Mike and Jeff's New House

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

Here are the sinks in the master bathroom, they are Duravit sinks and we really love them....GOSH those faucets stick out a long ways.....they are a bit longer than we thought they would be...oh well... Here is a detail from the half bath on the first floor. We have four showers in the house and all of them were missing the screws that hold on the escutcheon .Thanks to their website, we are back in business. http://www.danze.com/

Here is what our front door now looks like with the `eyebrow', light fixture, and mailbox installed. Here is the view from the master bedroom now that the rail is installed. The top rail and the pickets are all stainless steel and they were fabricated by a local welder named Steve Davis. Here is the exterior view of those same rails. Here are the rails that Steve made for the balcony overlooking the living room. Here are the stainless steel hand rails that Steve made. Also shown down on the landing is the subway grate that allows natural light and air to get down into the first floor landing This is Steve prepping the brackets that hold our `eyebrow' in place over the side patio. Steve is shown below welding the front door eyebrow into place. Here is the finished product on the south side. We will fit peices of tempered reed glass into these eyebrows to offer a dry and bright space for reading the paper in the AM.

This is the view out of the backdoor of our current home...Although it will be hard to leave this garden behind, it IS right next door to the new house...If anyone is looking for a great bungalow with a really nice garden, do get in touch....We plan to have it on the market by the end of June.

We had Mike Stokes Tile & Marble from Orangevale install our counter tops, they did a really nice job with one rather big boo-boo on the cutting back at the shop...it meant that half of another slab was needed, unfortunately for them it was their mistake, so they are paying for it...

The Icestone color that we selected is 75% recycled glass and mother of pearl shell mixed with concrete then buffed into shiny slabs. We bought it at San Rafael Tile and Marble, they are the Northern California distributor for this material, it is made in Brooklyn, New York. The type we have is called `Amber Pearl', you can learn more here: http://www.icestone.biz/ May 10 Additional Note: Although we really like the look of this material, it is unlikely we would use it again. Despite being a man-made material, the slab thickness is not consistent. On the union between a couple of pieces it is noticable. Furthermore our fabricator said he would never use it again unless he charged a lot more. It took a LOT of polishing to get the surface etching cleaned up.

And here is the finished island and kitchen sink corner...

Our stucco guy was here this week to cut out the excess stucco around our mailbox so we could install it....He thought that some of the cracks on the side of our house needed to be fixed so he send one of his guys over to saw cut them and fill them in....Parts of the exterior look like a 100 year old Italian Farmhouse with all the stucco cracks, filled cracks, and color variation....We had hoped that our color coat of stucco was going to hold us for a few years, we may end up having to paint it soon... We found our mailbox online at: www.mailboxes.com

Our plumbing fixtures are almost all installed, one of the cool features are the water saving Starck 3 wall-hung toilets from Duravit. To save water, we installed a dual function valve that allows for a small flush or a large flush....The pictures shows the back of the flush panel and Jeff installing the double flush valve....

Our heating, ventilation and air conditioning team was really fun to work with. We would use them again....You can find out about them here: http://www.airsmiths.net/ They are coming back on Monday to shoot a video of the boiler they installed in our garage, then they are officially done! Here are a couple of the final shots of HVAC, the installation of the diffusers and the connection of the fantech hood insert. The fan for this insert is actually located up on the 3rd floor, it has a muffler in the line so the noise from the fan is very minimal. Learn more here: http://www.fantech.net/fx.htm