All those clamps!

The finished rail

By popular demand, we put in a picture of the rail while being glued

The guys from Atlas Marble and Granite wrestle the island counter top into place. Autumn green granite in "leather" finish. The dishwasher is happily tucked in already

After a lot of rework in the wall, and drywall patching (!) the kitchen range top/prep area ready for tiling

The glass towers waiting to be installed on either side of the range being bonded to the stainless steel "schluters" which will edge the glass

The field and green glass tile going in around the glass towers (to the left you see Leo, our plumber figuring out how to adjust the Kohler Karbon faucet - I warned him a picture of him actually reading directions was going to make it into the blog...)

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Acid stain is not a paint or a dye, but rather a difficult to predict chemical reaction between the stain and the concrete, and as Bryan Lucay from Groundworks who did the acid stain said “anything you don’t like about your concrete will be magnified by stain”.  Sure enough! The dark spot with the 2×4 is still a bit dark, and the few areas of lumpy trowel marks are now in high relief, and the cracks are nicely outlined in stain, but the overall effect is really nice.  It is not the mirror-smooth high gloss effect I had imagined, but Paul pointed out to me, if the floor had been perfectly smooth with a high gloss, we’d have to sweep and mop a lot more than we are ever realistically going to do to keep it from looking grungy… with a lower sheen, it won’t show the dirt quite so much

The urethane sealer going on over the acid stain

The view into the kitchen showing the mottled floor.

Upstairs, the reclaimed walnut flooring is going in.  There was a bit of angst over the flooring too, as our contractors for the floor install, California Wood Floors, checked the moisture of the sub floor and the moisture of the wood that had been acclimating, and said the moisture levels were a bit on the high side, and we should close up the house, but the heat on, and put in a dehumidifier in anticipation of putting the floor in.  Well… we don’t have any heat upstairs outside of the bathrooms, so there won’t be dry hot air from a forced air heating system drying out the floor in the winter.  Heat upstairs will flow up the stairwell from the downstairs radiant floor heating and be distributed by the HRV (heat recovery ventilation system), so  I called the guys and we discussed our somewhat unconventional heating, and what that would mean for moisture balance in the house, and we agreed that although our moisture levels were a bit high, we were as likely to induce problems like cupping by drying the wood out to an artificial level than we were to prevent problems like gapping – especially since there wouldn’t be any forced air heating.  So in the end we decided to go forward with the wood as is.  The one thing strongly in our favor is that since this wood is salvaged, it is probably something like 100 years old, and it has had plenty of time to finish moving around and adjusting.  We’re hoping!

The wood flooring goes in! You can see many of the knot holes, nail holes, cracks, insect damage and other "character marks" that come with reclaimed wood. The walnut will be bleached to a lighter tone

The stair railing is also in now. Glued in place and held with about 150 clamps while gluing, the railing is also walnut to match the floor and the treads

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But the electricity did get attached to the house, we made one outlet in one bathroom live, and the temp power pole that has been our construction electricity is no more. Other details include downspouts going in, the backsplash tiling in Natalie’s bathroom getting done, a test-fit of the beautiful 2″ thick stair treads (reclaimed Eastern Walnut treads from Restoration Timber, but fabricated into the final form by our cabinet makers Wood Classics), and the rest of the reclaimed walnut flooring getting moved up to the bedroom to get acclimated.

NEXT week is now concrete week, and our door locks should all get installed, and possibly even the solar hot water panels (though, I’m not holding my breath on that one).  The following week the rest of the cabinetry, and the initial installation of the flooring should happen, and we can start on the kitchen tiling and install the appliances.

The mural in Natalie's bedroom gets more detail

Flooring acclimating in the master bedroom

The test fit of the stair treads - they fit perfectly! The credit goes both to American Steel and Stairways who built the staircase, and to Wood Classics who made the treads!

The treads stacked up in the office acclimating and awaiting final installation with the flooring

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The schematic of the grey water system (Grey water schematic) shows what is going on here, but the plumbing ended up being rather complicated as the sewer line from the rear guest house (pipe at the bottom of the picture) comes into the corner, gets joined to the blackwater outlet from the house and discharged to the main sewer line (leaving the picture at the left).

