slc202

Changes

2012-01-23T14:56:00.000-07:00

The home improvement bug sunk its fangs into me HARD at the beginning of the year, so we have changes afoot. Here's a sneak peek:

We've been quite busy, and I'll post some documentation soon.

Tree to table

2012-01-08T13:48:00.001-07:00

There's nothing quite like chopping down a tree and turning it into a table. But to get to this,

You have to do a lot of this:

It helps if you convince a talented little brother to swap an old table for design work on the new:

And then it's not even sad when you have to say good-bye to the table you bought just before you got married:

We love the new table. It fits perfectly with the rest of the house and it feels like it's been here since day one. Quinn did a wonderful job for us; he considered all the other finishes, angles, and design elements in our home and designed the new table to fit with those. The colors of the wood -- mostly plum with some lighter shades of rich brown -- blend so beautifully with the finished steel. The table seats 10 comfortably and 12 in a pinch. It arrived the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, just in time to host dinner for some family members.

Tai built the wood sections (as you can see from the slideshow), and we had the metal base fabricated by a few of Quinn's contacts from school. All told, we estimate that we spent roughly 8 to 10 percent of what it would have cost us to purchase a similar piece at retail. We now have an heirloom piece of furniture with a great story and a ton of sweat equity.

We're still waiting for Quinn to pick a name for it. Suggestions welcome.

Plants

2012-01-05T14:23:00.000-07:00

This past summer was year two of garden experimentation. I knew *slightly* more than I did for the summer of 2010. One of those was that squash and zukes need so much space, so this year I gave it to them. They returned the favor by producing a gazillion spaghetti squash (which store so nicely in our pantry over the winter), and more zucchini than we could bear to look at.

I think we won't be doing zucchini next summer.

The creeping thyme finally took off, filling in a couple of nice spots between pavers, and elsewhere our trees and grasses started to look like they belonged in the place. I got some onions and shallots for the first time, which was also fun:

We still have no idea what to do with tomato plants, though; ours grew up then out then fell over and killed the grass. I planted a currant variety, a cherry roma variety and a Cherokee purple. The currant produced the least but was my favorite. Tomato candy:

Not sure if/where we'll put tomatoes next summer. They are a bit too robust for our garden boxes and we haven't really cultivated the other parts of the yard. Whatever.

And I'll be planting the carrots in a deeper box this spring.

The real fun, as usual, was out front in the two long skinny spaces that frame the walk to our front door. Last year, I had a sugar pie pumpkin and a Cinderella pumpkin on either side. This year I planted a melon variety (and can't remember the specific name) and a moon-and-stars watermelon. As much as growing plants can be entertaining, these two certainly were.

The melon produced the sweetest, most fragrant fruit we've ever had. We shared it with work friends, relatives and neighbors before we finally got tired of it and lost out on harvesting a few melons in time. (At a certain point that heady-sweet smell starts to get a bit cloying and a little less appetizing.)

But the watermelon was so, so awesome. We got four edible fruits out of it, ranging from about 20 pounds up to 41 pounds each. And it tasted a-m-a-z-i-n-g. Here's the watermelon in the works in late August:

And here it is a few weeks later on its way to a family party:

The watermelon butcher of Lincoln Street:

Our only complaint here is that we didn't get as many individual fruits as we would have liked. I think I'll try for a smaller variety next year in the same spot so that we get more fruits (easier to share with people) and sooner in the season -- I was still waiting for watermelon to ripen at Halloween.

Landscaping-wise, the scrub oak trees in the front yard appear to be dying off one by one. We had to pull one this summer and another one looked dead at the end of the fall. We figure that we'll have to replace those with something else this spring -- I'm really liking blue atlas cedar trees, but I'm worried they'll get too big for the space. I also want to add a few more feather reed grasses in the front parking strips for symmetry, and I'd love to see whether I can get a pumpkin vine to grow in the space under our street tree (which just got hacked, ahem -- severely trimmed, by a municipal arborist crew).

Enclosing the yard

2012-01-03T21:20:00.001-07:00

Even though 2011 is over, I want to catch up the blog with the rest of the projects from last year. We were relatively busy with lots of fun things, and I want to share those before I start going on about plans for 2012.

May and June involved a lot of plant watching. The long wet spring made great conditions for all sorts of green stuff...

...including some spinach that really took off once the sun came out.

We also laid mulch down in the yard, subsequent to putting down weed fabric. We got our mulch from the gravel pit in North Salt Lake, and imposed on relatives with pick-up trucks to get it home.

Then, Tai spent the second half of June and the first part of July working on the rest of the fence sections we needed in order to enclose our yard. It felt so, so good to have privacy and protection from the neighborhood critters who kept using our backyard as a thoroughfare/bathroom.

He also re-sealed the cedar on the house and garage.

Closing in the yard required that Tai build a gate by our side-yard patio and another back by the garage on the alley. He set the posts and built the gate structure all by himself...because I was too busy (lazy) with other very important projects (reading in the sun).

And the side patio gate:

We also sat back and watched the plants grow (more on that in another post). Then Tai got restless and decided it was time to turn those walnut planks into a table. Lots more coming.

Yard mishaps

2011-05-31T08:58:00.001-06:00

The day after we finished the south-side fence, we decided to get serious about laying down the rest of the weed fabric. We have plans for mulch and drip-line sprinklers, but we wanted that barrier layer down first to save us some weeding down the road (we hope). It's not exciting work, so I present only one finished picture:

Then, I wanted to take advantage of the small gap between the finished fence and the retaining wall along our south patio to plant some vines that will eventually grow up over the fence:

In the course of digging the holes for those vines (thank you, Millcreek Gardens Groupon...), Tai got a little overenthusiastic with his post-hole digger and struck the neighbors' sprinkler supply line. We noted that line when we built the house and poured the retaining wall — it's on our property now as a throw-back to the days when their house and our lot was one piece of property — but had just forgotten that it was there. One geyser and a frantic dash for their water shut-off valve later, we had ourselves a lovely mud hole:

Tai is a total pro at sprinkler lines now, though, so the only casualty of that evening was the cancellation of BBQ plans (and our DIY home improvement pride). Instead, we dashed to Home Depot for a few inexpensive PVC elbow joints (we still had 1" line leftover from last spring's installation) and some primer+glue for the pipe. Tai had it fixed within an hour, and cleaned up by the end of the night.

So now we have a finished south fence and a fleet of trumpeter vines growing along its base. Now all we need is some sunshine with which to enjoy all the hard work...

Lettuce harvest

2011-05-27T08:11:00.001-06:00

Here's the picture of that lettuce harvest I was bragging about. Last September's planting yielded enough mixed greens (butter leaf, mesclun and spinach) to wow an extended family dinner. I'll be planting again this fall in every square inch I can find...

Finished fence

2011-05-26T14:58:00.000-06:00

Tai and his dad took a Friday off to finish the south fence, which has now completely walled in our patio and created a really nice private place for us off our dining room.

With the work the previous weekend on the post holes, the finish work went a bit faster, although it still took the better part of a day. First, they prepped the bottom rail:

...then the top:

Then, came the addition of the vertical boards:

By the end of the day, our patio smelled blissfully of fresh cedar, and the sawdust pile in the garage was a happy reminder of the work completed:

Planting

2011-05-16T13:01:00.000-06:00

To say that I didn't know what I was doing in the garden last year would be an understatement. I didn't really garden growing up and had no real experience digging in the dirt. I didn't appreciate the importance of space for mature plants, watering schedules, and hot/cool spots in the yard and sun. I thought I could do no wrong and made all manner of transplanting mistakes that killed many innocent plants. I also suspected that it would be rewarding and delicious to eat food grown in our own garden, but I had no idea how satisfying it would be.

Lessons from last year that I'm incorporating into this year's planning and gardening include:

Plants are amazing. I love watching them grow. It's totally worth it to me to plant something just to watch it grow, but it's nice if it produces something delicious at the end of the season, too.
Pumpkins, zucchini, squash, and tomatoes are enormous plants and must be given lots of space. Not just one square foot. Oops.
Broccoli isn't really worth the trouble, even though the plants are pretty.
You can never plant enough cucumber vines. Home-grown cukes are incredible.
If the lettuce isn't in the ground by the beginning of March, forget about it.
On the other hand, overwintering lettuce and spinach works really well -- the other day I pulled a delicious huge harvest from the garden that was planted last September. The greens woke right up with the longer days and warmer spring weather without me having to plant a thing.
Overwintering carrots didn't work.
Our kitchen garden space is great for early and late-season gardening, but it's so hot during the summer that I am only doing warm-weather vines in that space this year. If those don't work, that garden box is coming out and I'm planting a shade tree stat.
Purchased seedlings need to go in the ground quickly, or they will die. Forget about tempering or hardening or whatever it's called. I will forget, and they will fry.
Who needs flowers? I used the un-landscaped spots in our front yard for pumpkin vines last year and loved it. It was instant landscaping at almost no cost and lots of fun to watch. This year I'll do a variation of that happy accident with melon, pumpkin, and basil.

Thus far this year I have planted seedlings for chives, tarragon, cilantro, strawberries, tomatoes, basil, peppers, shallots, cantaloupe, and watermelon. I've also put seeds in the ground for cucumber, rosemary, beans, peas, squash, another melon variety, and another cantaloupe variety. I have plans to plant seeds for a couple of pumpkin varieties, zucchini, more basil, and more cilantro once the weather is warm for good. Photos to follow, if/when these things survive.

First signs of a fence

2011-05-11T08:21:00.002-06:00

The first good-weather Saturday of the year last weekend meant that we were actually excited to work in the yard, despite all the digging and weeding ahead of us. We're putting in a fence on the edge of our patio, so while I went to the Wasatch Community Gardens plant sale Tai got right to work digging the post holes.

By the time I got back, he was nearly done with the five holes for this part of the fence -- it took so much less time than we thought it would. Probably because our clay hasn't yet baked into solid rock yet (July). The holes were about 30 inches deep -- the bottom six inches or so are filled with a layer of gravel to drain water away from the post base and prevent rotting, and the other 24" are filled with concrete for stability.

You can see my haul from the plant sale in the foreground. I got three feather reed grasses for our parking strip, two creeping mahonia plants to join the four others already on our north side, and a few veggie and fruit starts for our garden boxes that I'm hoping to not kill this year.

While Tai worked on the post holes, I got down to weeding. I guess our weeding policy this year has been "if we ignore it, they'll die, right?" I faced reality and spent the morning on my hands and knees getting rid of this mess:

After (I know you don't care, but this weeding caused me substantial physical pain, so I'M SHOWING THE PICTURES):

Brother Daniel came over to help Tai set and level the posts. I was making eight-legged enemies among the weeds so I don't have any pictures of the laborers. But here is evidence of their hard work:

Along the way I learned that you don't pre-mix concrete for post holes -- you just dump a bunch of the powdered stuff in, then add your water. Neat.

Next up for us is finishing the fence (hopefully this week, if we can get some cooperation from the weather), and leveling our remaining exposed dirt and putting down weed fabric. Before we can do that, we do have to take care of this little mishap:

This gash is more than a year old and dates to our appointment with the sprinkler trencher. The pipe was buried rather shallowly (and the trencher wasn't really, um, paying attention), so this sliced conduit has been exposed for the last 12 months. The wires aren't live, though, so we've sort of ignored it until now. We're hoping to get our electrician out sometime this week to repair it for us.

Oh, and we finally got rid of this abomination:

So now I'm sure the Smurfs are mad at us.

Blinded

2011-05-05T16:35:00.002-06:00

Here's the post where we test your patience for home improvement minutiae. We finally, finally got window coverings. We've lived in the house for almost 18 months, sharing many of those moments with our neighbors, people driving by, and anyone standing on the sidewalk (or within 50 feet of the house, really). No longer!

We had honeycomb cellular shades in the original slc202 condo and loved them for saving us from the single-pane glass in that place, but our windows are good enough in the house that we don't really need the additional insulation that honeycomb shades offer. Plus they're a little more expensive, so we just went with a basic pleated shade.

We looked at a couple of online and local sources, and found the best combination of price and product online at Smith and Noble with their privacy weave pleated shade. Tai double checked the measurements, dug up a killer coupon online for our order, and about two weeks later we were installing.

Most of the shades nest inside the window frame with an inside mount. (Thrilling "installation" photos to follow...)

Our downstairs shades are bottom up only, since our house is slightly lower than street level (we didn't think we would ever really need a top-down option down there). Upstairs bedroom shades are top-down/bottom-up, and we love them:

Our fish bowl days are over.

The walnut tree

2011-05-02T15:17:00.003-06:00

Way back in 2009 when this house was a mere twinkle in our architects' eyes, this lot had a lot of unkempt greenery on it. At the time, I mentioned that up to one-third of the narrow lot's width was consumed by cedar, Chinese elm, and Russian olive trees. In the process of cutting them down, we also felled the trunk of a walnut tree that had been dead for many years before. Since then, the walnut trunk has lived in the back of our property while we tried to figure out what to do with it. A few calls around town led us to Nick Barlow, who enjoys cutting up trees and has the mobile gear to do it.

This trunk was about 14 feet long and around 18 inches in diameter. We didn't really know the true condition of the wood and were worried that it might have some damage from insects or just general wear and tear that could make it unusable.

Nick lopped off the top end where the trunk started to split in order to get a good look at the quality of the interior wood...which was gorgeous.

