Modern in MN

Modern Shed, the Finale

2011-08-31T16:10:00.001-07:00

Here's a couple more shots of the completed shed, hurray!

I ended up taking your advice about trying the window frost spray for that big picture window. It worked kind of eh. It's doing the whole "obscuring" thing, but it's kind of blotchy despite my best efforts with the rattle can. Oh well. Once it bugs me long enough I'll bite the bullet and go with the more expensive plan B which was to put frost film on it.

The bad news is I still haven't gotten any furniture for the porch. Argh. I loved the Alfresco lounge chair and ottoman from Crate and Barrel--which I ordered. But the chairs showed up damaged twice and I got fed up and told them they could have their cheap Chinese crap back. Sadly, I should have known because I have the Alfresco patio furniture and I had to exchange the dining chairs multiple times to get five that weren't defective, bent, or otherwise damaged.
But the real bummer is I can't find anything else I like that would be functional and comfortable for a reasonable price.
Here is basically my dream chair for that darn porch. Only in my dream there are two of them, plus some kind of table/ottoman thingie. And that is not a dream I can afford to make into reality, at least not this year. Maybe I'll save my pennies over the winter though.
Gotta love the awesomeness that is Etsy artisans, though, right? :)

And I DEFINITELY need one of these
I just can't decide. Too. Much. (made in MN.) Awesomeness.

Oh, and did I tell you about that lovely dirt patch by the porch corner? I know, the lush, lovely lawn is distracting (I'm working on making that go mostly away, FWIW), but if you noticed that little pile of rubble there at the corner, it's the remnants of our former firepit which got relocated about ten feet farther north. Because nature always gets the last laugh, that "firepit" I figured was no big deal to interfere with because I could just rake it up and throw some grass seed there, is actually a giant hardened wad of fired clay. Because clay and fire=pottery. Doh. One of the many previously unrealized joys of having clay soil.
Anyway, if anyone has any ideas about what to do about that short of going to rent a jackhammer (for the umpteenth time) and ending up with a big hole in the ground, I'd love to hear it. Seems like I should be able to use a buried wad of hardened clay to my advantage somehow... And it also makes me wonder if there's a way to utilize fire to make an actual building foundation.

Kee Klamp Trellis

2011-07-02T21:46:00.001-07:00

Have you heard of Kee Klamp? They're a whole line of plug-and-play fittings that can be used for building just about anything out of fence post or iron pipe, and they're pretty neato. With iron pipe, they accomplish the same thing as standard threaded pipe fittings, only with way, way more flexibility and minus the whole threaded thing. But as I said they also work with lighter weight galvanized fence posts. Perfect for adding a quick and easy something to our once barren back door area.
There's a tough, tough life outside our back door. It's a spot where just about a perfect storm of hostile-to-plant factors come together to make for a pretty unfriendly environment for things that grow. Unfortunately, things that grow are exactly what is needed there.
For a couple of years we had a really cool twisted baby locust tree. It did great and grew like mad and got huge and perfect, right up until it died one winter. So sad. It took me a whole year to accept it was dead, not a little bit because having to cut it down meant having to figure something else out...

Thus began the hunt for solutions to adding some green and vertical to this spot. Something super cold hardy and moisture issue-tolerant and perennial and of a not-too-big scale...which excludes most trees. Kind of a tall order once I got right down to it.
Eventually I decided I liked the lower risk, easier to plant (and remove should this plan B fail) idea of a vine of some sort and that a trellis for said vine would be an interesting way to add some dimension to the otherwise completely flat side of the house. Plus I figured if worse comes to worse and I fail again, I can always resort to a fast-growing annual vine instead.
So anyway, out came the Kee Klamp card. Because it's just too handy and cool of a product not to find a way to use.

Following one of those very non-specific kinds of plans that I seem to excel at, first I figured out what size and shape I wanted for the finished trellis. After acquiring the necessary supplies and fittings, we cut the fence post sections to the appropriate length, hooked the whole thing together and plunked it into place. As I said we went with galvanized steel fence posts which are available at the home center in 10 foot lengths and various diameters, just be sure you choose a size that corresponds to a Kee Klamp size. The actual Kee Klamp joinery is easy as can be--slip the fittings onto the pipe ends and tighten the allen screws to hold them in place. What's not shown here is that the lower section of vertical post is pounded down into the ground a few feet to help hold the whole thing in place:

After the basic structure was built and attached to the house came everyone's favorite activity, cable swaging. We're still working on using up the original, 1000ft. spool of cable I bought to do the interior railings!

