Mike and Jeff's New House

Our HVAC guy came by last week to test the `tightness' of the house.After shutting all the windows and doors, he installed this plastic piece over the door and started up the fan to pump air out of the house. We've got to get him some ceiling measurements so he can calculate the volume of air in the house. Based on the measurements that his device measured, we have very little air leakage and should be able to heat the house with minimal energy... It's almost time to turn on the radiant heat, the concrete floor on the first floor is starting to feel chilly.

The Eucalypus veneer panels are now installed on the cabinet in the master bedroom that defines the edge of the balcony.....The stainless steel skin has also been applied to the base that it sits on.....Now, to get the top of this cabinet finished....

FINALLY! After more drama than I care to recall, we finally have the correct shower valve cartridges and extension kits.....I know more about shower valve hardware than I ever thought possible...Turning on the shower with pliers lost its glamour after two months...... Our plumber also came back and hooked up the water line to the refrigerator so the ice maker finally works.... He also hooked up the faucets in the laundry area and in the garage...It's a regular water garden.....

Before the open house we were able to get most of the art back on the walls and the lighting adjusted.....It's starting to feel like home...

The last weekend of September we had an open house to celebrate the completion of our house. Our friends Mike Lewis and Jeff Mathieu came out from Chicago to help us celebrate and to install our Russound distributed audio system. THANKS AGAIN GUYS!!!!!! We now have 6 zones of audio control (2 per floor). Each of these controllers run a pair of speakers and control the inputs. They can access regular AM/FM , Sirius Satellite Radio, CD's, or MP3 files. The system is great, we bought speakers from Home Tech in Cupertino and have been very pleased so far.

In mid-September our friends Mary Bushette and Mike Balak came out from Minnesota for their annual visit. Mike is a computer network administrator and he did virtually 100% of the work to hook up our 110 punchdown panels. (THANKS AGAIN MIKE!!!!!) We are now able to distribute high speed internet signals and video signals throughout the house. The house also has a wireless network and future expansion capacity in that we have two coax cable drops in every room. The coax is not yet terminated as we have no need for it with SureWest (they distribute video on CAT-5). The pic shows our Surewest fiber optic gateway at the bottom of the box and then the mass of punchdown blocks and the wireless MIMO router up on the wall above. Bay Alarm FINALLY got our alarm system to work...we had truly poor customer service with them and would not use them again.

If you are looking for a firm to do concrete work, we had a great experience with our contractor, Excel Concrete. They did the slab for our house, all of the steps and driveway and finally our sidewalk....highly recommended! Here they are shown finishing the sidewalk in front of the house...

At long last our front steps and sidewalk are done... We also replaced half of the sidewalk in front of our old house next door. The city had flagged it for replacement due to tree root damage(at our expense of course - thanks to Proposition 13) six months ago. We worked with the new homeowners to repair their landscape and now we both have great looking sidewalks.

Our friends Rob and Kent are moving to San Fransicso and will have a much smaller home over there. Soooooo, we bought their beautiful cherry veneered Techline Murphy bed and paid the Techline studios guys to come and move it and install it. The bed has 6 heavy duty springs that serve to counter balance it and allow it to easily be lifted up to the storage position. It is kind of like installing a sliding garage door, easy if you know what you are doing, dangerous if you don't....

Here is what the bed looks like when it is folded up.

We looked at a lot of places and finally found some chairs for the living room that we liked. They were delivered on Saturday afternoon and we really like them... We fired up the gas fireplace unit last night, it is almost starting to feel like fall....

We found the perfect rug for our media room. It looks great on the cork floor. Now, all we need to do is buy a big-screen TV and we'll be ready for movie night....

The kitchen drawers are finally all done...The drawer pulls are aluminum and they went on last weekend....Next weekend we are going to install the stainless steel kick-plate underneath the cabinets....This cabinet system is all from IKEA and is a Eucylyptus veneer.

At long last our dining room light fixture is up and working.. This fixture is a modern homage to the crystal chandelier... Our new dining table is from Room and Company in Sacramento..

Thanks to IKEA we found the perfect storage shelves for the pantry under the stairs... One of the challenges we are dealing with is that the polyurathane that Mike put down on the entire first floor is failing....It just peels up in big sections...The manufacturer said `Sorry, that was a bad batch, we'll send you another jug'.....Needless to say, we won't be putting any more polyurathane down...we are going to pull it all up and put down a concrete wax instead.....oh well....

Our 3rd floor shower is currently the home for Mike's orchids that are not in bloom....We hope to put in a little greenhouse next year, but until that time they have to live somewhere...

Last weekend Jeff put all of the towel bars and toilet paper holders onto the walls in all 4 bathrooms. The master bath has a heated towel bar that is on a timer so that our towels are warm in the AM....Since our solar panels continue to make more energy than we can use, we don't feel too guilty about having it.... NOTE: Since being connected to the power grid in May we have yet to pay any money to our local electrical utility, we have almost 1 megawatt of excess capacity stored in our `energy bank' so we are ready for the foggy days of winter.

