works so much better in the dining room than the crappy brass chandelier that's been there since we moved in. Not bad for $20. I realized after visiting that I have a whole bucket of perfectly good (albeit ugly brown) electrical switches and outlets, as well as a perfectly fine dishwasher, up in Pennsylvania that I should bring down here and donate, along with one no-longer-needed brass chandelier. Today I decided I also needed to do something with the remaining tomato and pepper plants we bought. Looking at the railing on the south end of the porch, I decided that a few 2x6's and some plastic sheeting would net me a space for at least some of those plants. A trip to Lowes, $5 worth of lumber and a little work and I'm done. I put all 12 remaining tomato plants in here (planted far too tightly). We'll see how long they last. Once they start growing I'll build some kind of trellis out of string or wire for the vines. Now I just need to find a place for the peppers. Permalink Fresh vegetables... In a month or two. Posted on 04/24/08 A has wanted a garden since we moved here, and now that it's spring, it's time to get on that. For her birthday, I got her a bunch of gardening tools, some gloves, and a wheelbarrow. This past weekend we visited a few gardening centers and bought a flat of plants; three kinds of tomatoes, strawberries, red peppers, banana peppers, and jalapenos. We also bought seeds for squash, lettuce, spinach and a few others. Originally we'd planned to build a single 4' x 8' raised bed, but after speaking to a friend of mine, we broke that into two smaller ~3' x 8' beds for easier access. The other thing we realized is that the single flat of plants we bought is far, far more than we have room for in the two raised beds. Not sure what we'll do with the rest of them, although I'm tempted to simply throw them into pots on the front porch. This is really A's project, not mine. She did all the planning and planting (although I had some input on what she's planting obviously, as evidenced by the heavy emphasis on tomatoes an peppers). I handle the construction end of things though, and my next contribution will be a trellis for the tomato plants, and some kind of composting system. Check out this amazing suburban garden in Pasadena, CA. Gives you some idea of what's really possible, at least in sunny-year-round Pasadena. Permalink Happy Earth Day! Posted on 04/22/08 In the last two visits to PA, I haven't really done anything which was both photo-worthy and conveniently photographed. That is to say, the things I've done have been either too boring to take a picture of, or too inconvenient. The fact is, in the last few weeks I've really only done a bunch of coordination (and some little things to make the place ready for the contractors). Horrel-Neiderhiser completed the installation of the new high efficiency furnace and all of the ductwork, and will be testing that on thursday. Amerigas came and moved the propane tank from the front of the house to the south side where it won't be so prominent. And I found and hired a local contractor to install the last few pieces of sheetrock I hadn't gotten around to finishing, and then tape and mud the entire house. He tells me he'll be done by the end of next week or so. When I haven't been answering questions or talking to contractors, I've been busy cleaning up with the leaf blower, cutting down rotted trees, or picking up deadfall (lots and lots of deadfall). Oh, and I also cleaned out the shed and straightened and reinstalled the Fiamma bike rack on the back of the Westy. Last year sometime I accidentally tapped the dumpster at Speedgoat while I was parking and the rack popped off like a grape. So there's a lot going on, but I'm not the one doing most of it. The next time I'm up there I'll shoot some photos of the new furnace in the little alcove I built for it off of the master closet, as well as, with any luck, all of the completed spackling. Next on the to do list? Paint the whole house. In lieu of construction shots here are are some pictures of flowers I shot outside the house this morning. Permalink