Pope Street Modern

Time for an Update!

noreply@blogger.com (contraption) — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 03:26:00 +0000

Yes! We are still here - and enjoying the house tremendously!

A number of long-time Pope Street Modern blog fans have asked about the blog and suggested we do a "catchup" (not ketchup) post.

Well, a ton has happened since the last post in October. We've been buying furniture as quickly as we find it, though it has been quite a project. We're pretty particular (as you might have guessed) about the pieces we choose. Here are a couple of professionally-shot pictures of the great room in the front:

These pix were shot by Dasja Dolan for a yet-to-be-published piece in the Palo Alto Weekly. The Weekly is doing a "focus" piece on few local home projects as part of an annual "insert"/magazine-type-thing. We had a reporter here a few weeks ago to do the spoken-word part of it. Dasja came out a few days ago to shoot the project.

You can see a full set at Dasja's website right now - here's a link to the gallery: http://www.dasjadolan.com/Architecture/Pope/11488977_vmKHk#808430014_w35eY
I'll post a bunch more after I get the official CD of images from Dasja.

In other news, we've been winning a few local green-building and architectural awards. This all started with getting our project "Green Point Rated" last summer. That turned into the "Green Point Showcase" house tour (subject of the last post back in October).

Libby and Ana, our local architectural/cheer-squad, have been quietly entering our project in a few contests. The first award we won was a City of Menlo Park "Environmental Quality" award:

The award was presented at a City Council meeting back in the fall. I think we won against 15 or 20 other submitted projects here in the city, so that was kind of a hoot.

More recently, Ana & Libby entered us in a County-wide contest sponsored by "Sustainable San Mateo County" in conjunction with the AIA (American Institute of Architects) and The RecycleWorks. Well, we won the 2010 Green Building award for the Residential Remodel category! Woot!

They threw us a (giant) party last week at a local convention center hall up in Burlingame. I should have taken a picture of the full extent of the venue - there were probably 500-800 people there. There was a catered dinner, fund-raising auction, and a bunch of local politicians including a few of the council members from Menlo Park that approved our project at a public hearing about 2 years ago.

Here's the project team, proudly wearing their matching "Award Winner" blue badges.

And here's the actual award certificate:

Which came with an unique "plaque" made from a recycled granite floor tile from a local building recycling operation (Whole House Building & Salvage) in East Palo Alto:

And, not being ones to miss out on any opportunity to make an impression on their constituents, we also got a STACK of accompanying award certificates from, it seems, every elected official West of the Mississippi. Here's the collection:

CA State Senator Joe Simitian:

CA State Senator Leland Yee:

CA Assemblyman Ira Ruskin:

And our local Congresswoman Anna Eshoo:

And, yes, still more - our local County Board of Supervisors:

So, fun was had by all, and we got a nifty stack of paper and a free dinner!

Look for another post in the next week or two once I get Dasja's pictures!

That last one is my shot, not Dasjas ;-)

Showcase - More Pix

noreply@blogger.com (contraption) — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 00:40:00 +0000

Libby sent me a ton of pictures from the Showcase open house - here's a slideshow:

There are some really great ones in there - I'm particularly impressed with the candid shots of Cathy, Rebecca & Lizzie (and of course, the house too).

Showcase Tour

noreply@blogger.com (contraption) — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 06:14:00 +0000

Quick note: I should have done this months ago, but I finally registered "www.popestreetmodern.com " which will take you...well...here. It's nothing more than a shortcut, but one that is easier to remember.

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Finally, two days in a row that I didn't have to pick up a drill! Yeah! I've been working nights and weekends for forever it seems. But wow, the house looks fantastic. We had it ready for the "Greenpoint Showcase" on Sunday. We didn't do a prefect job counting visitors, but we think it was somewhere between 160 and 200 folks that came through.

We received lots and lots of great feeback and kudos! One visitor from Los Gatos already posted some thoughts on his Greenpoint house tour on HIS blog, here. Check it out - he's got an insane/very cool two-story Eichler-esque project going.

Things were so busy that I didn't have any time to take any good pix during the busy part of the tour, but I'm hoping to get some from Ana & Libby.

But here's a couple that I took early in the day. Here are Drew (our builder, on the left), Ana (lead architect), and Keith (landscape architect, right). All the stuff on the counter are project information sheets, business cards, etc. in preparation for the visitors.

Here is Cathy and the girls chatting with Libby (the other half of our architect team):

And Keith and his crew did manage to pull off the entire landscaping job - and it is really great. They completely constructed the front yard, and then tarted up the whole place, including updated low-water irrigation in the back, new plants, fire ring, and the "zen garden" outside of Rebecca's window. I don't have a good picture of that yet, but that whole narrow side yard is now a very inviting space.

Cathy and I have been eyeing yet-one-more-thing at DWR (where else?) - this fantastic "Bordato" planter. It's a VERY large copy of the classic clay pot, but done in translucent white plastic and lit from inside with a CFL. Keith and Cathy ran off on Thursday to get a giant plant for it, and came back with this ginormous Bird-of-Paradise from Roger Reynolds Nursery.

By day, just plain cool:

And by night, WOW. It is like a lighthouse for our street now. So much so that I think I'll have to try to install a lower-wattage bulb at some point.

Though it is sold by DWR, it is actually part of the "Vas" series by Luisa Bocchietto for Serralunga.

Oh, and we did manage to get Cathy's new desk installed on Saturday. The actual installation turned out to be pretty straightforward, which was good. Most of the pain happened previously. It is a great space, and we all really like the eye-popping orange color.

And, since we still don't have any living room furniture of our own, Ana brought over (well, with Keith's help) all of HER mid-century modern furniture (also from DWR, I might add), including an Eames lounge, Corbusier chair, and Eileen Gray table, plus her couch and rug. We relocated our Rotor (from DWR, groan) coffee table from the family room for the day.

Here are the girls, checking out _actual furniture_ in the living room. We already don't want give it up - the space is VERY comfortable and cozy, especially with the fireplace going. We turned on the fireplace during the tour (stinking the place up, I might add), but it got rave reviews and threw an amazing amount of heat.

You can also see some flowers that Drew and Sandy brought over to liven the place up inside - a very nice touch! Thanks to them for doing that!

Ana also loaned us some really fun chairs for the master bedroom balcony. I'll have to get a picture of those as well, before she takes them back.

Mad Scramble

noreply@blogger.com (contraption) — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 06:32:00 +0000

The open house is in two days, so it's an all-hands-on-deck scramble here. The landscapers are planting/digging/wiring/plumbing furiously. Saturday (tomorrow) should prove to be a crazy day.

