The house is rapidly approaching completion. Well, “rapidly” is overstating the case, at least emotionally speaking. As we’ve neared what should be completion, things keep coming up that push the actual finish date further out. It seems like every subcontractor still has one small thing left to do – caulking the floor, putting on a last grate, installing the thermostat – as well as writing us a bill that’s larger than what we expected from the estimate. Oh, except that the bill-writing part seems to go very quickly.
But momentary frustrations aside the house is looking *beautiful*! Check out these photos (kitchen photos to follow as soon as the final appliance install and countertop unveiling takes place):
Living Room
Or, How Soon Can We Get Our Certificate of Occupancy?
Here are a few quick pix of our house. We’re hoping to get our Certificate of Occupancy in the next week or so, which is required in order to finalize our house mortgage. And since the best rates are given to people who don’t require a long “lock” time, we went with a 30-day lock mortgage last week. So the clock is ticking! Right now the house is in that final pupa stage where it still looks like a construction site disaster, but where it will suddenly at the end, when the debris is moved out and the carpets rolled out, it will suddenly transform into a finished house. We shall see.
The kitchen cabinets are coming in. It’s a really exciting time at the house, where the project pivots from being a dusty construction site to more of a finished-house-in-progress. You can now see what the house is going to look like, which is both exciting and a little daunting. Decisions we made based on drawings, photos in catalogs, and our gut intuition are now suddenly spread before us in full 3D. The oak floor on the main floor is now stained dark and polyurethaned; the first final paint colors are on the walls upstairs; tile is appearing in the bathrooms; and, of course, the kitchen, the most expensive and most debated room in the house, is receiving its cabinetry.
Jess Armitage and Scott McPhie install cabinet lighting and the cabinetry
You can’t really see the floor underneath the blankets, but since the house is going to be so bright and white, Anne wanted a dark floor. It’s a beautiful coffee color that looks like it will really offset the white walls and cabinetry nicely. I spent more time obsessing about the finish. There are several options: very high VOC finishes like the Swedish Glitsa; oil-based polyurethane finishes; and water-based polyurethane. If you search around online you’ll find various people who swear by one or the other product, but the trend clearly appears to be to the low-VOC water-based finishes. They are now so good that there is hardly a reason to introduce higher-toxicity finishes into the house. Our finish needed only a day of drying before workmen could come back in the house.
Upstairs, the landing/hallway area is starting to take final form. The big north-facing windows that give light to the hallway are painted and uncovered again. The small window to the stairwell we added in the last minute to add light to the hall bathroom is in and painted; and the bookshelf is done and painted.
The windows are in and painted; the bookshelf is painted; we're getting there!
In the bathrooms, the addition of the tile is really starting to make the space look plausibly like a usable space. In the photo below, you can see the tiling on the floor and around the tub, as well as the little built-in cabinet that is built up around the opening for the laundry chute (the opening is covered by paper in the middle of the cabinet).
In the master bath, tiles and cabinetry are giving the room a final look
I forget whether I mentioned this previously, but we found that tub on a curb about two blocks from our house. Someone was gutting their house, apparently, and had no more use for this mid-century tub that was almost in perfect condition. We’ll take it!
The house is starting to take shape on the inside. Here some photos:
Mark Prince lines up a cut for the stairs
We always wanted to have a fireplace. There is a strong emotional component to having a central hearth, and watching wood burn on a cold winter’s night is wonderful.
Our original plan had it on the staircase wall, like this:
original location of fireplace
and in elevation:
original fireplace location in elevation
It seemed so cool. We imagined a floating, wall-mounted sideboard that happened to have a fireplace in it, very modern and chic. We thought that we’d build a half wall over the staircase so that the stovepipe could run up it. In short, we spent so long planning it and discussing it that we were pretty blindered to reality by the time building happened.
When I had our house foamed, the spray foam people told me I was an idiot for getting more than 4 inches of foam. Anything more than that was simply a waste of money.
The local brand of closed-cell polyurethane spray foam is Corbond. On their website they have a graph that looks like this:
More Insulation Is Clearly Useless. Or is it?
In an accompanying table of data, they state that the first inch of insulation reduces 72% of the heat loss. By the time you have four inches, adding a fifth inch reduces additional heat loss by only 1%. That inch of foam costs as much as the first inch (and insulates just as well), but is 72 times less effective. So was I an idiot for adding 12 inches of foam to my house? Maybe. Read on.
These days, it’s all the rage to put the washer/dryer near the bedrooms, which usually means an upper floor. From a modern convenience perspective, it makes a lot of sense. From a practical and environmental standpoint it’s a little more questionable.
Putting washing machines in the basement had a very practical reason: every once in a while, they leak. And when it’s on an upper floor, it can create an extraordinary mess. The environmental reason that we didn’t mind keeping the laundry away from the bedrooms is that we hang our laundry outside a good 90% of the time. So even if we’d put the laundry upstairs, we’d still be dragging the hamper full of wet clothes downstairs and outside. Or, given the convenience of everything on the upper floor, perhaps we’d use the dryer more.
