It's been too long

Oy.  What a difference a month makes.  We have had road trips to New York (Aunt Shirley's funeral) and Tennessee (Buddy Walk).  And work, and life, and occasional sleep.  The whole time, progress was happening on the house.  Here's a catch-up.  Pictures are from 9/4/08 through 10/2/08.

When we were picking out the stain color for the hardwood floor, we tried to get a balance between the new cabinet color and the existing table/chair color.  The installers put down different colors so we could choose.  They were going to sand off the colors afterward, so we wouldn't have color samples showing through the final colors.


This is the boundary between the hallway and the laundry room. You can't see it from this perspective, but there's a dip between the two flooring types. The hardwood floor guys had a disagreement with the linoleum guys.


And here's the result. I added in the sawdust for illustrative purposes, but eventually dust bunnies will migrate in and want to settle.


We think the two sets of flooring guys got it worked out so there's no Grand Canyon, but we'll have to check.

The hardwood floor guys also stained our vent covers so they would match. I understand what they did, but the way they did it looks like some piece of abstract art that is supposed to be vaguely disturbing.


We decided that we didn't like the hardwood after all, so we went with a paper carpet with blue accent lines. No, seriously, this is the paper used to protect the hardwood floor. We have picked up our own roll of it to protect the floor when moving.


Afternoon sun reinforces the correctness of the hardwood floor decision.


Shiny floor!


Down in the basement, this is our water handling/filtration system. The big blue tank is the water pump (I think), followed by (heading left) a water spinner (or centrifuge), a serious filter, and an ultraviolet light purifier. And we have no instructions on any of this, but they say it works.


This is our nifty remote sensor for the cisterns. It came from Australia.


Steve chillin' at the new place


and inspecting our only damage from hurricane Ike.


The hall bath, with covering still on the windows.


How NOT to do doorstops. The builder has replaced the door, and we purchased solid floor-based doorstops.


Nice floor, subtle problem. This is the computer room, with the sun flooding the windows at a quarter after 3. The sun will travel to the right, throwing the light to the left. Right onto where the computer screens will be, against the brown wall. No other way for this to be laid out, but I still think this is our one big design flaw in usability.


Here's how the driveway looked for most of the construction - dirt, and plenty of it.


Then the county told us that we needed an approach coming off the road, and the builder put up guard rails, and we got gravel. Much improved!






We have even passed the housing inspection!

(Steve is in yellow, hiding behind his dad, with his mom close. Our friends Dick and Starla are on the right. Bettie's behind the camera.)

And then in a moment of silliness, Steve and his mom got into a "duelling cameras" fight.


And as of this writing, we have passed our final inspection (Wednesday 10/15) and been granted our certificate of occupancy. The house is ours! There will be more pictures, including moving day(s), but wow - what a journey. Thank you, God. Thank you, Bettie. And thank you, Tag the builder.

Small steps

The work these days is done in smaller increments.  Big things - digging a basement, raising a wall - those are behind us now.  There's still a lot happening, but on a smaller scale.

We have toilets!  And the self-lowering lids work as specified.  No seat slams.

We don't have a water pump yet, so we don't have running water. That's another step somewhere down the road. But one question I have is why the water heater is connected to the furnace . . .


I have mentioned that we're scavenging water from the roof. A preliminary calculation says that an inch of rain will provide about 1800 gallons of water, from the whole roof area.


A delivery of water is 2000 gallons, and about $65. We will be doing rather well, especially in the springtime. The two 5000-gallon cisterns are here, with round caps poking up above the ground. Bettie calls these "industrial". We'll have to do something to soften that look up.


Outside the house, they have finally covered over the leopard wall, at the carport.


Inside, the little closet in the master bedroom has shelves on two walls


We're still not sure what we're going to do with the sloped floor, if anything.


And saving the best for last, two views of the hallway. This is from the great room looking toward the carport, wood the natural color.


And now from the other direction, with stain, from Bettie's cell phone camera.


They will be putting on clear coats Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday next week, and the floors should be ready for traffic on Friday.

Most pictures from Labor Day, Monday Sep 1, 2008. Final picture from Friday 9/5.

Even when it doesn't rain . . .

But first, the cistern. This is big. I thought it was going to be plastic, but it's concrete, and in two parts. This shows the first one. It's situated behind the house, next to the carport. That way, it's less likely to interfere with the underground electric and cable. And the underground geothermal. And it connects to the underground water collection system. But I'm getting ahead of myself again.

These pictures are from August 12, 16, and 21.

When I saw this, I thought it might be a place where we could bury the Cardiff Giant. Yes, Mom and Dad, that made more of an impression on me than the Baseball Hall of Fame.


And the cistern is big.


So big they build it in sections.


They seal the sections with green goop.


They use a specialized truck to bring it and place it.


And the truck needs special bracing so it doesn't tip over when the boom is extended. I'm glad the construction is done, so they don't use this board for anything else.