You can see the grey water line exiting the house, and then there is a big diverter valve that lets you divert the water to the sump tank (to the right) or directly into the main sewer at left (if for some reason you are using something in the house you don’t want to go into the grey water system, or if you don’t have your grey water leach fields set up yet!).  The black water sewer line exits the house below the grey water line and discharges directly out to the left.

The grey water comes out of the house too low too be discharged directly into the wetlands, so it needs a BRAC sump pump designed to work with grey water to bring it up to the discharge level (this is NOT ideal – we would have avoided much of this complicated plumbing if we could simply have a gravity discharge, but we couldn’t get it to work with the slopes of the property). The tank is not a holding tank – it is a temporary surge tank.  The pump is sized to be able to keep up with the drains in the house, and discharge water up out of the pipe sticking out of the top of the tank into the wetlands as fast as it comes in.  However, if the pump breaks,  grey water needs to overflow directly into the sewer rather than backing up into the house, so the overflow line with the white check valve on it leads from the tank into the main sewer line (if the main sewer line were ever to back up, the last thing you want is sewage backing up into your grey water system which is why the check valve is there).

The big white pipe along the top is connected to the roof downspouts and leads to the rain water cachement tank in the back yard.  The grey conduit is the main power and the low voltage data lines running to the back guest house.  I wonder if we can get a few more pipes in there somewhere.

The grey water outlet showing the diverter valve, surge tank with top discharge, overflow line with check valve and all the exits to the main sewer at left

The construction of the wetlands will be another big project, and will probably be something we have another construction party for (like the bale raising), so if you missed the bale raising and would like to build some wetlands and a stream later this summer, a general call for volunteers will go out close to the time.  Drop me a line if you would like an invite.  If you were in the bale raising party… you’re already on the invite list

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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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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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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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The PEX tubing for the hydronic heat being installed. Next week, the concrete floor will be poured, and this tubing will be embedded inside

In our current two-story townhouse, we always struggled with balancing the internal temperature throughout the house.  During the winter we were always trying to close off the forced air vents in the upstairs bedrooms (as we all like to sleep in cool bedrooms without super heated desert dry air blowing down on us).  Short of taping the ducts closed, however, we were never very successful at keeping the hot air from blowing into the bedrooms, so we hired some HVAC contractors and had them split the heating and cooling into two separate upstairs and a downstairs zones with separate thermostats and separate ducting.  What a wonderful difference this made!  After a few years of living with the two zones, we have discovered that not only do we never turn the heat on upstairs during any season, but that even if we only heat the downstairs, we often *still* have the bedroom windows open to keep them cool enough to sleep at night.  Yes, warm air rises.

"Warmly Yours" electric heating mat being embedded in Natalie's bathroom floor

I suppose if we were smart, we’d put the bedrooms all downstairs, and the living spaces upstairs, but maybe in the next house we build (ha ha).

For this house, we decided that given the large central stairwell, and the extremely open upstairs floorplan, we would only put hydronic heat in the downstairs concrete floors, and count on the HRV (Heat Recovery Ventilation) system to keep the air circulated during the winter when it is cold enough to shut the house up tight.

The only heating upstairs we are putting in are electric warming mats embedded underneath the stone bathroom floors. Because the bathrooms are the farthest from the stairwell, and also we tend to like the bathroom a bit warmer than the bedrooms, we decided we should heat these.  (Not to mention that cold stone floors are quite unpleasant under bare feet! )

The energy we will use for two heated floor bathrooms if we heat the floors for two hours in the morning, and two hours at night is about 1 kWh per day.  We have the same type of floor warmer in our current bathroom on a similar schedule with a programmable thermostat and we have found that we use it from October through May (8 months of the year – interestingly more of the year than we use the central heat).  Assuming we do the same thing with our two upstairs bathrooms in the new house, this puts the bathroom floor heating in the 250 kWh per year range which is about 1/100th of my estimate of the space heating requirements of the old house, and about 1/15th of my (hopefully) generous estimate of what the space heating requirements will be for the new house.

