The Noisettes

The countertop for our master bathroom is actually fabricated from a slab of bamboo that we bought from Indigo, a green home supply store in Gainesville.

I promise to have an updated picture of the whole arrangement soon.

It came unfinished so I brushed on two coats of Waterlox Marine Finish. I expect it to be relatively long-lasting, though probably not as durable as the Caesarstone we chose for our kitchen.

Basically it’s just like how you would handle a butcher block countertop with an undermount sink. Bamboo is naturally more resistant to water compared to other woods (though bamboo is actually a grass)…

Check back for more updates after our Big Move this weekend!

Our House

After weeks of saying “I’ll install the cabinets in the master bathroom tomorrow” I finally hunkered down last Saturday and did it. The reason it took so long was because we had a bit of a technical challenge: the IKEA legs were too tall and the cabinets couldn’t rest on the floor because they would have been too low. That, and like the rest of the 85-year-old house, the floor isn’t quite level.

I decided that the best course of action was to use a ledger board to hold up the back of the cabinet on a level line and find some shorter legs for the front of the cabinets. Skipping over the fact that it took me almost four hours to attach three cabinets to a wall and get them level.

I’m also lucky that the kick plate will hide my jury-rigged leveling system for the front of the cabinets…

If you look closely at the bottom you can see some of my “handiwork”.

The door handles.

Our floors are shiny.

Our House

So it had started very badly:

Our floors were the wrong color, our baseboards were trashed, and the same crew that did the bang-up job was back again to fix their mistakes. That foul-up meant our kitchen was still incomplete, further delaying our final electrical stuff and countertop installation.

Then our countertop and appliance supplier shocked us with the news that AMEX was not an acceptable form of payment — just as we were making the deposit.

While those were big problems they weren’t anything that couldn’t be solved with some more research, a good attitude, and a malted milkshake from Powells Dairy Freeze in Starke, Florida.

I snapped this picture as nonchalantly as I could. The young mother was sitting directly across from her newborn baby…smoking a freaking cigarette and blowing smoke (inadvertently, I hope) right back into the baby’s carrier.

The reason for the stop, other than the fine milkshakes at Powells, was because we found an alternate countertop supplier in Gainesville, Indigo Green Home store. We were incredibly excited to go because the perfect substitute for the CaesarStone we had chosen was the recycled glass countertops from Coverings Etc.:

…that is, until they rung up at $4600 $ a slab (and we needed 3). $14000 for counters was a little bit out of our budget for this project.

The trip wasn’t a total loss. We put in an order for a bamboo counter for our master bath. That should really add some nice spa-like qualities to the room.

Continuing our upward trend was the flooring company’s surprising 180-degree turnaround on the floors. They went from mismatched, discolored, and dull to deep, mysterious, dark, and glossy. We are extremely happy with the results of the second run at the job.

The living room

Dining room (temporary table)

The kitchen with ADEL birch cabinet doors

A view of the APC Cork plank floor. It’s soft!

Agnes’ studio

Our House

Our floor contractor wouldn’t start until we had the A/C systems running for two weeks so that the moisture would work its way out of the pine floors. So after we waited for JEA to finally hook up our power and the A/C company to finish their third attempt at installing our two Trane units, we called the floor company to start their part of the job.

Adding urgency to the flooring situation was Agnes’ sister’s baby shower, which was scheduled to be at the Dellwood House on Sunday, January 27. Because we had worked everything out to give the floor company over a week to do the patches, sanding, staining, and coats of polyurethane, they committed to a finish date of Friday, January 25 “at the very latest”.

As it turns out “at the very latest” wasn’t quite as accurate as they had originally predicted.

The contractor got a later start than originally planned, Thursday instead of Wednesday the prior week, and worked at a less-than-speedy pace up until Tuesday (or so our neighbors reported). So on Tuesday the contractor called me in hopes of extending his deadline to Saturday, which would basically ruin our chances of staging the already incomplete house for the baby shower.

That wasn’t going to happen. I told him that he was just going to have to meet his deadline and speed up the pace a little bit.

Mistake #1: Apparently holding some people to a deadline means they will do the absolutely poorest and quickest job possible to hit that date.

The floor patches didn’t match the rest of the floor at all and the guy managed to get stain on most of the baseboards and doors.

It reminds me of the Michael Keaton movie Gung Ho.

Mistake #2: Color is important

In this case it meant the flooring guy forgot to do a “test board” to show us how the stain would look on our floor.

When we started the process we had to choose a stain and I remember the conversation vividly:

Me: “What’s the darkest stain you’ve got?”
Flooring company: “Ebony”
Me: “Great. We’ll go with that”
FC: “Are you sure? Because on pine it ca—”
Me: “We’ve seen it on pine. We like it that way. That’s what we want.”
FC: “Are you sure?”
Me: “Yes! [dammit!]”