The front yard is starting to really come together and we are loving it - very, very interesting design that stops people in their tracks.

We are getting many compliments on the house and the yard from complete strangers, which is very satisfying:

Here's a progress shot during mid-day. They are planting the berms, but haven't put down the woodchips yet:

We have horsetail reeds wrapping the front corner of the house - they sort of look like minature bamboo, but aren't as invasive.

The whole yard is done with low water plants and a rather complicated drip irrigation system to save water.

I'm still frantically pounding away on projects - to the point where my knees are rubbed raw and bleeding from all the kneeling (yes, even with good kneepads on).

Here's shot of a "finished" older (nearly a week now) project - the "trap door" landing at the side door:

The plan is to store hoses, car wash stuff, gardening tools, etc.

It still needs a gas spring counterbalance (yet to be designed) since the lid weighs a stupid-ton, but that will come later. As least visitors won't fall in a hole or off a temporary landing.

I've been working on a ton of different things. Here's the last major project, in process. This is Cathy's "corner office" desk. As everything else, this one turned out to be trickier than I wanted. The alcove that this goes into isn't square and the walls aren't flat (all in the worst way possible - back is longer than the front), so it had to be scribed to fit properly. I won't bore you with the painful details, but to mention that the thing is a solid slab that weighs probably 40 or 50lbs so it's just brutal to heave around.

Cathy decided to go "hot" with the color - it's a transparent orange stain. I think it will look really stunning in the office. The plan is to install it tomorrow (Saturday) - closing out the last big construction project before the open house.

Another project that came late was the fire ring in the backyard, around the sculpture. We had joked about putting one of these in many years ago, so I had already run a gas line out to the planting bed which made this a relatively easy project. Keith thought it would be fun to do it for real, but I couldn't find anyone that had a large diameter fire ring in stock, so, naturally, I resorted to DIY mode - how hard can making a leaky pipe be?

It is made from "soft Copper" piping from Lowes, connected with compression fittings. I didn't trust solder due to the heating situation. Cathy and I were up past midnight (wearing oven mitts) last night fine-turning the number and size of the holes. Nothing fancy or precision here - this is "landscaping accuracy" work:

And the landscapers piled the "La Paz" stones (I'm pretty sure "La Paz" translates to "solid freakin gold" given the cost of these things - hand-picked off the beaches of Mexico, I'm told) on it today:

And here it is all aflame tonight:

A "real" ring would have cost $400-600 - this one works pretty well, all for about $80 in parts from Lowes + some sweat equity .

Cor-Ten Landscaping

noreply@blogger.com (contraption) — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 04:47:00 +0000

Our Cor-Ten retaining walls showed up on Friday morning. AJ and the crew from Fable Inc. architectural fabricators didn't waste any time off-loading the ridiculously heavy sections.

They warmed-up with the longest and heaviest piece (14' x 2'). It made my back hurt just watching them carry it into place.

Here they are landing in on the concrete support footings, being careful not to drop it on anyone's toes:

Adjoining triangle going in:

It's not like these things are going anywhere, but they pinned them to the foundation with rebar and welded them into place.

The second-largest rectangle:

And after some early grading - this is before we created a berm in the corner:

The berm on the other side - very cool:

Keith (our landscape designer) calls this landcaping installation "Tectonic Shift" - which seems appropriate given our general location. This is really more of an art piece than any kind of traditional landscaping - as Keith told Cathy "this is not about "natural" landscaping - this is man-versus-nature, and Man has won!"

We really like the way it is coming out - it harmonizes with the architecture of the house really well. We knew is was going to be "cutting edge" (literally, given the steel walls), though I think it will end up being the most controversial aspect of our project. We think it will look pretty awesome when we get it all planted and softened with actual green-growies.

Cathy and my weekend was (once again) spent building decks and doing yard work. The side landing by mudroom is finally done (I'll post pix soon), as is the master balcony deck surface. The Ipe is screwed down using recessed stainless screws, then the screw head holes are plugged with small Ipe plugs. Cathy did most of the zen-like color-and-grain-matching, though we got the girls to help out on the 4 boards on the balcony.

I then had to chisel off the sticky-up plugs, and sand them down flush to the deck surface. The Ipe gives off his yellow/orange dust, so by the end of the day I looked like an Oompa-Loompa.

Still More Concrete

noreply@blogger.com (contraption) — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 02:26:00 +0000

The concrete guys came back to strip off the forms around the stepping stones on Monday.

They look really good:

We really like they way they are sticking up, but alas, we'll have to fill in the gaps or we'll have all sorts of twisted ankles.

We didn't see the landscapers for a couple of days...not sure what happened there, so today they were back digging like mad to make the trenches (no forms this time) for the steel footings. I wasn't here when they poured the concrete, but Cathy says it was a bit of a circus for a while.

We now have a goodly amount of fresh concrete sitting in the front yard, which means only one thing:

Here's Elizabeth cleaning the concrete off her hand:

...and autographing her work...

Rebecca got home in time to add her paw print to the concrete. Of course, all of this will get covered up tomorrow or Friday with the steel, but hey, we know it's there...

One of my side projects this week was to install the old "milk box" door near the mudroom entrance. Here's the fixturing system (borrowed from the tiling guys) to hold it in place while the glue dried.

Stepping Stones

noreply@blogger.com (contraption) — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 06:11:00 +0000

The front landscaping is cranking along. We made a last minute change to the layout near the driveway, which involved saw-cutting out an old section, but it turned out to be the totally right thing to do. The forms for the stepping stones in the front and the driveway along the side of the house were finished on Thursday, and poured on Friday.

Form work:

putting in the 6" of base rock for the stepping stones:

Pouring the concrete, or more precisely, pumping it:

This is a different crew than the ones that poured the driveway apron (remember Mr. Owner with the cellphone?). In this case, the guy busting his hump with the concrete hose is the owner of the company, Brig Ord.

Screeding the fresh concrete:

Starting to finish it as it dries:

The formwork will get stripped off on Monday, leaving us something like 12 separate stones - we will be planting "low-growies" in between them (Lemon Thyme?):

The landscaping crew came back on Saturday to dig a bunch of the irrigation trenches and clean up the site. Next week should see yet another (final?) set of formwork and concrete for the Cor-Ten wall foundations. That should be less fussy work and will hopefully set us up for installation of the steel walls on Friday. That's the plan, anyway.

My weekend was busy as well. Saturday and part of Sunday was spent working on the master bedroom balcony deck again. I didn't get as far as I had planned (it has something to do with "measure twice, cut-once"), so that will continue next weekend too.

I did manage to get our 2 new floating nightstands (delivered by Jonathan on Thursday) installed, however, which look awesome.