This armoire was in our old house and is one of the few antiques that we are keeping. It is Italian and the dealer estimated it was built in the early 1900's.... It is now standing on a platform at top of the 2nd floor landing.....The nice thing about this armoire is that it was built to be taken apart, which is just what we had to do to get it up the stairs...Those Italians....always thinking of design....

Our new bookshelves finally arrived from Room and Board in Minneapolis...They are made out of recycled lumber from an old lumber mill in Forestville, CA. In addition to the shelves, we bought an Eames Lounge chair....it's a great place to read....

Our least favorite words this month? `Your house has some dry rot' Fortunately our friend Al is an amazing carpenter, he replaced our dry rot damaged siding in record time... The couple that bought the house needed to move in quickly as they were both starting new jobs in Sacramento this week...thanks to Al, we closed escrow in only 21 days....

The market here is flattening.........In today's market, this 900 sq. ft., 2 bedroom, 1 bath house just 50 feet from the freeway fence is worth $379,000..We missed the top of the market by 6-9 months and would have gotten at least $400,000 back then.....crazy...

Since moving into the new house we have largely been working next door on getting our old house ready to put onto the market....It now has a new roof, refinished hardwood, new vinyl floor in kitchen, lots of garden improvements, and on and one and on...... The old house went onto the market this past Friday, this past Sunday the realtor had an open house, we received an offer on Sunday night, we countered their offer on Monday night, they accepted on Monday night, we are going into escrow today (Tuesday.) It's a happy thing.... Here is a shot of the front courtyard that we had built this past weekend at the new house. Once we get the pre-cast concrete cap picked out, the mason will come back and install that. After the cap is in, they will apply stucco so that it matches the house color.

Well....we did it... Two long weekends of hauling stuff from one house to the other has come to an end... Does the blog end now? Heck no! We have to finish the trim work, we have to start the landscaping!! And the old house is undergoing a huge amount of work to get it ready to put on the market..... Stay tuned!

The first piece of furniture is now unpacked and ready for movie night.... One day we'll have a TV worthy of this 108'' long sofa.... A lot of our new furniture came from Room and Company, a modern furniture store here in Sacramento that is at 48th and J Street. http://www.roomandcompany.com/cgi-bin/index.pl

Our house has 4 toilets, 3 of them have POTS (Plain Old Toilet Seats) The one pictured below is in our master bathroom. It sort of looks like a regular toilet. Then one notices that it has an infrared transmitter on the left corner?? Then one notices that it has 4 winking LED signals to alert one to the status of the toilet???? What could it be? Why of course, it's a bidet seat with a remote control! I think their website explains it FAR better than I can. http://www.washlet.com/default.asp

This control panel is mounted on the wall next to the toilet but it is designed to easily detatch so that one can adjust settings while comfortably facing forward.... Leave it to those Japanese engineers to come up with an ergonomic solution to the pesky problems associated with hi-tech hygiene.

Although I know that the comments on this one will be numerous and earthy, one really has not lived till one has tried this thing. Our HVAC guy tried it....he forbid me to tell his girlfriend about it because he knew she would want one. (Actually, he spent a fair amount of time in there, maybe she'll get one after all.) It has a built in water heater - variable of course. It has a built in seat warmer - variable of course. It has a built-in dryer - variable temp of course. It has a wand that moves back and forth - either oscillating or pulsing. One can control the intensity of the water and the `region' it is aimed at. But best of all: It has a catalytic converter to suck odors out of the toilet bowl- yes, I'm serious.

This is a view I took today at about 5:45 PM. When the afternoon sun comes in through the living room windows, the place just glows.... Mike spent the better part of four days prepping these floors and the cork floors on the second and third floors for their final coats of polyurathane. Like a bowl of home made ice-cream, it was worth the wait....

Here is a close-up of the floor in the living room. The floor electical outlet is brushed aluminum so it gives one a comparison point to reference........

Every journey starts with the first step....we have 32 steps and it took almost 4 days to cover them with cork and nosing.. Here is the first one that Jeff did.....Every piece was cut to fit, then glued and nailed into place.

Annie Oakley famously sang that `You can't get a man with a gun'.....but one can nail a red oak stair nosing into place with a nail gun......Just one of the MANY power tools that we have acquired over the course of this project

Some of you still don't believe that we have cork floors. Here is a close up from one of our stairs...It took a LOT of dedicated daily wine consumption to produce enough wine corks for over 1,500 square feet of cork flooring, but by golly, we did it!

Here is the view from the 3rd floor looking down to the landing. Jeff designed the landing with a grate so that natural light from the skylight could filter down to the lower landing....

Here is the view from the landing between the first and second floor....The concrete floor is more reddish brown in the back of the house....