Unfortunately when they ordered the stain they didn’t actually get the “Ebony” color I picked, which looks like this:

They instead ordered “Jacobean”, which looks like this:

Which on our floor looks like this:

The Result

Agnes was furious. I was upset but at the same time very happy I paid by AMEX — and told the company so.

So they did the entire house in the wrong color, got stain on the freshly-painted walls, doors, baseboards, and generally did a really awful job.

Now the same crew is over at the house sanding off the stain and redoing the entire job. I have a feeling that the owner’s regular checkups on the job will influence the quality of the re-do.

At least the baby shower went well…

Our House

We had to really encourage the floor company to meet their promised completion date of tomorrow (Friday) — and even now it’s still not guaranteed that both polyurethane coats will be done on time. Of course the last thing we want is a rushed job, but with that being said the Baby Shower for Agnes’ sister is on Sunday and we’re going to do our best “Flip This House” impression on Saturday to get it at least slightly presentable!

Here are some pictures of the pre-finished floor. Hopefully the next time I post the floor will be much darker and kind of glossy!

If the floor isn’t done tomorrow I may have to don my Cobra Kai t-shirt and go “No Mercy” on somebody. Here is some Karate Kid inspiration for the floor company…

Our House

The weekend at the house was a qualified success. Thanks to the help of friends and family: Jonathan, Ed, Chris, and Sam, we were able to get the cork floor down in the kitchen, two layers of polyurethane on the cork, the in-wall speakers installed in the studio/presentation room, and all of the base kitchen cabinets built.

I say qualified because an extra wrinkle was thrown in at the last second on Saturday that ended up altering the course of Sunday’s work.

The short version is that we decided to put on a second coat of polyurethane over the cork and realized all too late that it wasn’t dry yet! All was okay after doing some sanding and mineral spirit rubbing. Here’s a picture from the first (and uneventful coat of poly).

My Saturday and Sunday both began like this:

Funny thing is today when I came out of Lowe’s I saw that another Prius chose to park right next to me. Sadly I know this wasn’t coincidence because I tend to park next to other Priuses/Prii when I’m able. It’s something strange that us Prius owners do!

Here’s a bonus picture of Agnes’ Prius after one of our recent trips to IKEA Orlando. These things can lug a ton of stuff. I think they’re pretty well suited for construction

Our House

Yeah, I’ve been bad at posting updates. I’m sorry. I promise to try to do better next time (emphasis on try).

The good news is that we’ve made incredible progress with the house. We’re not living in it yet but we’ve got most of the items necessary for living installed or scheduled to be installed this month. Our painter finished up over the weekend and our electrician has been incredibly patient with us as we’ve delivered fixtures to him in bulk.

Over the course of this week we hope to get some toilets installed and pass our final electrical inspection, which will in turn mean we can turn on our air conditioner. Once the air conditioner runs for a week or so we should have the bulk of the moisture out of the floor so the flooring company can install the patches, sand, stain, and coat the floors. While we wait for the floors to dry out we plan to install the cork floors in the kitchen and then assemble and mount our kitchen cabinets…

Anyway.

I’ll skip the slideshow and just post the pictures with some comments for context. I apologize for the poor quality but I was trying to get as many as possible before it got too dark — since we still don’t have electricity yet!

Here’s the view from just inside the front door.

Flipped around. We still haven’t figured out what we’re going to do about the side of the stairs.

The really awesome, translucent-bladed fan. I can’t take credit for this idea; I stole it from Jason Hammond’s modern home journal/blog From the Ground Up.

A view from the living room to the dining room and kitchen.

From inside the studio. The fireplace stays!

The central data panel for the house.

The downstairs half-bath. The lines are a little straighter in real life

A view of the mud room/back entry.

The properly re-installed downstairs A/C unit. The second time is the charm apparently.

Up the stairs…

The laundry room

The hallway. The Master Suite is on the left, two bedrooms on the right, and a bathroom at the end. The leg is Agnes ducking out of the picture…

Inside the master suite. The walk-in closet is through the door.

The other side. The master bath is past the french doors.

The french doors are tall. Eight footers (for when Yao Ming visits).

The shower still needs some painting done above it, so it will stay under plastic for a few days. The glass enclosure should be in very soon!

The office/bedroom 1.

The guest bedroom/bedroom 2.

The guest bath.

Back down the stairs. We still need to find a lighting fixture for this area…

And the thing that capped off an amazing year: The tankless water heater!

Another view of this fabulous piece of green technology.

More to come as we finish more!

Our House

Despite the lack of updates we’ve had amazing progress lately. The drywall is in, mudded, taped, sanded, and ready for paint.

The tile for the guest bathroom and laundry room is in and looking good.