This is what it looks like when it's all put together. And remember - this is only half of it.


This is one of the two roof water washers.


We're scavenging the water that hits the roof and passing it through one of these washers before it hits the cistern. It's like the first stage of a reverse osmosis system - this is where the big physical stuff drops out of the system. The intake and outflow pipes are higher than the floor, allowing us several inches of gunk accumulation before it needs to be cleaned.

How does the water get here? Glad you asked!


It collects from the downspouts and then funnels along the side of the house, and along the back.


Here's the part about the pouring. We have a sidewalk on the front of the house.


And a front porch, and the beginnings of a side patio.

While they were doing all that, they poured the bottom part of the ramp. We decided to have a switchback and extend the carport, instead of having it be an L shape and take up space beside the cars.

They're doing work around the bridge, too. This is a retaining wall. We'll probably try to get some ground cover to hold the driveway edges in place. But it won't be kudzu.


Inside stuff: the tub in the hall bath has been taken over by flooring:


Neat sunlight at 6PM. The floors are not finished yet - they'll glow when they're done. And the difference in shadow height is because the doors slide past one another, and one comes down farther into the beam of light. If they were french doors, the shadows would be the same height.


This is the laundry room. The outside door here goes to the carport. The cabinet will have a utility tub in it. The shelves are for stuff - books, keys, mail coming in, things headed out. In this picture, your back is to the master bath.


Here's the same room from the hallway door. This is where the washer and dryer will go.


These shelves are in the little closet of the master bedroom, the one over the basement stairs.


And here's what those stairs look like. The light over the landing is attached to the bottom of the closet.


Yes, we have a safety wall, and a handrail.


On both sides!


The kitchen is shaping up nicely


and the bedrooms have the fans installed.


And yet from the outside, not so very much different.

Floors and walls

The biggest changes this time were in the floors (hardwood is all down!) and the walls. All pictures are from Friday August 8, 2008.

The cabinets have been delivered, and are mostly installed.


This is where the fridge goes.


Tile on the floor of the hall bath


And the master bath


The master bath has a Smurf crossing marked:


Oh, wait. It's just a seam being held in place.


The hallway in all its glory

(but I found out that the nifty orange that's visible here will be hidden by the door to the computer room. Woe is me.)

This is the angled part of the little closet in the master bedroom, over the basement stairs. The knock-off Croc is included for size comparison.


Bettie makes sure a sliding door does its thing right


This is the view when standing at the kitchen sink.


And from a few inches over, which seems to be preferable to a chunk of window-frame

(yes, that's the front window reflecting in the window. Open floorplans are neat!)

Down in the basement, the electrical panel has been completed, down to the regulation cardboard map


Some of those wires will be connected to the contents of this pile-o-lights


And I'm hoping, real hard, that this isn't the final configuration for the air filters for our system.


On the outside of the house, we have working porch lights


What we don't have is wire. Some enterprising individual snipped a coil of electrical wire from the outside of the house. The builder had to disassemble the wall to patch the wire so it would be long enough again.


These pictures show that we live in the bottom of a sunlight well. The first is the line of sunlight hitting the trees at about 8PM. The second is the wall of trees that blocks the light.


And that's the latest update.

In living color

This post has pictures from Saturday, July 26.  There are two flavors of stuff here, wooden floors and painted walls, with a sprinkling of weather conditions tossed in.

The floors were about half-way done when we stopped in on Saturday.  This one is looking at the dining room from somewhere near the front door.

The stuff under the wood is this:

We decided to get the wooden registers that are flush with the floor, instead of metal registers attached to the top of the floor.  Better looks, and fewer snagged socks when Bettie or I go sliding across the floor.

The gloopy junk that patches the holes is

And the floor looks good, even before it's all down, and before it is stained.

This is where the hallway (wooden floor) goes into the laundry room (vinyl floor).  We call this picture "the meeting of the toes".

Yes, those are flip-flops on my feet.  It was a rainy day, and I didn't want to get my knock-off Crocs messy.

How messy was it?  I think Bettie's qualified to be an off-road racer now.

She's also a window-sill color picker

And a room inspector

Which brings us to room colors.  The blue room above is the spare bedroom.  The orange one is the computer room.  The spare room is all blue.  The computer room is not all orange.  The computer room window faces south, so there will be lots of good light coming into the room.  The wall opposite the window is painted white, to splash the light around.  The wall with the window in it is painted green, to complement the trees and field through the window.  At the carport end of the room is the brown wall, for a nice background to the computer screens.  And the orange wall is where the closet is, to give a splash of brightness to the whole thing.

   

It wasn't intentional, but the orange wall is visible from the carport door entering the house.  I think that's neat.

For other rooms, we're having a brown in the great room (kitchen, dining room, living room).  You can see that they saved paint by leaving the walls bare behind where the cabinets will be.

The hallway is a lighter brown.  This is the coat closet down near the carport door.

The master bedroom.  I didn't want a light purple, so we compromised on this cream color.