We used a plumb bob to get a straight line from the top pole to the bottom, and then drilled holes in the pipe sections so the cable could pass through:

Here's the finished trellis, planted with some super MN hardy grapevines we'll hope make it through the winter.

They don't look like much yet, but I've had great luck with another grapevine in a similarly hostile spot outside our patio sliders and if they take off even sort of as well as that one, we should have a lovely shady wall of green next summer.

The second step of this project is to add some kind of shade sail bit or polycarbonate "roof" section that attaches to the trellis and shelters the doorway a little, but I haven't quite worked up the ambition to tackle that yet. Maybe once the wicked August sunshine and heat ease up.

I KNOW. It's Been FOREVER.

2011-06-24T14:47:00.000-07:00

The problem is, I just have way too many projects on my to-do list.

The shed:
Done except for paint on the soffits and a couple of pieces of trim.
The whole tree incident, other than causing the finished product to be slightly less perfectly level than it was prior, turned out to have gone about as well as a tree falling on anything could have, so once Spring rolled around we were basically ready to hit it with roofing and siding.

I went with the same Hardi-panel siding and exposed fastener design we did on the house, along with some corrugated, galvanized roofing leftovers. It took some thought, but we managed to use up just about everything we had in the way of scraps of both siding and metal, so it's a win all around.

The big picture window frame got painted red for a pop of color, and the rest the same grey as the house.
For another couple of hundred bucks in lumber, we carpenter-ed up the rest of the wrap around porch and a ramp topped off with some lovely cedar decking, and I now have the perfect spot for some outdoor lounging...as soon as I find the a great set of chairs and side table.

With some patio pots added. Still waiting for paint on the soffits, but an excellent deal has been scored on some porch chairs and once those arrive, I have no more excuses. And it needs to stop raining every day, of course.

I need to do something to screen the view of the shed contents through the windows. I was originally planning to hang a curtain across the front, inside, because I like the idea of making it seem like more of a little cottage, but now I've thought of the idea of using frost film directly on the windows and I'm waffling between the two.
Shocking, I know.

So, moving on to the next item on our DIY menu...

And Then it Was Winter

2011-03-15T20:54:00.000-07:00

In Minnesota, when the weather decides it's done, it's done.

We made quick work of installing the awesome (KEYED!) Craigslist slider and windows, and then spent another couple of hours wrapping the whole thing up tight with Tyvek--perhaps overkill for a shed, but since the plan was to install Hardipanel siding on the exterior to match the house we figured it couldn't hurt just to make sure everything stays nice and dry inside.
The mini-storage style roll up door you can't see in the photo below, but it went in without a hitch in about a half hour. It was an easy job for two people and it works and looks great and was definitely worth the cost.

There's another one of those cool bubble windows hiding on the west side...

So all that remained for getting weathertight was some roofing. But because everyone's favorite (or not) big box store "pro desk" took two weeks and three different people to figure out how to order our 1 1/4" corrugated galvanized sheet metal (even though it is a stock item in many stores), and, once they got their act together enough to actually place the order, got it wrong, it was a month before we had anything to work with. Had we been shipped the correct product, we would have beaten the snow, but since we were roofless and the weather wouldn't wait, we covered the roof with Tyvek as a stopgap and considered the project put to bed until Spring.

And then it snowed...that very same night if I recall correctly. A heavy, wet, sloggy snow that coated and stuck to everything. It was actually kind of pretty to wake up to, until I looked out the bedroom window and saw this:

It was a sleepy weekend morning, and unfortunately for Boy, I believe the first words out of my mouth that day were "HOLY S*** A TREE FELL ON OUR SHED".