He then split that upper part into several chunks, one of which might eventually serve as some sort of stool or footrest for visitors at our front door who need a place to sit while they remove or put on their shoes. Tai's dad took another chunk (I hear there are plans to turn it for a bowl), and we have a few plans for the other chunks.

Nick needed to take a slice off the top of the log before creating true planks.

The wood was already really, really dry -- his best guess was that the tree had been dead for at least 15 years. This is good news for us because it cuts down the curing or drying time before we can use it.

Nick chewed through three chains in the process (because the wood was so dry).

We already have plans for a dining room table, but while we put the finishing touches on those designs, we'll let the wood dry for a bit more.

Underfoot

2011-04-30T14:33:00.002-06:00

A slow return to disposable income has meant that we can spend a little on small house projects here and there, bringing us long overdue upgrades...like entryway rugs. Flor had a sale recently and we took the opportunity to pick out a couple of arrangements for the main entryway and our back mud room.
Tai put together the front entryway pattern from Flor's Fedora line, inspired by/cribbed from this image:

We were very excited to see this arrive:

You can pay a few extra bucks for Flor to pre-cut your tiles in half, making the pattern assembly very, very easy:

We used a combination of charcoal, chartreuse, oatmeal, and cayenne to create an offset pattern.

We used Working Class in the mud room because we wanted something pretty durable. This is the entrance that we usually use and kick off our dirty shoes and boots into this area every night when we get home. Working Class isn't technically supposed to work over radiant floors -- we think the rubber backing will stick and rub off eventually -- but it was still the best option for that space. Besides, we figure that we'll pretty much always have some sort of floor covering in this area, so if the backing rubs off, we can just cover it with something else.

We used cool gray and dark gray for the simple pattern.

These are small details but they help the house feel friendlier and more lived-in.

Simple seats

2011-04-29T15:16:00.000-06:00

We've had a counter but no seating, until recently. My parents gifted us this set of bar stools at Christmas, and I recently surprised Tai by completing the set:

These are, admittedly, a pretty egregious knock-off. While we sort of wish that ours were the real designer thing, if we were waiting to save up for the real thing we'd be standing around for years. These work just fine, and I've seen them (or near-twins) showing up at Tulie Bakery and my work.

Setting the stage

2011-04-12T08:36:00.000-06:00

This is what a season's worth of yard projects looks like:

Looking around at what we still wanted to do this year, we cashed in pretty much every single credit card reward point to our name for a stack of Home Depot gift cards. We figure there are no black-out dates for these things (and travel on rewards is so difficult to book).

Then, I happened to ask my currently unemployed brother whether he wanted to help Tai build a fence this year and he enthusiastically said yes. I'm sure we can make him regret it.

The Office

2011-04-08T13:21:00.000-06:00

When we moved into the house, we basically just dumped everything that has typically gone in our office in here, closed the door and left it looking like this for about 10 months.

For our previous office set-ups we had a desk top made that we put on top of some filing cabinets. Here it is in our first place:

We really wanted to come up with a custom solution with built-in desks and shelves and make a really beautiful home office for the new house. Until that can happen, we needed a temp solution that still allowed us to function in that room.

In October, I got tired of staring at it (and trying to keep company from opening that door). Kersten went out of town for a couple of days this fall and being finally sick of having no functional home office, I decided to do something about it. Now keep in mind that this is not meant to be a permanent solution, but it does a pretty good job for now and best of all I didn't have to spend a single penny on it.

First, I took the above pictured desk top and ripped it down the middle with my table saw. We thought we might want to use it for something else at some point, but that point was seeming a long ways off and we had need of it now. I made two desks out of it and placed them on opposite walls of the office on top of the filing cabinets we already had.

Then, I used the above fridge cabinet that got scrapped during the fridge debacle last year as a cabinet for our computer printers and scanner and other peripherals.

Once the desks were set up I then spent about 12 hours going through 10 months of clutter and bills that needed filing to get it all cleaned up and functional.

It's been hard to know what to do next. We can't really find designs that we like and fit our style and the space. Any suggestions or inspirational sites?

These new homes are real killers

2011-04-04T08:52:00.014-06:00

Saturday we wanted to knock out a bit of yard work before another storm rolled in, so Tai mowed the lawn for the first time this season, then put down a fertilizer/herbicide, while I cleared a spot to plant a peach tree. We got those finished up and were about to start laying weed barrier fabric on our dirt stretches in the front yard when Tai went inside and stepped in this:

We had a similar puddle on the other side of that wall in our mud room. Water was seeping throughout the west end of our first floor via all the micro cracks (you can see that in the picture). Lots and lots of panic ensued. Can we avoid swollen dry wall? How deep is the leak? Which pipe is it? Will the baseboard be ok? Why is our entire first floor weeping? How the #$%^ did this happen? Why do these things always happen on the weekends? Etc.

We did what we always do in these situations, which is call Tai's dad for a dose of serenity and reassurance before tearing into the wall. The wall that divides the kitchen and the mud room is a shear wall, meaning that it's faced with plywood for stability in the event of an earthquake, meaning that even if we cut into the drywall we will have a lot of depth and structural stuff to cut through to get to the plumbing in the guts of the wall. One side of that wall was covered with kitchen cabinets and a counter top, and the other side had some lovely brand-new cabinets. Remember these?

They shortly looked like this:

Tai and his dad (who graciously and cheerfully gave up his Saturday to come help us) actually pulled the counter top off as well in order to cut a hole near where we knew the leak was coming from.

We thought that the problem wasn't in the regular house plumbing because we hadn't done anything unusual lately and hadn't gotten a leak until Saturday. The only thing we did Saturday that we don't normally do is use the hose (to water the nascent peach tree) -- Tai's first thought is that he had somehow punctured the hose supply line while hanging the cabinetry last week. As it turns out, it was a burst hose bib -- most likely my fault, from not properly draining and emptying and disconnecting the hose at some point during the winter.

Oops.

Tai and his dad confirmed this theory after cutting into the wall near the hose bib connection in the mud room. They chopped off the hose bib, which is a long length of copper pipe sheathing that goes deep into an interior wall -- so as to prevent exactly this type of freeze-burst! -- with a bit of pex tubing coming out the interior wall side for the water supply.

After a couple of trips to England Plumbing (seriously, they are the best) for the correct size replacement bib and a tool rental, they were happily cutting into the bones of the house and installing the new part.

We are no longer leaking, but we're not putting the cabinetry back together until we can fill in the hole with some foam for insulation of the hose connector. And I shall train myself from now on to always, always, always turn off the water and disconnect the hose. (Oops.)

I sheepishly stayed out of the way during the repairs and tried to make myself useful in other ways. So I got some of the weed fabric down -- turns out that you're supposed to get rid of all the weeds first, so I spent much of the afternoon on my hands and knees digging up all sorts of nasty little things. Then, I roughly graded the covered spots and finally tacked down the fabric:

We're hoping that this stuff makes life a little easier -- so far our greatest gardening successes have been the quantity and variety of weeds our yard supports. Sooner rather than later we hope to layer a lot of mulch on top, and we're hoping for a few plants down the road as well. We also got our lawn aerated cheaply by some folks trolling the neighborhood for business, meaning that now we do not need to spend several hours and $ grabbing a Home Depot rental aerator. The peach tree that (sort of) started it all:

So lesson learned: I said we were going to blog more, and the universe said, "You want to blog more? I'll give you something to blog about!" Then, right as this all was starting to develop, I mentioned to Tai that if nothing else this will make a good story, and he said, "I'm TIRED of having good stories." Here's hoping for nothing but boring updates for the rest of the season.

(And thanks to the friends/family who called or stopped by after reading my panicked Facebook status update. You guys are the best.)

Emerging from hibernation

2011-04-01T10:03:00.000-06:00

I smelled fresh cut grass yesterday on a short walk outside, which must mean that it's time to wake up the blog and all the house/yard projects. I wish I could say that we spent the winter painting or re-arranging or decorating or doing anything besides sitting on our rears, but alas. We needed a nice long break from home improvement.

But, we're back! And after hopping around all winter trying to get boots on and off, we decided to put some time and effort into cabinetry for the mudroom. I think we needed a break from Ikea, too, because going back after a looooong absence wasn't as painful as we were expecting. Their showroom had a nice butler's pantry/mud room set up, using a new dimension of wall cabinetry (18"x30") as base cabinets with a counter on top for a nice bench surface. Given that this is a relatively private room in the house -- we're pretty much the only ones who ever see or use it -- a less expensive, but still totally functional solution appealed to us.

We need to thank our friend Larry for coming over and helping us maneuver heavy flat-pack boxes in and around the yard. (Tai cracked a couple of ribs in a ski accident a few weeks ago, so moving some of the bigger stuff was pretty painful for him.) Nice-ish weather meant an expanded work area.

And, of course, I have no "before" pictures. Just imagine an enormous pile of dirty shoes, framed with a random tall cabinet (reject from the kitchen), our stash of grocery bags, and a ski boot or four. Our dimensions didn't exactly match Ikea's, so Tai hacked together an end piece that fits quite nicely.

Wouldn't be a project without a little pain, or in this case, a drywall gouge on an otherwise mint wall.

We are very pleased with the look. We had debated going with a more expensive countertop or door option, but this seems to fit our house just perfectly and actually looks like the much more expensive white doors we passed on.

(And of course those are my shoes still on the floor. Tai hasn't trained me yet.)
And if we can ever get the Flor website to cooperate, we may have some rugs to show you in the next week or so...

Crucial update

2010-12-01T12:29:00.001-07:00

Before two feet of snow took up residence in our backyard we figured out that it was a raccoon or raccoons who had been relieving themselves on our lawn. Lots of paw prints and a sighting.

Carry on.

A little privacy

2010-10-15T09:50:00.001-06:00

Sorry about the absence of blogging for the last two months. Life got really busy with some un-fun stuff. On top of that, our projects have been pretty low-key lately (replant this thing, mow that, etc.), with one exception: a wall on our patio.

We have a gorgeous outdoor space that we access just off our dining area. Because we're working on landscaping, decor, and finishes slowly, this space was totally exposed to the street on its east end. Part of the design of the house was always to have a wall on this end of the patio as a privacy shield to the street, so when we poured the concrete for the patio almost a year ago (!), Davido added some bolts to the pony wall in anticipation of this eventuality.

After pricing things out and thinking of the best way to maximize our limited budgets and claim the most privacy for the house, we settled on this patio wall as the first step. (Future steps will include a fence with the neighbors, a gate for this wall, and some window coverings for the dining area. All in good time, though.)

Tai did a couple of designs before we settled on one that would fit the horizontal cedar on the house. He grabbed the hardware to attach upright posts to the concrete wall and framed everything out in mid-August:

All that plywood cladding was reused from our construction scrap stash -- win-win for the dump and our wallets.

The wall sat dormant for a few weeks at this intermediate stage. It worked immediately, though, as we were able to enjoy our patio without sharing it with every passing pedestrian and driver.

Then, Tai used some scrap tar paper for some mild water-resistance at the top of the wall, and started putting up the cedar boards Labor Day weekend. He used a few leftover cedar boards from siding the house and garage, and then filled in the rest with a trip to Sutherlands. He pre-sealed the boards with two coats to match what we did on the boards for the house.

He did a great job spacing the ends of the boards uniformly on both sides of the wall so that there aren't any awkward joining spots. This is where it really pays to have married someone who spent his entire childhood working on house projects -- he is precise and meticulous about doing it right. He takes only a little more time, but he makes it look a hundred times better.

My sole contribution to this project (besides replenishing the water pitcher) was to stain the cedar at the end of it all to get it the same deep beautiful color as the wood on the house. This took me all of about 20 minutes, but I still managed to dribble stain on the concrete, which you can see if you look closely at the bottom left of the wall. Oops.

I think that spacing out the house/yard projects makes it easier for us to enjoy them along the way. We were really hoping to fence in the backyard (especially because various neighborhood animals -- please, please let it be animals -- keep using our yard to relieve themselves), but that will probably have to wait. In the meantime, it's still been great to make incremental progress where we can. Oh, and our house is still awesome.

Mid-summer yard update

2010-08-09T08:29:00.006-06:00

This is the year of the great squash experiment. Not knowing a blessed thing about the plants we were planting (as in, did you know that pumpkin vines can grow to be 35-40 feet in length? I didn't!), we have overloaded our tiny backyard garden box with two pumpkin vines, a yellow squash vine/bush, a zucchini plant, four cucumber plants and two broccoli plants.

The overall effect:

Up close with squash overload. Zucchini in the top right and one of the pumpkin vines in the bottom left:

Produce! This is so far the only pumpkin we have produced for our pains. It is ripe, beautiful and lovely. So now we have a pumpkin in August.

These pumpkin vine tendrils wrapped themselves around patches of grass in the backyard, holding on for dear life. I think they're gorgeous on their own, though.

The broccoli...that we're hoping will turn into something edible one of these days:

The cucumber vines and our nascent basil plant:

Fresh cucumbers from the garden are our top delight this summer:

Pepperoncini, for which I have my doubts, mostly due to serious overshadowing by pumpkin leaves:

That's all in one garden box. In the other backyard box, we planted a couple of varieties of carrots (Danvers, Nantes, Little Finger and Carnival Blend -- Carnival was the least successful).

