House update; Merry Chrismas!

We found some slate we really like. It is 16" X 16", from India. See above. It is called "Copper", and has a lot of interesting colors and textures. It is honed so it is fairly smooth, but not polished so it won't be slippery when it's wet. The stone looks like it is rippled but that is just the texture of the material. It should go very well with the Ipe flooring we will put on the main level. We're planning on using the slate for the foyer and running it up to the powder bath and into the kitchen. We got a pretty good deal on the stuff, too, since the store was closing it out.
Here's a photo showing the front of the house, with the "scratch coat" applied for the rock work. The forms for the front porch are also being installed.

We call this photo the "funky patio" shot. We got a call from our contractor who wanted us to come take a look at the patio before it was poured. A good thing, because we didn't like what we saw. The steps occupy a large portion of the patio and look pretty clunky, too. We got with the sub who was laying it out & decided to extend the patio 2' further back and widen it toward the window well (on the left side of the patio, as you face the back of the house). We also will shrink the size of the steps to the minimum needed for code. As we understand it, the steps come in two flavors: with and without a hand rail. If we go with a hand rail, we can shrink the depth of the steps by a substantial amount, so that's what we will do. We also want the patio raised as much as possible, to bring the patio closer "up" to the main level. There are limits there: the foundation sill is just a little above the lowest row of clapboards. So we'll do what we can.

Dry wall!!! This photo shows the family room/nook area, from the stairs. One of the drywallers is taking a break.

Drywall up in the upstairs rec room!

With the dry wall going in, the visual size of the rooms has shrunk quite a bit. Now the upstairs bedrooms feel a lot smaller (but adequate: we don't want guests TOO comfortable, eh?).

One issue with the insulation job has come up. We're not happy with what was installed between the storage room upstairs and the rest of the house. The storage room is unheated (altho insulated on the exterior walls). So we're concerned about heat loss through the shared walls. The original plan did not call for insulation OR sheet rock in the storage room so we figured that the shared wall would have the "good stuff" installed, i.e., blown-in; but that didn't happen. We didn't get a price break for the batt insulation so we think the job was not done as specified. Well, we will work it out -- I'd be very surprised if there weren't a few glitches during the building process.

House Siding, Rosco

Here's a wide angle shot of the front. All the siding is up; the bare wood on the left side will be covered by rock. More on that later...
Another photo showing more details in the front. We have several elements going on here: lap siding with a 5" reveal, with board & batten in the middle and shingles under the eaves. Each transition is highlighted by a belly band. Kinda busy but it should look very nice once it's painted. The colors you see here are just the primed surfaces. I found an interesting program, available off the Miller Paint web site, which claims to be a tool that allows you to re-color a photo of your house, so you can preview the paint design before putting paint on wood (or Hardy Plank in this case).

We have a little story about Miller Paint, too. It turns out that the videographer who went with our choir to Cuba belongs to the Miller family. He does (or did) work for OPB, so about 1 year after the Cuba trip we were out at a tree farm while Caprial and John were filming a segment about Oregon Truffles, and there he was, helping out with the filming of that. It's a small world. Anyway, back to the siding....


A shot showing the shed roof.


A shot of the east side of the house (the garage side).

The rear of the house.

Not a house shot, unless you count the newspaper as a kind of kitty dwelling. This is Rosco having some play time with a newspaper. He likes to lurk underneath it and ambush our Siamese as she goes by. Of course, she knows he is there but just cannot resist the opportunity to harass the big guy. Unfortunately, Rosco has a heart problem which will probably do him in, despite the meds we're giving him. Typically, once the symptoms become obvious they only have a few years left. He's the only cat we have who remembers our old Siamese (Dancer) so it will be doubly sad when he goes. They don't last forever, though, so we will just enjoy what time he has left.

Siding begins!

Recently things have seemed to be going slowly, but that's mostly because most of the action has been on the interior. But the siding portion of the job has begun, and that will make a huge difference in the appearance of the house.

This first shot shows the trim going in around the Nook windows.

The clap board siding, which will be installed at the first floor level.