Installing the wall cleat that holds the whole thing up:

Hanging in place:

The finished look:

Dig faster...

noreply@blogger.com (contraption) — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 05:04:00 +0000

Ana & Libby have entered our project in an AIA architecture competition. I wish I could tell you more about it, but that's all I know. They put together a visual "brief" for the submission, including this very nifty hand-drawn sketch by Ana:

Here 's a link to the actual AIA document with lots of swell before-n-after shots.

AWA also put together a flyer for the Build-it-Green tour:

Click the pic above to see the whole thing (3-pages, PDF).

You can see that while the actual house is a nice match for the picture, the front landscaping isn't quite...there yet. It does illustrate where we are headed though; there will be a series of low Cor-Ten "weathering steel" walls - a combination of rectangles and "wedges". We'll then berm soil against the walls and plant "growies" (a highly technical landcaping term we've learned).

So, to that end, Keith is scrambling to get the landscaping underway - and finished by the October 4th Build-it-Green tour. It's, um, going to be interesting, considering this is where we are at:

I came home after work today to find the Bobcat excavator perched on top of the dirt pile. Interesting place to park.

Here's the big trench from which all the dirt came...

So hopefully we'll see the formwork for the concrete footings (to support the Cor-Ten) and stepping stones (maybe?) go in this week.

My weekends are still spent on my hands and knees building the Ipe landings and decks. Here are a couple of in-process shots of the side landing (the one that opens up):

I should also mention that this shows that you can never own too many drills (I think I've had as many as 7 out at once...all being used.)

Here's the front riser board going in:

All the surfacing is Ipe (Ironwood), which is just a blast to work with - it might as well be Aluminum. It's about as heavy, and is so hard it can't actually be nailed. Every hole has to be drilled first. It also gives you the nastiest splinters ever - they are like steel needles - that hang around hurting for days.

The side landing is almost done now, it only needs the screw holes plugged with Ipe plugs, then sanded. I got Cathy to help with the fussy work of gluing in the plugs so I can come back later to cut them off and finish it.

While she was doing that, I moved on to the master bedroom balcony deck. I really want to get this one finished before the tour since I don't think having 500 people tromping all over the membrane roof would be a good idea.

This one is also a real trick. The deck has to sit VERY low to the roof as there isn't much of a step when you walk out of the bedroom door (2 inches). Just to complicate things even further, the membrane roof is sloped in every direction, with various valley's, lumps, seams, etc. I had to custom make 11 "sleepers" onto which I'll screw the deck boards - each one had to be contoured to fit the roof, yet have a perfectly straight top edge - that all have to line up perfectly to create the actual deck surface.

It's a good thing I've got a garage full of gear...I really don't know how you'd do this otherwise. Today's quiz is to find the jointer, planer, tablesaw, biscuit joiner, belt sander, palm sander, trim router, and metal bandsaw in the pic below. Extra credit if you can identify the second, wood-only, bandsaw. (And yes, I know my garage is an absolute disaster...I'll clean it up once all these projects are behind us...)

And here's the deck in process:

And this is as far as I got on Sunday...note the raindrops that cut my day short:

Stay tuned to see how this all turns out...

Shiny Things

noreply@blogger.com (contraption) — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 05:20:00 +0000

I'm back with a new update. We've continued to work on the house. Every weekend. Continuously.

Our house is going to be part of a Bay Area "Green House" tour on October 4th. The tour is a joint project with Build It Green and KTVU (a local TV station). Here's a link to the project page on the tour website. Our house is in the process (being powered by Libby's sheer force of will) of becoming "green point rated" with Build It Green. We didn't set out to achieve that "gold star" on this project - mainly we just wanted to do things "right" wherever we could. In the end, it looks like we will probably be eligible for about 130 "green points" which is really quite excellent. Many of the other projects are in the 50-80 point range, while only a couple have achieved more.

What this means is that we'll likely have a few hundred complete strangers (with tickets to control the crowds, thankfully) wandering through our place in a few weeks. It's only one day, luckily.

Because of that, however, we are scrambling to finish many, many projects - at least as far as we can get. The big one is actually the front landscaping - we gave Keith our landscaper the go-ahead yesterday to start the major construction, but it's going to be a close shave on that one.

In other news, we finally got our glass shower surround installed yesterday, as well as the mirrors in the master bath and a few full-length custom ones on the exercise room door and the hall bath downstairs.

Here's the master vanity, all shiny-shiny. The plant is compliments of Ana & Libby. It's nice to have an actual mirror now.

The shower surround looks great too (ignoring the duct tape holding the seams together while the Silicone cures):

All we need are some towel bars and toilet paper holder and I think this room could be called "done". We've been searching high and low (DWR anyone?) for the right towel bars, but we haven't found the perfect ones yet, so we continue to live with a $5 drying rack for now. As usual, I'm getting awfully tempted to make them myself...

Last weekend (all of it) was spent framing the landing at the mudroom/side door. It's not a normal landing, naturally. It turns out that during the foundation work, a huge cavity was created at the door - it's about 2'x2'x7' - which seems like an ideal place to store garden hoses, carwash supplies, buckets, and/or Jimmy Hoffa. So instead of just filling it in with concrete (the original plan), I decided that what it needed was a deck lid that would hinge upward. Well, it sounds simple enough, but it's turned out to be quite a project.

I've been going back and forth between CAD and framing to get it all to work out. Here's the "plan":

Closed:

Opened:

and here's how far I've gotten so far:

You can see the storage area below:

So, in my spare time the other night, I installed some hacked firmware (called CHDK) onto my Canon SD500 digicam. It provides a ton of extra functionality like RAW picture formats, and complete control over shutter and aperture - enabling really long exposure times.

So, I took it out for a test drive and got some pretty nice shots of the house - mostly as an experiment:

and some more:

These were taken with between 8 and 15 second exposures - pretty fun. I'll have to make some adjustments and take some more at some point.

Also, as one other amusement, I also put together something of a crude time-lapse of the project as seen from one vantage point in the front yard.

Here's the link to the Picasa web-album page:

From Pope St Time Lapse

I've tried to embed it here directly, but Blogger will only take 100Meg files and this one is ~150Megs.

Flying Birds

noreply@blogger.com (contraption) — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 04:29:00 +0000

Ken and Celestino came back today to work on a few loose ends.

Hanging Birds, Birds, Birds was the first job of the day. As Ken said afterwards, "well, that wasn't so bad, I was expecting a lot worse."

It went pretty quickly and very smoothly, no one fell off any ladders, no birds were harmed. And it looks GREAT - kooky, but great. People can't help but smile when they see it.