And this is what happens when you get a radish packet from Matthew Moore at Sundance and figure, eh? Why not? But then realize that neither of you like radishes (nasty little things):

Then, we have a third garden box (clearly in over our heads) by the kitchen. By and large it has been scorched by the heat and exposure of our site, but a few things have survived. Namely, the tomato plants that I didn't kill are now threatening to take over the house:

And this is the end of a fight with arugala. It started out so lovely, with spring greens that we added to salads and quiches. It ended with an insane patch of flowering plants that crowded out everything else. So I hacked it back:

...and made room for a watermelon vine that has showed its appreciation for the extra space by doubling in size over the last few days. I'm still hoping that this will produce something before the first frost.

In the rest of the yard, our front yard on the south side was not getting full coverage from the sprinklers. So now that Tai is a pro, he added a few extra heads to hit our borders:

But the best thing about the summer has been slowing down and enjoying the results of all our hard work over the last 18 months. It's a bit surreal to think of where we were a year ago and where we are now. That was a lifetime ago.

New moderns

2010-08-03T10:32:00.003-06:00

Just a hat tip to all the folks in our area doing new modern projects -- it's great to see a swell of infill modern homes. Grassroots Modern is keeping tabs on a few, including the one we drive past every day: ul[1] on 900 East around 700 South.

We like the lines, suspect the architect is the son of a former neighbor in our original slc202 condo building by the University of Utah, and love the privacy walls in the outdoor spaces (can you tell we still haven't built our fence yet?).

But this was our favorite:

"We had been looking for a lot in the up and coming neighborhood of the Salt Lake 9th and 9th area for a period of 3 years. This area is extremely competitive for vacant land and building small modern homes is beginning to be the trend. This has been going on in other metropolitan areas for years but we are seeing an increasing demand for this type of product in SLC for which there is few to choose from. I believe we are raising the standard for this building type in the area and am very excited to see it being constructed." (emphasis mine)

We also loved this gem (in a non-sarcastic sense):

"The house achieved Gold LEED standards but the owner opted for spending the additional 5-6 thousand in other areas instead of the LEED testing and registration fees."

Amen.

Cedar siding

2010-07-17T09:03:00.005-06:00

We knew when we agreed to this design that our cedar siding would take some upkeep if we wanted to retain its color. Without a yearly coat of sealant, the wood will fade and eventually gray, and we want to keep it looking fresh as long as possible.

Even though the cedar was sealed with two spray coats before it was installed, we could tell that it needed a refresh after the winter weather and Utah sun.

It took both of us about eight hours total to seal, with the majority of that time spent maneuvering very tall and heavy ladders.

We love the red look and can tell that the wood was due for a fresh coat -- it nearly glows now. So even though it will be kind of a pain, we'll spend the time once a year to re-seal the wood.

(Also, we were sitting in church a little while ago and noticed this Bible verse from 1 Kings 6:9: "So he built the house, and finished it; and covered the house with beams and boards of cedar." We had a good laugh.)

Barter

2010-07-13T08:44:00.006-06:00

What do you do when you're flat broke but have an enormous living room wall that cries for art?

You barter away an old red couch...

...call your friends over for an evening of watching you bicker over leveling a huge sheet of painted Tyvek...

...watch your husband do death-defying stunts 13 feet off the ground...

...and replace the old couch with one you've spent two years saving for! (Found here.)

Many, many thanks to our generous friend and artist Benjamin Wiemeyer for taking pity on us and doing the barter. We love the painting and the view from the sidewalk:

(And so does the neighbor kid who just rode past and shouted, "I love your painting!")

More yard

2010-07-10T08:35:00.002-06:00

We got the sprinklers in, got the sod down and basically stopped doing landscaping work. There are a few things we have to worry about still, though, including our parking strip:

Those used to be full of knee-high weeds, then we spent Memorial Day digging them out. The effort was so great, evidently, that we haven't done anything since then. Eventually, we plan to put in some weed fabric, plants and maybe some mulch or gravel to top it all off.

This is on our south side, just east of our patio. The drain runs to the gravel pit buried in our backyard. The white pipe is a stubbed sprinkler line for drip irrigation, which we hope will someday water a few trees and other plants in that spot. Our next project, though, is to put some more paving stones in that space to create a landing pad for our garbage/recycling/yard waste cans.

And here we're hoping to place mulch and a bunch of plants down here. But for now (because we don't have the scratch for plants) we are growing a couple of pumpkin vines, which is what the flags marked.

Yard photos

2010-07-07T08:30:00.001-06:00

The last post was a little long on words and short on photos, so here's a few pictures to prove that we still love you all:

The Yard

2010-07-05T16:54:00.000-06:00

Wow. Where to start...

...perhaps the best place is with my/our massive underestimation of the time, expense and good humor our landscaping would require. Admittedly, I know nothing of these things, but I now foolishly remember saying things like, "yeah, Tai will get the sprinklers laid in a couple of days, then we'll get the sod in right after. It shouldn't take us more than a few weekends."

HA.

With the first tease of spring in mid March we started planning and talking logistics. I think we made our first trip to the Sprinkler Supply Company in early April for a system design. And even though we are a teensy bit broke after building a house, sprinklers were something we wanted to spend the money on this year, knowing that this was really our only chance to do it well. Once we got a system designed and saw how much trenching this was going to take, we followed the company's suggestion and hired a trencher. Along the way, you realize that you really need another, different tool or you need five more of that one thing or it would be so much simpler if you had that other thing and all of a sudden all the charges on your account point to Lowe's. So it goes.

Then, the dirt. Oh, the dirt. If we were mud flats before the trenching, we became mud topographies after -- trenches, vales, swales, sinks, mounds, and plains all made it look as though an army of burrowing rodents invaded Lincoln Street. It wouldn't have been so bad if not for the relentlessly precipitative weather this spring. It's hard to lay sprinkler pipe when the trench is under two inches of water.

Anybody remember this incident? I remember the trauma of being 800 miles away and getting his text: "what's our insurance number?" During this sprinkler process I lived in fear (FEAR!) of getting a similar text or worse. Tai did nothing to assuage this fear.

The first night he worked on installation I walked up to the front yard to ask him a question in time to watch a 3-foot length of pipe explode from our water supply line with a terrifying WHOP, rocket 30 feet into the air, drop onto the sidewalk across the street in front of two alarmed pedestrians, and give way to a six-foot geyser. The next night's performance featured the end cap of that same pipe exploding off into Tai's face -- without, thankfully, injury to anything other than his manly pride. The following night involved several iterations of "hey, babe, do you think you might want a little professional help?" conversations.

But, dear readers, Tai is a total champ. These were not setbacks!, he claimed, these were learning experiences! He soldiered on in the face of my sideline skepticism. And, then, four weeks later, we had a functioning sprinkler system. Well, four weeks, many blisters, an incident involving pipe primer and eyeballs, and A LOT of bending-over back cleavage later.

This is what we see now:

And life is good.

Documentation

2010-06-07T09:32:00.002-06:00

I keep forgetting (and am frequently too exhausted) to take pictures of our yard and post them. But it's getting more awesome by the day. I promise I'll remember soon.

Also, we dug out a bunch of weeds in our parking strip on Saturday, then immediately noticed the neighborhood cat taking a dump in our dirt. So I'm glad that someone appreciates our hard work.

Sprinklers

2010-05-27T10:43:00.002-06:00

This is what functional sprinklers look like:

Major tip of the hat to Tai for the weeks of work that it's taken to get to this point. Major wag of the finger to the weather for raining (or SNOWING) every third day in May.

The front yard is already mostly put back together (holes filled). The backyard should be that way soon. Maybe there is some sod and mulch in our near future? I can't think of a better way to celebrate the unofficial start of summer than by putting in a lawn. (That was not sarcastic. I really want this project to be over.)

Tai wants you all to know...

2010-05-21T10:15:00.003-06:00

...that his biceps are getting huge doing all this sprinkler work.

Which is still not finished.

Our yard looks like a war zone right now, so I refuse to post pictures until something looks a bit more done. Incremental progress doesn't translate well to pictures. If you've driven by lately, you know what I'm talking about. On the plus side, I did pick out, set, and lay 11 large stone pavers all by myself last weekend. They are lovely and don't rock a bit when you step on them (which is my personal paver pet peeve).

And, my aspirations to be a doddering old lady with a garden are in full swing. I have already killed four strawberry seedlings and six tomato starts. Congratulate me!

It's about time

2010-05-13T14:24:00.001-06:00

You know where to find us this weekend:

Last weekend

2010-05-07T11:34:00.000-06:00

To thumb our noses at the rain last weekend and take advantage of some momentum in the house work, we pushed through a couple of indoor projects: sealing the stairs, finishing a scrap of baseboard, and sealing a small patch of concrete we missed the first time around.

There's nothing inherently difficult or time-consuming about these tasks. They're just a pain to do. Which is really the only reason that we hadn't done them before.

The stairs, all taped and ready for sealer:

Detail on the taping we had to do to protect the wall, facilitated by tiny gaps between the edge of the concrete treads and the wall.

The stairs now have a slight sheen on them, and we're glad to have them sealed. Now we can stop worrying about long-term dirt problems on them. But you still can't wear shoes in our house.

Our fridge saga -- our current fridge was the third one purchased -- left us with a weird patch of unsealed concrete floor right in front of the fridge, which happens to be the spot where we most often spill stuff. Dur. It is now sealed. The baseboard on the left side of the photo was also a lingering patch job from the fridge saga; it's now sanded, caulked, painted, and looking pretty again.

Tai has been working on our sprinkler system this week all by himself. Launching pipes into the street by turning on the water cut-off all by himself. Exploding muddy, capped lines onto his face all by himself. It's been an exciting week. We'll keep you posted.

Rain, rain, go away

2010-05-03T08:21:00.002-06:00

If you're in Salt Lake this spring, you know that we've had one storm after another, including a string last week and resulted in snow on rooftops for four mornings in a row. Aside from the immediate depression of mid-spring snowfall, the wet weather has extinguished our ideas for quick and speedy landscaping.

But there was a four-hour window without rain or snow of any kind last week, so we invited a sprinkler trencher over to do a little digging in anticipation of, someday, installing an irrigation system:

We were a little puzzled at how he interpreted our sprinkler plan in some spots, but I suppose the solution for criticism in this case is a shovel.

The trenches are about 6 to 8 inches deep. Among the treasures uncovered by the trencher were numerous roots from the trash trees we removed a year ago, an electrical conduit buried too shallow (we will be paying some money to get it repaired, since the trencher tore through it), and chunks of cement ranging in size from an orange to a cantaloupe.

One rainy morning last week the sprinklers were delivered. The pipes are sitting on a patio until work begins (maybe tonight?). Also sitting on our patio? These guys:

We didn't want to risk their health and future happiness by putting them in the ground and directly in the path of the trencher. Good choice, as it turns out. And this is what happens to your shoes if you still try to get yard work done after three weeks steady of storms:

So here's hoping for a little luck with the yard work this week:

The first tree of spring

2010-04-13T19:14:00.005-06:00

Behold:

A sign of progress. Thanks to friend Shannon for the very thoughtful and beautiful weeping snow fountain cherry tree, which has found a happy home in our front yard.

The latest punch list

2010-04-06T20:52:00.000-06:00

We love our house. Not a day goes by without us thinking about the morning light in our living room, the functionality of the garage, the ideal entertaining space that is our living-dining-kitchen space, our great exterior design, the tranquility of our bedroom...we love it.

That said, it's not perfect. During the design and building process, I guess I imagined that once we moved in the house-building fairy would appear and magically make everything complete and perfect with a wave of her sparkly wand. She hasn't shown up yet, so in the meantime, this is what we're thinking about completing or improving in the next little while:

• landscaping
• house numbers
• fence with neighbors to the south
• cabinet and storage configuration in laundry nook
• office configuration

You've read about our landscape plans. It looks like we're tentatively planning on mimicking this design for the fence:

Tai's been drawing up plans to make it two-sided and to take into account the fall in elevation between the east side and west side of our south property line. I'm really excited, though -- I think it's going to look great.

When we first moved in, a fence was in a top-tier priority, but in recent weeks it had slipped a bit. It bumped back up when the neighbors expressed interest in a fence, which means that we're going to be putting off some other optional upgrades in order to work with the neighbors. A couple of things that are slipping are window coverings, more plants for the yard, a speedier timeline for the landscaping, and office furnishings.

This is what our office looks like at the moment:

Lovely, huh? The un-interesting story for this room is that we thought we had a design we liked for a built-in desktop and shelving, then we decided we didn't. We also decided against doing anything from Ikea in this room -- our kitchen is Ikea by choice, our bookcases upstairs are Ikea by necessity, our wardrobes and bathrooms cabinets are Ikea by expediency, and we just don't want any more Ikea. Back to square one.

One of the smaller tasks we face is the positioning and installation of our permanent house numbers. In order to get our occupancy permit this fall, Tai spray pained some stencil numbers and tacked them up to our front post. After touring a Geoff Tice remodel, Tai spotted this line of numbers and found out they're offered at a very reasonable price at Lowe's:

So the 1, 3, 4, and 2 have been sitting on our kitchen counter for a week or so awaiting installation on our exterior concrete wall. Tai even make a trek to Harbor Freight for a hammer-action drill to tackle the concrete. Current thinking about placement puts them horizontally, off center (to the left), just below the canopy frame.

The last thing I wanted to share is that we are highly amused by the slow drive-bys. Watching the parade of gawkers outside our front windows has become a weekend past time -- keep 'em coming!

Landscaping

2010-03-31T19:39:00.001-06:00

Our yard is a mud flat right now. We have some plans to change this, but the thing about building a house on a budget is that the budget runs out at some point. I would love to work with a landscape designer for our property, but it's not in the cards.

Back in December we toyed with getting a few trees in the ground before the heavy winter weather hit so I drew up a landscaping plan then. We didn't get the trees in the ground (seriously, we have nothing but mud right now), but we have spent the winter thinking about spring, warm weather, and a landscaped yard. Here is that plan:

The notations are plant varieties, hopes and dreams I have for various zones of the yard. We're trying to limit our green grass varieties and water-hungry plants -- that's as much a financial decision as a sustainable one. I'm not interested in spending money to water my yard with culinary water!

We've visited the Conservation Garden Park in West Jordan a couple of times, checked out several water-wise gardening books from local libraries, attended a couple of landscaping classes at the library (trees! edible yards!), and done a lot of thinking about what we'd like in a yard and how we imagine we'll use it, both now and in coming years.

So, a couple of conclusions:

• We do want some grass.

Looking around at options for Utah's climate, it's become clear to me that if you want a lawn to look like a lawn, you have to expend some water on it. Sure, there are several different varieties for lawn grass that claim to use significantly less water, but looking at the actual water required compared to the standard Kentucky Bluegrass lawn, it's all more or less the same. A couple of other options might be a dwarf tall fescue mix or a bonsai dwarf tall fescue mix. From what we saw at the conservation garden, these have a similar look and feel to a traditional bluegrass lawn but with slightly less water usage. I don't know how easy they will be to find in sod here, though (we don't think we want to do a lawn from seed).

• I'd love to do rain-water catchment.

Our "flat" roof is slightly sloped to drain at three points on the north side of our house. Right now that drainage goes straight into a buried pipe system that eventually goes to a drain sink in our backyard. Every time I hear that dripping -- or on recent days with this heavy, wet, spring snow -- I think about capturing that water, storing it over the winter, and then using it for a garden and to "make up" for some of the higher-water plants that we will inevitably have. But...it's currently illegal in Utah. Not a huge deal at the moment because there does seem to be some momentum to change this law (at least for residents doing temporary catchment and then re-using the water on their own property), but I'm looking down the road.

• It turns out that I really love a lot of low- and zero-water plants and Utah natives.

The varieties of creeping thyme, native oak, native maple and native high-desert flowers have a stark beauty about them that I'm really loving at the moment. We're already planning on several varieties of creeping thyme for around our south-side patio and kitchen garden, and I think we'll end up with more than a few native flowers for the front yard.

• We may have an inter-family fight brewing over the front-yard trees.

I want to plant gambel oaks in a stand of 5 in our front yard, toward the north. Tai is a bit leery of them (and their more common name -- scrub oak). We've heard they send out runners that will undo a lot of careful landscaping work. But they're native! And I grew up with them in my grandparents' yard! And if you give them a little water (instead of zero supplemental water) they behave more like trees and less like shrubs! This is a sample of our stimulating evening conversations of late.

So, we welcome your suggestions. We're doing some preliminary planning — we got an irrigation system designed for us by a local sprinkling company. Next stop will be trenching for that system, then Tai is bound and determined to lay his own sprinklers! We're also collaborating with our neighbor to the south on fence plans (some designs that caught my eye are here, here, here, here, here, and here), and thinking about what we would put in the garden boxes we have planned.

Closets and Organization

2010-03-19T17:02:00.004-06:00

In the hustle to finish the house at the end of last year, building out the closets in the 2 smaller bedrooms ended up being pretty low on the priority list of things to do in order to move in. When we moved in though, that meant that a lot of things didn't have a place to go. Both rooms ended up becoming the limbo where all of those things went.

After a couple of months of always wondering where things were and feeling a little frustrated that even though we now have twice as much living space as we have ever had, we didn't have place for all of our things I spent the last 3 Saturdays working on building out the closets.

I was able to use unused shelving from our Ikea cabinets from the house and from our previous condo for shelving in the closets and I was also able to reclaim some shelving that my Dad had taken out of his house a couple of years ago. I used paint we already had so the only expense and new product I had to buy was the shelf rail material. Both closets cost me a total of about $50. Had we bought a pre-fab closet product from a hardware store it would cost at least 4 times as much. Though it would have taken much less time. Since I have more time than money these days it was a good trade off. Plus I felt good about reusing things that would have just ended up in a land fill otherwise.

They are not as refined as perhaps they could be, but since they are in a closet I think I will be able to overlook some of the rougher details.

A big part of the clutter in the rooms were boxes and boxes of books that we had no place for so we went to Ikea and got a couple of Billy bookshelves and installed them on the landing.

It really gives the landing upstairs a much more lived in feel, which is nice.

Living Room/Entry/Stairs

2010-03-15T12:37:00.009-06:00

It's probably about time that I continue on with the tour of our finished house. Keep in mind that when I say finished, I'm really just talking about substantial completion as I have a punch list a mile long to still complete. So if you see something that looks incomplete, I'm getting to it. Like the cedar slats in the front door canopy.

The door is a solid core birch slab. It has several coats of a marine spar-var finish on the outside. The painter said that we should never have to worry about it again.

The doorbell button is the True Illuminated Doorbell Button by Spore. We bought this and all of our light fixtures from lumens.com.

The mailbox is the Two Arcs Mailbox from Chiasso. I don't have a hammer drill so drilling the 4 holes in the concrete wall required to hang it took me well over an hour and lots and lots of elbow grease. And elbow pain.

Views of the concrete wall on the interior as well as Kersten's many knitting supplies and my prized possession, an Eames Lounge Chair and ottoman. We hope to someday have a really cool fireplace against this wall. We look forward to this day as winter nights will be very cozy and as it will also signify that disposable income has returned to our life.

George Nelson Bubble lamp from lumens.com.

Pay no attention to the slovenly fat guy on the computer in his pajamas.

Every time we move (4 times now) I keep hoping someone will drop my TV so that I can get a cool flat screen. Someday.

View of the upstairs balcony from the living room.

Exposed paralam beams that carry the second floor balcony and stairwell.

Before we finally got around to moving the piano out of our old place.

After we got around to moving the piano out of our old place.

1/4 inch stainless steel cable rail.

Pre-cast concrete treads.

Exposed paralam beam up close.

The Kitchen

2010-02-28T20:18:00.006-07:00

We've been in for a while and are slowly getting settled in. There is still much to do, but we thought we would share the finished product as it currently stands. Over the next few days we'll post pictures of each room. So for today here are some photos of the kitchen and dining area.

The cabinets are Ikea in the Nexus Brown-Black with Klippig door handles.

The faucet is from the Danze Parma line in stainless steel.

The range is by Bosch and the range hood by Broan. We had to mount it lower than normal to get by some of the plumbing in the wall to vent it outside. That's why the chimney extension doesn't reach the ceiling. We'll probably get around to buying an extension kit as soon as we don't feel so broke from building a house.

The standard Ikea cabinet sizes makes the fridge situation tricky. We went through two other fridges before we had to redo the cabinetry so that this Bosch counter depth would fit. As you can see I need to do some modification to make the gap between the top of the fridge and bottom of the cabinet less noticeable.

The countertops are quartz from the Cambria Quarry Collection line. We had originally picked out a white quartz, but it wasn't in stock and we were on a deadline. So we picked another, which wasn't in stock, so we picked another and then picked this one based on a 1 inch square photo online. It actually turned out to match everything quite well.

The dining room light is a George Nelson Bubble Lamp.

Rufus, our favorite dog to dog sit was a nice addition to the house for a week.

Pantry door on sliding hardware.

We used Ikea Gorm shelving inside the pantry. We love having so much space for our food stuffs. Maybe now we can work on some food storage.

Time Lapse, sort of.

2010-01-13T11:45:00.002-07:00

We decided early on to take a photo from the same vantage point at different stages of the process. I didn't take nearly enough photos to make the cool time lapse video out of it that I had in mind, but here is a little slide show.

Glut of Photos

2010-01-12T10:43:00.003-07:00

We've been in the house for a few weeks now and are still working on getting things put away and completely finished, but we are loving it and it instantly felt like home. We haven't really taken any photos since we moved in, but here are a bunch of photos taken from mid November to mid December that shows the process.

Now taking requests

2009-12-16T16:58:00.004-07:00

All of our energy over the next couple of days is focused on closing our loan and then moving in. In the meantime, we know that there are quite a few details about the house that we haven't shared (lighting, plumbing fixtures, finishes, etc. etc.). It's not a deliberate omission — we've just been incredibly focused on the big picture instead of documenting the details.

If there is anything you'd like to see photos of or get an explanation for in the coming weeks, please speak up in the comments and we'll do our best to oblige. And if you're in the SLC area and would like to see the place in person, we're pretty open to tours.

Finalizing

2009-12-15T08:19:00.001-07:00

As if the finish work were not enough to think about at the end of this process, there are certain people we need to get approval from before moving into this house. People such as Salt Lake City and The Bank.

Our fair city requires not one, not two, but EIGHT successful, separate inspections before issuing a certificate of occupancy. (Slap hand to forehead here.) We have passed all 8 of those 8. We are scheduled to pick up our certificate of occupancy from the city tomorrow morning.

The Bank requires a certificate of occupancy (see the dominoes lined up?), an appraisal, approval by the loan committee, and closing of the loan before we can move in. Our appraiser completed most of his work yesterday afternoon and will be back for a quick check today. Loan review will take place tomorrow and we are scheduled to close on the loan Thursday.

In the meantime, we will be continuing to clean the house (windows, bathrooms, floors, etc.) and will continue packing the condo in prep for the blessed move-in date.

The sealed floors look amazing, our kitchen is awesome, and everything else about the house is done and ready for us. It's going to feel so sweet to move in.

Weekend update

2009-12-14T08:50:00.001-07:00

Things that have happened at the house recently:

• backyard graded (landscaping waits until spring, but our mud waits for no one)
• siding continues to go up on the exterior of the garage, in prep for our appraisal this afternoon
• final plumbing went in, including our kitchen faucet and hooking up our stove:

• we gave imaginary gold stars to our family members who spent the day Saturday helping us clean the kitchen and clean and prep the concrete floor
• finished up the last of the baseboard detailing
• Tai and I sealed the concrete floor with a clear sealant that adds the tiniest bit of shine to the floor and brings out all the gnarly variations in the concrete
• cleaning, cleaning, cleaning

We have a major fridge problem. The fridge shown in my last post sticks out from the cabinetry about 9+ inches, which is a huge bummer because we love the bottom-freezer option and that was about the only one available (it also took two weeks getting here). So, we need a replacement asap.

Our limiting dimensions are the width of the space (30") and the depth that feels good in that space (roughly 28", excluding the handle); height is as flexible as we need it. I have run through salesmen at Lowe's and Orson Gigi looking for something that works with no luck. Suggestions welcome. Oh, and we need something as soon as possible so that we're not fridge-less during the holidays. Argh.

Kitchen countertop arrives

2009-12-11T16:58:00.004-07:00

In all its dusty, unkempt, unfauceted glory:

...

2009-12-08T08:42:00.001-07:00

Forgive us the posting drought. By way of brief announcement, I was pregnant this fall, and over Thanksgiving I went into pre-term labor and gave birth to our stillborn son. We will be mourning for quite some time, but we have been so grateful for the love and support of our family and friends through it all. Pouring ourselves into finishing this house has been a great comfort to both of us — we are clinging to the happy anticipation of a finished house as a way to soothe the grieving process.

We are close. Yesterday our staircase and landing rail system arrived and was installed in a matter of hours (you can also see our finished, exposed duct work):

You can see the blue that we settled on for the large north wall, too. Many, MANY thanks to the our weekend volunteer crew: Judy, Greg, Nancy, Laura, and especially my father-in-law Tainui who couldn't be dragged from helping by wild horses. Tainui: we owe you our baseboard, our painted walls, our light fixtures, our tile floors, our sanity and our love.

Davido's crew has been hard at work on our garage. Over the weekend that meant putting up particle-board sheeting in sub-freezing temperatures. Today, it meant installing a garage door in the biggest blizzard of the year:

In the "insult upon injury" category, last Saturday night we discovered water damage in our kitchen ceiling. Turns out that a part of our master bath shower fixture had a slow leak that had been dripping onto our ceiling since it was installed. A late-Saturday-night visit from Davido, the plumber and my in-laws helped us pinpoint the location of the leak. The plumber repaired it yesterday, and today the drywaller was redoing the kitchen ceiling.

Part of the stairs delivery included the frame for our front door canopy, which will eventually have 2"x4" cedar planks to form the "roof" for our front door and approach:

So, we're getting there.

A tale to warm your heart

2009-11-19T13:45:00.001-07:00

We have spent many hours griping about the bureaucratic city permitting process, both in public and in private. Here's a two-part tale to warm your heart and brighten your day.