This is a photo of one of the windows next to the living room fireplace, and also shows the bump-out that will contain the gas fireplace. The background shows the chimney for the upstairs Rec room fireplace.

The Den windows, next to the front door.

This shows one of the hose bibbs on the back of the house, an outside power outlet, and a little bit of the door that opens to the Master Bath. The hose bibb is a convenient hangar for the caulking gun...

Visits to Central Oregon

First, apologies for the funny order of the photos. This blog S/W is not very friendly when it comes to inserting images: it stuffs them all at the top of the blog entry, in reverse order. You get what you pay for, eh?

Introduction

Lisa and I have been visiting the central Oregon region for many years now and still find new and interesting places to explore. We have found seams of fossilized river-willow leaves sandwiched between lava flows in the upper Rogue valley, Matsutake mushrooms (along with Boletes and yellow and white Chanterelles), incredible obsidian spires brooding over valleys that were not created by water but by flowing lava, and thereon a canyon complex that may hold the remains of a small boy lost in Crater Lake. Obsidian-paved parking lots, lightning-scarred peaks and giant water-smoothed boulders are also on our list of places we have been. Here is a small sampling of photos we have taken over the years. The only thing that ties these particular photos together is that they are NOT in the Crater Lake national monument. That will be the subject of another post.

To start: here is a photo of Lisa near the top of Mt. Thielsen. Up at this level, there are no trails: the rocks move too much. I'm a long ways downhill so I can get out of the way of any rocks she knocks loose. She (and I) were wearing our bicycle helmets as a nod (pun) toward safety.


The photo below shows the upper Rogue River flowing through the Takelma Gorge. This is a beautiful section of river trail, not far from the city of Prospect.


Another shot of the Takelma Gorge...


This is a photo of the Rogue near Union Creek, flowing through the Rogue River Gorge.

This is a nice atmospheric shot of an ancient volcano (or what's left of it). It is in the distance. It is called Rabbit Ears. We have driven up to the base of Rabbit Ears and hiked partway around it. There are some interesting succulents growing in the cracks next to the trail. The shot was taken from the highway -- we just pulled off the road and snapped the photo.

A jarring segue: another shot of Lisa, sitting at the end of "chicken shit ridge" on Mt. Thielsen. From here, the last 100 feet is a vertical spire that requires more climbing skills than we have. Oh, something else too: the other side of the ridge (behind Lisa) is a vertical drop of at least 1,000 feet. The entire area is pocked with little puddles of melted rock that mark the terminal point of a lightning bolt. No Duh that this is called the lightning rod of the Cascades.

A shot of a lava dike alongside the "trail" up to the top of Thielsen.


Here's our obsidian parking lot. It was taken at the top of Mahogany Hill, at Glass Buttes. Glass Buttes is a complex made up of a number of obsidian flows, which occurred about 3 million years ago. The obsidian comes in many shades of black, clear and red, with some variations that are highly prized by rock hounds. There are holes dug everywhere in the search for the "good stuff". We always come back with a bucket or two of obsidian chunks and/or obsidian needles. The road up to the top of Mahogany Hill requires a 4-wheel drive vehicle...don't even bother trying it with anything else.

We first became aware of Glass Buttes from a native indian park ranger who was demonstrating flint knapping at Newberry Crater. He couldn't use the obsidian that was there at Newberry so he was using some Mahogany obsidian he had collected at Glass Buttes. We loved the looks of the stuff so we asked him where it came from.

Another shot of the "obsidian parking lot" at the top of Mahogany Hill. A lot of the material probably is the remnants of flint knapping "knap-ins" that are regularly held at Glass Buttes. The place is pretty remote so if you go there, be prepared -- take emergency water and food. When we're there we rarely see ANYBODY else. You don't want to become a featured article in the newspapers on the subject of lost & starving (or dead) travellers, right?

Photos taken by Lisa

Above: this shot is taken from the Nook, looking toward the family room. The Master is on the other side of the wall. Lotsa hardware/wire to be installed yet.

This photo was taken from the same location, turning to look south toward the kitchen and dining/living room. The 4 x 4 skylight is directly above where the kitchen island will be.

Here's a view looking up the stairwell to the 2 x 4 skylight.