Location of flock by day:

and tonight (dimmed):

It actually throws a lot of light on full - I guess 24 bulbs will do that, though they are special low-voltage/low-wattage (20W?) ones so it's not overpowering.

I also promised a some shots of our new dining room set - it's starting to look like a Design Within Reach store in here - which, as Libby says, is a good thing. The table, chairs, and chandelier are all from DWR. We are on a first-name basis with more than one salesperson at more than one store (is that bad?)...we hear a sucking sound every time we walk in the door.

Closeup of Cellula, Swarovski crystals and all (they make a great sound when they jingle).

And a bonus shot of the family room, from the deck, at night. I need a better camera to capture the warm tones and low light, but you can probably get the idea.

- and yes, the gray deck is just a temporary measure until the deck guy gets around to building it. Oh, wait, that's me.

And, I just realized, most of the furniture in the family room (credenza, shelves, and coffee table (you can't see)) are also from DWR. Hmmm. I think we've identified a problem here...

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A lot of readers have mentioned that they've enjoyed seeing who else is following the blog. I was using a simple "click tracking" service a few posts back, but that's only good for 24hrs and not terribly accurate (so I've heard).

I've had another one running for the whole silicontraption.com site (this blog is a branch off that main trunk), so here's a more complete view of who's been to the site over the past year. This covers all IP addresses (not individual people, just a guess of your location based on the location of your internet provider):

Also, I'm trying an experiment using GoogleDocs - if you don't mind, please take this quick survey and I'll post the results later (or, you should be able to peek at them now...once you fill it out ;-) )

Let's see if all this technology works - you should see an embedded survey right down there ⇩

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Post-Move-in Update

noreply@blogger.com (contraption) — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 05:19:00 +0000

I almost forgot how to do this, it's been so long. But, don't worry, it's all coming back. After 80-something posts, I don't think I'll forget everything too soon.

So, the construction toilet finally left on July 14th - not sorry to see that go away. That puts the elapsed time (toilet-to-toilet time) just under 11 months.

Just to refresh your memory (or for those relatively new to this project), we started here back on August 18th, 2008:

And ended up here 11 months later:

Backyard view:

We're pretty settled at this point, though we are still suffering from "moveinitis" - boxes still to be unpacked, furniture to be sold, art to be hung, stuff to be stuffed, etc. Oh, and the front yard landscaping has yet to be done.

However, the girls are pretty completely settled. Their rooms are almost complete and they look great. Here's Rebecca's room, complete with 8000 or so Webkinz on their own perch(es).

The girls also discovered the fun that can be had playing on the stairs. It turns out that the railing makes a great slide for the Webkinz, and the upper landing is a good launching point for parachute drops and bungee jumps.

The house is pretty stunning overall - we're lucky the owners are letting us live in it. The place is really bright, so we are living with some less-than-attractive paper shades on the bedroom windows for the moment.

It turns out that getting shades and drapes for a modern house is harder than it seems like it should be. Everyone wants to sell you the "usual stuff" - regardless if it looks like crap, or covers big portions of glass, or looks like grandma's house (a generic grandma, I might add, not a specific one). A few windows won't be too hard, but we've got a few really tricky ones, like the front corner window (check out the finished Chicipate wood on the sill - it looks awesome! That was a good call.)

I'm guessing we'll end up fabricating something pretty customized in a few places, but that probably means paper shades for quite some time.

We are also getting art hung and ceiling fixtures installed. I had to machine a custom angled ceiling adapter for the crystal Cellula chandelier in the dining room, so that turned out to be a project.

(We just sold the Teak dining set shown in the picture today, so we are now very excited to be finally using our new table and chairs - I'll post a pic of that in the future - it looks great!)

It turns out that we have direct, Western sun coming in the window right at dinner time, so we got a big surprise on the first night - the crystals refract and reflect the sunlight into about 2000 spots all around the front room.

It's now become a nightly tradition, waiting for the "show to start" - it only lasts a short time, maybe 20-30 minutes. I suspect that this will only happen this time of the year when the sun angles are just right. We'll let you know.

And what of "Birds, Birds, Birds" you ask? Well, it's turned out to be a cleaning and refurb project out in the garage. If things go according to plan, Ken (our electrician) will be here tomorrow to help us install it in the stairwell.

Stay tuned for that!

Move-In!

noreply@blogger.com (contraption) — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 05:49:00 +0000

Wow. Crazy week. I've been taking 5 days of vacation to work on the house. Both Cathy and I are just fried. We've been working 12-15 hour days packing, moving, unpacking, installing, wiring, cleaning, sorting...

To Drew & Fred's credit, we got the go-ahead to start moving in our stuff at 5:30 on Friday afternoon - right on the schedule that they gave us back in January. Very impressive!

There was stuff going on right up until the "end", and there continue to be painters and the assorted subs running around even this week, but we did the major move on Saturday, sleeping in the house for the first time on Saturday night!

The professional house cleaners did a nice job, and Adrian and his guys were here on Friday afternoon finishing up the stair railing detailing. I haven't had a chance to get some good pictures of the final product, but they nailed it. It, like the rest of the house, is spectacular.

Cleaning the considerable dust off the tops of the cabinets.

The "ghostbuster" was back - it turns out that the tank he is wearing is a nifty portable vacuum cleaner - here he is cleaning the sawdust out of the undie drawers in the master bedroom.

And here is Cathy, moving in the FIRST two boxes. They happened to be the liquor boxes...which is probably a good omen as we designed the house to be great for entertaining.

We were all working so hard on Saturday no one got many pictures of the moving party. It was great - we had tons of help and lots of kids running around, and the place didn't seem small at all. The bar worked out great - we set out food to eat and people just walked by and grazed all afternoon.

Here are Mark and Jake moving in Lizzy's bed (the girls have decided to take separate rooms after being roomates for, well, as long as Lizzy has been around - 8 years).

And here are the girls moving Scooter and Madam Cheesy-Cheesepuff (the girl's pet rats) across the street:

And here is our pile-o-mattress making the same trip:

It was nice to only have to walk the 300 or so feet from one place to the other. This whole process would have been much more stressful and a total drag if we were living in an apartment or RV (we came to our senses, thankfully).

I'll post some more pix of the (unfinished) finished house soon. Our bedroom is just awesome - though we don't have any kind of window blinds yet so it's like high-noon in there are 6:20am. But, the view is great - we can see blue sky & treetops when we wake up.

Here we are at about 6pm on Saturday (sweaty, and knee pads and all), popping the cork on our "move-in" bottle of bubbly. Yeah!

