The roof is on and finished, the grey water system plumbed (see separate blog entry), the kitchen counter tops are going in, tiling getting finished, the staircase has been painted and is waiting for a handrail and treads.  We passed the last “systems” inspection, and now most of those hazardous trenches crisscrossing the yard have been filled in and the water, electricity and gas can all be connected to the house…

Next week the electricity comes down off the temporary pole and the house goes “live”.  The concrete floors will be acid stained and sealed (pretty much a week long process where we can’t go in), appliances arrive, and outside the rough grading starts.

The following week (hopefully) we get the last of the HVAC systems installed (the hot water panels on the roof), and we install the upstairs wooden flooring…

From the front of the house now you can see the roof is done, but there is still an excavator for digging the gas line trench

From the back of the house, you can see the filled in trench (yay!) and the completed roof. the solar hot water panels will be mounted on the second story roof (South facing)

The tile in the master bath is done. There will be a teak screen and teak decking in the master bath, and black "river stones" around the copper tub echoing the river stones around the shower controls

The tub surround for Natalie's bathroom is now also tiled. Jacik (our wonderful tile guy, another excellent recommendation by Jana, our color and stone consultant) with his all-Polish team of master tile setters did the master bath tiling, and were able to take the random theme of Natalie's bathroom floor and continue it up onto the wall with the embedded fossils and pebbles

The countertops go in around the Bluestar range top. The green stone is a "leather" honed granite which has a wonderful grain and texture. The lowered pale area is a butcherblock set to Catherine's comfortable cutting height. On the wall you can see where a bit of blocking is being added for the hood (oops), and there was quite a bit of consternation about the routing of the hood ducting, but it will turn out OK after lots of measuring and re-checking

The countertop for the "coffee area". Also where the microwave, the oven and the fridge will go

The staircase painted and waiting for treads and a hand rail. Right now, it is still a bit hazardous every time you go up and down, but not as bad as the early days with the ladders!

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This feels a bit like the home stretch… but it is still going to be a couple months long!

Now the “punch list” starts – endless details as we make sure the tiling, cabinets, lights, electric switches, flooring, shelves, baseboards (not to mention the final connection of the electrical and water and sewer!) all happen.  Many many details..

The kitchen cabinets being installed

The kitchen cabinets in place

A picture from months ago - laying out the pattern for the "stream" mosaic on Natalie's bathroom floor in the garage of our townhouse

Countless hours later, Catherine's insane art project is mostly done on the floor of Nat's bathroom - still waiting on the special order dark blue grout for the "bubbles" in the stream

The metal pieces ready to be assembled into the roof - these are a very cool material which have high reflectivity in direct sunlight (high albedo), but if you look at them at a low angle, they look dark green

The roof FINALLY going on

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This week the big excitement was finally pouring the concrete for the downstairs floor!

The guys from Atlantic concrete with the truck and the pump

The concrete being pumped into the living room area

The guys hard at work

Floating the final finish

The final product setting up

After much back and forth, we decided we’d use wet “stamped” grooves for our crack control joints rather than having them cut with a saw afterwards.  The saw cuts would be a little less conspicuous, but they wouldn’t go all the way to the wall (the problem with round saw blades…).  The choice of wet grooves means the control joints are rather large, but we’ve seen places that have grouted the joints, and gotten beautiful contrasting lines.  In about 2-3 weeks after the concrete has had a chance to fully set up, it will be acid stained and sealed, and should be mirror finish.

If you’re going to be on a concrete slab anyway, concrete flooring is about the lowest energy flooring you could use, as you aren’t adding anything but sealer.  It is still pretty good if you already have a plywood sub- floor (like on a second story) as, per square meter, it has about the same embodied energy as hardwood… but there may be other considerations I haven’t thought of for second story concrete floors.

If you want to put something else on top of your concrete or plywood sub-floor, the energy adds up:

stone tile 3 kWh/m^2 (+4 kWh/m^s mortar bed)

3/4″ thick solid hardwood flooring 8 kWh/m^2

3/4″ thick concrete floor 9 kWh/m^2

engineered wood flooring  28 kWh/m^2

plywood underlayment 28 kWh/m^2

ceramic tile  30 kWh/m^2 (+4 kWh/m^2 mortar bed)

carpet (synthetic, including pad) 181 kWh/m^2

Wow! carpet…

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