Front Door, Electric Started, Siding Choices
The custom front door was installed on Tuesday. It's quite an impressive sight. It's made out of seriously thick solid Maple. It's kind of a shame, but our plan is to paint it - the Maple was recommended by the door company for a super-solid, long lasting, non-warping construction, and is supposed to paint nicely. I hate to cover up all that nice woodgrain, but we don't really want a stained front door fighting with the stained Cedar siding right next to it. So, we'll enjoy it for a while before we hide it.
The door has 4 frosted panes. The top two panes have clear glass "peepholes" in adjacent corners so we can see out. Another cool, yet functional, detail.
Speaking of siding, we've been looking at mockups of the siding details, specifically how the corners will look. There's an external corner board and a smaller board used for the inside corners.
The siding itself (custom milled, naturally) was also delivered today, so I think they will be getting started on that pretty soon.
Corner board stock:
We did a walkthrough with Ken our electrician at Tuesday's site meeting to check all the switch, light, and outlet locations. We also spent some time going over the fixture list to try to find some places to save some money. We knew our electrical budget was too low, but we were thousands over where we wanted to be, and that doesn't even include the surface mounted fixtures that we still need to find and buy... We had a lighting designer help us with the entire house, so we think it will turn out really well, if not over budget. Ken had a number of good suggestions, so in the end I think we saved $1-2K, so that's good.
Lots of things to plug in inside the mechanical closet:
And some days thing's just don't go your way - Ken had to excavate a couple of (non-structural) studs in order to bury a switchbox closer to the door in the Master Bedroom. Otherwise it would have been pretty much in the middle of a wall that we want to hang art on.
Oh, and someone asked about the "black tape" on some of the studs, like you can see below:
That's actually a heavy felt-like product that is used to bring up the "low spots" on the studs. You can also see that there are spots on the studs that are "clean" - that's where the framers planed down high spots on the studs. Leveling the walls like this (with a long straightedge and a lot of patience) is one of the last things they did. We are going with a "Level 5" gypsum finish, which is basically as smooth as you can get. Any imperfections in the framing would telegraph through the sheetrock and show up as visible waviness. Endless details. Probably more than you wanted to know...
The door has 4 frosted panes. The top two panes have clear glass "peepholes" in adjacent corners so we can see out. Another cool, yet functional, detail.
Speaking of siding, we've been looking at mockups of the siding details, specifically how the corners will look. There's an external corner board and a smaller board used for the inside corners.
The siding itself (custom milled, naturally) was also delivered today, so I think they will be getting started on that pretty soon.
Corner board stock:
We did a walkthrough with Ken our electrician at Tuesday's site meeting to check all the switch, light, and outlet locations. We also spent some time going over the fixture list to try to find some places to save some money. We knew our electrical budget was too low, but we were thousands over where we wanted to be, and that doesn't even include the surface mounted fixtures that we still need to find and buy... We had a lighting designer help us with the entire house, so we think it will turn out really well, if not over budget. Ken had a number of good suggestions, so in the end I think we saved $1-2K, so that's good.
Lots of things to plug in inside the mechanical closet:
And some days thing's just don't go your way - Ken had to excavate a couple of (non-structural) studs in order to bury a switchbox closer to the door in the Master Bedroom. Otherwise it would have been pretty much in the middle of a wall that we want to hang art on.
Oh, and someone asked about the "black tape" on some of the studs, like you can see below:
That's actually a heavy felt-like product that is used to bring up the "low spots" on the studs. You can also see that there are spots on the studs that are "clean" - that's where the framers planed down high spots on the studs. Leveling the walls like this (with a long straightedge and a lot of patience) is one of the last things they did. We are going with a "Level 5" gypsum finish, which is basically as smooth as you can get. Any imperfections in the framing would telegraph through the sheetrock and show up as visible waviness. Endless details. Probably more than you wanted to know...
posted by contraption at
5:39 PM
1 Comments:
Bruce,
On our house we have stained cedar siding and oiled fir doors. Looks pretty good. I'd send you a photo if I had your email address.
Terry, on Vancouver Island
tjohnson@qualicumbeach.net
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