Now we're upstairs in the "storage" room. A hodgepodge of wires there.

And the final shot, taken from one of the upstairs bedrooms. On the left, you can see the remains of our garden. On the right, the bare dirt is still covered by snow. The red barrier fencing is to keep the big equipment out of the drain field so the leach lines aren't crushed. They are not buried very deep, which is an item of concern. We will probably add some fill on top of the drain field to avoid problems.

House; mostly text

Progress on the house continues. The spectacular stuff is just about done -- most of the action has moved to the interior spaces.

The electrical work started about the time I flew to Dallas on November 15, to attend a symposium in my profession (failure analysis). We did a walk-thru and wound up putting in more lights and switches than the original quote covered (partly because we wanted to make the upstairs storage area a lot more usable). And some other odds & ends, like the 240 foot run of 3-wire to the old garage and pump house, power outlets under the eaves for Holiday lighting....and 10 outlet drops in the basement, at $75 each (they have to be mounted to the concrete walls and use metal conduit to protect the wiring). Oh, yeah, and a switch box for an emergency generator (no generator though: that may come later since that would be at least another $3K). The end result was about a $4K uptick in the cost for the electrical work. Youch -- that stuff is expensive!

But one thing we had to do before doing the electrical was to get the place secured. The exterior doors are installed, but the walls between the garage and master bath/closet/utility room and garage were not in yet (they are dry wall & that's waiting for the dry-out and insulation to be done). So the place was basically open to anyone who wanted to take the copper. And that is not a hypothetical concern....our electrician said that he had put in THREE sets of wiring in a house he had worked on recently, because two sets had been stolen for the copper!

So right now we have temporary plywood walls up. We had thought that plywood would be OK for a permanent install, since it IS a garage wall; but there are power outlets on the wall, plus access will be needed for the electrician and inspectors. So I guess we will get dry wall for the permanent walls. We will re-task the plywood as floor decking in our attic spaces to get more storage space. Like we really need the storage....

Speaking of the Dallas trip, while I was there I won a raffle. The prize was a plane ride in one of the vintage planes at the Cavanaugh air museum. I chose a WW2 trainer, the AT-6 Texan. One of the big reasons for choosing it was that it has a closed cockpit, since the temperature was just 50 degrees...at ground level. The plane is driven by a 600HP radial engine. Pretty noisy. The pilot flew over a nearby lake that had been created by damming the local river & thereby also creating some really expensive "view property" estates. One of them, owned by an NBA football player, had its own full-sized football field. No wild & crazy acrobatics, which was OK with me. We did do a few maneuvers which produced some 2-G and 0-G sensations. In the 0-G maneuver the wingtip was pointing almost straight down. Whee!!!

We _have_ finalized the house siding design. It's going to be very stylish, with three different types of siding. The main level will have lap siding with a 5" reveal. Above that, a board and batten "band", and then the roof peaks will have shingles. The siding work will start this coming Monday, after the electricians are done. We went with Hardie board, which is a cement/wood fiber material that is rot-proof and fire-proof. It has been used for quite awhile now and has a good track record for reliability. No mushrooms grow on it! Now all we have to do is decide on the paint colors.....about a zillion options there (Gawd help me, a mostly color-illiterate engineer!).

The siding will make a large difference in the appearance of the house, so I will make sure to post some photos during and after the siding job.

More decisions to make: Flooring for the upstairs. Flooring for the main-level foyer and utility/kitchen areas (if we decide we won't want to put Ipe' in the kitchen). Kitchen counter tops. Stair runners. What to get Lisa for Christmas.

Next post: more photos.

Windows; site cleanup

Here are a couple of photos showing the windows going up. ..

The living room windows being installed. Also note the mound of building debris in the foreground. More on that later...

And all the windows and skylights are in! The doors will be coming in next week, so the place will be buttoned up well enough to start the dry-out.

Our next big decision: the siding. We're thinking about a 3-layer look, with lap siding down below, a band of board & batten and staggered shingles up in the peaks. It would be good to decide soon, so we can get the siding up and painted. The wet season is upon us so finding a few dry days for painting will be a challenge.

