Mike and Jeff's New House

Today we started the process of getting our landscape started. Our tree guy (Bob from Busy B. Tree Service) came and took out the scraggly sycamore in front of the house. The city forester approved it for removal and they are going to replace it with a Dutch Elm Disease resistant cultivar named `Prospector'. Find out more about this program here: http://www.cityofsacramento.org/parksandrecreation/urbanforest/elm.htm It looks a LOT different:

Our tree guy also took out a redwood tree today....It will be replaced by a greenhouse, hopefully in this millenium...This view is from the back of the house on the second floor looking out over highway 50 and the alley.

The South side of our house has 5 `Dynamite Red' Crepe Myrtles that I planted last summer. They made it through the winter great and have really started to take off, they should be in full bloom within a month. Right now the entire south side landscape is covered with California Poppy...Our state flower does incredibly well here in the Central Valley...

The stucco and wall caps have been applied to the courtyard wall in front of our house....Now to get to the underground infrastructure (irrigation, 110, low voltage for lighting) so we can get some plants in the ground...

After several months of no blog posts, I thought I best put up some new pics....We spent the winter and spring not doing much work on the house...It was a VERY nice break, alas it is time to get back into gear and crank out the final big projects and the landscape... One of the things we finally had installed was the countertop in the bedroom..Stokes Granite and Stone installed them and they were GREAT to work with. Highly recommended.... Above is a pic of the built-in bedroom cabinet, the built-in headboard above our bed has the same granite counter top...

Our first Christmas in the new house was a lot of fun. We had a 10.5 foot tree....Next year we're going for 12 or 13!

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..