It was sort of unreal, because after choosing a location in the yard that happened to be near the treeline, we had joked about that very thing. JOKED. As in "it might happen in 20 years kind of joke".
Anyway.
I couldn't bear to go out to assess the situation, what with it suddenly being Winter and all. But Boy and PupCake went to check it out that day and reported back that--amazingly--there was almost no damage to the shed.
WHOOHOOO!

Or not.

Over the next few days, I kept looking at that shed and thinking something was funny, and when that ishy snow melted I finally brought myself to be able to confront the situation in full. As I made my way around the giant tree that I was dreading the idea of having to deal with cutting up, I realized that the tree in all of it's falling glory, had pushed one side of the shed completely off those foundation blocks that we had so painstakingly placed and leveled a few weeks back.

On the bright side, there was really very little damage to the structure--just a hole poked through the sheathing and a chip out of the roof. Quite possibly the most innocuous 'tree fell on it' outcome ever.
On the very dark side, we now needed to figure out how to raise up and rotate the almost completed (and, by this time, full of stuff) building back onto the foundation blocks.

About that project I'll say that digging frozen soil by hand, even if it's just down through eight or ten inches, has an extremely high sucklitude factor. It took most of a day, but Boy and I managed to dig under, jack up and lever the whole darn building up and over with nothing other than brute force, a couple of bottle jacks and some 2 x 4's. It's not an activity I'd look forward to having to repeat-- we've certainly had worse chores, but it did suck with a capital S.

Oh, and I left out the part about getting our truck stuck on the remains of that slushy snowstorm, aka glare ice, in the yard. That was almost as much fun as digging in frozen dirt and moving buildings by hand, and certainly to our neighbors, WAY more entertaining.

Bring on Spring.

DIY Modern Shed, Day Three

2011-02-06T08:30:00.001-08:00

Shed, day three. In between another trip to the building supply store for lumber and sheathing, I traversed the cities picking up some recycled windows and a door I found on Craigslist.
MAjor score.
I got a really nice vinyl slider with a keyed lock, a huge picture window and two really neato bubble windows for less than $200. Perfect for the "backyard destination" aspect of the shed.

So we were on to setting the roof trusses. Since the front of the shed will have a 4' deep porch area that I knew I'd want to shade, I designed the roof to have a nice big overhang. Getting the trusses in place and securely strapped and fastened was fairly quick and easy, and other than a lot of nailing. so was the exterior sheathing. Hurray for the light weight parts of the job.

You can see there on the "porch" my scavenged sliding door. That will go into the big opening on the front. In the big plastic wrapped dead body-shaped box is a mini storage style roll up door for that opening on the left side of the building. Since they are custom order and take a while to get, I put in an order for this as soon as I had the overall design finalized and the plans drawn. It showed up with perfect timing, from this place, chosen because they had the best pricing, literally HALF what the local place wanted to charge me. As far as the overall build goes, this was kind of a splurge, but it's got an industrial look that I think will be cool and functionally it just seemed to make sense vs. me taking the time to screw around with finish carpentry (that I suck at) to build and hang one myself. Plus, they come in a whole bunch of cool colors...any guesses what I picked?

Still Building a Modern Shed

2011-01-10T10:50:00.001-08:00

So.
We're building a shed, remember?

Day one started with digging sod, leveling and preparing spots for the nine stacks of concrete blocks that will support the underpinnings of the structure. We opted for a floating block foundation--meaning that the blocks just sit on soil roughly at grade level--rather than go to the expense and labor of pouring a concrete slab. This means there's a fair chance we'll have to do the occasional shoring and re-leveling of the structure over the coming decades, but that's a minor deal on the lifetime to-do list.
Once we got all nine foundation pads level and square, we topped them with the three big timber 4" x 6" skids that comprise the rest of the foundation. On top, perpendicular to the skids went the floor joists, all from pressure treated lumber. Then everything got nailed together.

Day two and we're ready to get started on the framing. Since it was the most complex with three openings, we started with the north wall:

I said complex, but this is really about as easy as framing gets. Still, though, lots of nails to pound. At about this point we started to wonder why, after all this time, we still don't have a pneumatic nail gun.

And then the south wall, working in between autumn rain showers:

and then the east and west sides:

It's starting to look like something!