Instead, Anne insisted we put in a laundry chute. It’s a fantastic solution to the dirty-clothes-in-the-bedroom problem and it eliminates half of the clothes lugging. Plus, it has the appeal of trap doors and hidden bedrooms: a laundry chute has such a wonderful retro feel that I approved of it on that basis alone.
Once we made sure to have the master bedroom straight above the basement laundry room, we discovered another bonus: the chute goes right by our first floor mudroom, so that when we come back from skiing and you want to unload your smelly socks, you can just dump them into the chute and off they go.
Another unexpected benefit was that the 2′ x 2′ opening that we left for the chute proved to be the perfect chase for our ERV ducts, our solar hot water piping, and the conduit for the wires we ran for our future photovoltaics – all the stuff that runs from the basement up to the attic. In the end, our laundry chute was about about 22′ wide by 18″ deep. Some photos:
the laundry chute opening in the upstairs master bathroom
the laundry chute in the mudroom
in the laundry room in the basement, the chute will empty into a hamper
Things are moving along swiftly at this point: Mark is putting up the outside siding, and the sheetrock is up on the inside. In a week or two, the outside siding should be completely done, and the inside walls should be primed. Here some photos:
front of the house
side of the house
the view from the southwest corner of the house
the kitchen, view towards the living room
One of the disconnects I have with the global warming debate is when scientists talk in the most apocalyptic terms about temperatures rising by one or two degrees. It seems hard to imagine that such a small shift could mean so much, especially when the temperature rises and falls so much throughout the day, and when one January day it’s 60F and the next day the temperature plummets to -25F. Wouldn’t two degrees get lost in the shuffle? And are they measuring in the sun or in the shade?
I was researching Bozeman’s temperature data the other day to understand the weather conditions my house’s heat recovery ventilation system will face. On the Western Regional Climate Center’s website I found a table of data of daily highs and lows in Bozeman, averaged over the years 1971-2000. It was fascinating because the averages smoothed out into an almost perfect graph:
Daily Highs/Lows in Bozeman, MT 1971-2000
The graph almost doesn’t quite capture just how smoothly the average temperature rises and falls. For the first two weeks of January, for example, the average lows are 12.2, 12.4, 12.6, 12.8, 12.9, 12.9, 13.0, 13.1, 13.2, 13.3, 13.4, 13.6, 13.8, and 13.9. It continues that way, almost exactly 0.1 degree per day, until three days at the end of July, where the highs are 83.3 and the lows are 52.8, and then the temperature begins to slide back down.
I think of Bozeman weather as unpredictable. It can snow in July and it can be shirtsleeves weather in January. Yet when you average together just 30 years of data, weather has already given way to climate, and suddenly it becomes obvious: when it comes to a warming planet, even one degree has nowhere to hide.
See the complete data here: http://www.wrcc.dri.edu/cgi-bin/cliMAIN.pl?mtboze
Thermostats. How tough can they be?
We have an in-floor radiant hydronic (ie water running through tubes) system divided into five zones. When I heard that the plumber was planning on five thermostats, one in each zone, that seemed like a lot of hardware on our walls. And then I got it into my mind that, c’mon, this is 2010, I should be able to control the temperature of my house from my cellphone, over the Internet, etc.
Aside from the gee-whiz nature of controlling the temperature from far away, I came up with two scenarios where it might be really useful: 1. You leave home on a trip and forgot to turn down the temperature (or just aren’t sure if you did). 2. The big downside of radiant systems is that they take a long time (several hours) to come to temperature. So I imagined us coming back from a long trip and pulling out our cellphones in the Minneapolis airport and turning on our heat so the house is toasty when we land in Bozeman.
Well. With the goal of having one central thermostat gathering input from five temperature sensors and then connecting the whole thing to the Internet, I quickly waded into a world of extraordinarily expensive systems. You can do absolutely anything, it turns out, but before you know it someone wants to charge you $5,000 for it.
The Internet-controlled BAYweb thermostat
So I started backpedaling. What if I still had five separate thermostats, but each was Internet-controlled? Here I had greater success. I found a great thermostat from BAYweb (check it out) that combines a really nice clean wall mounted unit with full Internet control.
But the Bayweb units are about $200 each. Your basic thermostat is in the $30-40 range. A 5-2 programmable one (ie you can have one programming setting for weekdays and one setting for weekends) are about $50-60. A 7-day programmable one (ie every day can have its own settings) are about $70-80. So the Internet control still adds quite a bit of cost, especially since we need five units.
In the end we decided to go with one of the BAYweb ones for the main floor, and then get 5-2 programmable thermostats for the other four zones.