And the sky was awesome that night, a very nice backdrop at sunset:

And today, Celestino was loading out the final DMC bits, including their giant job-box and their sign. Fred says that the construction toilet will be gone tomorrow - that's the first thing to show up and the last thing to leave!

Final Inspection

noreply@blogger.com (contraption) — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 03:47:00 +0000

We Passed! The inspector from Menlo Park came by this afternoon and signed off our house as "ready to occupy"! So, we are technically complete as far as the city is concerned!

We popped a cork to celebrate!

Though Cathy thought better of christening the place, since that would involve a callback from the siding crew...good thought though...

The cleaning crew showed up today as well - this is sort of the industrial strength Merry Maids. They started on the outside today, the inside still has a way to go with plaster/paint/sanding, etc.

I wish I had a picture of the dude who walked through at 9am this morning wearing a tank on his back, holding some sort of sprayer...he looked like he was a lost extra from Ghostbusters...

The goal is still to move in on Friday, or at least over the weekend. We should have a better idea about that tomorrow as we'll finish our "punchlist walkthrough" where we generate a "to do list" of things to tweak before we can call it complete and/or move in.

With the place signed off, we are definitely in the home stretch of the project. We are truly thrilled with the end product - we love the design (thanks to Ana, Libby, & Eric) and the execution (Drew, Fred, and 1000 subcontractors).

That said, we are still not done, so stay tuned as we finish it up!

---

And, if you like, if you click this icon, you should be able to see a map showing the location of other folks who are following this blog - and there are quite a few that I know of - in fact, at some point I'd like to get a list just to see...

This ⇒ ⇐ Close

noreply@blogger.com (contraption) — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 03:13:00 +0000

We had our "pre-final" inspection on Thursday afternoon. Close, but not quite, as expected. The list of issues is very short - only 3 things:

1) The stair railing needed to be completed (they were installing the rods when the inspector showed up)
2) The deck railing needed a gap-closure piece in one spot (now done)
and
3) We need a letter of compliance from our structural engineer saying that we built it to his specifications.

Fred says that the (fair-but-thorough) inspector did a really complete walkthrough and tested everything. So unless they decide to hen-peck us with other issues, we should be able to get the final-final this week, maybe as early as tomorrow.

The railing is quite stunning (as is the whole place) and came out great - Adrian and his crew (Adrian Burns Fabrication, by the way, if anyone wants to give him some work) pulled it off. See for yourself:

From the entry:

And the kitchen is nearly done (I still need to make the fridge pulls, the metal arrived today):

I spent the weekend crawling around under the house, again, pulling the last of the smurf tubing and a lot of the network/phone wiring. Wow, that was not much fun, but the worst is over, I think. Here's where it all ends up - in the wiring/datacenter under the stairs:

I also spent some time chopping holes in walls in the family room for the 7.1 surround sound speakers. For those who have been following along, this is what a lot of that wiring was about back in January/February.

Off the top, I think I have about 1200 feet of speaker wire in the house, with, I think, wire drops for something like 26 speakers. I figure we'll only use about half of that, but at least the wires are in the walls (and floors, and ceilings) if I ever need them. If I can only remember where they all are...

Cathy had her own painful experience - hanging the infinite number of crystal strands on the girls bedroom light fixtures. Cathy got them off Overstock.com for about $100 each. They come "all assembly required" - in fact, I had to modify them to make them work close to the ceiling (they normally hang on long rods) - but Cathy got the fun job of hanging 494 strands of crystal.

Here she is, having all the fun:

Railings, pre-Final Inspection

noreply@blogger.com (contraption) — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 03:01:00 +0000

Adrian, our metal fabricator, is in the hotseat - he's the last guy to have to finish his stuff before we attempt to get final inspection. He's been scrambling to finish up the balcony railing and the inside stair railing.

Here is the balcony - the railing is mostly in - at least the hard part. It still needs a few more screws, some cable tensioning (so they don't sag), and a real handrail cap.

I installed the temporary (Home Depot's finest 2x4's) cap over the weekend in order to get ready for final. I'll replace it later when I build the actual balcony deck, but that's still a few weeks (months) out.

The railing is a "cable rail" style - but it uses a really nice "invisible" system of cable termination/tensioning. It's called "Invisware" from Ultra-Tec and eliminates the unsightly "turnbuckles" used on most cable rail systems. Since our railing has 5 separate sections, each with 8 cables, we'd be looking at a ton of hardware with the "normal" approach. The Invisware gives us a nice clean look.

Due to the schedule crunch, Adrian has moved on to the interior stair railing. He got the lower post installed yesterday, and did all the rest you see here today. It's looking awesome.

The horizontal rods that go into the vertical posts are all in (loosely). That was good practice as the rest of them - that go between the stair risers and the railing - are the more difficult ones due to the angles.

That's the project for tomorrow morning - which will be interesting as we have the building inspector showing up in the afternoon to give us a "first" final inspection. There is a chance we will actually GET our final approval tomorrow, but no one is actually betting on it.

Rather, we are expecting a relatively short to-do list of things that will need to be finished/tweaked, and then a "final-final" inspection sometime next week.

Did I mention that the posts, railing, and rods are all SOLID Stainless Steel? Here's the railing before it got welded in place today:

Adrian did a bang up job on the holes that receive the "ferrules" on the rods - they are a perfect fit and gives us a clean look:

Did I mention that the railing is solid ;-) ? I guesstimate that just that one part alone weighs over 100lbs.

Despite seeming like overkill, it seems like it is working out according to plan - the railing is exactly as I hoped (and calculated) it should be. It's really robust and should pass the 200lb force requirement easily (whew!).

Here's one of Adrian's angled, bored holes:

Oh, and you might be wondering "what's up with that weird "extra" railing at the landing part"?

That's, um, a "feature" in order to pass inspection. The rules changed last year and you can no longer have a 36" railing (like on the stairs) at a landing. Now it has to be 42" high (a.k.a. UGLY) in order to meet code. So, that extra top rail, extra rod, and vertical ends will be chopped off after the ink is dry on our final-final signoff. (Shhh. Don't tell anyone, ok?)

Here's another view of it. The railing is going to look really nice without it, but we have to live with it for at least a while longer.

So, fingers are crossed for tomorrow, but I'd put the probability at about 30%.

Regardless, Drew told us today that they are still sticking to their plan of move-in on July 10th - which is 1 week from Friday. Whoo hoo!

We'll still be entertaining painters and other contractors doing miscellaneous work for a few weeks after that. And I'll have projects for a lifetime of weekends beyond that, but with luck we'll be moving our stuff back across the street very shortly.

Stay tuned!