Tai received a phone call from public utilities (our least favorite city department from our bruising, protracted permitting process this summer) about a week ago. The person on the other line informed him that he could now come down to their office to pick up our house plans — they were all approved and ready for a permit. This was a surprise to Tai since our house plans were approved, stamped and permitted in July...he couldn't do much but laugh at the caller's sincerity and earnest helpfulness. "Look! I'm doing YOU a FAVOR by calling to tell you that your house plans are approved! Look at how great we are!" We think that this person found an old copy of our plans laying around the public utilities office and took it upon himself to review and approve! What initiative! Five months late!

I love bureaucracy.

Then, we had to jump through some hoops to build a garage. We didn't think that we were going to have the budget to build a garage, so we had just put in our initial plans that we would pour a large parking pad (called a monument pad) and build one in the future. We didn't include it in our bank budget, we didn't have a design for it, and we didn't have a permit to build one. Enter Davido, who has cruised so quickly on our construction and saved us so much money along the way that we can now build that garage. It will still be really tight to fit it in the budget, but we are really used to that at this point. (Tears of joy for the frozen fingers I won't have scraping a car this winter!)

We started to tinker with a design and in the meantime, we expanded our dimensions for the monument pad beyond what was approved in our initial plans, so as to allow for storage space in the garage (us lacking a basement, you see).

We were getting ready to pour the pad that we showed on our original plans and assumed was approved. An inspector to the site last Friday refused to approve our concrete forms in advance of a scheduled pour. He said that he needed to see more detail. This necessitated a trip to the city where we realized that because the plan said "future garage over new monument pad" they had ignored it because of the word "future," even though it was what they told us to do in order to get our off-street parking and still be able to build a garage some day without pouring new concrete. So, we needed a permit for the pad, and since we were there and paying for new permits we might as well get a permit for a garage too. Tai had played around with a design, which is a basic shed-style building using similar siding materials as the house. He had drawn a site plan and floor plan already, and Davido took out a piece of paper and drew a framing plan and a detail on the monument pad and its footings.

It took about 2 hours to sort through everything but at the end building and zoning stamped the plans around 4:30 p.m., and the boss at building and zoning called down to the public utilities office to make sure they would stick it out to 5 p.m. so Tai and Davido could dash down with our plan and get approval, thus allowing us to remain more or less on schedule for the concrete pour and to work around the snowstorm last weekend.

Here's the miracle: public utilities did it. They stayed in the office when they said they would, they approved our garage plan in a matter of minutes, they gave us the green light to build this thing and were very friendly and happy about it. I'm still in awe even as I type this.

So Tired

2009-11-16T14:12:00.004-07:00

I haven't updated in awhile because I have been crazy busy working on the house. I am doing most of the interior finish work so since I last posted I have spent more hours than I can count finishing the and grouting tile, installing the bamboo floor, putting up base board, installing cabinets etc etc etc... My dad has been great, putting in many late nights with me and my brothers in law were really helpful getting a lot of the bamboo down two Saturdays ago.

The metal siding is almost done outside, most of our exterior concrete is in and most of the final grading has been done as well. We are really closing in on this.

Here are a bunch of photos that I'm too tired to narrate, so hopefully they tell the story pretty well on their own.

Kitchen and other finishing touches

2009-11-02T14:36:00.004-07:00

I've been really busy working at the house. This last week I took a break from tiling to work on the kitchen. We assembled the cabinets on Saturday and Monday night I started to hang them. My dad came and helped me Monday night and we were able to hang most of the upper cabinets. Shortly after he left at 9:00 I realized that in my haste to get going, I skipped a step and we ended up hanging all the uppers about 5/8 of an inch too high. Not wanting to lose a day, I took them all down and re-hung them at the correct height. I finished around mid-night, which would set the tone for the rest of the week. Late nights. Kersten also started painting this week and got the mud room, office and master bedroom painted. If you've seen the pictures of our other places, you'll recognize some of the colors, but they work and we really like bright colors for accents. My brother Quinn came by on Saturday and helped her paint while I continued to work on the kitchen and picked up bamboo flooring. It was also nice to have some help unloading the 29 boxes of bamboo.

The metal siding also started in earnest on Friday and by Saturday afternoon much of the south side was up. I'm really excited and think it will look great. They also started prepping for the outside concrete, starting with the sloped entrance to the front door. It will have retaining walls on the sides to keep snow melt and rain from easily making its way to our front door. We have a drain in there as well to handle any water that does make its way towards the house.

Here are some pictures of what's happened the last week:

Punch list

2009-11-02T12:31:00.003-07:00

I think we can all agree that the answer to Tai's last blog entry title is a resounding YES. But I will definitely forgive him because of all the hard work that the house has taken over the last couple of weeks.

He has all the photos, but in the meantime, here's a brief run down of what we have left to do:

• paint color walls
• master shower tile
• grout and seal all tile
• install bamboo floor upstairs
• buy and install kitchen appliances
• kitchen countertop
• clean and seal concrete floor downstairs
• bathroom cabinets and countertops
• figure out landscaping
• figure out window coverings
• resolve some differences with the bank

This is what the contractors still have left:

• complete mechanical (duct) work downstairs
• finish site grading
• start and finish site concrete (patio, sidewalks, retaining walls, etc.)
• finish electrical work — install lighting
• finish plumbing work
• finish exterior metal work
• some small finish work inside (perhaps baseboard?)

It's not a complete list, but if you don't hear from us for a while it's because we're happily buried in house work.

Am I Bad at Blogging or What?

2009-10-23T22:36:00.003-06:00

After the sheetrock was done, things on the inside were turned over to me for the most part. Originally we had planned on doing all the painting ourselves. I hadn't really thought through sealing the windows and doors and after looking into a few products we determined that it would be best to have them spray lacquered. We had a couple of painters that Davido has worked with give us a bid on it. Dave Miller and Dave Burleigh at Allstar Painting gave us such a good bid for that that we decided to also have them spray the primer and a finish coat of white on all the walls and ceilings as well. This saved us a ton of time. In the course of one week we had all the doors and windows sealed and all the walls painted. We still have some walls that we will paint an accent color on but I can't tell you how relieving it was to have the paint 90% done in one week. The painters were great to work with and let me do some of the prep to help keep costs down. They also did an absolutely great job. The combination of a really good paint job with an excellent sheet rock job make the walls look like a million bucks.

We went with a Kwal-Howell product called Envirocoat which is a no-voc paint and it turned out to be a really great product. The walls were given an eggshell sheen and the ceiling got a flat paint. With so much ceiling and no texture anywhere, a flat paint up there will keep light from glaring and make any irregularities in the ceiling less noticeable.

Between helping us prep for paint, Davido and his guys finished up the cedar siding. It looks really great. The mitered corners are a really nice touch. We just hope that they don't shrink up too much. Each board has two coats of sealer on all sides and all cut edges were sealed and all joints were glued, so we think it will do okay.

The painting was done last Friday around noon and as soon as they were done I got working on the tile work. Friday and Saturday morning I got the backer board down and then Saturday afternoon Kersten showed up and helped me start laying the tile down in the bathrooms and laundry room. She was actually really good at it. She's really a good baker and she said that spreading the mortar reminded her a lot of frosting a cake. Saturday we got all the laundry and second bathroom and about half of the master bathroom finished. I was back at it Monday night after work and finished the master bathroom. Then Tuesday night and Wednesday night my Dad came and helped me get the walls around the bath tub in the second bathroom finished. He was a huge help and once we settled on a plan of attack we were able to move pretty quickly. Friday I spent figuring out the rest of the shower pan for the master bathroom shower. Our plumber did the base slope and water proof membrane which had to be inspected by the city a couple of weeks ago but it still needed a mortar layer over top of the membrane for the tile to go on. I used a sand/portland cement mixture that goes in as a dry-pack application. Enough water is added so that it feels a bit like wet sand. It was pretty tedious getting the perimeter edges level and then sloping it towards the drain, but it's done now and I'll start working on the tile for the floor in the shower next.

We went with a 2x2 inch tile mosaic on the floor by American Olean in Ice White with a matte finish. The walls are 3x6 subway tile in the same finish.

Wednesday we got most of our finish electrical work done and even got some lights working. This makes working at night so much easier. We are just waiting for all of our accent lighting to come in and that will be installed. We've got some cool fixtures that we are excited about. Thursday they started installing the ductwork for our air conditioning system. We have radiant heat but really hate the heat, so we are going to have an exposed spiral duct running down the hallway on the first floor that will have registers to cool the first floor and trunks that feed registers in the floor for the up-stairs. We also put an exposed duct in the hallway upstairs to pull all the hot air that will gather at the top of the vaulted space out of the house and cool the house more efficiently. They should be all done on Monday.

Good things, Utah (or, wherein I sing the praises of our contractor)

2009-10-12T14:59:00.001-06:00

A long time ago when this house was just a twinkle in Tai's eye, we had a discussion about who would build it. Davido's name came up. Knowing next to nothing about the Biesinger clan (except that it is a mighty huge clan), I was reluctant to hire a family member — I was worried about what would happen if things went wrong, if we got mad, if he got mad, budget overruns, missed deadlines, etc. Basically, I was worried about what would happen if we hired a family member and then had a stereotypical GC experience.

But, my family connections include a geologist, a second-grade teacher, a pediatric endocrinologist, and a couple of college students, so I couldn't really produce another general contractor option. We hired Davido, and I'm so glad that we did. Here's a brief list of the good things that have happened because we did:

• started digging approximately 90 minutes after we received our building permit and finished excavation that same day
• got us a connection to an awesome concrete subcontractor who we otherwise couldn't have afforded — our first floor (which will remain exposed concrete) is beautiful
• got us another connection to a metal subcontractor who has matched an early, low bid and does great custom work
• put bonus reflective insulation around our bathtub — hey, who knows whether it will keep our water hot longer, but it's worth a shot!
• got us blown-in insulation for only $400 more than our initial blanket insulation bid, taking us from R-17 to R-23
• got us additional sound-proofing insulation in interior walls upstairs
• bonus: radiant heat in the front porch concrete!
• tolerated Tai working to his heart's content on the framing crew, giving him the bona fides to say, "I built this house"
• the specs on our framing plan called for a lot of unique hardware, but Davido tracked down less expensive options that still maintained high performance
• enjoyed a friendly relationship with all inspectors, who come out to the site more to admire Davido's handiwork than to find fault with it
• Davido found us an equally beautiful but less expensive window brand than was originally specified, saving us several thousand dollars
• got a level 5 finish on our drywall, making it look like it was painted before so much as a layer of primer went on and thoroughly hiding all drywall seams and patches
• found a pro painter who was willing to work on hourly with materials at cost, meaning that we get a fully painted house with lacquered doors and windows by the end of this week for minimally more money — saving us the roughly three weeks it was going to take us to do the same job (which saves us much more in construction interest payments than the painting will cost)
• Davido has done so well keeping things on budget that we have barely touched our contingency money, and we've gone so quickly that we won't use all the construction interest money in the budget. He has saved us enough money in construction that it looks as though we might be able to build a garage with the savings, something we thought we'd have to wait a year or two before doing.

But there are two big things that deserve their own paragraphs: timeline and peace of mind.

We are flying on this house. It's now looking quite likely that we'll be moved in before Thanksgiving, which was a laughable pipe dream back when we got our permit on July 29. Things have moved so quickly. We will get to celebrate the holidays in our new house.

Every time I hear anything about construction, it's because another piece of good news rolled in — either Davido has saved another $500 on some sub-bid or product, or he got us a free upgrade, or he's shaved another couple of days off the construction schedule. The more I share this with people, the more I'm coming to realize how exceptional it is to be under budget and moving faster than expected. Which gives us total peace of mind about our general contractor.

More Pictures and Progress

2009-10-07T21:12:00.003-06:00

Another week has gone by and I've been delinquent in my posting. The good news though is that there are lots and lots of photos for todays post.

The sheetrockers have been there every day including the weekend getting all the plaster just right. They will finish sanding and be out of there tomorrow and then we can get started on finishing the windows and painting.

The outside work got slowed down a bit due to the crummy weather last week but the guys are making good progress on the cedar siding. After they're done with that the metal guys will get in and finish up the outside.

When the forms came off the concrete fireplace wall, the subs put a patch on a few spots even though we told them it needed to be the finished surface. I was able to get it off last week using a rough sanding disc. It looks much better now.

More sheetrock

2009-09-29T14:55:00.003-06:00

I just can't help myself.

Today also marks exactly two months since we started construction, and we are already nearly done hanging sheetrock. We are thrilled, thrilled, with Davido's progress -- way to go!

42,000 words

2009-09-28T22:15:00.002-06:00

Here are some more photos. A lot has happened. Insulation was completed and sheetrock and siding have started.

First peek at drywall

2009-09-28T18:03:00.003-06:00

I didn't want you all to have to wait until Tai posts, so here's the first peek at our drywall:

That's in the dining room, stretching back into the kitchen area.

Update

2009-09-22T21:59:00.002-06:00

It's been quite a while since I posted any pictures. Since the last posting the framing has been finished up, the roof has gone on, the rough plumbing has been finished and inspected, the rough electrical has been completed, the gas line installed, the house has been wrapped in Tyvek and the windows have been installed. Tomorrow insulation starts and should be done by Thursday. Turns out that Davido was able to negotiate blown-in insulation which will give us R-23 in the walls instead of the R-19 blanket we originally had bid.

Here are a bunch of pictures of the last week or so.

Who wants to see some more photos?

2009-09-22T17:36:00.002-06:00

Make some noise and let's see if we can get Tai to post the latest. For shame!

