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....