The last of fall

The day after I took these pictures the temps fell into the teens and the winds kicked up; not much left of the leaves.




I'm probably not going to be out to the house much the next couple of weeks while the semester winds down, so while I may do some procrastination blogging I won't be posting any new house stuff til mid-Dec...

No more siding!

Sarah's brother Greg joined me at the house on Friday (thanks!) and we got a LOT done. Including getting the last of the siding finished (in the thirty-degree freezing cold and ridiculous wind - quite a change from Wednesday, when I was working in a tshirt):

Biggest party night of the year

I spent the night before Thanksgiving drilling holes in our deck posts. The cable rails will be 1/8", so the holes are 1/4". And we will have double posts on the corners with spacers in between; I overdrilled the holes on the spacers (1/4") so that passing the cables through three sets of holes won't be impossible.


Stained and ready to go:


Assembling the double posts:


Sarah's brother Greg on the business end of the ladder (he was in charge of bolting the posts to the deck):


The finished product:

An extra set of hands

I haven't had any, so I built one. That is a bracket made from ipe scraps that I clamped on the deck at the end of my fascia while I screwed the other side in place. Because I could slide the fascia in the bracket, it allowed me to adjust where the mitered ends met; I had tried just clamping the fascia right into place, but it was impossible to get the ends to meet precisely:


Here's the deck with all the fascia in place:


The odd colors here are just shadows as the sun set on a wonderful 75-degree day in the middle of November:

But I like them

I've followed the debate over wind farm power a bit; I'm from Long Island, and there's been resistance to the idea of an offshore wind farm there (much like the resistance to the proposed farm in Cap Cod). NIMBY and all that. I'm a bit perplexed by the environmentalist v. environmentalist schism around wind energy. I'm learning more about the pragmatic concerns all the time. And I love the East River equivalent.

But mostly I just think that windmills are gorgeous. They mesmerize me. All windmills, but in particular the modern incarnation. The couple of times I've traveled a bit in Europe, I was just giddy when we came upon windfarms in the middle of the countryside (in Portugal and in Germany) - they are like giant interactive landscape sculptures.

How do get money when you run out and no one will give you anymore

When we decided to do this, we knew we were going to borrow some undetermined amount of money to supplement the proceeds we had from the sale of our apartment. We didn't know exactly how much or when we would need it. A year ago credit was still VERY easy to come by, even for someone like me who hasn't had a regular W2 for awhile. We have some other assets and very good credit, and so when I called around and talked to some mortgage brokers I was satisfied that we'd have no problem.

Fast forward to the late spring, when it's time to actually borrow the money, and things were getting much tighter. If I'd waited another couple of weeks we might have really been in a pickle. It worked out fine in the end, but nobody's lending me another penny for awhile. So if we get really desperate we can always try this - a genius plan by a poor young grad student who bought her very own villa in Italy and managed to get other people to pay for almost the whole thing.

Sarah's in charge

I have bought the "ubiquitous" (Dwell's word of the month, apparently) Eames dining chair a hundred times in my head, and while I was agonizing over how much money is reasonable to spend on furniture for other people to sit on, Sarah bought six of these:


To go with this:

Like a glove

One of the things about DIY stuff for a guy like me is that things aren't gonna be perfect. I'm doing a lot of things for the first time and not always doing them with the right tools. (I can't go buying a fancy jigsaw table just cause I need to cut notches out of my deck posts.) I read as much as is practical. When possible I talk to guys who do know what they're doing. I measure twice, all that. I make plenty of mistakes, most of which I disclose here.

But the deck is turning out pretty well. Last of the ipe is on. I got lucky and the last row of boards fit the framing almost exactly, so I didn't have to cut those boards the long way; there'll be a little bigger gap between the ipe and the facsia than I'd like in a couple of places, but perfectly tolerable (for me):


Starting getting the 2x12 cedar fascia on, which looks great. Hard to do by myself:


I finished staining all the cedar for the top rail; I notched all the deck posts, which now need to have their holes drilled (for the cable rail) and to be stained:

The view from a possible hot tub location

I'd have to build a lot of steps...

Break from Derrida

This is the funniest story you'll ever read on a modern building blog.

(And that house ended up being pretty over-the-top.)

Bittersweet Endings and Happy Beginnings

The DOResearch team has hung up its keyboard to concentrate on the actualization of all that, ummmm, research. Good luck to them.

Seiko arrived safe and sound.

As did Marco Joseph Limarzi.

And Izzy finally remembered Michael's birthday.

Congrats all around.