Here’s a before and after look at the guest bathroom:

And the laundry room

The drywall finishers left a nice little note on the wall. I’ll let the Spanish-speakers translate…

Our House

To return the American Standard toilets we purchased and get the dual-flush TOTO ones.

I’ll have to see about getting a better price than $400.

Blah, Our House

I love stories like the one below because they inspire me to be more thoughtful about the building process. A lot of the things we’ve done to this point with the Dellwood house have been in the spirit of green-ness, but I won’t lie and say that some of those decisions to reuse old portions of the house were driven by our limited budget.

Hiring a crew to rip out virtually everything old, bad, or in need of a little work would have been a lot faster and easier — with the right budget — but would have been the wrong thing to do. It also would have been a mistake.
One of the great things about our project is that we were able to reuse so much of the wood from areas we cleared in other areas of the house. A wall in the studio originally had some termite damage, so we grabbed a bound-for-the-Dumpster baseboard from one of the rooms, ripped it, and installed it as a new plate. The old 2×4s are incredibly dense, old growth pine and after 86 years in the house are still straighter than any piece of lumber you can buy at Lowes!
Link to the original article

IF the idiosyncratic, ’40s-era cottage Alice Keller bought in Shoreline, a small city just north of Seattle, had a style, it might be called classic teardown. The ceiling in one room was so low she couldn’t stand up under it. A downstairs bathroom was so narrow she had to wiggle sideways to get to the toilet. None of the windows matched.

“It was livable, and quirky,” Ms. Keller said, “but in ways I didn’t find amusing.”

The place was crying out for a wrecking ball, but Ms. Keller, a 63-year-old retired teacher of English as a second language, who has an environmentally aware conscience, didn’t want to scrap the building materials only to buy new ones. Instead of having her 1,300-square-foot house bulldozed, she hired Jon Alexander, a contractor who shared her environmentalism and was willing to dismantle the home shingle by beam, and build a replacement with the same two-by-fours.

The crew left the garage and a portion of the subfloor intact and broke the concrete driveway into chunks for a back patio. A gas water heater, fiberglass insulation and windows landed at the RE Store, a local nonprofit shop that sells used or excess construction materials. The drywall, shingles and extra concrete went to a recycling center.

Ms. Keller was able to reuse around 90 percent of the original house. “I just like reusing things,” she said. “You can end up with something with more character.”

Read more…

Blah, Our House

Sometimes reusing what you’ve got is more trouble and more expensive than going new. That stinks.

So even though we have a stack of the original wood doors we’re going to put new interior doors in the house. The time and cost of stripping, sanding, repainting, and rehanging the doors we have is prohibitive. We may end up using some of them in another project (a rustic desk perhaps?) once we get into the house.
Here are some of the options I’ve found for door replacements, listed in my order of preference:

1. Craftmaster Clermont

2. Jeld-Wen Cambridge

We’ll see what Agnes has to say about it

Any thoughts?

Our House

I apologize for the lack of updates, but it’s been a busy couple of months. Between Agnes re-launching her photography business’ “brand” and website over Labor Day weekend, a trip up to Columbus to visit my mom, and a bunch of work at the house, I’ve been slacking badly on the blog updates.

So here’s the latest: The place is really starting to look like a real house! We’ve got insulation. We signed a contract with the drywall guy and his crew will be starting on Wednesday.
Instead of doing the slideshow thing I’ll just post some pictures with captions:

1. The duplex door is finally gone! Can you believe they had a cheap interior door in place there before?

2. The inside — freshly insulated!

3. From the top of the stairs.

4. The laundry room

5. Next to the laundry room — from the inside of Agnes’ walk-in closet.

6. Agnes’ walk-in closet

7. The master suite (it’s big).

8. More master suite.

9. Inside the master bathroom.

10. The master toilet room. Eat your heart out, Al Bundy.

11. The other bathroom, the one with a tub.

12. Bedroom 1 — this will be Agnes’ office.

13. Another view of Bedroom 1. Check out the floor – we had the closets pulled out about ~2 feet to make them, like, actually useful.

14. Inside Bedroom 2.

15. Downstairs, the main room.

16. Agnes walking from the kitchen (the plywood area) into the dining room. The kitchen will have cork floors (the white boxes sitting behind the trash can).

17. We had the ceiling insulated in the studio/presentation room to cut down on the noise from the sound system. In the center you may be able to see the rough-ins for the ceiling speakers. We decided to go with the Polk Audio speakers after all.

18. The back of the studio/presentation room.

Our House

I was writing a quick email to a good friend about the status of the house and realized a couple of things:

1. We’ve been kind of stuck for the last few weeks because we needed the electrician to do a few more things and he was waiting on us for stuff like bathroom fans and speaker wire.
2. I don’t visit the house enough in the weekday evenings to get stuff done. I was gangbusters at first but now I’ve been so wrapped up in the photography stuff that I’ve let the house stuff get shuttled to the back burner.
3. I shouldn’t beat myself up much because it isn’t like I’ve been sitting on my butt playing Nintendo Wii or anything [during daylight hours at least].

