In (un)related news

I have been limiting this blog to house-related posts. And this only barely qualifies as house-related. Left my wallet in my unlocked car last night after I got home from WV, and somebody took it. So I'm dealing with canceling all my cards this morning. I thought I'd probably just left it in WV until I saw this activity on my debit card (for our LostRiverModern operating account) this morning:

09-10 *DEBIT AUTHORIZATION
AT 06:22 MCDONALD'S M5008 O HYATTSVILLE $ 1.37
09-10 *DEBIT AUTHORIZATION
AT 06:20 MCDONALD'S M5008 O HYATTSVILLE $ 1.58
09-10 *DEBIT AUTHORIZATION
AT 03:00 CITGO 7-ELEVEN STO COLLEGE PARK $ 14.16
09-10 *DEBIT AUTHORIZATION
AT 02:16 CITGO 7-ELEVEN STO COLLEGE PARK $ 2.35
09-10 *DEBIT AUTHORIZATION
AT 01:44 CITGO 7-ELEVEN STO COLLEGE PARK $ 11.11
09-10 *DEBIT AUTHORIZATION
AT 01:39 CITGO 7-ELEVEN STO COLLEGE PARK $ 1.49

Twelve thousand dollars in this account and this is what some knucklehead does with it. I hate debit cards, I've always gotten all my ATM cards as ATM only so when I lose them people can't drain my account, and I didn't do it this time for this account.

I'll probably have some time to post today while I'm on hold dealing with all this....

So shiny

Home from a long and productive weekend out at the house. Here's what it looks like right now (with a finished roof!):




Lots more tomorrow...

Yeah!

I got to the house this morning to find:

-electric hooked up;
-roofers on my roof; and
-DSL guy waiting for me.

So I'm posting this from our bedroom floor!

Ipe, cedar and drywall should be here any second. Only problems so far: when I turned the water valve on, I found out (when water sprayed all over the bathroom) that the plumbers missed a compression fitting on one of the pex runs. So I can't run water til we get that fixed. And the fridge isn't working - who knows why. But those are hardly even blips...

Who needs hot water?

I called our HVAC guy this morning to see if he was starting on our house next week like he's scheduled to; he apparently fell off a ladder and is going to have surgery for a ruptured disk. He won't be doing any work til next month. So I've got to call around for another HVAC guy...

I'm out to the site tonight for the weekend; Sarah and the boys might join me for some (or all) of it. Working on the deck and drywall in the basement.

Stairs

We've got stairs framed, with temporary treads (we'll have bamboo at the end of the day):

September 10 is almost here already?!?

I am going to be so sad when this is over and I haven't been up to see it.

Who knew?

Apparently its Blog Day 2007. And apparently the idea is to link to other blogs you enjoy that maybe other people might think are cool but don't know about. So here goes:

3Hive: Legal music sharing blog with lots of great music you'll never hear otherwise;

Hendrik Hertzberg: I had to give up the New Yorker when I went back to grad school for productivity reasons, but I still need my fix;

HoyaProspectus: Not much here til October, but oh boy check out those highlights on the right;

Capital Weather: not really a blog, but I'm addicted to weather;

BitchPhD: If for no other reason than the picture at the top of the page (but lots of other reasons, too).

You throwing that away?

You mean this?


The big pile of wood, with all the scratches and dents and cracks, and even one broken board? Just in a heap at the bottom of my driveway? With a broken pallette and the plastic wrapping thrown in for good measure?

No, actually that's just five thousand dollars worth of ipe that was delivered two weeks late and apparently just thrown piece by piece from the delivery truck. The driver actually called me the night he delivered it and told me that he'd done this so that thieves wouldn't think that it was valuable. Ohhhhhhh. Not because you were lazy, or in a hurry, or aggravated that the driveway was too steep for your truck even though it was described in detail at the time of purchase.

So I left the boys with Sarah's parents and raced out there the next morning to find this mess. Not ten minutes after I got there (around 9am), two people had already stopped to ask if I was throwing it away. It's a wonder it was still there. I spent the next four hours loading it into the back of my minivan, driving it up the hill, and restacking it up at the house. Five trips and 3500 lbs of ipe later, I was finished. It's all scratched up...




Couple of boards were even broken...



(Hey that's me in the reflection! That might be my first appearance on this blog!)

Oh, and it wasn't pre-grooved (to receive the TigerClaw clips). I call Mike at Austin Wholesale, tell him the whole deal. He was apologetic, but also tried to tell me that I hadn't ordered it pre-grooved. After we confirmed that I had been charged the pre-grooved price, he actually told me that they had delivered the right stuff but charged me the wrong amount! To his credit he immediately offered to refund my money and come and get the wood, and I said yes, give me my money back and come and get the wood. Of course, I don't have my money back yet and I've still got the wood. So we'll see where we get with this mess.

When I was looking for ipe, the places everybody seemed to recommend were Austin Wholesale, East Teak, Banner Elk, and IpeDepot. Austin Wholesale had the best price by a few hundred bucks, and they said they would have it there four days from the time I placed my order. They were two weeks late and they screwed it up. So on Tuesday I called George at East Teak, who had longer lengths than I could get from Austin Wholesale (fewer butt ends) and they're supposed to deliver it to my local 84 Lumber today (84 will deliver it the rest of the way on Tuesday). Cost a couple of hundred bucks more. I suppose I should have factored in the potential difficulties of a long distance delivery when I first compared prices.