---

Location Test code (me just fooling around):

The Reveal, Part Deux

noreply@blogger.com (contraption) — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 03:45:00 +0000

Sore point. Way back when we were getting our permits from the City, they added a requirement for us to "improve" the back alley . Many of the properties in this neighborhood have a unique feature of a shared alley running down the center of the blocks. A few of us have built garages on these alleys as it enables us to use the yard behind the house for things like a pool, rather than a garage.

Because our legal city parking spots are in the garage, the City is now requiring "big projects" to improve the alley by putting down an "all weather" surface. We almost lost it when we discovered that 200 feet of asphalt paving "done right" would run us $15-18K.

I tried valiantly to fight the city attorney on this, but in the end he pretty much told us to "suck it up".

So, in the spirit of "if it isn't worth doing, it isn't worth doing well", I managed to talk the public works department down to the smallest upgrade I could. We finally negotiated down to 3-inches of "compacted, class-2 aggregate base rock" -which only cost us $3200 after shopping around a lot. Not bad considering where we started, but still, the whole thing still sticks in my craw.

Anyway, today was the day for long-awaited upgrade:

Compacting:

I have to say, begrudingly, that the whole thing looks a ton better and has really given us a useful way to get to the garage in the wet California winters without having to crash through mud puddles. For us and the neighbors, I might add. Maybe I'll get a Christmas card or something from them. Still, I think I'd rather have my $3200.

The front yard got a major facelift today as well - the construction fence finally went away, which is a sure sign we are nearing the end! Whoo hoo!

The house is stopping people as they walk, drive, & bike down the street. We had a couple of architects wander in yesterday as well (not the first ones I might add), so it is clear we got a lot of things right. Everyone seems to really love it.

The kids were enjoying sitting on the front porch this evening as people walked by. Today is Lizzie's 8th birthday, so it seems appropriate that we unwrapped the house for her today!

The Reveal

noreply@blogger.com (contraption) — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 05:49:00 +0000

As I mentioned in the last post, the guys were here late on Friday evening starting to strip a lot of the protective masking off the floors. The second floor is completely unmasked now, and it looks awesome:

We had them leave the paper on the floors in the girls rooms as they have started to put the their personal touches on their spaces - Rebecca has come up with a cool geometric pattern of overlapping colored rectangles:

She's done 90% of it herself - the design, wall layout (a small bit of help from the adults with a level), all the taping, and nearly all the painting. It is looking great!

Lizzie is going for the opposite look - totally organic / freehand stripes. She got off to a frustrating start (this would be a tough painting project for an adult), but with a huge amount of moral support, technical advice, and infinite patience from Ammah (my mom) she's got it going. This is definitely a design that no adult could pull off - the complete freehand nature if it goes against all our urges to apply masking tape and make straight lines. I heard her say yesterday "I decided that I want to do this all myself" - so we are letting her have at it since it is her room. It's hard not to go "all adult" on her, so it will definitely be her very own work on this one.

Here she is, hard at work:

So, while the girls and Ammah were painting, Cathy and I were installing wire shelving back into the closets. We managed to get the girls rooms done, the hall linen closet, and the big one in the upstairs exercise room:

The cabinet guys also came back to install the mudroom cabinet and shoe-putting-on-seat:

And the carpenters were wrestling with the front living room window sill. It is made of Chicipate (Southern Chestnut). We were originally going to use Honduran Mahogany, but we couldn't find a wide enough/long enough piece of certified FSC wood. This option looks really great, so we are very happy with it.

Getting Lit

noreply@blogger.com (contraption) — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 05:49:00 +0000

The concrete guys came back and poured the driveway approach and sidewalk on Friday. They did a nice job, though the concrete is curing with something of a Leopard-print look - hopefully that will go away in a while. I don't remember specifying animal-print concrete.

Ken came back and finished installing just about all the electrical fixtures - all except the ones we don't have yet. We are still trying to figure a few of our surface mount fixtures out...like the dining room chandelier, girls rooms, etc.

The whole place is pretty well "hotted up" now - all the lights are blazing, which makes for some really great views at night - finally!

You can also see that I installed the street numbers and doorbell in the second-to-last picture above. I think we are gaining on it!

The flooring crew (different from the finish carpenters who did the stair treads) were back for a long day on Saturday to finish the stair landing. WOW! the whole thing is stunning. This is definitely one for stairporn.com (click it, it's safe ;-)

There is still a lot of plaster work to go, and the "reveal" edge under the tread ribbon isn't to our liking yet, but the woodwork is just great.

Speaking of woodworking, here is a shot of the finished Teak shower floor that Cathy and I made last weekend:

They took up a lot of the rosin paper on the floors on friday so we can start to see the finished product...that's the next post!

Screwing in Lightbulbs, etc.

noreply@blogger.com (contraption) — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 03:51:00 +0000

Wow, it keeps ratcheting up. Somehow we _thought_ the end would be kind of a tapering off, having (we thought) made "all" the important decisions. Ooof. We were wrong.

The end is is just crazy - tons of people, everywhere, every day - and decision after decision, minor crisis after minor crisis. It's exciting, and fun, but we are definitely getting tired.

I can't even list the number of things happening right now, but here's a smattering:

Pulls - remember all those cabinets we agonized over - layout, wood, heights, etc.? Well, it turns out that they all need some sort of pull or handle. There are only about 85,000 to choose from. Oh, and not only do you have to figure out what pulls to use, you then have to figure out WHERE to actually put them. Did I mention that you can't really get it wrong as they'll be drilling holes in the face of every cabinet door and drawer front so there's no going back?

Here are some (a small fraction, this is just from one box of samples) that we've looked at for the master bathroom and bedroom:

The kitchen is even more fun - we've known we've wanted "European stainless steel bar pulls" for a while, so that narrowed down the search to only about 300 options, many of which were variations of this basic look:

We finally found a somewhat unique design from Siro that we really liked as it had the "rectangular" theme that's emerged everywhere in the house:

So, done, right? Um. Not even close.

[OCD Alert] OK, so how do you reconcile that the pulls only come in 4 lengths but the drawers and doors come in about 15 different lengths? Use the same one everywhere you say? OK, that works on the cabinet doors, but a small pull on giant drawer front, I think not. OK, use the different size ones, then match them up as best you can? Maybe, but still unsatisfying.

Then factor in that there's a Bridgeport milling machine and a Hardinge lathe in the garage...and the answer, naturally, is, make them all precision custom lengths to match all the fronts:

After a few late nights, I've finished the cabinet ones - 15 were totally standard, 24 were custom in some way. I'm still making the last 3 larger ones for the refrigerator. The custom lengths will enable us to maintain the same "edge distance" on all the fronts - so that the mounting blocks are all set in the same distance from the vertical edge of the face.