And the laundry room, just inside the carport door.  The doorway you see the edge of here is into the master bath.

Color details may look different in real life as opposed to these pictures.  We try, but the shadings (especially the brown wall behind the computers) look very different based on flash/no flash, outside light, and phase of the moon.  Something like that.

Coming together

Folks, the house is coming together. It's really amazing to see the different parts of a house as it is being built, the different systems that are made live at different times. The house is not a unified whole, but it's a bunch of different parts that interact with each other. More like Unix than like Windows.

Anyway, these are from July 15 through 19, 2008.

The drywall has been mudded.


Here's the hall bath. It almost looks like it's been hit by amateur graffiti artists who only use white.


The kitchen ceiling got hit by the geometric guys:


and then by the squeegee guys!


This is soft, rounded texturing on the ceiling. It's not the hard, sharp, pointy, balloon-popping texturing. That was intentional. We want to live in a balloon-inclusive house.

They even did the ceiling of the basement stairs.


But not safely:


Not at all safely.


We now have power at the place (after all the intensive power-tool stuff was powered from generators)


That makes me wonder why there's an ice chopper present. In July. Indoors.


Probably not an ice chopper, but I don't know what it is. That's just my northern up-bringing showing through.

Do we have slugs crawling around in the master bedroom?


Nope. We have electricity, so we have a shop-vac.


We're going to have to be careful shutting doors. We didn't work out the line-of-sight too well on this one. The picture is from outside the house in the carport, looking through the laundry room, into the "throne room" of the master bath.


This is where they ran out of matte black spray paint while finishing the air vents.


And the storage side of the basement. Clear evidence of electricity in the house!


Bettie got caught by the paparazzi


We are having hardwood floors finished on-site. Here's the delivery of the raw materials.


Because of the weight, they wanted the boards stored over the center support beam of the house.


We will be able to get by without socks and shoes . . .


They installed a septic tank just outside the carport. I think they want it to stay buried.


Some flora and fauna.






(evidence of raccoons, if not the critters themselves)


The creek is drying up.


But the place looks like a vision at 8AM. I really like this photo. The end of the road, the end of the trip, the promised land. Thanks, Bettie.

Catch-up #2

Be sure to see Catch-up #1 below.

These pictures are from June 14 through July 10 - almost 4 weeks. That's why there are so many of them. I'll try to keep this better updated.

This post will tend to show contrasts across the month, instead of a purely time-sequential view.

Here's the kitchen - electrical outlets on the walls, but nothing spectacular:


Bettie with Ron Hammonds, who will be putting in our hardwood floors.


The kitchen with some plumbing and HVAC work done:


And then dry-walled. What a month it's been!


Now driveway views. This is before the carport was added:


Here's the framing for the carport.


And a roof!


Here's the trench for the underground electric.


And the transformer.


Speaking of electric, here's how the power company remembers where things go.


Can't fault them, though - it worked. Here's the new pole, across the road from the driveway:


For the foundation holes for the carport posts, here's one method used to empty the dirt:


And here's another one:


Then after all that work, they went and filled the holes up again.


But it was for a good cause:


The carport is neat. We're going to be able to have dinner parties out there.


This is where the ramp is going to go. We're not building the house to be strictly ADA-compliant, but it's close.


You can see one side of the ramp here. Because of the distance from the house to the ground, the ramp has to turn at the carport wall and double back.


We could call it the leopard house


We have had some visitors. This guy Bettie shot out in the field.


Our niece Caroline was a good helper.


Edison passed the sobriety test. Which was good, considering the shirt he was wearing.


This guy was an unwelcome visitor. He was at the house on the evening of June 30. He tried to pass himself off as a carpenter, but our builder and Brad the head carpenter haven't heard of him. The county sheriff has, now. No information, but the guy hasn't been back.


More things leaving - but these should stay (the stones, not the belly). the builder will shore up this area and put up a retaining wall.


The finishing of the porch roof. This is how I think the bad guy got inside the house. There's no interior roof on the other side of the window.


We finally got a front door to replace the plywood. Bettie took this one through the deadbolt hole.


Afternoon sun in the great room. Bettie did a good job of arranging the rooms in the house.


Somehow Bruce the electrician makes sense out of all this.


The geothermal system will dump excess heat in the summer, and warm up air in the winter. It attaches to the back of the house.


and then turns a corner and comes out past the great room.


We're having a lamp post out in the field, so Bruce is making use of the ditch that's already there.


More inside work. After Bruce the electrician was done inside, they added insulation and put it behind plastic. And invited in the dry-wallers.


They worked everywhere. This guy is doing the top of the basement stairs. Standing on a board.


The computer room.


The finished great room.


The master bedroom. On the left is the doorway to the master bath. The closet is in the center, with the door to the hallway on the right.


Here's the great room end of the house, with a big pile of drwyall leftovers piled out front.


And then how the house has changed, from June 19


to July 10


That's a lot of changes!