Here’s what I told my friend:

“We’ve been at the almost-drywall stage for a while now. Our electrician is supposed to have everything inspected this week so we can install insulation. Then I get to get all itchy trying to put that stuff in the walls. Fun fun.

The drywall guy says it should only take a day or two to get the rough drywall up. Once that’s done we’ll actually have, like, a real house. Then I can start using my power tools (cue images of Tim “The Toolman Taylor” Allen). I’ve got a compound miter saw and a nail gun. It’s going to be crazy as hell…

We’re many months away, but I’m not sweating it. Things will start to pick up steam once the walls are up. Then we can start doing the finishing stuff and get the floor guy in to refinish the wood floors and patch some spots.

Yikes… this list keeps getting longer every time I type it.”

And by no means is the short message above a definitive list of things that need to be done even in the short term. I’ve got to rip down some drywall that we left in place because we thought we could save it (no point). I need to whittle a block to fit in the big crossbeam in the front room to fill in where the termites feasted. I need to…

So much to do. I guess I’ll be over at the house tonight destroying more drywall…

Our House

I may not have to build bookshelves after all…

Bibliochaise by .nobody & co. (Italy)

Our House

Update: I just ordered our cork floors. They should be on their way in a week or two!
Here’s the latest slideshow from the Dellwood House (Click on the picture).

Here’s where we are:

• Lead boots have been attached to the roof over the new plumbing vents.
• The gas line has been installed with a tap for an outdoor grill!
• The kitchen floor has been cut to extend the plywood base out to the edge of where the cabinets and island will go.
• The laundry room now has Hardibacker concrete board down for tile and hookups for the washer and dryer.
• The plumbing has been roughed-in and inspected.
• We have a new PVC sewer pipe — at least to our neighbor’s fence.
• Our walk-in shower has been mostly framed (above) and the shower liner is in.
• The tub has been installed.
• The shower valves have been installed. We’ll have a rain shower in the bathroom with a tub.
• The upstairs closets have been extended out about 1.5 feet on both sides, giving us roughly 4-ft deep — actually useful — closets in the upstairs bedrooms.
• The dividing wall for the master walk-in closet finally got built. That took me all day on a Sunday and most of a Tuesday evening.

I’d love to say that there were some incredible physical limitations that prevented me from getting the wall up in less than a day but the real limitation is that I’m an awful framer.

First I cut the studs 1″ too short the first time because I didn’t consider the slope of the floor and only measured from the center to the ceiling. What’s really sad is that I managed to get seven 10-foot 2×4s into my Prius (diagonally) and ended up almost wasting them when I cut them down too far. Luckily I was able to throw an unused 2×4 from a wall that I had pulled down at the bottom of the wall to make up for that 1″ gap.
Here’s what’s next:

• Finish the closet expansion/reconfiguration.
• Have the electrician finish wiring through the new wall.
• Get a final electrical inspection.
• Wire studio/presentation room for sound & volume controls with 14/4 + Cat 5e cable. (I may also extend the wiring out to the kitchen and front porch)
• Buy insulation and put it in the exterior walls.
• Have drywall contractor begin his installation.
• Have the floor restoration company begin his work.
• Install floating cork floor in kitchen.
• Install tile in laundry room, front entrance (?), and upstairs bathrooms.
• Install glass tile in the walk-in shower.
• Install less-expensive tile in the other shower.
• Cut baseboards and new window trim and install.
• Install our IKEA kitchen.
• Buy appliances.
• Move in!

I’m sure there’s plenty I’m forgetting, but, hey, that’s a pretty long list already!

Our House

Updated with the link to the Laurey PerfectMount guide.

In a previous post I mentioned that I like to read other home-improvement blogs. To be totally honest I have to admit that it’s about all that I read at this point (except for some photography blogs).

There are just too many good ideas out there. When I say “good ideas” I mean actual things that I can do or techniques I can employ to, like, not screw up and do things efficiently. I saw this one today on IKEAFANS:

A marked hole guide for making sure cabinet hardware placement is consistent.

What will they think of next?

I hate to admit that I’m a complete dope at times when I’m over at the house working, but after last week’s closet wall fiasco (more on that in a future post) I finally figured out — on my own — that having a template is a good way to ensure that things are spaced out correctly.

It’s actually sad that the rebuilding is almost done and I only now figured out how to do things the best way. I was about to get all rueful about how this knowledge will die because I sincerely doubt that we’ll take on a project of this scope…

And then I remembered we haven’t even started working on the back building…