So we've been thinking about having the boys paint some pics for us for WV

Here's their first crack at it (it was a team effort by Michael and Joshua - they call it "Painting"):


Assisted by JacksonPollock.org (h/t AustinModHouse) - anyone with kids who want to use the computer all the time should check it out...

Finishing Touches

We really are getting close to done with the upstairs. A couple of nits left here and there, but not much. I put in the pendant light (CB2, $49) over the dining room table when I was out dropping off some stuff. We were surprised when it came to find that it had a twenty foot long cord with a switch, and was intended to be plugged into an outlet. So I bought the mounting hardware myself (standard Home Depot cover plates were all pretty terrible), snipped the cord and hardwired it (Simplex had installed a junction box above the table). Looks pretty good:

Where's It All Go?

When we were designing the house, John Kim at Res4 explained a rough engineering version of what effect water has as it moves downhill against a wall - I didn't really get it, but it sounded scary. And because our retaining wall opens on the uphill side of the house, it acts kind of like a giant catch basin for water coming down the hill underground. So it was really important to get the drainage right and send whatever water gets trapped by the wall through to the other side. The guys who poured the foundation took care of that with pretty extensive drainpipes around the footers that funnel the water through a pass-through in the wall (where it travels through an underground pipe to an outlet below the house down in the woods).

Because we also get a lot of water from the roof through the scupper above the retaining wall, the same process needs to happen - it all needs to get funneled through to the other side of the wall. So as they infilled the retaining wall they connected some black sewer pipe to the footer drains and ran it up the side of the wall to right below the scupper. I built the walkway with a box for a gravel catch basin:


When the stone for the driveway came a few weeks ago, I stole some of it and filled the bottom half of the box, cutting down the pipe:


Graded the stone toward the pipe and lined it with plastic and some chicken wire:


And filled it (almost) the rest of the way with stone:


Remains to be seen how it will handle a lot of falling water - how much splashing we'll get, how quickly it will drain through the gravel, etc. And I'll finish the open edges of the box with some leftover ipe.

Waiting for Spring

Trees are popping here in DC, and even at the lower elevations in the Lost River valley, but not up on the top of our hill yet...

Happy Tax Day

So it's been two weeks since I was last out at the house, so not much to blog. This is how I left things:


That's gonna be a cozy bathroom, by the way. (That's NYC realtor talk for tiny.)

In the meantime, I have done the following:

-bought a fancy plasma tv on craigslist (new Panasonic TH-42PC77U in an open box for $900 - won at a charity auction by some rich guy who already had two (!) plasmas in his house);
-arranged to have DirecTV installed;
-bought a reproduction Wassily chair for $20 (also craigslist);
-bought a nice aluminum and teak outdoor table (guess from where?);
-researched the staggering variety of mulch available for purchase just down the road from the house in WV;
-got a bill for (gulp) $4200 for the work the excavators did stoning the driveway and putting gravel around the house;
-did some homework re: website aesthetics/functionality at the behest of my IT consultants for our lostrivermodern.com homepage;
-presented a paper at a conference in NYC on early slave petitions;
-had dinner with Zach and Jen (Michael is looking forward to doing "karate" with Evan) and drinks with a bunch of old work buddies; and, finally,
-filed an extension on my taxes (merely to delay the misery of trying to figure out whether I am now, in fact, a "real estate professional" whose losses - and there are losses, believe me - can somehow mitigate the adverse consequences of borrowing from his 401k to fund this adventure).

Hopefully out to the house to deliver some of the aforementioned loot tomorrow, but have to come right back home for school. Next week I'll get a couple of days out there for some real work...

...oh, and when this thing starts making money hand over fist I'm gonna get a couple of these for the deck:

Penny Wise

Dollar foolish. That's the saying, right? Well DIY can have that effect on a man. One of the VERY FIRST THINGS we should have done after the foundation was poured, or at least after the house was set, or at least after the siding was on, was get gravel down around the perimeter of the house. It helps drainage and it keeps rainfall from kicking dirt and mud up against the side of the house. (The ridiculous construction litigation in which I made my last contribution to the world as a lawyer had, as one of its subplots, the failure of anyone to install gutters/downspouts to protect the $20K custom made garage doors from splattering mud.) It also would have cleaned the site up quite a bit instead of being the mud pile it turns into every time it rains, with me dragging mud all over the inside of the house all the time.

But because I am a DIYer, and because all it takes is a strong back and a couple of days work to do this yourself, I made a conscious decision not to have any of the guys working on the house over the summer take care of this. And here we are, the beginning of spring, and I still haven't done it. So last week I finally bit the bullet and had the original excavator (who was coming back to put stone down on the driveway) take care of it. Of course, it was three fifty-year old guys using shovels, rakes and wheelbarrows. Which just KILLED me to see (I was out at the house working on the basement). This is one of the perverse consequences of DIY - you start to think, not that you can do things better than anybody else (I have no illusions about that), but that you SHOULD be doing anything that you CAN do. So the idea of paying someone else a not-immodest sum to do something that requires NO skill at all becomes galling. But at this stage of the game, something that takes three experienced laborers an entire day would probably take me months to get done, so there you go.

You can see some of the dried mud on the siding in these pics; it washes off, and while it won't actually cost me any more money than if I had just had them do it when I should have, I'm still kicking myself...




Now as I understand it, the gravel in this pic below is probably too close to the bottom edge of the siding - you want to keep any critters that can climb away from any possible points of entry. So I'll have to pull it back a little (the appropriate distance, I think, is 6", though we don't have that much to work with).