Welcoming the Doldrums of Winter

2011-01-10T09:49:00.001-08:00

Happy 2011!
Whew!
I'm finally feeling like I have time to take a deep breath after the craziness that extends from late summer into fall and then into the ubercraziness of the holidays. Thus, I am taking inventory of the project situation, both those balls that I have in the air and those that are yet to be tossed.

First up on the "balls in the air" category is the shed. Yes, a modern shed!! For my backyard! Very exciting!
This ball got tossed in large part due to Boy, who got himself all whipped up last fall and decided that both our vehicles needed to go in the garage this winter.
For the first time ever.
Ahem.
And that left us with a lot of housebuilding tools and lawn and garden stuff in the way, and as driver of vehicle #2, the one newly installed in the garage, it only took about two days of entering it by climbing through the passenger door before I was ready for a bit more free space. So I busted out my pencil and sketch pad and slide rule and designed us up a nifty little shed.
(just kidding about the slide rule, but come to think of it, maybe I need one...?)

Truthfully though, calling this project "a shed" isn't quite fair, because that implies a simple, strictly utilitarian building, and WHERE, I ask you, is the fun and Modern in MNishness in that? Strictly utilitarian, no (and yes, for the umpteenth time, I'm sure Boy wants to strangle me for turning what could have been a simple project into something more complex). A backyard destination that happens to look fun and interesting and still be functional and hold our stuff, YES! Sign me up!

Here is my original sketch of the proposed structure:

For ease of construction and limited waste, The dimensions are 8'x12', with an additional 4' or so given over to a deck that wraps the north and east sides. I knew I wanted to tart the place up with windows and doors (that whole "not just a shed" thing) so I more or less designed the fenestrations and facade based around recycled windows and doors I found on Craigslist. Over the course of a week or two I collected up a very nice gently used vinyl slider, a big (new!) picture window, and two cool bubble windows all for ~$200 and a bit of schlepping. The other supplies--lumber, sheet goods, fasteners and a mini roll-up door came to around $1200. So far, a reasonable budget for a bunch of great storage and a cool addition to our property.

And speaking of budget, I had one. For those of you big spenders, there's lots of cool pre-fab shed options. Those in the modern genre are mostly outrageously expensive. And I mean outrageously, like on the order of 10x or more what I wanted to spend. Great inspiration, not great for our bottom line. And besides, I get itchy when I haven't built anything in a while...

So to come, the dirt of the shed build and other balls yet to be tossed!
One of my goals this year is more Modern in MN, more often, so I hope to be back with you again shortly...

Flesh: Lost and Roasted

2010-09-09T16:55:00.000-07:00

So after agonizing all summer over how to finish the facade of my wood fired oven, I finally made a decision...
that led to more agony:

If it weren't for being packed with grout, those ouchies and BIG CHUNKS OF MISSING FLESH would have been a bloody mess. Ouch was the understatement of my entire last week, actually.

Here's the start of the 3D wood-fired oven mosaic adventure from hell that led to a week of the utterly useless and extremely painful fingertips pictured above. I wanted something dimensional to accent what is otherwise a very flat, boring facade, so I concocted a way to make a heat-proof sculptural element around the oven opening using a wire armature and vermicrete, aka a mixture of vermiculite and portland cement that I could cover with a colorful glass mosaic.

(The foil you see here was just a temporary holder-upper)

While the vermicrete cured I started in on adding some totally awesome stainless steel pennyround tile to the main portion of the facade. Big splurge, that stuff.

I think I once saw a t-shirt that said "mosaicists bleed for their art". I need one.
Prior to now I've always kept my stained glass mosiac-ing to flat or flat-ish surfaces...wisely so as it turns out. But hey, as I've said before, suffering for art seems to be sort of my thing...

Applying that gorgeous red glass to the 3D sculpture, no problem. Grouting around those razor sharp shards on such a dimensional surface, BIG, BLOODY PROBLEM. And a problem that I couldn't really bail out on once I'd started. Grouting is fun that way.

But, as has so often been made clear in the whole WFO project, it's all worth it in the end, especially when the end is roasted meat! Big thanks to my pal Brian for the excellent food shot below. Following the mosaic carnage, I threw a party for myself that involved a keg of beer and six roast chickens, and the finger agony was forgotten.