Another Finished Res4 House

When Sarah and I started thinking about Res4 and had our first meeting with them last summer, they told us about a house that had just been set in Wainscott (about an hour past my mom's house on Long Island). We met the contractor out at the house one afternoon and he showed us around - we really wanted to feel what their boxes were like inside size-wise, and we were lucky to be able to take a look. The space was terrific - much bigger than we'd expected (of course this house is about 4000sf). But it cinched it for us - Res4 was the way to go.

Well that house is finished. And quite a house it turned out to be:




This is about where we stood and thought, "This is a pretty big space" (the kitchen module was roughly the size of what we were thinking about at the time for our whole house!):



Res4's site has lots more pics of this house, from drawings to factory construction to finished product.

I need more artsy friends

Anybody reading this blog an aspiring artist trying to make it big? Who wants to contribute to our project in exchange for whatever publicity we can manage to attract for you? (I think I have a phone interview with a reporter from the NYPost this afternoon.) Anyway, an arrangement like this would be perfect...

Been busy, gonna get busier

Tomorrow is the official end of my summer - back to "work," for lack of a better word. But I don't have class on Mondays or Fridays, so I think I'll still be able to get quite a bit done on the house. We'll see...

I've been back and forth from the site a couple times already this week; once to deal with some mis-delivered ipe (a fiasco that I will describe in another post) and then the last couple of days to finish working on the roof and continue in the basement. Here is the current state of things: septic installation was inspected this morning and approved, and Jim the Excavator covered everything up and we're all set there; Heath and Derrick from Hardy Telecom - two of the most pleasant and enjoyable guys I have come across so far on this project, and I've met some pretty great people - got my phone up and running on Thursday (and then Heath and Crystal, one of the waitresses at the Lost River B&G, got married on Friday - nice); Allegheny Power pulled my line up to the house (but haven't connected the pole at the bottom to their grid yet - argh); I got some insulation and drywall up in the stairwell so Quelman and Juan Carlos could start framing the stairs, which are now half done; today I got the rest of the insulation up on the walls; and I'm halfway finished with The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, written by Himself. (It's interesting so far.) Forgot my camera, so no new pics. Oh, and I installed the microwave over the range.

But Marc reminds me that I haven't posted many photos of the state of the inside of the house lately. So here goes:

Framed basement (looking from the stairwell through the rec room, and then back toward the stairwell):




Looking down the hallway:


Into the small bedroom (designed as a bunkroom for kids, but currently storing our pocket door kits and our bamboo stair treads):


Mechanical room (orange pex in the floor are the ends of the radiant loops):


Rough-plumbed bathroom (with a recessed light can on the floor because its planned location in the ceiling has a 2x12 running through it...):


Into the big bedroom (which is home to a LOT of construction materials at the moment, though most of that insulation has made its way into the walls):


The newly-drywalled stairwell (sans stairs):

Open Thread for Marc

Finished (and available for rent!) by the beginning of August

Yeah right. I don't remember exactly when I wrote that, but it seems like a long time ago. To be fair, we didn't set the house (for a variety of reasons) until about a month after we were originally intending. But we're still a bit off from being done. Now we have to figure out whether it's worth paying some trades to get in and get it done faster (drywall, painting, etc. - things that we can do ourselves but will take us a lot longer than it would take pros) and start renting it, or save the money and finish it ourselves over the next month or so but forego some rental income. The trick is leaf season, usually at its peak right around the beginning of October. Another option we've been thinking about is renting it as a 1BR until we get the basement done (the top floor is finished), but that doesn't seem like the ideal experience for a renter.

Anyway, I've been getting a lot of inquiries about when we'll be ready. I'm putting together a mailing list; if you'd like to be on it drop me a note (lostrivermodern AT gmail DOT com). I'll send out some more info as soon as we have a better idea of exactly when we'll begin doing business.

Oh - we got our domain name purchased and hope to have our real website up soon (though it would be nice if that website could have pics of a finished house...).

Mmmmm, lobster

I spent some time in Stonington, ME (the self-proclaimed lobster capital of the world) a couple of summers ago. The only place we could get internet service was at the Blue Hill Public Library, and Blue Hill was a great little town, too. And we visited Mount Desert Island, with its fantastic and kid-perfect Sand Beach:


The Longhouse - a "modern take on the Native American Longhouse" - is lucky enough to be right in the middle of all that fun. Its architect owner/designer and family are keeping track of their progress here, and this is what their house looks like at the moment:


Check it out.

Professional advice

Thanks to John at Res4, who helped me fix a little problem I ran into finishing the roof eave on the backside of the house yesterday. Turns out that the roof trusses on that side of the house didn't extend far enough to leave room for the air vent. So following John's suggestion (after talking to him on the new phone service installed at my house!), I extended each of the truss ends - the white of the house wrap is where the original truss ends - before fastening the 2x6:









Another roofer came out to the site yesterday; we should get an estimate from him by the end of the week and soon we should have a finished roof!