Mike and Jeff's New House

One of the cool things about the house is that when taking a shower in the 3rd floor bathroom, ones head will be in the skylight dome....Do they issue tickets for flashing a helicopter? You can also see that the HVAC (heating, ventilation and air conditioning) guys started last week. They started to pull duct work up to the air exchanger and fan on the 3rd floor.... All 4 of the toilets in the house are wall mounted Geberit low flow toilets with dual flush mode. You can see the `carrier' for the toilet in the middle of this pic. The tank for the toilet is hidden in the wall cavity. We bought almost all of our plumbing fixtures online. The sinks and toilets were purchased from Ira Wood & Sons in Kentucky. They have an excellent website for comparing products: http://store.yahoo.com/irawoodinc/tewamotosy.html

Our electrician has started to pull wire to outlets and switches... Do you know how you sometimes wish that you had a few more outlets in your home? That should not be a problem with this house....Those of you who have seen the 7 gang switch in our current kitchen will recall that we like to have lots of control over our lighting......The new house will have lots of shiny switches and other fun techno doo-dads.... Our electrician will be very busy for a few more days...

And here it is in all it's gas burning glory...

The electricians started their installation by putting in our electrical, cable, and phone panels.... This view is from the back of the house on the south side of the directly adjacent to our current garage...

Sacramento recently changed their laws to allow water to be distributed via plastic PEX tubing. (Plumbers resisted this change for years as PEX is much easier and faster to install than copper tubing, hence it gives them less billable hours.) These manifold systems (hot on the left, cold on the right) will reduce the amount of wasted water when one is waiting for hot water to get to a faucet. This form of distribution will also minimize wild temperature swings when one is taking a shower and someone else turns on a faucet somewhere in the house. Or so they say, we'll see.. The big benefit is that if one should want to shut off the water to just one fixture, it is easy to do so.

We have a great plumber contractor. His guys have done what they said they would do in the time that they said they would do it...What a nice change.. The rough-in phase of plumbing is 97% done. We have just a couple of small changes and that step will be completed. The view below is in the corner of the new kitchen looking into our current house....Hmmm, I see a fence in our future.....Of course that depends on who buys our house... :)

One of the final steps in the framing process was the installation of the frame for our living room bench. We will pour light weight concrete on top of this to form a bench. Running through the bench will be radiant heat coils and sitting on top of it will be a cool Danish gas burning stove from Scan. We spent the weekend cleaning up the house and getting rid of the waste wood from framing and breaking up concrete chunks...The big dumpster was picked up this afternoon, the City is paving our street tomorrow so it was good timing to get the place cleaned up.

Our framer committed to doing our house in six weeks, it took 13....We had a little heart to heart talk last week when he came by and asked for money....He almost apologized for the tardiness and implied that the reason it took so long to finish our job was that his immigrant framing crew would not come back to our project when they figured out we were gay. From the second floor joists up, our home was framed by independent contractors that our framer paid to work on our house as a side job to their regular jobs....Funny how we never figured that out when the only real progress occurred on weekends....It is even more funny that our framer didn't fess up to this at the beginning.... I would like to write something more bitter and judgemental that expresses the full depth of my anger. Alas, the legal department has encouraged me to take the high road..... Onward and upward, framing is 97% done and all the bracing is down. We'll have to have the framer come back in a few weeks to

Here is the current view of the rear side of the house.....

Here is the front side of the house as of the first week of August...

Framing - The guys showed up a couple of days this week and put on even more exterior metal shear straps. (This house has more underwire support than Madonna.) Carlos was here on Saturday and Sunday and built the walls in the bathrooms so that the plumbers can start tomorrow. They also replaced the joist that the plumbers cut two weeks ago....At this point the framing is about 98% done. Inspection - We had our shear inspection on Friday...He called out a couple of minor things to change, nothing major...Our framer is darn slow, but he is good..(according to the inspector.) This week: The plumbers start tomorrow.. Next week: The electricians start next week.....

It's not real glamorous right now, but give us about 3 months, a couple of candles, and a fluffy towel or two and this is going to be the guest bathroom. The frame for the jacuzzi tub was installed this week...

The bracing is finally all down....Here is a view from the corner of the living room into the dining room and the kitchen.....The room on the second floor is the master bedroom suite...A short portion of the third floor is visible at the top of the pic, this space will be covered with wallboard...

The framer made a lot of progress last week..The guys were on site for 4 days in a row! (A record.) The roof sheathing is completed. The toungue in groove over the living room is finished, a lot more shear wall straps have been installed, the final shear wall was installed... Left to go: one wall in 3rd floor office... front frame around window... bathroom walls in 3 bathrooms... install new joist to repair the one the plumber cut... If we are lucky, they will be done by Friday of this week..(and this time we actually believe it.)

Our living room, dining room, garage, and back bedroom are full of boxes....We could start a hardware store with all the appliances, skylights, fans, door hardware, plumbing fixtures, and lighting fixtures we have stashed around our place.... Only 23 weeks to go and we'll be done!