Oh, and the building debris issue -- we told our builder that we would take care of the debris. Well, it's turned into quite a pile. We're storing as much as we can in the barn and in some bins we made out of some pallets (they were used to ship the concrete blocks used for the window wells). But we're still going to have 'way more wood than we can use. We will check with friends and acquaintances to see if they want some wood. We also have some places we can take it where it will be shredded and turned into compost, but that means loading a lot of wood into the truck, maybe a number of trips, too. More work to do....

House progress: cabinets, roof; blue chanterelles

Builtins! The downstairs cabinets will be Brazilian Cherry and the upstairs will be Knotty Alder for a more rustic appearance (and to save a bit of money).

The kitchen, viewed from the family room ^.
Family room ^ We will put a TV on the left side, haven't decided what we want to do on the right side so for now it's open.
Utility room ^. The cabinets will have an easy-to-clean laminate rather than wood.


The house is now (mostly) waterproof -- the shingles are all on, as you can in the above photo. The "mostly" part refers to the chimney -- there isn't any roofing over that part of the house, so a bit of water can still get in. I'm tempted to cover it with plastic, like our contractor did for the skylights. The roof looks sort of dark in this photo because it's wet. Also, the garage is ready for the concrete -- it will be poured tomorrow.

We're working on getting the exterior doors, too. We found a local source of Craftsman style wood doors for a very good price so we're going to go with nice stain-grade fir for the front entry and back door. The utility room and garage doors will either be fiberglass or steel.

One interesting aspect of the house design revealed itself when I was trying to find transoms to go over the front and back doors. The rough-in widths don't work for the standard off-the-shelf transoms. 3 feet is too narrow for the front and too wide for the back; and 6 feet is too wide for the front. It's starting to look like we will have to get something custom-made for us if we want transoms....

And now for something completely different: a "plate shot" showing a dinner we had recently, featuring blue chanterelles (Polyzoellus Multiplex) and winter squash harvested from our garden:

Roof; rain

Here's a sample board showing some of the choices we were contemplating for the roof. We actually went with a color/style called Mountain Timber from Certainteed, with a 40-year warranty. The colors in it will match just about all the paint/trim color combinations we're interested in, so it shouldn't limit us there. You can see the stuff loaded onto the roof, ready to go down:

....But we didn't quite make it in time for the rain, as you can see below:

Oh, well, that's what housebuilding in Oregon is about. We tried to avoid this but all the delays did finally push us into the rainy season. But by the end of the coming week we should at least have a roof over the place: roofs go up fast. The windows will be another week. Then there are the exterior doors.....and garage doors....and on and on.....

Yipe's -- consequences

Sorry for the pun-ishment in the title . Hopefully you will survive it!

We have chosen the wood flooring for the main level of our house -- or perhaps it's more accurate to say that it chose us. We were visiting a local flooring place that was having a good sale on flooring. We were interested in the hickory -- it was a very good price -- but the salesperson said that it had sold out. After talking to us some, he said he had some really nice tropical hard wood for a good price. We took a look at it and that was IT. It's a variety called Ipe (or Brazilian Mahogany). It's not prefinished, but the milling is so good that we should be able to do just minimal sanding to get it ready to seal. The photo below shows the stuff, wetted down a bit to show the approximate color (and color range) it will have. This wood is used for outdoor decks and is about as hard as bamboo, so it should be waterproof and wear very well. So this choice forced some other choices regarding the woodwork downstairs -- in particular, the kitchen cabinets....so we may have a wash as far as cost goes -- a good deal on flooring and then more-expensive cabinets to match it...
A possible "match" for that Ipe' floor -- cherry with a 'toffee' stain. We like the simple lines of the Shaker style. And it all seems to go with wool rugs, as well!


