The Brick Yard

As much as we love our new house, the one thing that has made this summer difficult is that we have no yard to enjoy. The dirt that surrounds the house is less than inviting and is something we've tried to train our children to avoid. That won't change too soon, as we are planning on seeding grass- but the one bright spot is that we are well on the way to having a completed brick patio in our back yard.

This is the stack of brick pavers that had to be torn up during construction. It's a painful site for the former owners who put their own sweat into creating pretty elaborate patterns in the walks and patio areas. It's also a painful site for Kevin, who neatly stacked them up and now is working at the unstacking. There are literally thousands of brick pavers in this stack. (We're only going to use about 1/3 for our large patio)



On Friday, the guys from CurbSide Landscape and Irrigation excavated the patio site. They laid down a root barrier sheet, then infilled with about 6" of crushed stone. They took a while to get this perfectly level using a surveyor's transit. Unfortunately, they were a bit short on the crushed stone, so they'll be back on Monday with the remainder.

Kevin ponders just how much work this would have been to do by hand......

We got a tip from the guys at CurbSide about setting the sand base. They suggested laying (2) 1" pipes down, infilling with sand, tamping it and then screeding it level using a 2x4. This technique worked pretty well and Kevin made a ton of progress on Saturday.

A rubber mallet is used to tap the bricks into place in the sand. Kevin used a (mostly)half basketweave pattern. See if you can spot where the pattern goes awry in this photo! We're not too worried about the occassional quirkiness of the pattern. It's a character-builder.

By Sunday, the entire family was helping (?) out.We should be complete with this project mid-week. After CurbSide delivers more crushed rock base, we'll be able to complete the patio area. CurbSide will then be working on the grading on the rest of the site, the installation of the rain garden and the hydro-seeding. Even though the seeding of the lawn won't provide a useable yard this year, at least we'll have a nice-looking patio from which to enjoy the outdoors.

Getting Ready for the Move

Okay. We are about 8 days and counting until move-in. The contractors are going thru room by room finishing everything and doing their thorough cleaning. . The house is cleaning up very nicely!

This is the shared bath. The casework by Eastvold Custom turned out great. We used a douglas fir veneer and the hardware is by Mockett. The Toto sink and faucet is from Rakieten Sales. The recycled glass terrazzo countertop is from Natural Built Home Toilet and tub are also from Toto. I can't wait to soak in this one! The tile is from Kate-Lo Tile.

Here's a few shots of the Master Bath: Some more doug fir cabinets by Eastvold Custom with square recessed hardware by Mockett again. We used the Toto Aquia dual flush, along with Toto sink and Grohe faucets from Rakieten Sales.

The countertops are made of Skatelite. Skatelite is a recycled paper product like Richlite, but it is thinner (and less expensive). It's actually used for skate board parks- thus the name Skatelite. Matt Eastvold suggested the idea to use it with a substrate and some doug fir edge banding. We love how it turned out!

In preparation for the move, we’ve been trying to finish all the closets and storage units so that we have places to put our stuff. It’s a good thing IKEA is so close to our new house, because we’ve been going there A LOT. We’ve become regulars there and Kevin even has developed his own “system” of IKEA shopping which involves shortcuts through the store and ignores the 1-way traffic. What a rebel he is! Even though IKEA products are relatively inexpensive, we’ve managed to spend a pretty penny there this month. I’ve been just waiting to get a call from our credit card company asking what the heck is going on. This is the Ikea Pax closet system we used for our master bedroom closet.

The exterior paint is done. We’re not thrilled about the blue we’d chosen (okay, okay, I chose). I changed the color at the last minute and I probably should have stayed with the original choice. The first blue paint being painted was definitely the wrong color. We gave the painter the right name, but we were one digit off on the number. (I guess that is the kind of thing that may happen when you get only 4 hours of sleep). Then the next blue being painted was still not the what we wanted and we think it’s because it was painted “satin” and not flat –which surprised us. At this point, we’re just too embarrassed to have him repaint it again. I think we’ll live with it for awhile and then see how important it is to us. It’s only paint and we can repaint if necessary.

Light at the End of the Tunnel

The stress of building a house is incredible and as we are coming down to the wire, we are feeling the full brunt of it. Somehow, you have to put it all in perspective and know that someday, somehow, our lives will be back to normal again. It helps to have a 18 month old, whose life is so simple and innocent. When things are getting us down, he usually does something like a little dance, or gorilla-chest thumping that can bring us back to a happier place. Tonight, he was walking around the backyard and stopping to sniff every blooming flower, including the blooming weeds. It made me think about how life is too short to not stop to smell the flowers. Call it life lessons from a toddler.