(P.S. Our windows started going in yesterday and word from the hubby is that a couple of the big ones up front are also already in.)

Elevations

2009-09-15T14:25:00.007-06:00

It occurs to me that many people reading this blog (are there many?) are seeing the building coming out of the ground without any idea of what it is designed to look like. In the beginning this was deliberate and then I guess I just got lazy. Since our house is quite modern and permitting was stressful and painful enough on its own, we wanted to avoid the possibility of someone trying to slow down the process for us at the city because they didn't like our design. We were actually very careful to design the house completely within the zoning requirements without any variances. This was to avoid giving anyone else any input into the design of our house. Though it would have been nice to try to get some extra height, we have seen too many examples of modern home designs seeking variances get squashed by neighbors who would seem to think a nuclear waste facility was being put in next to them.

With permit in hand and building well under way, we now unveil the elevations of our home.

East Elevation

South Elevation

West Elevation

North Elevation

I colored these myself, so the colors aren't probably very representative of what it will actually be but the silver sections are two different profiles of 12" wide galvalume siding. The light brown areas are horizontal cedar 6" tongue and groove siding and the areas that are a darker brown are bronze window and door cladding and matching metal panels.

We really love the design that Kenner and Matt came up with for us and we really love watching the Davido bring it out of the ground and make it a reality.

Stupid Rain

2009-09-15T14:16:00.004-06:00

The roofers are scheduled for tomorrow. Mid-week last week, the forecast was looking pretty dry and we were feeling pretty good that we might actually get the house dried in without any major rain. Then yesterday happened. Every part of the house was completely soaked. We are told it's fairly common to get one or two good soakings before getting sealed up, but it still kind of sucks.

It doesn't look much different on the outside, but the past week has seen major progress with the plumbing, mechanical and electrical subs. The framing is about 90% there and we hope it gets mostly wrapped up this week with the framing crew back on the job. Windows are supposed to arrive sometime this week and after the building gets wrapped in Tyvek, those will start going in as well.

More good progress

2009-09-06T15:23:00.004-06:00

Friday marked 2 and a half weeks of framing and about 5 weeks from when we broke ground. Things are looking good. This week the second floor and roof were framed. The radiant for the second floor was put in and the rough plumbing was started. The duct runs for our a.c. were installed.

Next week should see the rough electrical start and perhaps the roofing go on.

Here are some pictures of the progress of this last week.

11 views on YouTube = famous!

2009-09-01T09:36:00.008-06:00

We mentioned on Twitter recently that we had a visit from Park City TV to take a look at our current condo. We are clearly not TV stars, but we still get a kick out of seeing the finished product (and that remixed Jose Gonzalez song as the soundtrack!):

(Plus, how classic is it that Tai's first reaction was, "the SWINYARD condo??!?" Totally makes up for all those times I've been called a Biesinger, darling!)

Catching up on the rest of the week.

2009-08-30T14:54:00.002-06:00

It was a busy week and lots got done and I'm just barely catching up to the blogging.

Tuesday we started setting the floor joists for the second floor. Because of the unique design of the house and the various cantilevers and open spans, a lot of engineering hardware was required, so getting the second floor ready for walls consumed most of the week.

Since a picture is worth a lot of words, here is the rest of the week in pictures:

Tuesday

Wenesday

Thursday

Friday

Days 3 and 4 of framing

2009-08-24T20:51:00.002-06:00

The framing continues and we are moving fast. Friday the interior walls for the first floor were framed and they started roughing in the window opening for the front of the house.

No work over the weekend and we were back at it Monday morning. The big task for today was to get the beams set. The house has 3 paralam beams. One to carry the second story over the vaulted space, one for the stair well and one to carry the roof over the stair well pop-out. Two of the beams are 7 inches wide by 14 inches deep and the other is 7 inches wide by 18 inches deep and they are really really heavy. We didn't really stand a chance of getting them set manually so we had a crane come to put them in place and in less than an hour, they were all set.

We also got some more work done on the front of the house. A wood post carries the south east corner of the house and we poured a footing for it, but it was in the wrong place. I had the lovely task of digging to uncover the footing so it could be moved to the right place. Once that was in the right place, we were able to set that post.

Selling

2009-08-23T15:07:00.003-06:00

We just put our current condo up on the market.

Here's the expanded "for sale" blog (same as how slc202 started), and here's our Utah MLS listing #908277.

Please help us out by sending the links around to whomever may be interested -- thanks!

Framing Day 2

2009-08-20T20:52:00.003-06:00

Another productive day of framing today. We got the bulk of our south wall up as well as the shear wall on the front.

We also got 3 posts in on the corners of the double high walls and set the beam over the patio opening on the south side. The beam is a 5 1/4 inch wide by 18 inch deep over a 12 foot opening. Needless to say it was really really heavy. Fortunately Nick the concrete guy and Jared the excavator stopped by and with their help we were able to rig it to the bob-cat and transport and lift the beam in place. Thanks guys.

Walls in the Air, and Sewer

2009-08-19T21:40:00.002-06:00

Big day today. First of all, it's been 3 weeks since we got our permit and we got underway in earnest on framing. I have been waiting for this day for a long time. We also got our sewer connected.

The excavators trenched out to the sewer main in the alley. They had to cut the road and dig down 12 feet to the main. Because it was so deep, the city required the use of a trench box to prevent the sides of the trench from caving in. Our guys had to do all the digging and bring pipe from the house to the main but the city actually cuts into the sewer main and makes the connection. Once it was connected, the city inspected and then it was filled back in.

Yesterday the lumber was delivered and Davido did the lay-out for the first floor walls. I held the other end of the chalk line.

Starting early this morning the framing crew showed up and we got started. As Kersten told everyone on the site today, I have been talking about framing my own house since she's known me. So, needless to say, today was really exciting for me. We got two of the double high walls up. Because they are so tall, we had to use engineered studs so the walls would be straight. Engineered studs are much heavier than regular studs though, and so these walls were a bear to get up. The first one we borrowed the excavating crew and the 8 of us got it up. The second one was in a tighter spot and much harder to get up and there were fewer of us. Fortunately, the excavator was able to get in and use the track-ho to help us lift the wall. At the end of the day, about half of the exterior walls on the first floor were up. Can't wait to see what gets done tomorrow.

And now we have a floor.

2009-08-15T19:13:00.005-06:00

We had a really productive week this week.

Monday they finished back-filling and prepping the inside of foundation for the slab. 4 inches of gravel were brought in to go under the slab.

Tuesday our plumbers started the rough plumbing. They put in all the sewer and water lines that need to go under the slab.

Wednesday all the work the plumbers did on Tuesday was inspected and then the interior footings were dug, the plastic vapor barrier was put down and a wire mesh was put down. The vapor barrier is to hopefully keep any ground water from making its way from underneath into our slab. It also serves to reflect the heat generated from the radiant tubing up into the slab and not down into the earth. The wire mesh should help keep any cracks in the slab from spreading too much.

Thursday the plumbers started working on the radiant tubing for the first floor. The tubing was laid out in rows one foot apart. A loop was put outside the front door so that we can tie into it later and keep the porch heated and ice-free. We are really excited about the radiant heat. This was all inspected Thursday afternoon and ready for the pour on Friday.

On Friday the concrete crew for the flat work was there early to get ready for the pour at 9:00 a.m. First they snapped a level line for the top of the slab then put rebar dowels into the foundation walls to keep the slab from slipping in the event of settling. We did a lot of compacting and hope that settling won't be an issue. We couldn't really afford a pump truck for this pour, but fortunately there was room for the concrete truck along the south side of the house. We had a really good crew on the flat work and they worked quickly and efficiently to rake out and level out the concrete. As soon as we started to pour the wind really kicked up causing the concrete to set up a little faster than we would have liked, but with the power trowel, we were able to get a really smooth surface.

Saturday the slab guy came back to score the slab. Concrete slabs like ours have a tendency to crack. It's a pretty big area for a single slab and it is inside the foundation without anywhere to expand. This makes it pretty unpredictable and cracking is pretty much inevitable. By scoring the slab we hope to create a place for the slab to crack where it will be contained and unnoticeable. Like I said though, concrete is unpredictable and we had a few cracks overnight. One of them was pretty big right through the center of the house. I'm sure we grow to love our cracks here and there, and hope that we won't have many more.

Back Fill

2009-08-09T16:34:00.003-06:00

The forms came off the concrete foundation walls on Tuesday morning and that afternoon I started my first sweat equity task. Waterproofing the foundation was dirty dirty work that took me about 14 hours Tuesday and Wednesday to complete.

Wednesday afternoon and Thursday Davido and his his Ian started backfilling and compacting the inside of the foundations by hand and on Friday the excavator showed up to help us back-fill with the machines. Usually the dirt just gets pushed back in without compacting, which can lead to settling later. Since our concrete slab is also the finished floor, settling would be unacceptable. Therefore, we have been compacting the soil as we go. The dirt is pushed back in in 12 to 18 inch lifts and then we compact it before more dirt is pushed in. The compactors are essentially jack-hammers with a large plate on the bottom to tamp the soil. This is very jarring work and after a couple of days of this everything shakes when I close my eyes.

The level of dirt is still a little high on the inside, so on Monday the excavator will take that out, put in the 4 inches of gravel that goes under the slab and finish filling and grading outside the foundation. We are scheduled to pour the slab on Friday. Before that the rough plumbing will need to be done and the tubing for the radiant flooring will need to go in. This should all get under way on Monday as well.

More concrete photos

2009-08-06T10:09:00.004-06:00

Here are a couple of photos from the concrete pour for foundation walls and the fireplace wall.

We haven't done photos for a couple of days because the exciting stuff is at a pause. The foundation walls are in (as you can see from the pictures), and Tai has spent the last couple of days building some sweat equity (and GIGANTIC blisters) by waterproofing the exterior walls of the foundation. Now that that task is complete, the team is back-filling and compacting the dirt inside and around the foundation walls in preparation for pouring the slab.

We're hoping to finish compacting and back-filling the dirt this week, work on slab prep early next week (including a few inches of excavation and rough plumbing for our radiant floor) and perhaps pour a slab by the end of next week? As usual, stay tuned.

The long version of the permitting rant

2009-08-06T08:43:00.000-06:00

After weeks of gnashing our teeth, we finally got a permit from Salt Lake City on Wednesday, July 29. The road leading there was a long and painful one that started many weeks prior.

We initially sketched out a pretty ambitious and aggressive design, permitting and construction schedule. Part of that is because we just want a new house to live in, and the other part is because the duration of our construction financing is finite. The bank put a timer on our construction loan that will expire in mid-January 2010 regardless of how finished we are with the house at that point. We knew this from the moment we closed on the lot back in March, which is why we did a whirlwind design phase with an eye toward submitting a permit application June 4 and construction beginning in early July.

Design was a blast and moved along quickly. We ate up a couple of contingency weeks fairly early in the design process due to vacation and travel scheduling conflicts, and we ate up another week or so with missed connections for engineering/contractor/architect/owner discussions. That pushed our target plans-submittal date to about June 15.

A quick note about how you get a residential permit in Salt Lake City: your contractor must submit full plans for your house. Various city departments review those plans, either stamp them "approved" or note revisions they'd like to see you make on the plans. If they require revisions (and every city department that reviewed our plans did require revisions from us), then you have to satisfy their comments, re-submit the relevant portions of your plans and wait for that golden "approved" stamp.

On June 15, we tried to submit plans but did not have a complete enough set. We were missing a mechanical plan and a detailed engineering plan. It had been a while since our architects had gotten a permit for a house in Salt Lake City, and last time around the city allowed deferred submittals for a lot of those things. Not so any longer. The city turned us away on June 15, and we spent the next 8 days scrambling to get a more complete set so that we could at least log our permit application with the city and get the process started. (We were able to log our plans with public utilities in June 15, though -- which makes the end of this story all the more frustrating. Oh, but wait for it...)

We finally were able to log our plans on June 23 (already a stressful moment because we still had a June 4 deadline in our minds). Then the waiting -- the horrible, horrible waiting -- began.

The first comments we got back were from the city's zoning plans reviewer on July 1 -- a quick turn-around. We had a few mistakes on the plans (including an oversight on the building height) that she caught for us, and she also made a comment to the effect of, I need to see the grades on your lot in order to properly process these plans. We had not ordered a topographical survey (cost: $5,000 or more) because 1) the city did not require it, 2) we could not afford it, and 3) the lot we're building on is relatively flat. But us vouching for the lot's relative flatness wasn't going to cut it for the city. They wanted numbers and grades.

How were we going to get grades? How much would it cost? Did we even have the correct property lines? Oh #$%^, we didn't order a property line survey -- can we even build on this lot?!? Would the city believe us if we shot our own grades? Would they make us get an expensive topographical survey even though their code didn't require it? Could they even do that? How much would we have to redesign the house? How long would that take? How much would that cost? What is the contractor willing to help with? What are the architects willing to help with? What can we do ourselves? How are going to pay for this? How far off schedule will this put us? How much more review will zoning require after our resubmittal?

And so on, and so on.

We ended up ordering a property line survey (cheaper and less involved than a full topographical survey) and shooting grades on the corners of the property and the planned corners of the house to satisfy the city requirement for numbers. Based on those numbers, we discovered a bit of fall in the property (the street end of our lot is higher than the alley end of out lot), which necessitated a redesign of the first floor (farewell 9-foot ceilings -- we never knew ye), the site drainage plan, and the footings/foundation plan. It has also necessitated a redesign of our mechanical system since our previous solution for air conditioning will no longer fit on our first floor. Lots and lots of ripples.