Click and Clack

Have I got a story for the Car Talk guys. Last weekend I got out to the house pretty late and didn't feel like stopping to fill my car's almost empty gas tank. Next day the propane tank guys showed up and needed me to get my car out of the way, so I backed it up and, in squeezing past their trucks, got the whole passenger side of the car up on the side of the hill along the driveway. Fine. Next night when it's time to leave, I can't start the car (presumably the tiny bit of gas I had left all sloshed to one side of the tank and couldn't make it to the gas line). So after spending far too much time and effort trying to push my car off the side of the hill (the front tire was in the ditch line along the side of the driveway and I couldn't budge it), I walked down my 1/4 mile long driveway and over to a neighbor's house, who lent me his car to drive over to the gas station (thanks Jerry).

Now here's where I'm an idiot. I fill my 5 gallon gas can and drive back home, where my first attempt to get gas into my car is a disaster (the gas cap is on the driver's side, which is at maybe a 30 degree angle to the ground, and I can't get the gas to do anything other than spill down the side of the car. It occurs to me that the spout of the gas can is not depressing the little hinged flange that a nozzle at the gas station would open. So I find a stick to open it; gas goes in no problem...

But I forget about the stick. It takes a couple of minutes to get all the gas into the tank, I put the gas cap back on, start up the car, return my neighbors car, get a ride back up to my house (thanks Foley), hop in my car and go straight to the gas station to fill the rest of the tank. Where I cannot figure out why the nozzle won't go into the tank. Until I realize there's a stick in it. Which I can't get out. Cause probably five inches of it were stuck past the flange, and maybe a half inch was left sticking out. Which of course I couldn't grasp, much less pull out. After spending too much time trying to remove it, I gave up and pushed it the rest of the way in.

I assume it'll just float around in my gas tank until it dissolves, fouling my engine a little at a time. This car will probably die of something much sooner that this stick can do much damage. But I have no idea...and how often do you have a good story for Car Talk?

When to buy stuff

One of the things about not having somebody (besides me) in charge of everything - especially in light of how slow I'm going - is figuring out when to order materials. You want to have everything on hand when you're ready to use it, but you don't want too much stuff sitting around onsite, getting in the way, having to move it over and over again, vulnerable to theft, getting damaged, etc. For instance:

*I've had to move the drywall that hasn't been hung yet twice - and that's no fun. And now it's outside - covered, but not the ideal place for it;

*the cedar for the railings and deck posts has been onsite for awhile now (also outside), and it got pretty wet once (tarp had a hole in it I didn't know about);

*the pressure treated lumber for the deck frame was onsite probably a month before we were ready to use it (though we had it in a fine spot and we kept it out of the sun to prevent cupping).

Today I ordered the Feeney Cable for the deck. $2000 for roughly 1000' of 1/8 stainless steel cable and their threaded ends and fasteners. (You can buy that cable from any supply store for about $.50/ft, but how do you fasten it? I couldn't think of any good ways...the Feeney system has tension fasteners and that's what you're paying the big money for.) The last of the ipe is waiting for me at the house (only two rows left to do), as is the rest of the cedar fascia and all the notched deck posts (all needs to be stained). And the last of the t&g cedar is stained and ready to go up. Sears is supposed to come tomorrow (the fifth time we've had a visit scheduled) to fix our fridge, and I'll be out there first thing to wait for them and get some work done. I've got no school next week and hope to get a lot done (house and school). We'll see...

Things I didn't know

Apparently when you buy a gas range, the little nozzles underneath each burner are set up for natural gas. My gas service is "LP," or liquid propane. The nozzles for LP have much smaller islets - something about the combustability of natural gas v. liquid propane. The people who installed the gas inspect the gas lines, etc. to make sure you're up to snuff. One of the things on their checklist is the type of nozzle in your range. Apparently if he hadn't called to my attention the fact that my nozzles need to be swapped out for the correct ones, when I turned on my burners the flame would have reached to the ceiling. That would have surprised me.

Worked in a short sleeves again this weekend

I had hoped to finish all the outside stuff before it got too cold. And I have been VERY lucky so far with the wonderful fall weather we've had. But my luck might be running out. My weather sources tell me that this weekend is gonna be cold, and the beginning of next week could see an honest to goodness snow storm (of course it's a ways away, but never too far away to be excited about snow). As the good folks at the NWS say below, STAY TUNED!

AREA FORECAST DISCUSSION
NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE BALTIMORE MD/WASHINGTON DC
1005 PM EST TUE NOV 13 2007