Today, we shifted our move day one week and will now be making the big move on July 2. Although we were pushing for next week, we don’t want to move into a construction zone. No doubt there will still be incomplete work, but the extra week gives everyone a bit more time- including giving us more time to pack all those boxes. I’m longing for the day where everything I owned and needed could fit into the back of a Ford Escort (that was my freshman year in college). Now, apparently we have enough stuff that the 2 Men and a Truck that we hired to move us will actually need to be 6 Men and 2 Trucks. How did this happen to us?

Quite a bit of work happening this week……The exterior and interior railings at the balconies were installed yesterday, making our house instantly a whole lot safer. I was always in constant fear of having a kid fall off one of the openings. We used a cable rail system for its simplicity and minimal esthetic.

The exterior painting is adding a bit of color……

Kevin has become a regular at IKEA with about 5 trips so far. He has put together a number of shelves and closet systems and has a number of war stories....

Some Real Wood and Some Faux Wood

As our project progresses, there have been some moments where we go “Umm. This is not exactly what we planned on….” and then we proceed to lose sleep over it, worry and eventually make peace with ourselves. And some other moments where we say “this looks great!” and we're excited about the project again. It’s all part of the highs and lows of a home project, where we are so emotionally invested. One of those “great” items was the Ipe wood sunshades. We love how the Ipe wood added richness to the façade and was a counterpoint to the gray metal siding.

We liked the look of the Ipe so much that we changed the design to add more wood to the front entry. We originally planned on finishing off the soffit of the balcony and the entry overhang in a metal or hardi-board flat panel. As we looked at the details, we decided it would add more warm and simplify the material language by finishing off both the soffit and entry canopy in Ipe.
The canopy soffit has yet to be finished. The upper soffit (thru the tree leaves) is complete with ipe.

Ipe (pronounced E-pay) is a durable teaklike tropical hardwood sold as Ironwood or Pau Lope (pow LOW-pay). Known for its hardness , ipe is more durable than redwood and cedar. It has a life expectancy of 40 years or more, and is resistant to insects and decay. Ipe is sustainably harvested in Brazil and it has a gorgeous reddish-brown color. To maintain the rich walnut color, it will have to be resealed every 1-2 years. If not sealed it will become silver-gray, which still looks good, but just doesn’t have the richness of the sealed wood.

Ipe is not cheap. It can be even higher or similar in cost to redwood- but it is durable, so if you consider the life-cycle costs, that makes it easier to swallow.

For the front entry stair, back stair and balcony flooring, we chose a composite material called Trex. Trex is made of approximately 50% reclaimed wood and 50% reclaimed and recycled plastic. You know those pesky plastic shopping bags you get from the grocery store? Many of them end up in Trex, along with sawdust, wood chips and shavings. The end product has some great advantages over wood:
- never needs sanding, painting or staining
- doesn’t splinter
- the plastic shields it from moisture and insect damage
- the wood protects it from UV damage
- Trex offers a 25 year warranty
- doesn’t use those nasty chemicals that go into pressure treated wood. (note: before getting seduced by the inexpensive pressure-treated pine lumber option, make sure you thoroughly research the chemicals used. There is a lot of literature out there that may cause you to reconsider this as a viable option).

We choose a reddish color for the Trex that would be compatible with the Ipe. There is will be a bench under the Profilit glass window in the future.

Again, the composite product is not the cheapest solution- but for maintenance, durability and sustainability, it’s a great choice. Although, we could have used the Ipe for the decking as well, we wanted to demonstrate different materials and test how they will be to maintain over the years. Check back with us in couple of years!

Steady Progress

We are about 3 weeks and counting until we move into the new house. Here's a few things that happened this week...

This might just be my favorite room in the house.... Our master bath Richlite countertops were installed, along with the lav and toilet. The base cabinet is a natural finish douglas fir veneer. Left to finish in this room- lav faucet, shower faucet, cabinet pulls and mirrors.

The above picture is the shower at the shared bathroom. The far wall is an orange glass tile wall, but it looks a bit redder than we anticipated.

The recycled glass terrazzo countertop was installed, along with the Nexus vessel sink and faucet set.

Here is a close-up of the glass terrazzo from Natural Built Home. There is a combination of grey, clear, orange and amber recycled glass.

Here's the first of 5 sliding doors to be installed. We used Leatherneck Flat Track hardware.

The master bedroom floors are finished. We used 4x4 sheets of birch plywood, alternating the grain direction. We debated for quite awhile about which way to install this. The sheets can be biscuited together and act as a floating floor or secured down with screws or nails. We opted for nailing it down and filling in the nail holes with putty. The sheets were then finished with a sealer.

