Home Stretch

Gotten a few things accomplished on my last two Wednesdays out at the house. Last week I got the rest of the tile up in the tub:


As you can see in this pic, the framers didn't center the window when they framed in these walls. Odd.


I did the first round of taping/mudding/sanding in the bathroom and in the boys' bedroom (which was basically a storage closet when I did the drywall finishing in the rest of the house; not ideal to have to do things twice). I had hoped to grout yesterday, but I got distracted by some outdoor projects that needed finishing.

"Due to gentrification, the Ear Inn now allows poodles."

I mentioned how much I loved Philip Johnson's Glass House a while back; I didn't know that Johnson's last commission was a NYC development called the "Urban Glass House," a glass and concrete condo loosely reinterpreting the original (right next to the historic Ear Inn, and not too far from Bill and Amy's apt):


Turns out the developer who's responsible for the Urban Glass House is also building a hotel around the corner from our apt in the West Village (on a footprint that used to be the home of Mookie's vet). Though it's getting the usual NIBMY reaction from local critics (it'll be the only hotel in the immediate vicinity, and I suppose that risks undermining the small-town feel of the WV a bit), the proposed version looks pretty cool to me from a design perspective. Rather than a glass and steel design that has become pretty popular in lower Manhattan, it's going to mimic the brick facades that are more common in the neighborhood:

Seasonal View

When we were looking at land to purchase, it always cracked me up to read about "seasonal views" or "winter views" - and of course that's what we've got right now. We probably won't do anything to change that anytime soon - maybe trim some branches to open it up a little, but nothing too drastic. The leaves come in at the perfect time to keep the late-day western sun's heat off of the house (we've got lots of exposures, obviously, and direct sun could really be an issue in the summer, I think). But we would like to keep some of this nice view of the ridge to the northwest and the notch to the west where the sun sets:

Four weeks to go

We've got volunteers to be "test guests" Memorial Day weekend, so I've got one month to finish up...

I got a LOT of work done on Tuesday and Wednesday: plumbed the tub drain/overflow, hung the sheetrock/cement board in the bathroom, trimmed the bathroom window, tiled the shower until I ran out of mortar, hung and trimmed the basement doors. Forgot my camera, though, so the only evidence I have are these fuzzy phone pics:






I actually got most of the shower walls tiled - only about ten rows left to do, plus all the partial pieces to cut. Hanging tile is not rocket science - especially if you've hung your cement board well (with nice level seams), the only real tricks are laying it out so that you don't have to cut really tiny pieces of tile at the edges, and then getting the first row level. (I had an issue with the lip of the tub not meeting the cement board cleanly, so I've got a couple of pieces of tile that aren't perfectly vertical. C'est la vie. A whole post one of these days will be devoted to our DIY mantra of "it's good enough.")

Who's Overbudget?

Yeah? Us too. A lot of debt on credit cards at the moment. We'll see what it all adds up to at the end of the day.

According to the Wall Street Journal, this is not an atypical experience...

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.