LONG TERM /WEDNESDAY NIGHT THROUGH TUESDAY/...BOTH THE EC/GFS BRING A STRONG COLD FRONT ACROSS AREA THURSDAY MORNING. GUSTY NORTHWEST WINDS EXPECTED BEHIND FRONT WITH LIKELY POPS FOR THE MORNING. EC HANGS ON TO PRECIP A BIT LONGER THAN GFS OVER REGION SO CONTINUED CHC POPS INTO THE AFTERNOON. HIGH PRESSURE BUILDS IN FOR FRIDAY/SATURDAY BRINGING SEASONABLE TEMPERATURES. MODELS TRACK A VERY WEAK FRONT ACROSS N VA ON SUNDAY BUT DO NOT EXPECT MUCH WX EXCEPT AN INCREASE IN CLOUDS. FORECAST CONFIDENCE IS MUCH LOWER FOR THE START OF THE NEW WEEK. GFS TRACKS A COLD FRONT ACROSS THE AREA MONDAY WITH VERY LITTLE AMPLIFICATION ALOFT AND THUS VERY LITTLE PRECIP. EC HOWEVER AMPLIFIES A NEGATIVE TILT TROF OVERHEAD AND GENERATES A SURFACE LOW JUST TO OUR EAST FOR MONDAY NIGHT. 85H TEMPS ON THE EC SUGGEST A MAINLY SNOW EVENT. TUESDAY APPEARS TO BE DRY FOR BOTH MODELS BUT FOR DIFFERENT REASONS. EC HAS BEEN ADVERTISING THIS SYSTEM FOR QUITE A WHILE SO AM INCLINED TO LEAN ON THE EC...STAY TUNED.

We have....

...a full tank of liquid propane, heat, hot water, and a working radiant system.

We do not have a finished deck. (Marc tells me that this is the slowest-built deck ever to be documented on a blog.) But I'm almost there!

Mixing Business with Business

Sarah tells me she's been getting complaints (from people who will remain nameless) about my last post. Sarah, in fact, has wondered aloud about my last post. Sometimes I just need to justify my blogging to myself, you know?

Here's a story in today's Times about a fun house in the Hood River Valley in Washington state that my friend Bill pointed out to me. Similar to the volume of Res4's Mountain Retreat house, but by functional demand as opposed to simple aesthetics:

The more things change...

Owing to the ambiguous state of the law of slavery in England in the early eighteenth century, it wasn't clear whether English common law countenanced the existence of chattel slavery on English soil - obviously it was kosher in the colonies - or whether getting baptized freed one from slavery, or whether slaves weren't really slaves but some kind of indentured servants. So planters from the West Indies basically took the King's Counsel to dinner, got them drunk, and had them issue a declaratory memo telling all the courts yes, no, and yes. The Yorke-Talbot Opinion "suggested" that slaves did not become free simply by setting foot on English soil (so planters could bring their slaves with them to England untroubled about whether they'd be able to leave with them); that becoming a Christian did not change a slave's legal status (despite the fact that their "heathen" nature was a popular justification for slavery); and that "slave" meant "slave" - property like a cow or a dog, subject to physical punishment and even "destruction" at the whim of the master, protected by none of the rules of villeinage or indentured servitude that had come to govern slavery in practice in England. No legal reasoning, no reliance on precedent, just wrote down on paper what the planters told them and those were the new rules (and these were the two most prominent lawyers in England at the time). So every time a lawyer had to fend off an action calling into question the rights of master over slave in an English court, counsel simply cited the opinion of the learned King's Counsel and that was that.

By the end of the eighteenth century, Lord Mansfield has overruled the Yorke-Talbot Opinion and the abolition movements in both England and the U.S. are in full swing. Olaudah Equiano and Ottobah Cugoano - both Africans who freed themselves from slavery - are vigorous anti-slavery activists, two of the first published black writers, and active participants in the legal debates over the legitimacy of the enslavement of blacks.

That's what I should be doing whenever I'm blogging. Like now.

Oompa Loompa

We have a Munchkin modulating boiler to run our hot water supply (for both domestic hot water and for the radiant floor). The boiler is kinda like an on-demand boiler, except that it monitors the temp of the water coming back into the unit from the radiant system and pumps in more hot water as needed to maintain the temp. You can manually adjust the flow to each loop to adjust the floor's temp in different zones if you're so inclined. (I think there's something crazy like 2 total gallons of water in the whole radiant system.) And the tank underneath is a small storage tank for high-demand times. The mechanical room is getting crowded...

HVAC guys are going sloooooooowwwww, but hopefully we'll be up and running by the end of the week, and our gas tank can get installed on Monday.

Par for the Course

Twenty five degrees at night in WV this weekend, but up to 60 during the day. We've got a working furnace in the house (but still no gas), so the house stayed pretty warm. Still a little drafty with the basement unfinished.


It should come as no surprise to regular readers of this blog that I didn't have enough ipe to cover the whole deck. I was two rows short. Ninety linear feet. We didn't have any waste at all; I think I probably didn't include the square footage of the walkway in front of the house when I ordered it. On Friday I got all my boards down, and I'll get the six more that I ordered sometime next week.

I stained some of the T&G cedar and some of the cedar 2x12 for the fascia; I built some new drying racks and set up a drying station on the deck. (That's tricky with all the leaves falling, but I don't have anyplace else to put it.)

Oh, and I FINALLY got my money back from Mike at Austin Wholesale for the original misdelivered ipe...