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?).

Walls going up

The back wall going up! ^^^ The door from the Nook to back patio and the family room/master bedroom windows are roughed in, along with an outside door in the master bath (so we can use the bathroom without tracking stuff into the main house).

The view from the nook, toward the garden ^.

Looking from the back toward the front of the house. The living room window-panel is up. It's peaked because the living room/dining room space is vaulted.

Looking west. The framers have just raised the west wall and are securing it in place. The start of the living room fireplace and two flanking windows (on the left side) can be seen.

The wall between the garage and den is going up. ^ The flooring and sheathing are plywood, not OSB. No, there is not a window between the garage and den! The hole will be plugged later.

Not a wall. This shows where the power transformer will sit. It was relocated to get it further away from the driveway.

Our general contractor building team, reviewing some project details.

House progress report

Sorry about the bad contrast -- it's hard to balance highlights with deep shadows on a digital camera. This is a shot of the framing that's started, looking East. The framing crew is about 1 day into that portion of the project. We had a bit of a scare on this one -- my wife was on the job site and saw OSB subflooring starting to show up. We had specified plywood, which will probably be important this fall because we expect a lot of rain. By all reports, OSB isn't quite so nice in the rain because the exposed edges can absorb water and swell: and the swelling doesn't go away once the OSB dries. We called our contractor and got that straightened out before any of the OSB went down.

The above shot is taken from the East side of the house. The contrast is better because the photo was taken in the morning so there was more sunlight getting into the shadows. You can see part of the foundation waterproofing system (the brown stuff that looks a bit like plywood). We're looking across the garage, which still has to have a concrete slab put in.

Our framing crew will be done in about 4 weeks. In that time, we have to complete some (hopefully minor) design changes. Lisa wants an arch above the living room window, and we want to modify the powder-bath to improve its floorspace efficiency and give more room to the Den so it may be possible to use it as a bedroom, if need be. We may also change the master bath -- the outside door that's in the master bath has a major impact on the amount of usable space in the bathroom. We may opt to put a window in the bathroom and move the outside door to the MBR.

In addition to interior design decisions, we need to decide what to do with the basement window wells. It sounds like putting in poured concrete wells will be pretty expensive. Galvanized steel is relatively cheap but doesn't look as good. Maybe we can hide the steel (at least from the outside) with some stone or concrete placed around the wells.

A fairy ring of Coprinus (ssp undetermined) I found in the barkdust by the barn. Again showing that life continues elsewhere on the property regardless of the mayhem.