Remember public utilities? Remember how they got our plans on June 15? Well...three weeks later, Tai finally made a casual and extremely friendly phone call to inquire about the status of our application review. Oh, those plans? they asked. Those plans are still on the pile, but we'll get to it. And what's more -- you'll be lucky when we get to it when we do. (I'm paraphrasing the general front-desk attitude at the public utilities contracts counter. Public Utilities is known the city over for a lack of interest in public service.)

We got the public utilities review a few days later and again scrambled to make changes based on their revisions. The changes we made based on the first review didn't pass, so we had to go back and make even more changes. Complicating this entire process was a short week due to a state holiday, a sick public utilities plans reviewer, and the unwillingness of anyone else in the department to look at our plans in this reviewer's absence. Each of these tiny little conditions would have been manageable in sequence, or spread over a long period of time, but compacting them into each other and on top of each other created a stress that I have a hard time describing. There's nothing like knowing that your hopes and dreams hang in the balance of a couple of ornery and over-worked city employees -- it's terrifying.

Meanwhile, we got comments back from a building plans reviewer. Our only complaint there was that submitting on June 23 instead of June 15 put us at the bottom of a pile of applications that piled up on that reviewer's desk while she was on summer vacation for a week. I kid you not: our house-building process is now delayed because a city employee went on vacation without anyone covering for her. Other than that, her comments were pretty straight forward and required only a few changes.

We had pushed, pulled, prodded, and shoved this process nearly to its bitter end last week. We had submitted all our review comments and received approval from zoning and building departments. Public utilities was all that's left. We satisfied their requirements and were hallucinating a building permit hovering over our heads when the public utilities plans reviewer said, "oh, so has anyone talked to you about a fee schedule?" (Hence, this rant.)

Two very depressing days later -- I did not believe that we were ever, ever going to get a building permit...only that we would continue halving the distance between us and the permit without ever actually reaching our destination -- we finally satisfied the myriad requirements for a permit. And, got our permit. (Which, as it turns out, are two different things.)

So, here's what I have learned from this bruising process:

If you're new to this, go to the city and get a punch list of what you'll need (we didn't and were immediately sorry).
Have an explicit conversation about the city punchlist with your architects/engineers/contractors.
No request from the city is too small. They WILL withhold your permit until they are satisfied.
Sometimes the city will make you do stuff that is not required by law.
All the time the city will make you do stuff that is required by law.
City employees will screen your phone calls and not call you back.
City employees might, if you're lucky, return your emails.
If they say they want the plans redrawn, then it means they want the plans redrawn.
Keep the controlled substance of your choice handy -- you will need it.
Public utilities needs some nice pills.
Venting helps.

So, thanks for listening/reading/sending cookies/your moral support. And thank whoever you thank that we are finally underway and building. This is such a nicer place to be.

Foundations

2009-08-03T16:15:00.003-06:00

Starting bright and early this morning, the concrete crew was on set tying rebar and getting the forms ready for the foundation wall pour today. Part of this pour today is also the fireplace wall (where the fireplace will eventually go), a 12 and a half foot tall concrete wall on the front of the house that also makes up part of the entrance.

By 1:00 the city had inspected and the pump truck was set to go. The whole thing was poured and j-bolts set within 2 hours. The j-bolts are what attache the framing to the foundation. There are also tie-down straps for seismic stability that were placed in the foundation.

Here are the photos of the day.

Photos of the footings concrete pour

2009-07-31T18:35:00.003-06:00

Here's a bunch of photos from today's concrete pour for the footings:

Footings

2009-07-31T11:45:00.005-06:00

We are not messing around, folks. We had a building permit at roughly 11 a.m. on Wednesday, our contractor had an excavator on site by 1 p.m., hole digging started at 2 p.m., and the footings depths were all dug out by 4 p.m. Wednesday. Then, Davido set forms for footings yesterday to prepare for an inspection and concrete pour this morning.

This is the beginning of our first pour this morning:

And here's the finished pour for the footings, an hour (!) later:

I do not have words to communicate how thrilling this is for us.

(And yes, yes, we will post elevations/drawings as soon as we can get pdfs from the architects. Then those footings will make sense.)

Photo experimentation

2009-07-30T09:51:00.005-06:00

We're playing around with a couple of different options for displaying photos on the blog. Feel free to point us in the right direction in the comments — we're just looking for something that will let us easily upload and share construction/design photos.

This one is Picasa, the Google photo partner.

This is the very first scoop of dirt on the lot — a very exciting moment for us!

Under Way

2009-07-29T18:35:00.005-06:00

As we posted earlier today, we have a building permit. I'll save the gory details of that struggle until another post, but we were able to finally pull the permit this morning at 11:00 a.m.

Never one to let grass grow beneath his feet, our builder went straight to the lot and started laying out the building for the excavator. We will eventually live between the spray painted lines.

Because we had been really hoping to have pulled our permit by the end of the day yesterday, the excavator delivered his track hoe to the lot last night. This turned out to be great because once Davido was finished with the layout, the excavator showed up and got going right away, hence our construction began in earnest at about 2:00 this afternoon.

I had to run somewhere at 3:00 and when I came back at 4:30 they were done and had displaced a LOT of dirt.

I can't even imagine what it would look like if we were digging out a basement.

Oh, whew.

2009-07-29T11:59:00.002-06:00

We have a building permit.

Still no permit

2009-07-27T17:14:00.004-06:00

I am so deflated.

And, time for a mini-rant:

Really, public utilities, REALLY?!?!?!? In the last eight conversations that we've had over the past week about OUR #$%^ING HOUSE PLANS you could not, at any point during those eight conversations, mention the fact that your @#$%^#% department would not provide plans approval to zoning withour first attaching a fee schedule to our application? You had to mention this at 4:45 p.m. on the very day when we finally satisfy all your requirements to redraw our site plan (instead of accepting plan notations, like you have for all other residential plans up to this point) to mention casually WHILE WE'RE STANDING AT YOUR $%^&ING COUNTER, "oh, so has anyone talked to you about a fee schedule? Oh, no? Well, we can't release these plans to you until we have a fee schedule for your plans. And since so-and-so was out of town, things got backed up, so we'll add you to the pile." And then the kicker: "We might be able to get it to you on Wednesday."

And now I'm off to search craigslist for firearms and large-scale explosives.

Stump removal

2009-07-16T17:28:00.004-06:00

You may have been able to tell from the pictures of the tree clearing that we left pretty hefty stumps above ground -- the majority were at least four feet tall. We haven't been quite sure what to do with stumps (and have been thinking about it for a while, given that we knew about the need to remove them almost from the moment that we bought the lot).

You can imagine our relief, then, when our contractor, Davido, called one morning and offered to bring an excavator around to dig them out.

Turns out that Davido was working on another job in the area that required this, and he and the excavation sub-contractor were able to save us some transportation costs by bring this bad boy over to the lot this week.

We are a bit saddened that we weren't around for the actual stump pulling. I bet it was exciting, with that bucket and thumb tearing away at the stumps. (It's so awesome to see heavy gear on our lot -- gives us hope that maybe someday we'll actually get a permit!)

We stopped by at lunch time of the second day of removal and the lot looked like this already. And although the stump removal wasn't free/cheap, it took them only a couple of hours to get everything cleared.

Compared to the DIY options (trimming the stumps to level ground with another round of chainsaw action, then renting a stump grinder, tackling the 12+ stumps on our own), this method was priceless.

And, we're still waiting for a building permit. If I can paraphrase a bad piece of religious folklore: No one ever told us it would be fast. Only that it would be worth it.

Waiting for the book deal

2009-07-10T00:07:00.001-06:00

In the meantime, we're trying not to jinx ourselves more than necessary by revealing information that might come back to bite us.

Things are stressful, but things are moving. Now, just offer me that tell all and I'll unzip my lips. Soon -- I promise.

The Trees

2009-06-27T10:13:00.006-06:00

We've been a little quiet lately, or maybe subdued is the word. After the thrill ride of house design, we had a few minor (and I do stress minor) setbacks that took the wind out of our sails. First, preliminary cost feedback came back a little high, which put us in budget mode — the stressful process of figuring out what to cut was one that we knew we'd eventually face (and we'll probably have another round later in the building process, too), but that did not make it any easier.

Second, our permitting attempts did not go quite as planned. We are very happy working with our architects, but they are the first to admit that residential design is not their core business. We also have never applied for a building permit. Setbacks at the permitting counter cost us a couple of weeks.

Then, there is the tree saga. Anyone who has been following us on Twitter (or facebook, via my linked twitter account) may have noticed a stream of tweets about the neighbors and the trees. Here's the deal, folks: 1) yes, we had many tall, old trees on our lot, 2) yes, they encroached into the building footprint and utility trench, and 3) yes, they really, truly, honestly had to come down.

The lot is 37 1/2 feet wide — a narrow start at best. Even though our house is several feet under the sideyard setbacks required by Salt Lake City zoning, our sideyard utility trenching will run directly under those trees. A line of Russian olives, Chinese elms and old cedars ran the full length of one side, at points extending in about 10 feet into the width of the lot and 6 feet into the building footprint.

We'll spare you the gory details of a neighborly interaction. Suffice to say that it's unfortunate that the most visible change to the lot is the one that had to happen first. The trees are no longer standing, but it is, for the first time, possible to see how a house may actually fit on this lot.

Here's the lot before any major tree clearing, but after Tai did a little assessing and discovered a snail's paradise, crazy thorn patches and many parasitic climbing vines:

This is our contractor, Davido Biesinger wielding a chain saw, and thus preventing Tai from self-inflicting another major injury:

This is the beginning of day two of clearing, with the help of a former Forest Service employee whose job used to be solely tree felling in national forests. You really get a sense of the mass of green material that came down:

And this is the after shot, including the piles of cut lumber after the bulk of the clearing was done:

We still need to go back and take out the rest of the trunks and grind down stumps, something that may be happening on the long weekend ahead. Given that we're already about 3-4 weeks behind where we'd like to be, we don't want the lot preparation to be any cause of delay to breaking ground. Our fingers are crossed for breaking ground mid-July.

Itching to start

2009-06-12T14:25:00.006-06:00

Tai is at the lot right now clearing brush from some pretty nasty overgrowth on our sideyard. If the weather cooperates, we'll be cutting down some trees tomorrow. If the weather doesn't cooperate, then we'll doing tree removal two-by-two during the evening next week.

As often happens with me these days, my earlier Tweet about applying for a building permit today isn't going to happen. For many reasons (with many people at fault), the permitting and bid sets of drawings won't be finished today in time to visit the Salt Lake City permit desk. We're hoping that visit will happen on Monday morning, which puts us about two weeks behind when we originally thought we would start the bid process (again, many people at fault).

Our current circular pinch point is that we cannot start construction until we get a full set of construction drawings from the architects. We can't get a full set of construction drawings from the architects until they are, rightfully, paid for their services. We can't pay the architects until the bank releases money from our construction loan, and the bank won't release any money until they have a detailed cost breakdown. We can't give them a detailed cost breakdown until we have completed bids from the contractor and his subs...which takes us back to the permit/bid sets of drawings that will be done by Monday morning. Stay tuned.

Dumped On

2009-06-08T12:05:00.007-06:00

I spent some time on the lot on Friday and noticed that it has become quite the collector.

We hope to start clearing the lot this weekend.

Stabbing Pain

2009-06-06T22:59:00.003-06:00

We met with the architects and the builder on Friday and have made cuts and are close enough to just move forward. The plans will be done on Friday morning next week and we will go to the city and put them in for permit.

So this weekend I went to my dad's house to help him on some projects before my life gets consumed in the construction of our house. We were fixing his fence which had fallen down in a few places and............... I stabbed my self with a bowie knife.

Long story long, my dad has a knife that he uses for sprinklers that he had just gotten cleaned up and sharpened. I went to look at it and then decided to throw it in the grass, because that's what really cool people do. My stance had my right leg in front of me and I threw the knife handle first (first mistake) and let go of it a split second too late and so instead of going forward and down into the grass a few feet in front of me, it went straight down and into my shin. The point of the knife went into my leg, pierced the shin bone and then bounced several feet.

At first it just felt like I hit my shin with some blunt object but then I remembered that I had been throwing a fracking knife and fell to the ground and put pressure on the stab hole that I had put in my leg. My dad helped me into the car and we went to the ER. I got to ride in a wheel chair for the first time though and that was cool. When they were checking me in they asked what my pain level was on a 1 - 10 scale. It was about a 4. After about an hour the doc showed up and shot the area up with some very nice stuff that makes it feel like nothing happened. As he got to cleaning the wound he found that the knife had pierced the shin bone, which changed things quite a bit since if infection got in the bone it would be a really really bad thing (amputation was mentioned). So he stitched me up and ordered an x-ray to see the extent of the damage to the bone and gave me a huge shot of anti-biotic in each of my butt cheeks and prescribed me a 7 day round of anti-biotics. This with all the cleaning he did of the wound should take care of any danger of infection, but I need to follow up with an orthopedic surgeon if it doesn't feel better in a week or so.