Two coats of Bona `Traffic' floor finish and the cork looks ready for the Dwell Magazine photograpers. http://www.dwellmag.com/

At long last the end is finally almost here.....Jeff and I are going to use some vacation days next week to knock out the final punch list so that we can move in the weekend of June 10 & 11th. Have some time on your hands? Stop by, we'll give you a job. concrete floors downstairs - strip bad areas, re-stain, seal cork floors on 2 upper floors - clean and seal stairs - install cork on treads/risers & attach red oak nosing pieces kitchen - install cabinet doors/handles & all the shelves and drawer inserts. laundry room - install washer and dryer garage - finish painting section where the doors were stored master bath - install cabinets on both sides of the sinks offices - install filing cabinets/shelves kitchen - hook up refrigerator/wine cooler / dishwasher

Tomorrow we owe the bank our first payment on the new house. We're almost done! --------------------------------------------------------------------------------- mort·gage ( P ) Pronunciation Key (môrgj)n. 1. A temporary, conditional pledge of property to a creditor as security for performance of an obligation or repayment of a debt. 2. A contract or deed specifying the terms of a mortgage. 3. The claim of a mortgagee upon mortgaged property [Middle English morgage, from Old French : mort, dead (from Vulgar Latin *mortus, from Latin mortuus, past participle of mor, to die. See mer- in Indo-European Roots) + gage, pledge (of Germanic origin).] Word History: The great jurist Sir Edward Coke, who lived from 1552 to 1634, has explained why the term mortgage comes from the Old French words mort, “dead,” and gage, “pledge.” It seemed to him that it had to do with the doubtfulness of whether or not the mortgagor will pay the debt. If the mortgagor does not, then the land pledged t...

Laundry Area... Kitchen with all of the counters in. Guest bath.. Laundry Area Our counter top guys came back today and finished installing the countertops in the kitchen and the laundry room and on top of the little shelves in all 4 bathrooms....They have to finish buffing out some etched areas but the installation is complete and it looks great.

Our stucco guy was concerned that the cracks on the south side of our house would only get bigger and lead to problems down the road so he is fixing them...... Today they put up a scaffold system and drilled out and then filled the cracks on the upper parts of the wall... Tomorrow they will be back to put yet another color coat onto this wall..... Oy....

We saw LOTS of people using our port-a-potty over the last year....Some of them were even our subcontractors. Alas, tis over...today our blue privy rode off into the sunset... National Construction Rental was very easy to work with. Their pump truck came out and `freshened' up the port-a-potty every week, and here is the check list to prove it... $82 a month will bring one to your house.....

All of the kinks have been worked out with our sink drains in the bathrooms......All five of them are hooked up.....now all we have to hook up is the laundry area sink and the garage sink.....Shown in this pic is the Kitchen sink handle from Hansgrohe..... http://www.hansgrohe-usa.com/indexf.html

Shown in these two pics are the basic boxes that almost all IKEA cabinets start with. After one builds the box, one can clad it with a variety of doors, tops, and side panels. This cabinet system is acting as both clothing storage and a permanently anchored rail for the loft space. This box will be bolted to the deck and clad with the same veneer as in the kitchen once we have hefted all the large furniture over the edge. Without using a chainsaw, the 108 inch long sofa in the top pic would have been a challenge on the stairs....

The range is in...It's a Fisher Paykel device and should be easy to keep clean..

The electrician was here most of Saturday, the plumber was here most of the morning today, the HVAC guys are still here.....The punch list from Friday was punched out..... The inspector came by.... The final signature is on the dotted line... We have officially passed the last major hurdle.... We have some trim work to finish this week, some countertop needs to be installed in the laundry area, there are 3 more doors to hang...when that is all done, we'll call the painters and hopefully by the end of next week the place will be pretty much DONE....

On Friday May 5th we had our first round of final inspections. There were a number of items we had to change, but none of them were major. We're going to have another inspection on Monday afternoon, cross your fingers!

Our tile guy came back and did a smashing job of installing our final tile this weekend.... And here is what it looks like up close. It pulls all of the colors of the room together and really is the perfect choice. Special thanks to Julie Brown and Bret Harper for their help with colors and finishes! And here is the finished tile and IceStone combination...We really like it...

This is our doorbell, it has a camera mounted in it so we can see who is at the front door. The system is from Aiphone, one can read about them here: http://www.aiphone.com/General_Info/What This collection of boxes sits in the middle of the house on the second floor landing. The bottom device is the doorbell chime, it also has a video monitor so that we can see who is at the front door, we can also pick up that phone and talk with them. The upper two boxes are thermostats and damper controls switches. Our two skylights are now operable. We LOVE them, Velux makes great products. Shown are the remote control and the hard wired switches to control the skylights when the remote control is lost. We can control both up and down movement of the window and the deployment of an externally mounted solar shade screen. http://www.veluxusa.com/ We have a total of 5 ceiling fans in the house. They are all `Cirrus' models from The Modern Fan Company and are all shiny shiny....... http://www.mode...