21 April 2013
Setting my record for the most delayed update ever, I finally have time to bash out some notes on our move in.
Nothing to do with moving in to the house, but I went down to the INS office in Tukwila to get my green card renewed. As it turns out, I can stay in the US without a valid green card, but the moment I leave the country they won't let me back in again. Fortunately the renewal process is less problematic than getting it in the first place. Everything went smoothly, I was photographed and fingerprinted, got a sticker on my existing green card that extends it until December, and should be getting the new one in the mail soon.
This was the day for Comcast to install our phone, internet and TV service. This being the Century of the Fruitbat, internet is of course the most important of these three, as seen in an updated version of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs.
This was the official day for handing the house over to us. The house had its final clean in the morning (which meant for the first time in quite a while it wasn't covered in a layer of sawdust) and so, for a few brief minutes, we had an absolutely pristine house. When I say "a few brief minutes", that is exactly what I mean. About 15 minutes after the cleaners left our niece and nephew (Carlie and Jax) arrived with their father (Stewart) in tow. Jax, being 5 years old, did exactly what his 5 year old nature obliged him to do and found some nice freshly polished panes of glass in the doors to Laura's office, and wiped his grubby paws all over them.
So, here are a few pictures of the house, looking as neat as it is ever going to.
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Saturday afternoon was spent moving fragile and difficult to pack items from the apartment to the house - many thanks to Marni, Ann, Beth, Mark, Andrew, Stuart, Carlie and Jax for helping us get everything delicate into place.
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Finally (it was a busy day) we had our window treatments fitted. It is possible that I might have seemed a little sceptical in the past when it came to window treatments, but I have seen the error of my ways. I have been converted, I am now a believer, I have seen the light (except in the master bedroom where we went for the opaque option which gives us almost total blackout without affecting the essential jasmine wispyness [or perhaps that should be wispy jasmineness] of the fabric itself).
We do not have anything as common as blinds, oh no, our windows have been treated like they went to a spa, and don't you forget it.
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Relatively speaking, this was a quiet day. We made one trip over to the house with a few odds and ends, but spent most of the day preparing for the big move.
Thanks to Adam's Moving, with 5 men, 2 vans and 7 hours we got everything moved from the apartment into the house. Getting the couch into Bob's office was the trickiest operation of the day, even the piano was easier. Debbie brought us over food in the evening for which we were incredibly grateful. We got the bed set up and spent the first night in our new house.
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The most important residents of the house moved in. Laura went over to Animal Talk, an animal rescue shelter on Roosevelt, and came back with two three month old kittens. The lighter one is Bella (short for Bellatrix Lestrange), the darker one is Sadie (short for Satanic Sadie), and they are everything you could hope for from kittens - playful, adventurous, affectionate (to each other as well as to us) and thoroughly at home in the new house. They're cute in the pictures, they are ten times cute in real life. In fact, it occurs to me that once I've finished making house updates on this blog I could probably just post pictures of the kittens. Cat pictures on the internet, it seems like such an obvious idea, I wonder why nobody's thought of doing it before...
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That's most of the moving news. Since then we've been unpacking boxes; hosted Easter for Stuart, Mitzi, Jax and Carlie; had our first guests in the guest room and our first dinner guests; got most of the house set up how we want and been working through the final items on the builder's punch list. The new fence between us and our neighbours is going up next week, the weather is improving so we might get the outside painted and the final built ins in Laura's office should be done soon.
More updates to follow, just don't hold your breath.
31 March 2013
This deserves a full update but things are still hectic round here so I've just thrown up a bunch of pictures and I'll link to their galleries.
17 March 2013
You can tell we're getting near the end because the protective coatings are coming off things like the floor and the windows. Most of the floor is now visible, it will get its final sanding and finish next week, and we can actually see out of the windows. Since the hardware for the windows also got fitted we can even open them.
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You will notice some protection in the pictures, this is mostly for the painting - the stairs are almost finished, and most of the interior walls and ceilings are done.
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All of the things that had been bought, but not fitted, in order to protect them are now
coming into place - the plumbing fixtures, window hardware, deck door hardware and the applicances.