Inked Again!

2010-07-05T11:01:00.000-07:00

At long last, Modern in MN meets Brigitte Woman!

This has been ages in the works and it's really fun to finally see the finished product. The whole deal actually started over a year ago, when I got an email from Marike, a German journalist, asking if I and the house would be interested in being featured in a magazine article she was thinking of doing for the German women's magazine Brigitte Woman. Being the attention whore that I am and always being up for a potentially interesting new experience and pal-making opportunity, of course I said yes, and about six months later she and photographer-sidekick Claudia (who is also German but based in NY) came and hung out with me for a day here at Modern in MN. It was fun and crazy and a little bit scary, because unlike the NYT article I appeared in a couple of years ago, these girls wanted to know about and photograph our entire house. The dust bunnies and cobwebs were on high alert, let me tell you.
Anyway, when we got home from our D.C./Paris adventure* late last week, I was pleasantly surprised to find a copy of the July issue of Brigitte Woman in my mailbox.
And here we are!

So fun! But being that I don't read or speak German and because I am too lazy to type all that text into an online translator, I have no idea what the article actually says. If there are any German-speakers out there who would like to translate, let me know. You'd be my hero. On the other hand, maybe I sound like a total loser and it would be better for my ego not to know.

*because I know how much everyone loves looking at other peoples' vacation pics, I've got our DC pics and our Paris pics over at Flickr and I'll be giving the rundown of events/food/stuff over at Splatgirl Creates in the coming days.

Mosaic Madness, the Sequel

2010-02-15T16:58:00.000-08:00

It is with great relief that I bring you the documented completion of one of the many projects on my winter agenda!

The guest bath, as you may recall, was subjected to a whirlwind of decorating after the NYT called wanting to give me two of my five minutes of fame. With what amounted to a two day notice, I was able to bring the functional-but-not-much-else guest bath into the realm of almost finished with some paint and accessories, but the tub surround, well.... that was more than I could manage in 48 hours.
So ever since we moved in, and while the rest of the room was professionally photographed and published for posterity, here's what that tub surround has looked like:

Ready and waiting for my next great idea. And ever since we moved in, I've been letting it simmer on the back burner of my brain, but I was never able to nail myself down to anything specific or interesting or cool enough. Because my original foray into mosaic madness with our master bath set the bar pretty darn high.

I went out on a limb and put this project on my "MUST FINISH" list for this winter, and with the prospect of some fancy house guests coming for a visit and really just being sick of looking at a partly finished room, I was finally able to make a move. Or several moves, since I ended up sourcing several different products from different places.

That's seven or eight types of tile ranging from 1"x3" glass to 3/8" glazed ceramic and it arrived in various states of readiness for setting. A quick little project this was not, but I guess that's just my kind of insanity.

Because anything for art, right?

To give you an idea of the timeline, here's my day one progress. I think it amounted to about four square feet, and that's not counting the MANY HOURS I had to spend meticulously arranging about eighty gajillion 3/8" loose tiles into foot long strips of single tiles held together with skinny tape. It was WHACK, and do I need to tell you how much fun it is to spend the day working at floor level?
Ouch.

Day two, minus many more unseen hours of wee tile arranging:

Fast forward several days in which many pain relievers were consumed, back rubs begged, and more wee tiles lined up and taped. Grout was applied and meticulously detailed. Arms and fingers ached, curses were hurled, but finally we have the finished product:

That bit on the far side of the vanity goes all the way across to the other side of the room. My plan is to run those rows to about midway up the wall next to the vanity and mirror and as soon as I get another free minute, I'm going to get that part up.
Such delicious randomness, isn't it?
It's been finished for a few weeks, but I still can't help myself from going in there to admire it a couple of times a day.

Rearranged

2009-12-08T13:22:00.000-08:00

Just in time for Thanksgiving, a little rearrange-ify-cation of things:

Now, if only I had a cooking fireplace around which to nestle that cozy little seating area, my last remaining kitchen dream would be fulfilled.

