Mike and Jeff's New House

Before we could put the stoves and warming drawer into place, Jeff had to cut a piece of trim from an IKEA trim panel. The opening of IKEA in West Sacramento could not have come at a better time. We have been there at least ten times since they opened to pick up miscellaneous parts. If one has a tool belt and knows how to use it, one can save a significant amount of money on kitchen cabinets when compared to Home Depot or Lowe's. The process starts with some planning and the fine folks at IKEA have a free software tool to help you plan your new kitchen, get it here: http://www.ikea.com/ms/en_US/rooms_ideas/kitchen/download1.html

We did a ton of research on stove and oven options, for our stoves we chose the GE Monogram Advantium Microwave/Halogen oven and the GE Monogram Electric Convection unit for our ovens. They sit over a GE Monogram warming drawer. The Advantium oven is really cool...It cooks with both microwaves and halogen light so it can bake, broil, brown, roast, microwave and grill, with no preheating. See more here: http://www.geappliances.com/products/introductions/advantium/overview/

Building stairs with decent tread to riser ratios is one of the most difficult things for builders to do. As we have 32 stairs from the first floor to the third floor, comfortable stairs are mighty important to us.....Before we can go for final inspection we have to have our stair treads and hand rails installed. On Saturday Jeff's brother brought in some dried red oak and milled it into the shape that we want for our stair nosing. Once Scott was done, Mike took over with the sander and made all 32 peices look shiny smooth....Click here to go to a great article on stair design: http://www.hammerzone.com/archives/framecarp/technique/stairs/outdoor.htm I love the tag line for hammerzone.com. (Better Living Through Handymanlyness)

After sanding all of the the nosing pieces down it was time to stain them......The color didn't quite come out as expected....They look more reddish than the honey color of the cork..... oh well....Later this week we'll be putting the stair treads, risers and these nosing pieces on the stairs.

Our electrical service is done! (well, except for the all important punch list that will be knocked out on Monday) The Integrity Electic guys spent several days here this week. They said we have one of the most intense switching systems they have ever seen in a residential project.......I must confess that I'm still not sure what all 12 of the switches behind the front door actually do..... Pictured is Joe from Integrity Electric putting the finishing touches on our kitchen island. The counter top guys were here on Wed to measure the counters, they were fabricated today and will be installed next Wednesday....

Our door guy (Jeff's brother Scott) was here all week, he's made steady progress but it's a timely process and we only have about half the interior doors hung so far.....Scott hopes to be done by the middle of next week.....Pictured here are the 4 closet doors in the master bedroom. Once all the dust is cleaned up we will be calling the painters to come back and paint the doors and baseboard.

The glass doors in the master bath went in today thanks to the talented Dale and Johan from Accent Shower Door. They did an excellent job with the fabrication and installation of the doors and with their customer service. Highly recommended - http://www.accentshowerdoor.com/ The doors are into the toilet compartment and into the shower.....The shower door has a transom window that can be closed when the steam generator is filling the shower stall with steam......Both doors are slightly green reed glass that nicely complement the green tiles on the opposite wall. The toilet compartment and the shower stall both have a remote fan in the attic that is on a timer, helpful to air out the place, if you know what I mean......The shower stall's steam generator is also in the attic and it has a timer right next to the shower stall door.

30 of our interior doors have an upper hinge and a lower hinge that must be inserted flush into the door...Shown here is the template that our door guy made to help him guide his router as he digs into the doors.....

We have 32 interior doors...Two of them have regular butt hinges....the rest of them use pivot hinges.......The fabrication of these doors has been quite a process....The frames were custom made, on site, one by one.....The doors are being cut to size and milled on site as well, the work is going slowly, but we know they will be worth the wait.....Shown here is an installed lower hinge along with a plumb weight hanging down from the upper pivot..The installation really needs to be done perfectly the first time...

Here is the view from the alley... Excel Concrete did our flatwork and our foundation and slab, we had really good experiences with them and highly recommend them: http://www.excelconcrete.com They did what they said they would do-and on time!