On the subject of the appliances, it turned out that our refridgerator was too big
to fit through any door in the house. For those non-Americans reading, this is because the
typical American fridge is roughly the size of the space shuttle. Fortunately by removing the
cargo bay fridge doors our builder was able to squeeze it through. This is
not the first time this has happened to my family. Many years ago my father built a large dustbin (trashcan)* as a
prop for a stage show. Upon completion he discovered that it was too big to fit through the
door of the room he had constructed it in. He therefore opted for the obvious solution of
removing a section of door frame from each side of the door, getting the dustbin out, then
replacing the missing bits of frame using polyfilla (spackle)* and paint to cover the gaps.
Building codes were less stringent in those days.
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Other details include the final fans (which we like a lot) and a pane of glass in the master bathroom that stops the shower from splashing water onto the landing,
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As you might expect, our apartment is currently in even more chaos than usual as we try to get everything into boxes (we appear to have acquired an alarming amount of stuff since we moved in) and get everything in place for the move. We have a group of friends coming next weekend to help us with the fragile and difficult to pack stuff, then the movers come a couple of days later. If anyone is thinking that we could do the move ourselves with a few friends I would like to point out that the move to the apartment took 2 large vans, 9 very fit men and about 5 hours. We have thoroughly exceeded the limit for a few friends and a U-Haul to get the job done.
The "who's going to be our first overnight guest" competition is warming up. It looked as though Nancy (Laura's mom[mum]*) was going to be first - she's coming to visit in mid April - but a friend of ours from Portland might make it up before then. Are you going to let someone beat you Nancy? The honour (honor)* of Indiana is at stake.
To cap it all I have an appointment this week with the immigration service to get my green card renewed. I hope this is just a formality. If it isn't my stay in our new house could be shorter than expected.
The following galleries have the complete set of pictures for this entry (it's taken me 9 months to work out that this is the obvious way to make it clear where the new pictures are. Luckily my job doesn't involve me having to do clever things with complicated computer based systems otherwise I'd be in a lot of trouble):
* Simultaneous English / American translation services provided by me. If anyone thinks they're not necessary, give me a bell (call me on the telephone)** and I'll insult you in the language you don't speak.
** See what I mean?
13 March 2013
Less than two weeks to go, so everything that we've been putting off has to happen now. A couple of galleries that haven't had many updates get some love this time around - the electrical and networking galleries now have new pictures.
Most of the lights have now been installed - finally we don't have to spend our Saturdays looking round lighting showrooms, or alternatively taking back the lights we bought the previous Saturday because they didn't look as good in our house as they did in the catalogue or showroom. We have the final fittings for the can lights in place and some of the lights inside the closets.
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One of the ceiling fans has been fitted (the others didn't arrive in time) and we have exhaust fans in the bathrooms, laundry room and cat room. We have electrical sockets on the front porch and back deck, and sockets fitted in the deck roof front and back so that if we ever want to festoon our house in Christmas lights we'll have an easy way to plug them in.
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The thermostats have now moved to the correct place in the house (they were jury-rigged to the heating system in the cat room before) and the smoke alarms are in place.
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On the networking side of things we have a structured wiring cabinet under the stairs with cables that carry TV, network and telephone signals to a number of rooms.
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Installation of the butcher block in the kitchen is finished and it looks great. Behind the scenes (so no pictures yet), work on the plumbing has continued which will allow all of the fixtures we so carefully picked out months ago to be installed.
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The built in bookcases around the entrance to Laura's office are now in place, as is the cabinet in the master bathroom. The hardware for the sliding doors has also been fitted - almost every door in the house now works as intended.
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6 March 2013
The house will be available for us to move in starting on Saturday 23rd March. Our plan is to spend the weekend moving some of the fragile items ourselves, then we have the movers booked for the 25th to do the heavy lifting. There will still be a little work outstanding, there's some outside painting and concrete work that has to wait for warmer and drier weather, and there will be a few details to finish inside but we are getting very close to the end of the project.
The butcher block has been installed on the kitchen counters. The main counter has two pieces of the block glued together which you can see clamped in the pictures. Most of the interior door knobs are now in place, the stairs have some railings and hand rails installed, and, as always, the painting and trim looks better and better.
More pictures in the kitchen, stairs and interior detail galleries.
