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!

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.

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 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…

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…

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

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!

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…

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

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.”

Due to rising landfill costs, tighter recycling guidelines and the growing trend toward ecologically sound building methods, this sort of home “deconstruction,” as the practice is called, is starting to catch on. About 1,000 homes a year are disassembled this way, according to the Building Materials Reuse Association, a nonprofit educational group in State College, Pa., which reports growing interest in the practice.

Fueling that interest are efforts by cities and states across the country to stanch the flow of demolition rubble into landfills. Some 245,000 houses in the United States are razed each year, generating nearly 20 million tons of debris, according to a 1996 report from the Environmental Protection Agency, the most recent data available.

Confronted with mounting waste, the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection has banned brick, concrete, metal, wood and asphalt from landfills.

In San Jose, Calif. — where construction and demolition refuse accounts for 30 percent of landfill waste, according to official estimates — homeowners who apply for a city permit to demolish, remodel or build an addition have to pay a deposit based on the size and type of project. To get the money back, they must show that 90 percent of the material generated has been reused or sent to a certified recycling or reuse center. Cities including Seattle, and Chicago have also introduced measures to reduce construction and demolition waste.

Using old materials for new buildings isn’t a new idea. The Coliseum in Rome was used as a quarry to build St. Peter’s Basilica and other Roman landmarks. In the United States, families often reused building materials to save money in the early part of the 20th century, a custom that fell out of favor as the country grew wealthier in the 1950s.

Today, according to the Building Materials Reuse Association, up to 85 percent of the average house can be recycled or reused; the hard part is harvesting the materials in a way that preserves their integrity.

Unbuilding a home takes longer than leveling it the usual way and often costs more, at least initially. While almost anyone who’s watched a TLC rehab show can rip out a kitchen cabinet, unpiecing an entire house without having the roof collapse isn’t a job for the uninitiated. The Building Materials Reuse Association, which introduced a deconstruction training program in May, has certified 60 builders so far.

When Carolyn Bronstein and John Tapper wanted to dismantle a 2,500-square-foot Victorian adjacent to their house in the Southport section of Chicago, they could not find a local deconstruction contractor. They recruited Ted Reiff, a contractor and the president of a group called the Reuse People of America, based in Oakland, Calif. The couple bought the house for about $800,000, intending to knock it down so their children could have more space to play, and to make sure a developer didn’t snap up it up.

While the standard demolition quotes were around $25,000, the couple spent $38,000 to have a contractor trained by Mr. Reiff unpiece it over six weeks last summer. They expect to come out even or better after selling door hardware, windows, appliances and other components at a salvage auction and reaping a tax deduction by donating the rest to a reuse store.

“It was cleaner and quieter than demolition,” said Ms. Bronstein, an assistant professor of communication at DePaul University in Chicago. “We didn’t have dust flying everywhere.”

Usually, the real savings comes in the reconstruction phase. Paul Pedini, the owner of the Big Dig House in Lexington, Mass., possibly the country’s most celebrated recycled dwelling, estimates he shaved at least $200,000 from his materials costs by using concrete on-ramps and steel beams recovered from the Big Dig highway project in Boston for his modernist structure.

“There were these materials and we wanted to build a house. We just put two and two together,” said Mr. Pedini, a civil engineer who was a contractor on the Big Dig. “I told them, why not keep the money you’d pay in disposal costs and give the materials to us to reuse?”

Although few home builders have access to the remains of a $14.6 billion highway project, many cities now have “reuse” stores, which sell salvaged goods — from wall sockets to vintage redwood floorboards — for 50 to 75 percent off what similar products would cost if purchased new.

There are about 1,000 such stores nationwide according to the Reuse Association, most of them nonprofits that offer tax deductions in exchange for donations of used housing materials. Habitat for Humanity International, the affordable housing organization, runs 500 such shops in 45 states, mostly selling easily recoverable accessories like cabinets, doors and flooring. Unlike architectural salvage stores, which sell marble fireplace mantels, stained glass and spiral staircases, reuse stores generally traffic in mundane items like light switches and insulation.

As with buying secondhand clothes, the challenge — and potential charm — of reuse shopping is its unpredictability. Build it Green! NYC, a reuse shop in Astoria, sells sets from nearby film studios alongside items rescued from residential demolitions. Recently, $25 diner stools from “The Knights of Prosperity,” a short-lived ABC show, were for sale alongside $40 doors from “The Sopranos” and a set of cherry-finish kitchen cabinets removed from an Upper East Side apartment. The original owners paid $18,000 to buy and install the cabinets, according to Justin Green, a founder of the store, who was asking $1,200 for the set — top and bottom cabinets as well as counters.

“I love shopping there,” said Timothy Etienne of Garden City, N.Y. “You never know what you’re going to find.”

He has purchased windows, doors and paint at the store for a second home upstate, along with a six-foot-tall wooden tepee ($30) that is now a backyard playhouse for his four daughters.

Ms. Keller, meanwhile, has been combing the RE Store in Seattle for months, trying to find secondhand glass blocks for the master bath in her new 1,600-square-foot home. She recently scavenged a double-pane glass door for her balcony and a cast-iron double sink for a craft room.

To outfit a home this way, it helps to have a retiree’s schedule.

“You have to be patient,” Ms. Keller said. “It’s the thrill of the hunt that keeps me going back.”