City of Sacramento Building Code requires us to lay a concrete driveway even though our garage entrance is onto an unpaved and seldom used alley..(And in spite of the fact that we won't be parking our cars in our garage or on this driveway!) Our neighbor across the alley built his house a year ago and they didn't make him put in a concrete drive......We are compromising by putting in concrete pavers with gaps that we can plant into....Defining the space will be a twelve inch band of concrete.......The primary viewing of this garden will be from the picture windows on the second floor, the view from up there is shown on this picture.

This picture shows the guys from Excel Concrete(highly recommended for both foundations and flat work) smoothing the concrete at our front door stoop....Down the side of the house you can see three of the other four additional sets of forms that they filled with concrete today..The house has a total of 5 exterior doors and one roll up garage door...All of them now have concrete steps with salt textured finish....We have a front entrance garden planned that will incorporate a concrete wall and more concrete work.....If the city makes us put in a sidewalk to pass final inspection I guess Mike will be laying down temporary pavers next weekend....

The pic shows our living room ceiling. Each of these tracks is a dual circuit track so we'll have a total of 6 track lighting zones in this room.....We bought these from an online electrial supply house in Los Angeles, their customer service was terrible, but their prices were great. The house has track lighting in 6 other locations and it was all installed today...Our electrician (Joe with Integrity Electric-highly recommended) should finish up the electrical tomorrow....

Thanks to our neighbors Tom, Scott, and Jeff, after work this evening we were able to lift the hood enclosure into place so that it could be attached. The pic above shows Jeff tightening the screws that hold it to the ceiling.......And yes, those ARE lights in the kitchen ceiling.....The electrician was here today, more and more circuits are coming online....

Pictured here is what Jeff spent most of his weekend working on. We were shocked at the price of a custom fabricated stainless steel fan enclosure. We have a Fantech light and fan insert, but the best price we could find for a stainless steel enclosure to wrap around it was was $3,800....Jeff used some extra wood panels from IKEA to make this hood enclosure for less than $300. It is the same Eucalyptus veneer that is throughout the house.

Does anyone out there have any experience with drilling holes through glass tiles? The pic above shows the mounting screws for our sinks in the master bath. We have a total of 6 more holes to drill through glass tiles. It took over an hour to drill EACH of the holes pictured here with a special carbide tipped drill bit.

Have you spent much time thinking about your bathroom fixtures? .....Didn't think so....Neither did we until we had our new ones installed, now we go into the bathrooms just to look at them....crazy stuff..... The house has 3.5 bathrooms....that's 4 toilets, 5 sinks, 1 tub plus 2 other showers.... Fixtures are EXPENSIVE but thanks to some online places we were able to save a lot of cash... We are using Geberit's `Starck 3' wall hung toiles and Duravit sinks. The tile guy has to come back to do some things before the plumbers can finish mounting all the sinks and fixtures....

Our living room bench is now stained and sealed. The Scan2 stove from Denmark is also hooked up to the gas, but we have yet to hook up the vent so we haven't fired it up yet. It should be ready to go about the time it hits 80 degrees outside. We also hope to get the washer and drier moved out of the living room before the house warming party...

This pic shows a couple of things, Mike painted the garage a couple of weeks ago and the electrician has hung lights in the garage, they should finish with most of the electrical late this week. Also shown on the left is our completed boiler which heats 3 things: 1. The radiant heat loop in the 1rst floor concrete. 2. The hydronic loop of hot water that goes to the air handler (for blowing hot air to the 2nd and 3rd floor, they don't have radiant) 3. Domestic hot water

This past weekend Mike spent scraping grout out of tile...It was the 4th weekend in a row like that....After repeatedly complaining on the phone to our tile guy, he called the manufacturer and they suggested a strong acid based tile cleaner and a soft steel brush, it helped a lot, but it still look over 60 hours to scrape the thousands of textured tiles in the house. (We broke the dental tools and moved on to Exacto knives.) Oh well, live and learn, there is a reason one seldom sees textured glass tile, it is a GIANT pain to set and clean. The link below takes one to the manufacturer website to see what this tile is supposed to look like. We discovered that the tile appears to come with a number of scratches already embedded in the grooves...nice....Although we no longer have any grout on our tiles, we do have thousands of deep and obvious scratches.....We're going to see if using something like Lemon oil makes the scratches look less visible. http://www.crossvilleinc.com/products_

What can I say? It's a gas meter, it's gray.... Best of all, it is now hooked up!