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24 February 2013
Things are moving steadily along. Most of the major construction work has been done, now we're onto the last thousand or so details - getting the proper finish on things, fitting the last of the cabinets, installing lights and fans etc. One thing you'll notice from the pictures is that the delicate details get added, then immediately covered over to protect them from all the other work that's going on, so for a couple of pictures we lifted off a protective layer to get the photo, then put it back so that the floor / counter top / whatever doesn't get damaged.
We now have the correct counter tops in the master bathroom and on one side of the kitchen. This also means that we have the sinks installed in both places. The butcher block for the other side of the kitchen has arrived and is sitting in its packaging waiting to be installed. Take a look at the kitchen gallery and bathroom gallery for the full set of pictures.
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Painting the rooms, trim, and outside of the house is continuing. You might notice that some colours have changed, and that the range of colours on the outside of the house has increased. As I might have mentioned previously, the number of colours and the ridiculous names associated with those colours is effectively infinite, and I have a horrible feeling that we are going to try every single one of them on the outside before we find something that we like (and when we do find one we like it'll have a name like "zig zaggy zoodlepants"). We've gone for a mexican chocolate in the den to give a warm and cozy feel. As you'd expect, there are plenty of pictures with paint samples on in the interior detail gallery and the outside gallery.
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Laura and Anne (our colour consultant) have a large spreadsheet with all of the colour details on, so if you want to know the exact choices please ask Laura (I mean it, ask Laura, not me because my interest in colours was limited at the beginning of this project and has now decreased into negative territory. Did you know that the number of different colours available in a Crayola colouring box doubles every 28 years? It's true. There is a web page here that documents the increasing size of Crayola boxes since their introduction in 1903. It won't be long before it'll take a fork lift to get a box of crayons home. Sometimes I long for those simple days a century ago when the world was in black and white, although I bet if you let some of these modern colour people loose they'd still be coming up with silly names ("raven", "smoke", "black cat in a coal cellar")).
Short pause while Laura makes Bob take his meds.
Did you know that jokes about people who haven't taken their meds are much funnier when they're not about you?
The stair treads have now changed from being whatever odd pieces of wood we had lying around nailed onto the framework to have the proper oak treads that match the rest of the house. They were then immediately covered up, but we did get one picture of them. The posts for attaching the handrails to are now in place and we've been experimenting with the positioning of the handrails and the brackets that they're attached to. Having handrails that are not properly attached is vastly more dangerous than not having handrails at all - fortunately nobody was injured in discovering that fact. The stairs gallery has all of the pictures.
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The back deck is finished, and the front porch is almost finished. We decided to do them in ipê (pronounced ee-pay), a neotropical hardwood that is extremely long lasting. At the back of the house there's a concrete step, then a wood step to reach the deck, at the front there's just the single concrete step.
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After many, many trips to hardware centres, and much visiting of websites we finally picked the cabinet and drawer pulls from the million options available (and if you think I'm joking about that number you should check out some of the home improvement websites). They are simple, elegant and I think you'll be amused by their presumption.
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The stain has now been added to the sunroom floor. The floor itself is concrete which has some natural surface variation which the stain allows to show through. Since the floor also has radiant heat tubes buried in it that space should be warm and cozy all year round. The colour is called "padre brown", and my interest in colours has gone so low that I can't even be bothered to joke about it. The somewhat neglected floor gallery has all of the pictures.
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Yesterday Laura and I picked up what we believe to be the last of the lights. The electrician is coming on Wednesday to fit everything so not much in the way of pictures right now but there should be a bumper batch next time.
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And finally, the most important detail in the house. The cat doors have been installed. If you looked over the plans in detail (and I assume that all of you have) you will notice that the room right next to the kitchen is referred to as the cat room. There is one cat door between the pantry and the cat room, and another door from the cat room to the outside. The doors work on different mechanisms (one is controlled by magnets, the other by an RFID tag) so we can choose whether to allow any particular cat into just the cat room or into the house proper. As an added bonus, due to the slope on our site and where we have the floor level inside, the outside cat door is actually about 2 feet off the ground on the exterior. Our cats are going to need to learn to do some serious gymnastics if they want to be warm and fed. I can imagine the video on YouTube now - "Fluffy's warming up for her signature move, she's running, the takeoff is good, a double pike with two twists and .... ohhh .... she missed the landing and splatted against the side of the wall. That'll cost her with the judges".