After about 3 hours I was able to leave the hospital and I was feeling pretty good, if not like a complete idiot. I went back to my parents where I had dinner and then took off for home. I needed to pick up my prescription first. This took about an hour and half. Each minute that passed more of the local anesthesia wore off and the pain increased. By the time I was driving home from the pharmacy the pain was approaching a 9. Nobody was driving fast enough and I hit every red light. I was screaming louder than I ever have at everyone in my way all the swears I could think of.

All I could think about was getting home to the Lortab that was not prescribed to me for this, but that I have in my cupboard from some oral surgery last year.I took it and now the pain is a 6 or 7. Advil just wasn't going to cut it.

I had ridden my bike 30 miles this morning and then worked in the sun for a few hours and I was pretty dang filthy. Now, you're not supposed to change the dressings for 24 hours and you really aren't supposed to get them wet. Well, I put a trash bag on my leg and taped the top with tape that wasn't sticky enough and got in the shower. I got my dressing all wet, so I changed it with the stuff I got at the pharmacy, but it isn't really doing the job and I'm alone because Kersten is in San Francisco for the weekend. So, I'm basically a wreck and though they stitched up my leg, my ego needs some major work right now. Like maybe a transplant.

So, don't throw knives because getting stabbed hurts exactly as much as you think it would hurt.

Almost There

2009-06-04T10:29:00.003-06:00

It's been a little quiet on the blog for a while, but there has been a lot going on behind the scenes. When we left off last we were working on getting some cost feedback on the design to see how we are doing relative to our budget before pushing through to finished construction docs. When we got our feedback last week, we were a bit high. So we had an emergency meeting with the architects on Friday last week to see what we could do about it. We took a look at things we could delete from the plan, things we could defer to a later time when we can better afford it. We targeted the high ticket items in the feedback and are trying to trim here and there.

Windows obviously are a high ticket item, but we didn't want to attack them or the square footage too aggressively because you can't come back later and add those in easily. We deleted a couple of windows and are seeing if there are configurations of windows that could be a little more cost effective. Right now the plan calls for metal clad wood windows. If we went to vinyl windows we could cut the cost in half or more, but we really feel like the windows need to be done right the first time.

We are doing radiant heat and that is important to us, but also important was having good air conditioning. We don't suffer the heat very well. Our original plan was to use a high velocity system with flexible 4" ducting that would be easy to hide. This number came back much higher than is feasible for us. We are going to now go with an exposed duct on the first floor that will feed floor registers on the second floor connected to a standard air conditioner and fan unit. Early feedback is that this will be much more affordable and still keep us very comfortable. The greener option would be to go with a swamp cooler, but because we are heat wimps our love for the earth could be summed up nicely by Meatloaf, "I would do anything for love, but I won't do that."

We have decided to defer the fireplace and stone countertops for now, which will also save a lot of money.

We think we have found the savings that we need and will spend the next week with the architects and engineers finishing up construction docs for delivery next week. Then we will march them into the city for permit and work on getting our formal bids tied up.

Quiet, but Busy

2009-05-20T16:41:00.003-06:00

Things are a little quiet on the blog front right now. Design work is essentially complete, but before we can finalize the plans, we are getting cost feedback from the contractor to see if we are doing okay on our budget. This isn't the formal bid, but we need to know in a few key areas if we need to make changes. Since I will be putting in a bit of sweat equity into the house, this means that during this time, I am also checking out costs on items that will be my responsibility. These include the kitchen (Ikea), flooring, painting, rough electrical, base boards.

This phase is supposed to be finished early next week, after which we will decide what changes need to be made and then move towards construction docs, which, if all goes as planned in the cost estimating process, should be done on June 4th.

Edumacated

2009-05-15T13:15:00.001-06:00

While we're waiting for our cost estimate (a pre-bidding phase that will help us refine the design to maximize but not break the budget), here's a little book I saw in Philadelphia recently. My thinking was, "ooooh, I wonder if they have good photos of tile that we could use..."

And then I turned the corner and saw the rest of the title.

Have a great weekend, everyone. I will, once again, be dreaming of a yard.

Hot diggity dog

2009-05-13T09:21:00.004-06:00

Well, it looks like we sneaked onto local spotters and touters Your Heart Out recently — check out our shout out. (Thanks, Amelia, for the heads up!)

And now I'm off to figure out that Bertinelli reference.

Finalized floor plans

2009-05-11T17:55:00.004-06:00

You've seen crappy camera-phone photos and lots of iterations, so this might not be as exciting to you as it is to us, but here are the finalized floor plans.

First floor:
Second floor:In each case, north is up, and the front door/street is on the right side.

We're now getting some preliminary cost feedback from our general contractor, then we'll move into construction documents over the next couple of weeks. We're still hoping to break ground sometime around July 4.

Exposure and expression

2009-05-08T13:59:00.002-06:00

One of the things we are excited about with the design of the house is that there are going to be several exposed construction elements. We will have 2 or 3 paralam beams that are exposed to some degree and our fireplace is going to feature an exposed concrete wall that will also serve as a shear wall and of course our floors on the first floor will be the concrete slab. We really like that parts of our house will be an expression of the things that built it.

We had to reschedule our architect meeting for this afternoon, which is why this week was light on updates. We're now off to the meeting to hopefully wrap things up and enter the construction documents phase of design.

Priorities

2009-05-05T15:47:00.003-06:00

Yes, that's our Eames lounge chair showing up in the elevations. The first — and, to date, only — piece of furniture included in our elevations. We are those people.

(Sorry for the horrible photo quality.)

Vaulted space

2009-05-01T07:54:00.000-06:00

We are tentatively expanding the vaulted space in the living room (far right of the floor plan here, the part with the "x" through it). It had been a bit pinched with all the design tweaking we did to the second floor.

If you have sharp eyes and a good memory, you'll notice a very slight shift in the placement of the second floor over the first. We're moving it to the west to create a little more vaulted space in the living room. The second-floor jog at the loft (top of the stairs) is what will require one of the structural beams in the house (it's also where we're talking about whether that beam will be exposed).

You can also see the orientation of the master bath, including a re-orientation of the toilet room, and the shower-only stall at the south (or "bottom") of the master bathroom. This particular orientation would not accommodate a double-sided linen closet, but it does reclaim a foot or so of space that we desperately needed for the second bathroom to be truly comfortable and functional. And the door for the master bedroom can be at any point along that approach hallway — as per a commentor's suggestion, we will likely put it at the public-space-end of the hall.

Parallam

2009-04-29T12:53:00.001-06:00

The architects and structural engineer think that we'll need a beam or three in the house to keep the fairy-tale wolves at bay. Steel beams are typically the most expensive beam option (and therefore, probably too pricey for us), so we'll look at a couple of wood options instead. Traditional old-growth timber is not a great choice if we're trying to use materials from sustainable sources, but reclaimed timber may still be an option.

Another option, which I hadn't heard about, was Parallam (and similar structural composite lumber, like Glulam), but I guess that it looks a bit like wheatboard (which I had seen, and liked):

We'd look for a source that doesn't use formaldehyde to hold it all together. If we end up using this as a beam, we might leave it exposed. Has anyone out there seen this application? Does it look good exposed? What works?

Master bath update

2009-04-28T14:42:00.003-06:00

We may be ditching the full tub in favor of a shower only. I know, I know...I said I didn't like showers only. But space has become a bigger issue than it was before, and in order to get everything else in there in a way that makes sense, we may be relying on the tub in our second bathroom instead.

Our schedule has morphed a bit as we approach the end of design. We met with Kenner, Matt and Stephanie last week for our penultimate design meeting. Our next meeting isn't until May 7, but in the meantime, the team is finishing design and starting construction documents — blurring the lines between the two phases ought to keep us on schedule for bidding and permitting during June. We'll be firing up the chainsaws for some "brush clearing" on the lot around mid-June, and we're still hoping to start construction somewhere between mid-June and early July.

Cathouse

2009-04-24T17:41:00.006-06:00

Last night's meeting was great — we know what our floor plans will be, we have an idea of what the exterior will look like, we're all on the same page for materials, and on and on. (If you know us in real life, just ask to see the exterior elevation sketches next time we run into each other.)

A new and welcome wrinkle for us is the addition of Stephanie Kooyman from Architectural Nexus to help with our interiors. She comes to architecture by way of an interior design background and now works with Kenner and Matt at the firm. We talked last night about generally what we like for interior fixtures and finishes.

Stephanie's caveat is that no, we won't be able to afford everything we like (sad, but old, news to us!), but she can help us find similar things that will still look great in the space. She already has some interesting materials such as cork-infused bamboo and connections with suppliers that will help us understand what makes sense for our budget.

As part of that conversation, we touched on paint preference — light? dark? strong? any that we actually hate?

After a few seconds to think about it, my reponse was, "I'm not really afraid of bright colors. I would even do a bright purple, pink...whatever." Kenner: "Pink?! What is this? A cathouse??"

Kenner gets bonus points for being under 80 and using the word "cathouse." I get negative points for briefly considering a hot pink wall.

Batter up

2009-04-23T14:34:00.004-06:00

It's been two weeks since our last meeting with Kenner and Matt, and we are suuuuuuuper excited for this one.

Things that we hope to learn about our house tonight:

• final floorplan (including whether the master bedroom mash-up works)
• exterior treatments (tweeted earlier this week — btw, check out the new feed on the right!)
• window placement

I feel like we've been hearing great things about this house for a while, but tonight is the first date when we finally get to meet in person.

Structural Engineer

2009-04-21T10:58:00.006-06:00

Turns out that structural engineering is a pretty important step in the process of designing a home, especially a non-traditional home, since a structural engineer essentially figures out a way for your house to not fall down. I don't really know enough to sound intelligent about it, but basically lots of things want to make your house fall down. There's gravity, live load, dead load, snow load, earthquakes, wind, and fairy tale wolves. After getting recommendations from the architects, the builder and one of my clients, we interviewed several and had them submit proposals. I found the choice to be a bit stressful because I was trying to balance several priorities, budget being a pretty big one, while still feeling confident that they could engineer to everyone's satisfaction what will end up being a pretty unique structure.

Since our house is not going to be a traditional structure we needed to make sure that the engineer understood this and was prepared to interface with the architects and brainstorm with them to figure out how to make certain of our design elements work. Since steel frames are probably out of our budget, it is important too that they figure a way for us to do this with traditional wood framing. We finally hired our engineers yesterday and they are meeting with the architects today to get going on the process. This is good, because it really was the next step before we could go much further with the design. We need to know where and how big the shear walls need to be before we can make meaningful decisions on the windows and door openings. Our hope is that after their meeting today, the architects will have a good enough idea to have those things ready for us to look at at our meeting on Thursday.

So, after architects and engineers have worked together a bit and we generally know what is possible and settle on our final design, the engineer will take the plans created thus far and figure out how to support the structure so that none of the above referenced forces can make the house fall down.

Shaking my faith

2009-04-17T09:14:00.001-06:00

I learned a little while ago that photos such as these...

...are about as real as these:

Why can't we have a little more of this?

Here's the slc202 promise: we will never touch up our house photos! (You'll be lucky if we even clean first.)

We didn't have an architect meeting this week, so we'll have to wait until next week to get another update. In the meantime, enjoy your spring — we're spending ours thinking of a yard.

The master bedroom mash-up

2009-04-16T12:16:00.000-06:00

After looking at the different bedroom options, we realized that a great solution was probably going to take a bit of mix-n-match. We're not totally sure that what we want to do will actually work, but the design process has involved some dreaming for us, so why not a bit more?

This is what we'd like the master bedroom to look like — we pulled elements from three different sketches to get to this option.

If you can't read our scribbles, then the bedroom portion is from Option 3, our preferred toilet-linen combination is from Option 2, and the rest of the bathroom is from Option 4. We're not quite sure that our preferred drawing will work, hence the (2), with a slightly smaller linen closet and re-oriented toilet room.

Also, kudos to Lisa for her two-sided linen closet idea. We will henceforth call it "The Lisa." (Other naming opportunities still abound.)

Master bedroom layout

2009-04-14T08:35:00.003-06:00

We've been working on laying out the master bedroom and bathroom. As it turns out, making a closet, toilet room, double vanity, shower/tub and linen closet into an 18'-by-18' grid is a bit tough. This was the first go at it:

We wanted to redesign this version because 1) we forgot a linen closet, 2) we needed a bit more living space in the bedroom part itself, and 3) it turns out that I really don't want a walk-in closet, even though I said I did. Ever the indulgent ones, Matt and Kenner sent over a few other options.

Option 1:
Option 2:
Option 3:
Option 4:
Option 5:
In each drawing, north is "up," and the rest of the second floor is to the right of the drawing (you can see the entrance to the master suite in the same location on each drawing). We're still working on the drawings, but in the meantime, which would you choose if it were your bedroom?

Meet the contractor

2009-04-13T09:22:00.000-06:00

Meet our general contractor, Davido Biesinger, of Biesinger Construction and general Biesinger family fame.

Davido comes from a strong residential building background, with a lot of work on custom details and large, fancy houses. We're thrilled that he's slumming it with our little project, and we're counting on Davido to keep us on the budgetary straight and narrow, take our heads out of the clouds, and let Tai swing a hammer every now and again.

Davido (pronounced "David-o") was an early adopter of ICF building, and has agreed to bring his building experience to our ideas about what works for a small, modern home.