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The view above the stairwell where you can see five paint colors!

As we embarked on painting, I was rapidly running out of time to research what we needed to do with the paint, so this is a bit quick and dirty.  I know that low or no VOC (Volatile Organic Compounds) paint gets you LEED points and “Green Points” and your Boy Scout merit badge for saving the earth, but NOWHERE in all of the info about low and no VOC paints is there any kind of *quantitative* data about how much you don’t emit if you “go low VOC”.   There are many of the same kind of wishy washy relative “this is better than that” statements to be found on the web and in those lazy journalism eco-articles, that made me go beserk about countertops.  Of course the marketing materials of these paint companies assure me that I am saving the world by buying their product, but, can you blame me for being suspicious?  I couldn’t find anything that would let me calculate how much I would save by using low VOC, in numbers that meant anything to me and could give me an idea of relative values.

So I did a back of the envelope calc, and decided to buy zero VOC paints, but this is not as rigorous as I would like it to be, and if there is anyone out there who has done a real analysis of this, I’d love it if you could drop me a note.

First some definitions:

“No VOC” = 5 grams VOC/Liter of paint

“Low VOC” = 20-200 grams VOC/Liter (most eggshell and flat paints that claim “Low VOC” on the label are in the 25 g/L range, but glossy paints tend to be up towards 150 g/L)

“Regular”  (i.e. “interior latex paint”) = 200 grams+/L

NOTE: this is for the base only, and some companies play fast and loose with their claims as the colorants can add significantly to the VOCs in the paint, but these are reasonably good ranges.

Some of the 27 odd gallons of paint we used

Many of the benefits that people ascribe to the low and no VOC paints have to do with indoor air quality, but since 99.9% of the VOCs are gone after the first two weeks of drying – it seems to me that this aspect of the low/no VOC debate only really matters if you are painting a house you are going to be living in at the time of painting, since after the paints are fully dry, a properly vented house would have no discernible difference in air quality.  Given that we aren’t living in the house yet, I discounted the indoor air quality aspect (since painting with the stuff, however, next time I am painting a house that I am living in at the time, I am DEFINITELY using “no VOC” paints, as anecdotally, it made a huge difference in the livability of the space during the two week drying time)

But if I am simply interested in figuring out my effect on the environment, if I use about 100 liters of paint (~27 gallons) of paint inside the house (including primer and extra coats), then using zero VOC paint in the house vs. “regular” saves at least 200g/L*100L = 20 kg of VOCs

From the EPA “Automobile Emissions: An Overview.” Fact Sheet OMS-5. August 1994, my typical commute of two “cold start” car trips a day and my car sitting around evaporating fuel, I produce about 24g of VOC per day from my car (4 g/day from evaporation only if I just let it sit and don’t use it).   So painting the house with “zero VOC” paint is the equivalent of over 800 days of a 1997 automobile’s VOC emissions. (OK, I have a newer car that that, and my running and evaporative emissions are probably much lower, but even if it is half that, I am saving over a year of car emissions)

That was enough for me to make the decision.  Without looking into it further, we went zero VOC, and bought the Benjamin Moore “Natura” paints.  And they were remarkably un-stinky as we painted.

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Seeing four spaces at once at the top of the stairs

In our current townhouse, we don’t have much white, and no two rooms are the same color.  Our living room is orange, bedroom green, the office a steely blue, Nat’s room is bright purple and “rocket red”, her bathroom an undersea mural…

looking out from the office

The new house has a very open floor plan, which is wonderful for airflow and light, but it means that the colors we choose for each room will often be visible from other rooms, and the combinations you see will be different depending on where you are.  This called for some careful planning!

Natalie tries out "tangerine" on her North wall

We knew we wanted bold colors, but at this stage in building, we are definitely suffering from “decision fatigue”, and we wanted to find someone who could help us with the process.  At the excellent recommendation of a friend, we found Jana Geller (listed in the contacts link) to help us with both color and stone choices, and have been playing with bold colors that mix and complement from the many different angles that you can see in the house.

Painting this week, then on to flooring and finish work – exciting!

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