P.S. Laura has just informed me that (a) we will have a ramp up to the cat door on the outside and (b) she's increasing my meds.
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10 February 2013
Lots of work on the cabinets this week. The pantry cabinets are now fitted and look wonderful.
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The kitchen is being filled in. Most of the lower cabinets have doors on them, the upper cabinets are in place and there's one shot of a small sample of the butcher block that's going onto the peninsula. See the full set of pictures in the kitchen gallery.
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We now have our first fully painted room - Bob's study has three walls painted with a nice blue while the fourth wall (opposite the windows) is a more neutral cream.
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We've picked out the door knobs for the interior doors - a passage knobset in molten bronze with an oil rubbed bronze finish, a square rosette (I know it's really rectangular but they call it square) and an egg style knob. I am a little depressed that I know what all of those terms mean. I am also a little depressed that I spent yesterday morning discussing window treatments. As my friend Evan remarked, "there is nothing macho about window treatments". Our "window treatments" (blinds to the rest of us) will be honeycomb shades in "Jasmine Wisp" (see my previous post on the subject of paint colours - exactly the same rant can be applied to blind colours) with top down bottom up functionality, a mixture of corded and cordless from the Kathy Ireland collection. Again, I know what all of these terms mean.
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27 January 2013
The floors are in, almost completely throughout the house (the stairs still need finishing), they're sanded, finished and were then immediately covered up for protection, but there are still a few open areas so we can show you what they look like. See the floors gallery for all of the pictures.
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Most of the interior doors are in place, including closet doors and the giant 5' wide sliding door that separates the den from the entry way. The complete set of pictures is in the interior detail gallery.
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The cabinets have been delivered and are in the process of being installed. Since most of them are intended for the kitchen I've set up a new kitchen gallery for them. You'll also see a couple of pictures showing the base of the tall cabinets to be installed in the pantry.
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You'll also notice that many of the interior pictures, and a few of the outside pictures have various paint samples on them. We now have the unenviable task of choosing between them, trying to decide if "concord ivory" and "rendezvous bay" will set the mood we want better than "leap of faith" or "french horn", or whether "mallard green" (not, as I originally thought made from real mallards) will be more relaxing than "royal flush", or "your majesty". (All paint colour names real. Seriously. I couldn't make up names as ridiculous as these if I tried. Which means that there is someone out there with much more imagination than I have, or alternatively smoking something even stronger than the marijuana that is now legal in Washington state [although not if the feds catch you with it], whose job, whose livelihood, whose mortgage payment and food on the plates of their children depends on them coming up with names like this. I notice that while they have a colour called "french horn", they don't have any named after accordions. Somebody thinks that "mighty aphrodite" is a better paint colour name than "accordion bellows gray", or "slightly out of tune puce". When I rule the world ...)
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And finally, as a reward for getting past that last paragraph, here's a picture of Laura testing out the sunroom.
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9 January 2013
The floors have been laid out through almost the entire house now, and will be fixed into place in a couple of weeks time once they've done all of the changes in size and shape that they're going to. The concrete for the retaining wall has been poured, and trim is being added to more and more of the house.
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7 January 2013
This update has been waiting for me to sort out all of the pictures. It's really only of interest to construction geeks, but we know there are several of you out there. Last October, after the electrical and plumbing rough in, but before the dry wall had been installed, we went round and photographed the inside of every wall with a tape measure for scale so that in theory, we can work out where everything is buried in the walls. The pictures are all linked from here.
5 January 2013
The biggest change is one that you can't see from the pictures. We now have heat in the house, it's warm. Not just warm, a week ago our builder was trying to dry everything out and had things turned up to what felt like 90°F. As an added bonus it appears as though the heater and tank were designed by Rube Goldberg (Heath Robinson for our British readers).
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For the first time in many months there are some new pictures in the floor gallery. The concrete has been poured in the sunroom and the wooden floor is being laid without being fastened into place so that it has time to acclimate (another reason for getting the heat working).
Some of you may remember that we were very proud of the floor we had chosen - a woven stranded poplar that would have given us extremely interesting patterns. The people who wanted to sell it to us assured us that it would work over radiant heat. Our floor installer was not convinced, and the warranty on the floor had so many exceptions that he wasn't prepared to warranty the installation. We went back to the people trying to sell us the poplar and asked for examples of places where the poplar had been installed successfully over radiant heat. They went very quiet. So, with a little disappointment, we switched to a rift and quartersawn red oak which our installer has used over radiant heat without problem. A couple of pictures have a small section of the floor made up and finished with different finishes. We haven't decided exactly what finish we're going with yet, that's part of a much bigger "colour" discussion.
