Winter's Here

To celebrate Winter, Andreas installed the dampers in the fireplace, I replaced the broken stones with the replacements Wittus shipped to us, and I built a fire in our new Bodart & Gonay Optiplex Fireplace. It's a serious fireplace and it worked great!

Also, a special thanks to our neighbor, Jeff, who volunteered to help our neighbor/contractor Jeff Gunther with the deck railing construction. I came back from my shopping spree at IKEA (I bought a temporary vanity/sink for the basement bathroom) and Amicus Green Building Center (I picked up the floor tile for the master bath shower, the wheat board for the kitchen countertops, and a sealant for the wheat board) and found Jeff helping Jeff with our house construction. Wow!

As I was putting together the IKEA vanity, Jeff's wife Helen stopped by to visit. I proudly showed her the radiant floor system in the basement (which I still haven't photographed), the step lights, the new master bath tile, etc. It's fun to show off our accomplishments!

Snowy Sunday

We started the morning with a bit of a shopping spree at Home Depot, picking up some miscellaneous plumbing and electrical supplies so Tom and Bernie can be extremely productive tomorrow. We proceeded to the house, following behind people who clearly had no business driving in the snow. They didn't know how to do so safely, and for the public's sake, they should have stayed off the roads. It was good we went to the house last night to shovel a path to the house and clear the decks. That allowed us to start working productively as soon as we got to the house.

Since I hadn't been in the house for almost two weeks, I had to go around and inspect the work that had been done. I smiled all the way through. First, Jeff Gunther and his helper Andrew are doing an amazing job with the deck. I'm impressed with their work. Season's Services did a nice job touching up the EIFS they cut away in order for the ledger board to be attached to the house. Craig Smith's doing an excellent job with the interior trim carpentry, Marcelino's crew did a nice job finishing the basement bath tile and tiling the upstairs guest bath for me while I was in Pennsylvania with my family. And Andreas and Bernie did an amazing job installing the radiant floor system. It's really quite impressive -- I was in such awe that I forgot to snap some pictures of that. Tom clearly was productive installing lighting fixtures, plugs, etc. and Andreas attached all the face plates right behind Tom as he installed the plugs.

In addition to a number of small tasks, today we attached the two Duravit sinks on the walls - one in the guest bath and one in the master bath. The sinks look great to us - clean lines and minimalist design. The designer of this sink was Phillippe Starck. Before tiling the master shower, we wanted to ensure the Durock was sealed as much as possible, so we used a product called Kerdi, which is made by Schluter Systems. It's an orange colored waterproof membrane that is attached to the Durock using Thinset. Then Thinset's applied to the top of the Kerdi and the tiles are embedded in that Thinset. It's a great system and one that will ensure our shower stays dry for the long term. If you're installing a shower like ours, you might look into using the Schluter Kerdi System which includes a basin as well. Had we known about that product before Bartley poured our shower basin from concrete, we would have used the Schluter System instead. Schluter's a German company, so there's an umlaut over the u, but I don't know how to type that in blogspot.

I hope you enjoy these photos.

Deck the Halls

I'm back from Montreal and spent the day working on the house. Evidently, I brought the snow with me. One of my priorities was to inspect the work that Jeff Gunther is doing as he constructs the deck. All I can say is, "wow!" So far, it appears that he's doing a very good job with this, as you can see in the pictures.

We had ordered the finish trim wood so Craig can start next week with the trim carpentry. TW Perry's crew dropped the wood in two stages - the first batch, Jeff carried in for us since Andreas and I both were out of town for work. The second batch they dropped in our neighbor's front yard. Fortunately, it was wrapped in plastic, so the wood didn't get damaged with today's rain and snow, but I felt badly that our neighbors had to have a stack of wood on their front lawn for a day until I could get to the house to carry it inside. Walking through the snowy mud wasn't fun, but the wood needed to be moved inside so it can start to acclimate with the house's temperature and humidity level.

In addition to the deck and the wood delivery, a number of other things happened last week. Bernie the plumber came to bring the rainwater capture fresh water line into the house, but realized when he got there that he was missing an attachment to a tool, so he couldn't drill through the foundation. So he moved on to another project - installing the hot water heater. And we uncovered another problem. Aaron Holmes told us this summer that the radon vent was going to be in the utility closet off the basement bedroom, and he had Bernie set PVC piping for the gas hot water heater vent. As Bernie looked at setting up the hot water heater, it occurred to him that it needed to be vented. Andreas reminded him that he already set the PVC piping for the vent. Nope - what's there is the radon venting. Another unbudgeted item - drilling through the foundation for the hot water heater vent.

So after speaking with the City inspector and learning the details of where the natural gas hot water heater vent pipe can go, Andreas arranged for Bob DeMarr's crew to come out to drill a hole near the hot water heater and another in the utility closet for the rainwater line. Andreas made a point to emphasize the importance of cleaning up after they drill the hole, so the crew did an okay job sweeping up the concrete and removing the concrete core, but they totally messed up our finished basement floors trekking gobs of mud throughout the entire basement. It took a long time today to clean up after them, and I'm still not done.

I checked some small items off the to-do list, but I didn't get as many done as I wanted to. Tomorrow's another day and I hope it'll be more productive.