And these:
Tuesday, June 03, 2008
In a world where I have infinite funds...
...and am not horribly in debt, here's what would be going up on the walls in this house. These:
And these:
And these:
One Step at a Time
This actually wasn't so hard. Used construction adhesive and my finish nailer (which is a little tricky, you have to get the angle and location just right to replicate the effect you get from a floor gun). One of the things that really hit home doing this whole house project has been how much each phase of construction depends on how well the last thing was done. Imperfect joists mean imperfect boards on the deck and lumpy drywall on the ceiling; poorly hung drywall means sloppy seams when you mud and tape; stringers on the stairs that don't perfectly match mean risers that have gaps where they meet the treads. But you make do.
The risers here are actually just two 4" boards of bamboo, with the top board ripped to size. The treads came from the manufacturer in 6' lengths that I cut to size. I was able to get them all to sit cleanly enough that we won't need to trim out the stairs. (John at Res4 was hoping I could do the landing that way too, but I'm not that good...) Caulking should hide all the gaps. (I've got a LOT of caulking to do; haven't done any of the cleanup on the trim yet, and lots of places outside could stand to be caulked as well.)
The risers here are actually just two 4" boards of bamboo, with the top board ripped to size. The treads came from the manufacturer in 6' lengths that I cut to size. I was able to get them all to sit cleanly enough that we won't need to trim out the stairs. (John at Res4 was hoping I could do the landing that way too, but I'm not that good...) Caulking should hide all the gaps. (I've got a LOT of caulking to do; haven't done any of the cleanup on the trim yet, and lots of places outside could stand to be caulked as well.)
Sunday, June 01, 2008
How much is 15 cubic yards?
A LOT. I had the guy drop some of the mulch above the house and some below the carport. Spent probably three hours moving the first pile one wheelbarrow full at a time:
Here's the second pile, untouched. Gonna work on that this week.
Oh, and it came with A LOT of flies.
Here's the second pile, untouched. Gonna work on that this week.
Oh, and it came with A LOT of flies.
All Niters
So the week before Memorial Day was kinda crazy. As one of my loyal commenters pointed out, sometimes it just takes a deadline to get things done. I administered my exam on Tuesday, slogged through a marathon grading session Tuesday night, got out to the house Wednesday evening in time to meet the mulch delivery, spent way too many hours Wednesday night laying out paper and tape for the final coat of painting, painted Thursday morning, spread mulch while Sarah's mom put some serious elbow grease into cleaning the floors, graded the last of my papers, installed the last two exterior lights, installed the outdoor speakers, moved all the remaining construction materials from under the deck to behind the far side of the house, finished putting electrical outlets/switches in the basement, tripped the breaker for the three way switches that I can't get to work about ten times, finished trimming the basement floor,
*at this point it is pushing two a.m.*
started laying the bamboo treads/risers/landing, finished laying the bamboo treads/risers/landing, trimmed the landing,
*at this point the sun is coming up*
moved all my tools/supplies to the boys room (which is my new giant closet), installed the brushed aluminum cans in the recessed lights, set up the dvd player, and cleaned. Oh, and I had a ridiculous running nose that is better left undiscussed. Drove home to meet Sarah and the boys on the way to the airport to catch a flight to FL for a long weekend that my mom treated us to. Whew. (Then, after arriving home Wednesday night and spending six hours in my bed, I drove to Pittsburgh to help Tom Oates drywall his handyman special, and finally got home for good yesterday afternoon.) I don't even want to think about Sarah's hour-by-hour diary at home with three sick boys.
There's still plenty to do (biggest items are finishing the bathroom, installing a closet system, and some semblance of landscaping). But all our renters so far are singles or couples, so I've got some breathing room. We'll head out for a few days this week and the following week, and then I've got to get a real job for the summer...
Anyway, the short version of this post is we went from this on Thursday morning:
to this by Thursday night:
*at this point it is pushing two a.m.*
started laying the bamboo treads/risers/landing, finished laying the bamboo treads/risers/landing, trimmed the landing,
*at this point the sun is coming up*
moved all my tools/supplies to the boys room (which is my new giant closet), installed the brushed aluminum cans in the recessed lights, set up the dvd player, and cleaned. Oh, and I had a ridiculous running nose that is better left undiscussed. Drove home to meet Sarah and the boys on the way to the airport to catch a flight to FL for a long weekend that my mom treated us to. Whew. (Then, after arriving home Wednesday night and spending six hours in my bed, I drove to Pittsburgh to help Tom Oates drywall his handyman special, and finally got home for good yesterday afternoon.) I don't even want to think about Sarah's hour-by-hour diary at home with three sick boys.
There's still plenty to do (biggest items are finishing the bathroom, installing a closet system, and some semblance of landscaping). But all our renters so far are singles or couples, so I've got some breathing room. We'll head out for a few days this week and the following week, and then I've got to get a real job for the summer...
Anyway, the short version of this post is we went from this on Thursday morning:
to this by Thursday night:
Saturday, May 31, 2008
Evolution of a Brand
We've had a bit of a break from the house for the last week (after an all nighter and a week away from home). The most exciting thing we're doing right now is working on our website. The designer is Gabe, a friend of some friends, who is working for a generously modest price and in exchange for some free time in the house. The friends are helping with the architecture out of the goodness of their hearts. And its coming along great. We're working on a "logo" right now. Gabe asked for some parameters and he came up with two options on his first crack:
We gave him some feedback; we wanted the font a bit heavier and we wanted to see some options that incorporated a graphic element. He came up with these:
And then we asked him to mimic the lines of the house a little more closely, and here's where we are right now:
I think these are all pretty great. Sarah likes the second and third the best; I like them all, I think. Opinions?
We gave him some feedback; we wanted the font a bit heavier and we wanted to see some options that incorporated a graphic element. He came up with these:
And then we asked him to mimic the lines of the house a little more closely, and here's where we are right now:
I think these are all pretty great. Sarah likes the second and third the best; I like them all, I think. Opinions?
Wednesday, May 28, 2008
Thanks to Our Test Guests
I'll have more to say about this after I get debriefed, but our first visitors seem to have had a wonderful time. Here are a couple more pics of what they arrived to find. The stairs turned out well:
As did the tv room downstairs (though I didn't have time to fish the dvd hdmi cable through the wall):
Lots of trim work and other finishing items to take care of, and I still need to finish the bathroom and hookup the washer and dryer. Hopefully the next couple of weeks will find us really finishing the last of these things...
As did the tv room downstairs (though I didn't have time to fish the dvd hdmi cable through the wall):
Lots of trim work and other finishing items to take care of, and I still need to finish the bathroom and hookup the washer and dryer. Hopefully the next couple of weeks will find us really finishing the last of these things...
Thursday, May 22, 2008
Five Thousand Words
An absurd number of things have gotten done over the last 24 hours, which I will elaborate on later. For now:
And a HUGE thank you to Sarah's mom Beth for all her help.
And a HUGE thank you to Sarah's mom Beth for all her help.
Wednesday, May 21, 2008
Free HBO
[***I'm going to stick this post at the top of the blog for awhile - updates will appear below.***]
Just arrived at the house, where it's 45 degrees outside, and I can hear the roar of the creek at the bottom of the hill from the beginning of DC's monsoon season - something like 12 inches of rain already this May. I'll be here til Saturday. Hope to really bang the last few things out, so we'll see how much progress I can make in the next few days. I'll give "live blogging" a chance again...
And I'm starting to get a fair number of requests for reservations. Mostly weekends so far, and I'm slotting people into the calendar. We're going to have our real website up in the next few weeks (which Res4 is going to circulate to the 4000 people on their mailing list!), at which point I *hope* that we're going to get a mad crush of inquiries/requests, leaving all you loyal blog readers out in the cold. So if you're interested and have a date in mind, drop me a line: lostrivermodern AT gmail DOT com.
Just arrived at the house, where it's 45 degrees outside, and I can hear the roar of the creek at the bottom of the hill from the beginning of DC's monsoon season - something like 12 inches of rain already this May. I'll be here til Saturday. Hope to really bang the last few things out, so we'll see how much progress I can make in the next few days. I'll give "live blogging" a chance again...
And I'm starting to get a fair number of requests for reservations. Mostly weekends so far, and I'm slotting people into the calendar. We're going to have our real website up in the next few weeks (which Res4 is going to circulate to the 4000 people on their mailing list!), at which point I *hope* that we're going to get a mad crush of inquiries/requests, leaving all you loyal blog readers out in the cold. So if you're interested and have a date in mind, drop me a line: lostrivermodern AT gmail DOT com.
Tuesday, May 20, 2008
Saturday, May 17, 2008
Baseline, Revisited
You may remember our tour of the house from Tuesday? Well here's where we ended up when I left today:
I still haven't started painting yet. Man. Taping and papering an entire house really is not fun. Hopefully with the paint gun I will be rewarded with a quick and painless painting experience. I understand that professional painters use a "shield" to screen off, rather than tape, no-paint areas. Man that must be nice...
Plan is to be back out at the house first thing Monday morning to paint. Then a final round of cleaning, some miscellaneous to-do-list stuff, and we're in business. Landscaping is going to be a continuing work-in-progress for the foreseeable future. (I remember when we first talked with Joe and Rob and John at the Res4 office in NYC, I was pretty focused on not disturbing the site too much, and in my construction naivete revealed some silly expectation about just sort of dropping the house of in the woods and being ready to rent it. I was imagining in my head a scenario where only the 65'x16' footprint of the house was excavated, and everything outside that footprint remained in its natural pristine state. They gently informed me that the process is more complicated than that, and as an aside talked about "a year or so" before the site no longer bears obvious markers of what took place. Short of bringing in a landscape architect or a truck of sod, there's no getting around the fact that backfilled dirt looks like backfilled dirt for quite awhile. We're going to start with mulch and go from there...)
