Posts tagged sunset

Now that the painting and drywall is complete, it’s time for hardwood floor and tile installation. I signed up to purchase and install the hardwood floor. Here is 2 1/4” wide 3/4” thick solid Hickory in the office. We went with a click carbonized strand bamboo in the kitchen (see below) and a warm 3” wide Eucalpytus in the living room.

Here AA stands on the newly installed Bamboo. It was a great learning process and in all I think we did a good job. The hardest part was all the irregular cutting around the island and cabinetry.

AA chooses appropriately sized length of Eucalyptus for the living room floor.

The installation on the nail down material uses a fabulous tool - a pneumatic angled knocker/nailer. I’ve never used air tools before (requires air compressor), but it certainly saves a TON of time over hammering or nailing. The process looks a bit like this:

Aside from the flooring, we have gone through a couple iterations of color changes for the interior walls (our house is COLORFUL!). After realizing that we had chosen about 6 colors of yellow in the house, we opted to cool down this tall wall with a blue.

All these finishing touches are getting us unbearably excited to move in!
 

The roof trusses have been placed and fully covered in OSB. The envelope of the house feels realized. Again, it does look much larger from below, but at the same time the addition to the high stem walls on either side of the house reduces the towering nature of the house. The proliferation of wild daisies all over this area is quite strange and beautiful, especially since there were none in the last two summers.

A great moment happened this afternoon when I first lifted my head up into the trusses. When planning out the roof system with the architect, he had planned on standard trusses, but I had an inkling to have a walkable attic space. That desire, which probably stemmed from exploring old barn haylofts as a child, resulted in us going with ‘storage trusses’. To our great delight, those trusses make for a cathedral-like space. Even better, it spans the full 40’ of the house. The best comparison I can make to this space would be: fir-cathedral-bowling alley.

Now that the fascia boards on the roof are in place, it’s much easier to imagine paint colors on the exterior. The only thing missing now is the chimney, and potentially some solar panels on the exterior. 

Another fun (potential) project is to make built-in shelves extending from the dormers in the two bedrooms. These were one of those architectural areas where it was easy to imagine the exterior dimensions, but not the interior ones. Now that it is all framed up and looking quite REAL, it’s clear that we could have two bookshelves, on either side of the windows:

Since there is a going trend of sharing animalian encounters in this house-related blog, it’s only fair that we share the latest image. AA finds a baby Western Fence Lizard (my sister WAS right about the species…blue stomach upon recent reptile flipping):

A good deal of our time in the last couple months has been creating, editing, and appending to this Sketchup file in order to figure out all our materials, fixtures, etc:
 

In the DIY court, progress on the main floor vanity has neared completion:

A little modification of drawers was necessary to allow for plumbing to fit in the vanity.

Here the jigsaw trickery is revealed. It was pretty fun to make three distinctly different type of modifications to each of the three drawers in order to acomodate the sink’s goose-neck plumbing.

The final product looks pretty close to this (I still need to do some caulking and touchup work on the antique scratches, but this is pretty much it). I can’t wait to install this in the new master bathroom space. I must be a house-geek to get excited about installing plumbing fixtures!

We slept in the house for the first time over the weekend. Air mattress and sleeping bags. Great sunset, fresh air blowing through and my WORD there are a lot of chirpy birds at 5am. Yes, great to experience nature in its glory…but 5AM!  :)

Another great addition (as of 7-6-11) is this:
 
If this doesn’t look familiar, this is the stringer that holds stair steps. Cut out by hand…oh so nice. Now there are many triangles floating around. The good news, we don’t need a ladder to transition between floors any more!
 
Here the basement leads up to the first floor. I feel like there is so much to learn about engineering, material sciences, physics and chemistry by studying this process closely as the house gets built. Also, I have a HUGE amount of respect for the TWO GUYS (Darin and Kevin) who have framed up this house in its entirety! 

And of course, no blog entry is worth a grain of salt without a silly parting photo. So here it is…the bath tub sans plumbing: