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...

Blogging is the best form of procrastination

So I should be grading papers right now, to return to students tomorrow. But instead I am blogging and getting ready to go to a friend's house to watch Jeff Green's professional NBA debut (one of the downsides of not having a tv).

I am headed out to the house on Friday to review the HVAC work, get some more boards down on the deck, maybe stain some cedar, and meet with a guy who I hope can drill the faucet hole in our kitchen countertop, which was on our original Simplex punchlist (we've been washing dishes in the bathroom sink). For a host of reasons this didn't get done before the house shipped - another thing on my to-do list is to get a comprehensive punchlist posted, detailing all the items that needed attention after the house was delivered. We didn't have anything big, and Simplex has been attentive to my requests, but I'm sure it'll help folks to see what sort of stuff goes into the post-delivery phase...

Want to spend some money?

I've been meaning for awhile to post some of the sites I've been trolling for furniture and other fun stuff. A couple of good ones: BetterLivingThroughDesign and GrassRootsModern. I'm going to put them all together in one set of links on the sidebar one of the these days pretty soon.

This guy, who built his own very fun house himself, recommends them as well.

Looking to lose yourself in the world of modern building blogs?

LiveModern is the place for you. They have begun aggregating all the modern building blogs out there, and there are lots of them. The interface isn't great yet (they are just posting all the posts from all the blogs, instead of letting you look at which blog is which), but I bet they'll get the bugs out soon. Lots of good stuff in there...

The LiveModern community used to be really vibrant, but has quieted down quite a bit over the last couple of years. The forums are really productive when they hit on something that is relevant for you; hopefully they'll get some more traffic and liven things up again.

Going once, going twice...

Today's Times has a piece on Richard Neutra's Kaufmann House. (Not having spent any real time in California to speak of, I am intrigued by this place they call "Palm Springs.") Anyway, down at the bottom of the article we find the names of the architects responsible for its renovation: Marmol & Radziner, who of course have another noteworthy home in the California desert. There's something about that landscape that really lends itself to modern design. The endless views? That it's dry as a bone? A much different aesthetic than a cabin in the woods. (We don't have scorpions.)

Don't call us, we'll call you

We got a call a couple of months ago from the reporter who wrote this article in the NYPost on Res4; but she never followed up and apparently we weren't good enough for her. (Actually she said it was probably going to be much easier for her to interview someone local.)

All these cookie-cutter articles about prefab seem to read the same after awhile...

85 and sunny

Hard to believe the leaves have just barely started to change. I was working in shorts and a tshirt this weekend. Strange fall. [UPDATE: 29 degrees last night, just about one week after this was originally posted. So fall's here.]


Made a lot of progress on the deck - the ipe is almost all down:


The trench and hole for the gas line and tank are dug, but apparently my HVAC guy is still at least a week from being finished:


One of the BIG downsides of being your own GC is not having continuing relationships with trades. I'm sure I'm at the bottom of this guy's list, and I don't have a whole lot of leverage. So we're just crossing our fingers that we have heat/hot water before it gets too cold...

What I imagine it would be like in a submarine (a really nice submarine, with lots of windows and cool furniture and deer on the outside)

It was cold at the house this weekend, and we don't have heat yet, so we were shut in tight and bundled up in sweatshirts and all that. And for as much as we've imagined all the glass in the house as really opening up to the outside (and that's how it's been most of the time we've been out there - all the windows open, breeze and birdsong coming through), it was a really pleasant experience to be sealed in the house and looking out, instead of feeling the outside coming in. Michael shouted DEER! at one point, and sure enough, out the windows on the hill above the house was a line of six deer, just slowly making their way along one of the deer paths, stopping to nibble on trees. That didn't happen during the day when it was warm out and we were making noise for everything out there to hear. But now it feels kinda like we're inside a bubble, and the woods is alive and undisturbed all around us. And we get to watch.

The magic of TV

Though we are nowhere near finished with anything, our friends from TV land were out at the house again this weekend for the "house is finished" segment of the show. Actually was great, cause it meant we had to clean. Now the upstairs really does feel like the space we've been waiting for:


Of course our first piece of furniture arrived as the camera crew left...