I still haven't started painting yet. Man. Taping and papering an entire house really is not fun. Hopefully with the paint gun I will be rewarded with a quick and painless painting experience. I understand that professional painters use a "shield" to screen off, rather than tape, no-paint areas. Man that must be nice...
Plan is to be back out at the house first thing Monday morning to paint. Then a final round of cleaning, some miscellaneous to-do-list stuff, and we're in business. Landscaping is going to be a continuing work-in-progress for the foreseeable future. (I remember when we first talked with Joe and Rob and John at the Res4 office in NYC, I was pretty focused on not disturbing the site too much, and in my construction naivete revealed some silly expectation about just sort of dropping the house of in the woods and being ready to rent it. I was imagining in my head a scenario where only the 65'x16' footprint of the house was excavated, and everything outside that footprint remained in its natural pristine state. They gently informed me that the process is more complicated than that, and as an aside talked about "a year or so" before the site no longer bears obvious markers of what took place. Short of bringing in a landscape architect or a truck of sod, there's no getting around the fact that backfilled dirt looks like backfilled dirt for quite awhile. We're going to start with mulch and go from there...)
Friday, May 16, 2008
80% Preparation...
...20% execution. I read that somewhere about good construction practice. Well, I'm at the end of an entire day of prep for painting, and no painting yet...argh. There's a lot to clean up before I get started, and I haven't even laid down the paper and tape yet! But I finished the last round of mudding in the bathroom/boys' room, finished trimming everything except the tv room, moved the cable box to a new spot and fished the appropriate cables (always a treat when that goes off without a hitch), and rearranged all my materials so the rooms to be painted are ready to go. Finishing dinner now, then time to get the paper on the floor.
For those of you who are intending to hang your plasma tvs on the wall, remember that often times your cable isn't going into the back of your tv. I had the guys who roughed in the electric run the cable to where I'm going to hang the tv, but it has to go to the satellite receiver first. Duh. And then an HDMI cable from the receiver to the tv. So I had to both those through in their proper places:
And a pretty clean room, I gotta say. One of the WONDERFUL things about getting close to done is that instead of having to move stuff around all the time (like doors and trim and cedar and drywall - a DIY reality if you are working as slowly as I am and have lots of mat'l just sitting around), I am actually putting it where it's supposed to go! There's less and less stuff around here by the hour!
For those of you who are intending to hang your plasma tvs on the wall, remember that often times your cable isn't going into the back of your tv. I had the guys who roughed in the electric run the cable to where I'm going to hang the tv, but it has to go to the satellite receiver first. Duh. And then an HDMI cable from the receiver to the tv. So I had to both those through in their proper places:
And a pretty clean room, I gotta say. One of the WONDERFUL things about getting close to done is that instead of having to move stuff around all the time (like doors and trim and cedar and drywall - a DIY reality if you are working as slowly as I am and have lots of mat'l just sitting around), I am actually putting it where it's supposed to go! There's less and less stuff around here by the hour!
Not really a surprise
More rain. Mosquitoes are going to be fierce this summer and DC is not going to be fun (though not out here - we have lots of flies, some gnats, the occasional wasps and bees - and the boys found three turtles this weekend! - but no mosquitoes here at our cabin; maybe because the grade is too steep for much standing water?).
I added the finish caps to the cable system yesterday:
I hope to get all the prep for painting done today, and paint today and tomorrow. I've finished most of the door trim, all the pocket door hardware, one round of mudding sanding to go. I have to move the cable outlet to accommodate the satellite receiver. Maybe mount the tv before the bball games come on tonight...
I added the finish caps to the cable system yesterday:
I hope to get all the prep for painting done today, and paint today and tomorrow. I've finished most of the door trim, all the pocket door hardware, one round of mudding sanding to go. I have to move the cable outlet to accommodate the satellite receiver. Maybe mount the tv before the bball games come on tonight...
Work Hard, Play Hard
My helpers have gone, and we didn't really get much in the way of cleaning done, but everyone was productive in their own way...
Thursday, May 15, 2008
Helpers
They came late last night to help with cleaning, so I figured the least I could do was make a decent breakfast.
I ate dinner at 10:30 last night
Grouted the tub in the basement last night; pretty tedious job. And you can't really stop once you start, so I had to finish before I could eat...
I had 3x6 subway tile from two different companies (two boxes left over from Simplex that came with the house, and then two boxes that I bought at HD). They are ever so slightly different in color and size. Doesn't appear different in person, but it actually comes through a bit in this pic (the top two rows below the window).
I had 3x6 subway tile from two different companies (two boxes left over from Simplex that came with the house, and then two boxes that I bought at HD). They are ever so slightly different in color and size. Doesn't appear different in person, but it actually comes through a bit in this pic (the top two rows below the window).
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