Lights, Camera, Action!

This week, the lights went in at the house. Although we've been very impressed with how daylit the house is, the lights really make it feel like home. Now, we are actually able to work there at night (both a good and bad thing)! Kevin took advantage of this on Saturday and spent the afternoon into the evening working on laying the FLOR carpet tiles in the kids' bedrooms.

Mazzy designed the floor pattern for her bedroom and also helped lay the tile. We used 4 colors of FLOR Toy Poodle.

View looking towards her closet.

There is one wall with an accent color. Mazzy is finally out of the pink, purple and frilly stage. Her favorite color is blue.

Declan help with his bedroom installation also. In the boys bedroom, we used the Straight & Narrow line from FLOR. It's not nearly as soft as the Toy Poodle, but this is a case where they had the right colors.

There is an orange accent wall in the boys bedroom.

Cormac checks out the drawers in the newly lit kitchen. The glass shades at the island are on backorder, so we'll be looking at bare bulbs for awhile.

Exterior Siding Progress and Sunshades

The work on the exterior siding is progressing nicely this week. It's rewarding to see it all coming together and so far, we're happy with the results. During the design, we debated long and hard on the exterior material palette. Our criteria was pretty simple:
- We knew that we wanted durable materials that would be as low maintenance as possible.
- We wanted a clean and simple esthetic.
- We were concerned about proportions and minimizing height.

Early on, we decided to go with a corrugated metal panel and some sort of cement board. Cement board can come in a variety of forms such as flat panels (4’x8’ sheets and larger), shingle style and lap siding in various thicknesses. HardieBoard is one common manufacturer of cement board products.

There are many sustainable advantages to cement board siding. Cement board is composed of natural materials- wood pulp, cement, sand and water. There are multiple manufacturing plants throughout the country, so it will likely be produced regionally. It’s a very durable material with a 50-year warranty. Cement board resists damage from insects and flame spread. You can get the product in a pre-finished baked-on paint (limited colors) that has a 15-year warranty or you can paint it. Paint holds on to cement board much better than wood, so it means very little maintenance.

Like most products, along with all the good points, there are a few drawbacks. Cement board is very dense and quite hard to cut. Manufacturers will have cutting recommendations, as the dust produced by cutting cement board contains silica. All silica-containing products can produce small, respirable size particles when cut, drilled, ground, sanded, or otherwise abraded. Inhaling excessive quantities of respirable silca dust can cause silicosis (lung scarring) and other serious lung-related diseases. In other words, you need to make sure you’re protecting your lungs when cutting this stuff.

Although we liked the look of the flat cement board panels, with open joints or with reveals, we were a little nervous about this system in that it is so dependent on properly detailing the rainscreen system. Although it can look great, the panels don’t always lie flat and if not properly detailed or installed, it would not hold up over the years. Durability was a major requirement for us, so we decided to go with the cement board lap siding. This is a simple, proven system and requires no special detailing. Visually, it will provide us with the horizontal lines we wanted and recalls the vernacular style of the existing house.

We also debated quite some time over whether to put the metal siding at the base and the lap siding above or vise versa. In addition to the esthetics, we decided to put the lap siding at the base, so when we need to paint it in the future, it will be easy. (Important criteria for Kevin, who has had a bad ladder experience that resulted in a back brace for 6 months a few years back!).

We are using Hardie Panel at accent areas and between some of the windows on the upper floor. This helps to visually make the window openings appear larger, to unify the openings in the façade and to break up the scale of the metal. The HardieBoard lap siding is used in two manners – although they will each look the same. On the new wall construction where we have spray foam insulation and high r-values, the lap siding is nailed up tight against the drainage plane and sheathing (Tyvek Drain Wrap) with flashing and caulking as needed. Just like any other well built wall. However, on the old walls where we used a blown in cellulose insulation, we used a building wrap/drainage plane with a reflective surface (Tyvek thermawrap). We then used a “dri-side” clip system that provides a 3/8” air space between the back of the siding and the drainage plane – this enables the siding to behave like a rain screen and the air space traps warmth –thereby improving the walls’ overall R-value. This additional R-value helps the existing walls with less insulating value behave more like the new walls with higher r-values and so balances out the performance of all the walls, making the house more consistent. This way, negative air pressure and temperature draw is not significantly pulled to the lower performing walls hastening temperature loss which helps improve energy efficiency as a result. That means lower utility bills. That means more beer and pizza for us. And tell me, who wouldn’t rather spend their money on beer and pizza instead of heating and cooling their home?

We're excited to see the IPE sunshades. They are gorgeous and add warmth to the exterior.