The cabinet guys haven't mounted any as yet, so we'll let you know how well this plan worked out in a later post.

And, while on the topic of custom fabrication, here's the Teak shower floor in process. Cathy helped rout the edges and sand all the pieces.

I bought World's Most Terrifying Woodworking Tool ® off Craigslist - an ancient Rockwell Jointer - for $40 - to joint all the boards. You just had to ignore the fact that cutter guard was missing, the cord was disintegrating, and the v-belt drive didn't have (and never had) a guard. It actually worked great, the cutterhead was even sharp. I'll buy a better one someday, but this was a quick solution.

The deck came out great, but I don't have a picture of it installed yet as the stairs have been getting finished so I can't actually get up to the bathroom. The whole staircase is looking really, really awesome! The floating platform at the bottom is killer cool:

It's exactly what we were picturing, but even better.

Ken the electricain continues to trim out all the fixtures, switches, outlets, etc. Here is is working on the exercise room light trim - he has to cut out the gypboard for the fixture, hence the coating of plaster dust:

Speaking of messes, here's the driveway approach being torn up. The city is making us replace the cracked sections of the driveway and the sidewalk.

The crew set a new record - they had busted through the watermain by 8:12am (their day starts at 8am). Note the flood on the sidewalk, and the guy in the red shirt trying to turn off the main.

Quick quiz: find the company owner in the picture below:

There was a giant cloud of concrete dust as they saw cut the old sidewalk (extra credit: find the owner again):

Our master balcony railing also arrived, some assembly required. Hopefully they will be back this week to do the install. That's the easy one. The stair rail is the last major challenge, hopefully we'll see that next week. That's the last substantial piece of the puzzle we absolutely need before final inspection, which I think Fred is trying to get around July 1.

Oh, and one more piece of OCD - I'm making a drill template for the house numbers so as to get the alignment and kerning just so.

Hey, we've come this far...

Appliances & Trimout

noreply@blogger.com (contraption) — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 04:17:00 +0000

It's getting pretty frantic around here most days - some days we have 5 or 6 different crews here doing their part.

The ScanTop guys finished the orange bar top on Friday, and it looks awesome...from about 6 feet away. There are still some seam and finish issues that they need to fix, though it's not clear how exactly they are going to do that. It totally works in the kitchen - the orange is bright, but not overly so. The contrast with the hard-edged and glossy quartz with the softer, more organic concrete and Wenge cabinets is really exciting!

The view when you come in the front door:

A Wenge panel goes in underneath to complete the illusion that the bar flew in and landed, slicing through the island on the way down.

Today they installed many of the appliances - the Bosch french-door fridge, the Miele dishwasher (we saved it from before - great appliance):

...and the Miele electric (cookie) oven under the island.

Here's the BlueStar 36" range - we are having the kitchen place we bought it from install that tomorrow since it's got some tricky bits with it.

The Viking hood is also in, but it still needs the duct cover over the top. Oh, and it's hard to tell, but there's a stainless backsplash under that white protective covering as well -

The faucets are also in, and working (yeah, water!). These are the nifty, articulated Kohler Karbon ones - everyone likes them as they are sort of functional sculpture:

The electrician is also starting to trim out the electrical holes

here's a typical MR16 recessed ceiling can (we've got lots of these):

The trim carpenters were back and glued down the stair treads today. They look really awesome - there's some really careful joinerey there:

They still have to finish the vertical edges of the treads, and the landing, and the platform, but they are getting there.

The cabinet guys were back once again to install most of the cabinet faces. Here's the largest, built-in Wenge dresser in the Master Bedroom (ignore the blemishes, there was schmutz on my camera lens).

And the master bathroom cabinets look *fantastic* too - we really struggled with the choice of bamboo for that, but are REALLY happy with the way it came out, particularly with the concrete sinks:

They are still remaking the backsplashes to fix their mistake. Concrete doesn't stretch very well.

The shower fittings are in, and the toilet (a dual-flush Toto) works!

Outside the downspouts got installed, removed, then installed again:

It's starting to look _almost_ finished. The outside still needs some lights, and the balcony railing, and a new Ipe deck landing at the NanaWall.

OK, that POPS

noreply@blogger.com (contraption) — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 05:31:00 +0000

It looks like today was Popping Color Day a the house. Our Tequila Sunrise bartop installation started. They've got at least 1 more day at it. The good news is that the top is safely installed and glued down, so they can't drop it anymore.

They had to hoist this thing on and off at least 3 times that I saw in order to scribe and then grind it to fit precisely:

The grinding process was noisy and dusty, so they did the worst of it outside.

And here it is with the outer leg getting epoxied into place. They still have the right leg to go tomorrow:

So, that was the extreme color pop for the kitchen. Thankfully it is not "day glo" orange - that's one of the big reasons we wanted this particular Quartz - the other alternatives are painfully bright and don't have the depth that this flavor has. There are tiny brown specks in the surface which makes it a nice complement to the tops, cabinet, and floor. It's a brave choice, but not completely insane. It looks pretty awesome - just what we had hoped.

Down the hall a ways we got the second color pop of the day - the painters came by for a short time to get the first coat on the laundry room. Ow, my eyes!

Cathy is thrilled with it! It does look cool, but wow, THAT pops. Have I mentioned that we have a really nice pocket door on the laundry room?

Counters In, Stucco Done

noreply@blogger.com (contraption) — Sat, 30 May 2009 07:06:00 +0000

The countertops went in according to schedule. The kitchen was uneventful, but the master bathroom vanity put up resistance.

Here's the Concreteworks delivery truck - all the tops are stood up on their strongest edges and clamped to the walls for transport:

Here's the CW crew heaving one of the sections into place:

The island is in two sections, one quite large, the other (far end) average size. The head installer said that the island came out really well - apparently large sections can warp quite a bit when they are curing. Apparently ours is flatter than usual, which makes the seam line up better and create less installation hassle.

Here is the entire kitchen - it looks really great. The "rice hull aggregate" goes beautifully with the Wenge cabinets and bamboo floors and gives the countertop a nice organic look.

The vanity with the custom sinks turned out to be a bit of an installation headache. We knew we were cutting some clearances pretty tight with the sinks fitting into the cabinets, so inevitably there was some cutting and grinding to get it to fit. It's none worse for the wear and looks awesome. There was a mixup on the backsplash - the sections weren't long enough so they are remaking them. Not a big deal since they aren't holding anything up.