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We've had a few new doors installed as well. The front door is now in place, although with protective cardboard taped over it to stop it getting banged up by construction. The sliding doors on Laura's office have been fitted and the window company finally came through with the correct sliders for the dining room.
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Also, as you're browsing through the interior detail folder you should look out for some examples of trim around the windows, ceiling and columns. We're still working on the exact details and colours, but we're getting closer to what we want.
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The bathrooms now have their own gallery. Several of the fittings from the old bathroom have been placed into the new downstairs bathroom, much of the tiling has been done and the bath has been fitted into the upstairs bathroom. Also, we finally have the filler spout for the upstairs tub. For a company that is supposed to make and sell bathroom fittings, Grohe have really taken their time coming up with this one (it's been on order since September).
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And finally, the concrete has been poured for the step at the front of the house and the step up to the back deck. In addition, the forms are in place for concrete to be poured to make a small retaining wall on the north side of the house. That will stop the soil all washing down onto the side of the house and make gardening up there easier.
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1 December 2012
Well, not all about looks, but we're doing more on the details that give the house its character. More siding is up on the outside of the house, and a few trim details have been added - for example under the master bathroom windows on the front of the house.
We have the heater and tank for the radiant heat system which should go in next week. At that point the house will be warm and dry. The recent rains in Seattle gave the roof a good test, and aside from a small fix required to the flashing on one of the vents it came through with flying colours (which is better than our apartment did).
Inside the house the drywall has been finished and primed. The rooms really look like rooms now, and the arches look absolutely terrific. I've added a lot of pictures to the interior detail page.
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10 November 2012
It's a bumper set of pictures this time. The inside of the house continues with insulation and dry wall being added. We have a front door, although it hasn't been fitted yet (we have a piece of plywood nailed over the door opening which we have to remove, then renail into place when we leave). The sliding doors for the sunroom are now in place (the sliding doors for the dining room are being re-ordered because the window company sent us the wrong ones the first time round).
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We now have the outside trim on some of the windows, and the interior details are taking shape with more of our signature arches being put into place (that arch also goes over the front porch). Installation of the siding started this week as well.
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I've added a new album of pictures of the outside of the house, most of which appear in other albums, but it's nice to have a whole batch in one place.
We're getting into the nitty gritty of interior fixtures and finishes. We've spent several weekends looking at lights, had many discussions about kitchen countertops, and the conversation about the right colour to paint the trim will probably go on long after the house has finished.
14 October 2012
This has been a big week - lots of things that have been in the planning for months came together. The windows arrived on schedule and are being installed. They made one mistake with one of the big patio doors - fortunately we were able to confirm that we'd ordered the right thing so it's the window company's problem to fix it. We're pleased with the look and colour of them, inside and out.
The roof now has its full complement of shingles - between that, the windows and the Tyvek wrap that you'll see in the pictures the house is now ready for the Seattle rains, which just started this week. We were fortunate over the summer to have a long dry period for the outside construction, now it can rain as we move inside. The skylights on the sunroom are fully installed, and we have the solar tube that's going to be used for the skylights over the stairs.
Most of the pipes for the radiant heat have been installed - they're the white pipes laid in regular patterns under the joists. The pipes all end up coming back to the cat room where they'll be connected to the water heater and pump.
As well as a wireless network we're also running wired connections to a few points in the house. Each of the blue cables contains two coax cables for TV signals, and two cat5 ethernet cables. All of them come together in the space under the stairs which I am grandly naming the Network Distribution Centre.
The lights now light. At least some of them do - several banks of lights have been hooked up to the power which is handy since enough of the house is in place that it gets dark inside, and the days are getting shorter.
4 October 2012
We spent two hours on Monday morning going through the house with our electrican to determine the position of every light, switch, socket and network connection (and there still won't be a socket in the exact place we need it - we can count on that) and the rough in for the electrical systems and lights have has now started. The plumbing rough in is now finished and the box for the bath has been framed. The bath itself and the rest of the plumbing fixtures have been ordered (another set of decisions down, only about a million more left to go).