Our plan for the short term is to put mulch down on the bare ground around the house; that's another project that needs to get done before we're ready for renters.

The last ten percent

They say it takes the longest...

I took care of a lot of the trim work in the basement this weekend. The sliders in the tv room, the window in the downstairs bedroom, most of the floor. I'm not really sure how to trim the pocket doors (they're a little tricky). Here's how the sliders went:






Simplex sent a lot of the trim along loose in the house, so I just had to rip it where necessary, cut it to size, nail it in place. Already primed, too.

One of the mistakes we made was not cutting the sill plate across the slider thresholds before we installed the doors. So we'll need to trim those with something different (that doesn't pick up footprints, dirt, etc.).


And the bedroom windows:

Kid-Friendly Modern Furniture

Craigslist. $50 for the (Ikea) molded plywood coffee table. $1150 for the (barely ever sat on) reproduction Corbusier couch and two matching club chairs.

The Paint Crew Has Arrived

The Wagner Paint Crew 770, that is. Not in a million years would it have occurred to me to buy a paint sprayer, but Sarah - with a not-atypical focus on "how can we get this done faster" - suggested it and I have to say boy was that a good idea. I put 5 gallons of primer on the walls in a little over an hour, including the entire ceiling. Try that with a roller. I was a little scared of it at first, but got the hang of it pretty quick. $200 at Lowe's. And even if we never use it again after this project it will have more than paid for itself.




There are some tricks to using it (I recommend starting off in a place no one will ever see) and it apparently needs to be cleaned pretty well to ensure that it'll keep working, but I can't recommend it more highly for what I gather is a pretty entry-level paint sprayer.

Self-Assessment

Sarah and I were talking the other day about our DIY competence. We both feel like we're pretty capable. But in the couple of big projects we've done, the thing that has always felt like the biggest impediment was just having the right stuff. We've both spent countless hours wandering Home Depot, searching for someone - anyone - to answer a question about what kind of supplies we need to finish something. The more we do of this kind of stuff the more comfortable I get just wandering into the store and finding things on my own. But still - there are 8 MILLION different PVC connections that you have to wade through if plumbing is not your first language (and it's not mine). So going to Lowes and being handed every single thing I needed to resolve my small plumbing issues in less than two minutes by the first employee I met was really pretty wonderful.


Proof that it works:


I'll say a couple of things about our faucet from Ikea. First, for $99 it compares awfully well to the various Hansgrohe Axor models we looked at that you can't get for much less than $400. But as we all know the installation "instructions" are in fact only pictures of a smiling stick figure and no words indicating which supply is hot/cold, which of those lines is intended to be removed during installation and which will leak afterward if you pick the wrong one. So a little bit of plumbers tape seems to have resolved that - we'll see.

For Kate, A To-Do List

Here's what we've accomplished so far this week:

-last round of mudding in the basement;
-last round of sanding in the basement;
-repaired all the upstairs drywall cracks from the delivery and set;
-trimmed the excess deck cable and mounted the finish hardware;
-installed the kitchen faucet, sink trap and garbage disposal;
-installed dishwasher;
-installed the under-cabinet lighting;
-installed all the cabinet hardware;
-installed a new outlet behind the stove (house came with a 220 outlet for an electric range, but we changed to gas and needed a 120); and
-started painting.

Here's a rough list of what's left:

-I haven't yet done a thing in the basement bathroom, and the small bedroom in the basement is basically a storage closet right now, so its drywall hasn't been mudded or taped;
-all the basement doors need to be hung;
-w/d need to be installed;
-we need to figure out what we're doing about a closet system in the basement;
-bamboo treads and risers and the bamboo on the landing;
-basement trim;
-finish matl's for the basement recessed lights and we still need to find a pendant light for above the dining table;
-cement board and remaining couple of pieces of cedar trim;
-outdoor speakers;
-basement media (tv, satellite, audio system);
-finish coat of paint; and
-I'm sure lots of little things that we'll figure out as we go.

Mood Lighting

I knocked out the under- (and over-) cabinet lighting this afternoon:




That's 2x2 aluminum angle from Home Depot. (John Kim at Res4, when I asked him exactly what they were envisioning for the flashing to cover the light fixtures, directed me to the exact aisle in Home Depot where these could be found. THAT is the kind of expertise you're looking for from your architect.) The fixtures should probably be located a little further toward the front of the cabinet, but I didn't have much wire to work with. They look great (though they're fluorescents and have a bit of a hum).

And as an aside, turns out I had no idea how to spell fluorescent. U then O. Who knew.

Family Affair

I've had some welcome company the last couple of days:




And yes, the drywall is (finally) finished and we are painting.

Design Contest, Redux

Here's another nit that Res4 is helping me with. Any suggestions appreciated.

The cleanest way to install my stair treads is flush with the drywall. But what to do about carrying the trim from upstairs? I also will have bamboo t/g flooring on the landing, which probably will require trim. So do I carry the trim from upstairs all the way down? And if so, what to do about the lower half of the stairs, where - as you can see from the last pic - there isn't enough clearance for the baseboard trim that's upstairs? (The treads that are on the stairs now are temporary and will come off before real treads/trim go on.)

Locals v. Interlopers

We've had some cloudiness and occasional (what I thought was) sediment in our water. The well guys came out yesterday to check it out, run tests, etc. They found that what I thought was sediment was actually iron flakes (some manganese too - 2.0 parts of iron and .5 parts manganese). We talked about filtering options. And when I asked them about whether these levels were too high to just live with, one of the guys paused thoughtfully and said, "Probably for you."