The stucco guys finished the last of the exterior and finally took down the staging that's been up for about 2 months. We are very happy with the stucco - it's got the hard-edged modern look and the color is a perfect complement to the Cedar siding. We are getting tons of compliments on the house from neighbors and passers-by. I also heard that some unknown architect stopped by one day and was gushing about the design and material choices.

The last of the stucco:

Driveway side:

The painters are still at it. We've tweaked a few colors along the way. The exercise room was orange, but it was going on pretty dark. We lightened it a bit and love the new color (jack-o-lantern):

And here you can see the view from the exercise room into the master bedroom. Our bed will go in front of that brown wall, directly under that window:

Countertop Signoff

noreply@blogger.com (contraption) — Wed, 27 May 2009 01:29:00 +0000

Field trip day! Drew, Fred, Cathy, and I drove up to Concreteworks this morning to check out our kitchen and bathroom countertops. Drew has taken to doing this in order to catch major mistakes (worst case) and to find minor touchups (best case) before the tops are delivered to the jobsite.

Fortunately for us, it was the latter - the tops look freakin' awesome - they came out great. There were just a few minor rough edges to polish before they are delivered (drum roll...) TOMORROW!

Here are some of the many pieces of the kitchen countertop puzzle:

Note that they sectioned it through the sink in order to make it more transportable and reduce the risk of busting it. There's a separate section that goes in front of sink to finish it.

Here's the espresso bar area, with the small bar sink:

And here are Drew, Fred, Cathy, and Alexis discussing the finer points of concrete casting. Alexis is one of the owners and head designers of Concreteworks - she seemed really cool and was clearly happy with the way the tops turned out.

Closeup of the "Rice Hull" concrete in the kitchen - it looks really great - a very unique, rich, interesting surface:

And here is the master bath dual sink vanity top with the sloped, slot-drain sinks:

These are made from white concrete with some small flecks and mica:

And here's a gratuituous shot of a cool silica sand formation out in the back of the Concreteworks shop:

Speaking of concrete, the stucco crew was back again today working on the front and north side of the house. I think they are down to the two second-floor rake walls, so they should be done tomorrow.

Mud:

Fresh front walls, more stucco mix delivery:

The crew seems really conscientious, and it shows - the finish is really nice. It has a good amount of "hard troweling" detail that gives it a nice visual texture - much nicer than if it were all just plain and uniform all over.

So, tomorrow should be a big day with the start of the countertop installation.

The painters are still at it inside as well.

Believe it or not (we are having trouble), the appliances are supposed to be delivered on June 1 - like 1 week away. That's the start of the final trim-out of the electrical and plumbing...yikes.

Doorhenge, Minty Green

noreply@blogger.com (contraption) — Sun, 24 May 2009 02:45:00 +0000

The painters are working like mad and making good progress. We finalized all of our colors (well, nearly). So they are underway. The inside of the house looks like a haunted house, with all the plastic sheeting, tarps, and rosin paper everywhere:

They created an ephemeral spray booth out of the living room for painting all the first-floor doors - pretty brilliant:

Here's our "doorhenge" after the plastic came down:

Second floor doors were painted in the master bedroom:

The masking on the left door is over frosted glass. That's the door for the master bedroom, at the top of the stairs.

They also have a first coat on Lizzie's & Rebecca's rooms, as well as in the two downstairs bathrooms. Lizzie's room is a really nice "minty green" - it gives the effect of standing inside of a bowl of mint ice cream. Cathy offered to paint chocolate chips on the walls, but Lizzie declined.

The hall bath got the Pacific Reflections Caesarstone vanity top. Did I mention that color was discontinued too? Thankfully that piece didn't meet the same fate as the orange...

Speaking of that, we heard that they DID manage to locate a good slab of Tequila Sunrise to replace the smashed bits. So, we are back with Plan A for the kitchen bar top. Whoohoo!

The stucco guys were back on Friday and did the South and East walls on the first floor. They look great. Cathy is overjoyed with the finish and color. They should finish up the rest next week.

The front yard got cleaned up quite a bit, with a bit of rough grading:

And the porch is drying nicely:

So, we are about 6 weeks away, theoretically, from move-in. There is a list 5 miles long of all the things that need to get done and in the right order. Fred is on top of it, but it looks like it will be a crazy finish.

Final inspection should be the first week of July, the official completion date is July 10th. It was originally June 15th, but we lost about 1 month due to rain and the holidays. DMC told us July 10th back in January and it looks like they will hit it, unless something unexpected happens. There are still a few major things to happen, like the stair tread installation, stair railing, and balcony railing. Lots can still go wrong, but we are tracking the schedule pretty well.

The Teragren Bamboo plywood for the stairs and long landing finally arrived from Jupiter, or whereever it comes from:

So, we are starting to get serious about buying furniture. We are going to re-use a lot of what we have already, but need stuff for the living room and our bedroom mainly. We bought a bed last weekend (floor model deal at Jimyko in San Jose), and a new dining room table today (another smoking floor model deal at Design Within Reach (our favorite place to lose cash). Cathy found the DWR table on a Craigslist posting. We also bought some nice pendant lights for the kitchen bar from guy in SF. They are well-made and only cost us $12 each. Cathy's Craigs trolling has really paid off.

Here we are at a fantastic place called Limn in San Francisco - the place is very large, with a huge variety of stunning, creative, and shockingly expensive furniture. We didn't buy anything.

A very cool reading nook:

A light Cathy really likes:

A REALLY awesome, really comfortable lounge chair (Lofty from MDF Italia) that is cantilevered off a single point on the base.

Cathy had to drag me away. If the company name has the word "Italia" in it, hold onto your wallet and step away.

I think this was Rebecca's favorite piece:

And here was another mind-blowing, yet totally impractical, table. There are actually 6 "real" legs in there, and all the others can be pushed out of the way so you can get your legs under it. Sorta. But wow, it was stunning. We didn't bother asking the price.

Oh, and we had a pool party last week (temps were in the 90's), so here's a picture of the house from the backyard, but without the pool fence. It's looking awesome!

Deck Day

noreply@blogger.com (contraption) — Thu, 14 May 2009 06:38:00 +0000

We had two "deck" projects going on today - the front porch and the back deck landing.

The concrete crew was here first thing this morning to pour the porch, as well as the last two foundation piers under the house.

Concrete pump in the street:

Liquid Porch®:

Hard troweling:

The finished porch - looking nice!

Score lines:

We will eventually have the porch sandblasted to give it some grip and visual texture, but this will do for now.

And toward the back, Celestino is building the temporary landing at the rear NanaWall. This needs to be in place in order to get our Final Inspection. We'll eventually replace it with a proper Ipe version when we get to it, but we don't want to risk slowing anything down.