The front porch and back deck have been started, and most of the interior framing is complete, in particular the framing for the closets and several of the sliding doors is now in place. We decided on using a shallow arch as our motif and our first example of it is now in between the entryway and the main hallway through the house.
The roof shingles are currently sitting on the top of the house, the skylights have just been delivered, we have a couple of miles of tubing for the radiant heat system sitting in boxes in the sunroom and we've picked out a front door. Finally, the windows will arrive next Wednesday - the 10th. The discussions, visits to showrooms, changes of mind and swearing that went on when we were choosing the windows is something we don't want to go through again so we're really looking forward to seeing the windows in place.
16 September 2012
The stairs are now in place - at least the skeleton of them so we can get upstairs without needing the ladder. The framing is in place upstairs so we can see the outline of the rooms, there are new pictures on the upper floor page. And finally, the plumbing has started to be installed.
8 September 2012
The roof now has its plywood sheathing, and they've started to put the felt on it. The dormers are now in place so we're really getting the shape of the house - it's quite a bit bigger than the old one (which of course was the intention). We have samples of the different colour roof shingles to choose from as well.
The pictures of the upper floor are limited because I haven't been up the ladder with the camera yet (I haven't managed to be there with the camera when the ladder is in place). You can see the plywood flooring on the upper floor from below in a couple of the pictures though.
We decided to take out the kitchen door. Having seen and felt the way the rooms and doors line up we realized that the kitchen door was using up valuable space for not very much function so we're removing the door and extending the kitchen cabinets a little.
Roof pictures here.
Upper floor pictures here.
25 August 2012
It's been a busy week on the house. The roof trusses were installed on Wednesday. Photos here and a couple of videos below. The trusses for the dormers have also been delivered and will be installed soon.
The ground floor framing is also in place, we can actually see the layout of the rooms now. Laura spent an hour on Friday standing in each of the rooms to really get a feel for the house.
19 August 2012
We thought we were happy with our overall house design, until this weekend when our 8 year old niece, Carlie, turned up with these pictures of what our house should look like.
As you'll see, she has taken our request for a 3rd floor swimming pool seriously (our architect just laughed at this suggestion). Her colour palette is bold and striking, she took the time to visualize the garden and her melding of contemporary design with Seussian aesthetics is outstanding.
We'll be handing the new plans to our architect and builder tomorrow - prepare for a very different look next time we update. We fully expect to win several awards for this house.
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15 August 2012
The framing has started which means we have walls. Some walls anyway. Check out the new framing gallery for all the pictures.
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12 August 2012
The floor joists are mostly in place now - some new joists, some reinforcement of the existing joists. We also have a large pile of lumber on the front lawn in preparation for the framing which should start next week.
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03 August 2012
If feels as though we have moved to the plus side of the column with the pouring of the foundation. We can visualize the sunroom and the bay window in Laura's office. Next week... the framing begins
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29 July 2012
Yes, it has been a long time since our last update. Things have been both very busy and frustratingly slow. We discovered that we weren't going to get a mortgage from the company we've been working with for four months (if there's one thing worse than not getting a mortgage it's not getting a mortgage after being strung along for four months). We've had delays with the demolition, our contractor has a new baby daughter (congratulations Peder!) and a garbage strike in Seattle has made it difficult for us to get the dumpster emptied.
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Finally though, we think we have all of our ducks in a row. We sign for a mortgage from a different company tomorrow, demolition is well under way (see the demolition pictures here), and we've made decisions about windows, flooring and bathroom fittings.
The demolition has the roof off and all of the internal walls taken out. There's a trench out back for the foundation for the new sun room, and we should be down to the foundations early next week.
2 July 2012
Finally we are officially started. It'll be a slow start - since we're saving the current bath, sink and toilet there's some small scale targeted demolition which needs to happen before the large scale destruction, but things are under way.
1 July 2012
Take a look at the right hand column for a link to the plans for the new house.
We've had to push the start date back a couple of weeks - there were just too many
things that needed to be sorted out so we're now planning on starting on 25th June
2nd July.
We're getting closer to the start of the remodel. We'll be moving out next week and with any luck (which mainly involves the mortgage coming through), we'll be starting work in the first half of June.