Our HVAC system is up and running! We have a very unique system with a master controller on the second floor to control temperature and then 3 slave thermostats (one on each floor) to control the dampers at the air handler.. When the temp is satisfied on a floor, the dampers will close off the flow of air to that floor and only direct it only to the zone that is still calling for heat or cold. Our air handling system was designed by the Davis Energy Group, they are on the cutting edge of high efficiency heating and cooling. See them here: http://www.davisenergy.com/ It was SO amazing to have the radiant heating system up and running this weekend, despite the rainy and chilly weather, our house was very comfortable. Shown above is the radiant manifold with all the connections and valves hooked up:

For the past 2 weekends Jeff worked like a mad-man to get the floors installed. Good news! The floors on the 2nd and 3rd floor are now installed, they are interlocking rectangles of cork that were imported directly from Portugal. Check out the company website for more info: http://www.amcork.com/ Next weekend we'll be cleaning them and putting down two coats of sealant... This pic shows the master bedroom. Next weekend the railing will be installed, can't wait....

what can I say? It makes us want to get clean... this is the third floor bathroom with the skylight over the shower stall...we call it the SkyBath....

this tile lines the guest bath tub area...it's a crowd pleaser...

The master bath shower is nearing completion...We had the glass door guy here this week to measure for the doors into the toilet compartment and into the shower compartment....

We love 3 of our 4 types of tile.....the limestone and two types of smooth glass tiles look great....our 1x1 textured tumbled glass tiles are another matter...they were not properly wiped down before the grout hardened....we are now hand scraping thousands of these little things as they are in 5 locations in the 4 bathrooms......we're not so fond of our tile guy any more as he has not stepped up to the plate to take responsibility for dealing with this.... Do you have an hour to spare? We are using old dental tools that our friend John Williams gave us......they work well, but we have LOTS of tile to go over before we can seal it and place our sinks and toilet fixtures. We are so very thankful for our friend Jeff Adams and our neice Chris, they have spent many hours helping us with the tile scraping project....

Right across from the fridge will be an island that has our cooktop in it..the bases are all installed now. (This pic only shows half of them installed.)

The kitchen cabinet bases are all installed, the only appliance we have placed is the fridge. The others will go in over the next week or so....you can see the Eucalyptus veneer on our cabinets....yes, they are from IKEA.....it has been a lot of work for Jeff to put them together, but they were significantly less expensive than the other choices we looked at.

and here it is...the Scan 2 from Denmark..

Our living room bench is done with staining and sealing...now it just needs about 5 coats of wax....once that is done, we will install the gas stove on the bench...

What we have generated as of today is 221 kilowatts. What we have used as of today is 10 kilowatts. We are excited to be owners of a micro electrical plant....Our meter has been in place for two weeks and as of today we have generated over 220 kilowatts of electricity and we have only used about 10....We don't get paid for any excess that we produce, but we do have `net metering' so we only pay for the portion of our bill that we don't generate ourselves.

Our welder came out and placed the uprights for our railing a few weeks ago...he then welded them together and took them back to his shop so that he could fit the stainless steel pickets into place...it is being powder coated this week and hopefully will be installed next weekend...

There is something to be said for peace of mind....Our alarm system is up and running and we have only tripped it once so far.....

We gave Sacramento's Habitat for Humanity all of our extra lumber. They sell anything that is not used on one of their projects, check them out at: http://www.shfh.org/restore/index.html

Jeff used cabinets from IKEA to build a custom headboard for the master bedroom. It will have storage galore for blankets below and books above...each side of the bed will have 3 switches built into the side of the cabinet, one for ambient room lights, one for the ceiling fan, and one for the overhead reading light that is over each side of the bed.