There wasn't enough of the Ipe' to do the upstairs so we will go with something else there. Since we're not going to use it as much, we're actually thinking about putting in a fir floor. Fir is a softer wood so it won't stand up to a lot of traffic like oak/maple/bamboo would, but it sure looks nice. Like the Ipe', we have found a good source for inexpensive T&G fir -- both 3" and 6" planks, for a lot less than $2 per square foot. 'Course, we will spend some money getting it finished, but fir would be a great way to instantly add about a century's worth of apparent age to the house. Our deliberate choice of extra-deep eaves and rakes helps make the house appear more timeless as well.

house progress; crickets

It's been awhile since I last posted, so there have been some big changes. Our framers are just about done. We're currently working on some smaller detail things like the dimensions for the fireplace rough-in, and some variations on the original plan (more on that below). The first shot is taken from the west side of the house, showing the living/dining room, kitchen and nook (far left side). One design variation, not readily visible in this photo, is the enlarged window well nearest the photographer. We decided to put in some concrete steps, rather than an egress ladder. This could be a big deal for someone not fit enough to climb out of a window well using a ladder. This doesn't apply to any of us....yet....but it also could facilitate moving stuff in and out of the basement without having to go thru the house to do it.


The photo below is of my wife and sister-in-law looking out of what will be the Storage Room window(s). They are directly above the garage area, and the main-level front entry is to the left, just beyond the edge of the photo. A nice day for mid-October!



Here's a shot of the rear of the house. Starting from the right and working our way left on the main level, we have the nook, family room, master bedroom, master bath and rear garage door for the tandem garage bay. On the upper level, the windows are for two bedrooms.



That completes the exterior walk-around. The east side of the house is rather mundane so I didn't waste any blog-storage on it. The shot below is an interior shot -- duh -- but shows one of our (likely) variations on the original design. This shot is taken from the front of the living room window toward the kitchen. The original design has a symmetrical vault, starting at the front of the living room and continuing on through the dining room. But we noticed that one side of the vault is not structural -- the actual space extends all the way up to the roof joists. And that's what this photo shows. We're strongly considering the idea of NOT covering that space up, so we will end up with an asymmetrical (and higher) vault above the dining room. We had a couple of folks come by and take a look at the space to see what they think, and they thought it was a good idea. So we're going to run it past our contractors to see what they have to say.

The last photo (below) shows something unfortunate that happened during the framing process. The photo shows an apparent design or construction screw-up (we're still trying to figure out which, without doing too much finger-pointing). The roof joist (the diagonal member that runs from the lower left side of the photo to the upper right) had to be cut and shortened on each side, then nailed to the sides of the storage room shed structure. This is because the corner of the shed interfered with the joist. It's possible that the plates put on the sides of the shed are the problem, or maybe the placement of the joist isn't quite right. Our house designer re-ran the load calculations to see if this would cause a problem, and we're OK -- so no harm there, but it's unfortunate.

The other thing is that now the corner of the shed goes right into the bottom of the roof valley, and we're concerned about water ingress there since the flow of water down the valley will be impeded slightly. To fix this, our framer suggested putting in a water-diverting device called a "cricket". These are most-often seen in use to divert water around a chimney, so water (and debris) don't dam up against the side of the chimney and lead to water problems. To move the joist or shed over would cost over $1K, as opposed to an almost zero-cost cricket, so that's what we are going to do. The cricket will have a reduced slope so our roofer will put an elastomer membrane on top of the cricket. It has a lifetime warranty so we're hoping that will suffice. By the way, the term 'cricket' refers to the resemblance to a cricket plate (? maybe not the right term?) rather than the insect.

Now that the framing is about done, we've started looking more seriously at roofing options, along with doors and windows. Doors in particular are expensive. We have found a source for "surplus" doors that are made of real wood, rather than MDF or hollow-core hardboard, for not much more than the hardboard. The supply may be an issue, along with what level of prep is done. The main thing right now will be to get the exterior doors in so the place can be buttoned up for drying out the framing. We can take a bit more time on the interior doors...and there are a lot of them...

The Dungeon

Here's a shot of the back wall. The main torture rack will be here, plus there's room for a pot of boiling lead, maybe a halberd storage locker as well. We have a lot of room down here...

The entrance to the dungeon. We'll throw the prisoners down the shaft.

Another view of the one-way entrance. This photo was taken from the (future) entrance to the dungeonmaster's wine cellar. In a pinch, it could also be used for storing body parts (depends on what part gets pinched, eh?).