I have perennially itchy decorating feet so this quick change was just what I needed to help cope with the gray days of winter. It's nice to have a new view, and I'm liking being able to plop right down in comfy chair to enjoy a cup of coffee or a quick email check while I'm busy banishing the nasty weather in the kitchen.

Wood Fired Oven, Now Open!

2009-11-10T16:23:00.000-08:00

Ta DA!
The big reveal of the almost finished WFO enclosure complete with mid-October snow which, thankfully, was only temporary.
The enclosure is clad in Hardi-panel with exposed fasteners just like the house, and eventually it will get a couple of coats of paint in the same color as well. The roof is galvanized corrugated steel, a nod to the other component of our houses' exterior finish. I recessed the front wall with the intent to add swinging doors to provide some weather protection for the mosaic I hope to add on that surface next season.
So, not the fully finished, beautified enclosure I hoped to have by this time, but instead a work in progress that I look forward to revisiting again come springtime.
And it was just in the nick of time.
As my awesome luck would have it, I had planned a big neighborhood party for just a few days after the picture was taken, and the weather in the preceding few weeks was so awful that my plan to spend them finishing the whole deal and pretty-ing it up in time for my guests was completely foiled. I had to just go for the important functional bits, one of which was pouring a concrete landing and countertop. In 35ish degree weather, the wet work of pouring and finishing a concrete slab was NO fun. But I survived and the counter turned out just fine. My first foray into casting in place vs. molding, and also my first time working with curves:

I've tidied it up a bit with the diamond pads since, but then I got crazy busy again and still haven't gotten around to giving it a good full-on polishing. I'm sure I'll be kicking myself if I leave it until spring because it will be much harder and harder to work, but that's likely to be what happens. I'm just glad I was able to get it poured in time, as having the extra bit of workspace was great while I was running the oven for a crowd.
We ended up with a pretty big turnout for the grand opening, and I think I did about 40 pizzas total along with a ton of artichoke dip and some roasted veg. Most importantly, we got a weather reprieve just in time...some gorgeous crisp sunny weather which was as good as I could have hoped for after a month of constant rain:

Rambling in a Snowstorm

2009-10-12T16:08:00.000-07:00

What's under the big blue tarp? I'd show you if it would stop raining...or snowing...for half a minute.

I continue to be thwarted by the icky weather we've had lately. Just when I finally get a free weekend and a couple of days to put some serious effort into finishing the wood fired oven enclosure, it rains nonstop and is like 40. Or like 35 and snowing. Totally boo.

So, in lieu of a fun progress report on that project, I bring you my very own installment of "Keeping it Real" as Pioneer Woman would say.

Check this out:

I found this photo the other day when I was digging through one of my file boxes. It's of our previous house, shortly after the lovely gold masonite siding was replaced with the even lovlier environmental tradgedy of grey vinyl siding, and a couple of years before that SO fabulous custom painted garage door was replaced with one that couldn't be read from the window seat of a passing 747. Yep, that door was so awesome we just HAD to let it hang around for a few extra years. Cool, huh?
ahem.

Yep. I lived there. That was our old house. A plain Jane, crackerbox 70's rambler in a neighborhood of plain Jane 70's ramblers and 80's split levels. About as ordinary as it gets.

Except for that garage door, that is.

It taught me a lot, that house. It's where I really cut my chops in the art of not being afraid to TRY, and I'm hoping by showing it to you you'll see that I'm no different than anyone else who has a dream of doing something.
I wasn't then and I'm not now some fancy, entitled person of substance for whom things like designing and building a cool house just happen. And I'm telling you this because sometimes I get afraid that maybe you guys think I'm something that I'm not. That Modern in MN came to be because I am special...that I can do crazy projects like make stuff out of concrete and build things and paint graffiti on the walls because I have something you don't. Maybe you think I'm somehow not like you? Different....or exceptional in some way? And maybe you read my blog and think that you'd love to do that, but then you tell yourself that you are TOTALLY not the kind of person for whom anything like any of that would ever be possible.

So the deal is, I need you to know that you're wrong. And honestly, I used to think that same thing. But then I decided I was sick of not doing things or finding answers to things because they seemed scary or because I was afraid. And so I jumped off the cliff. And that particular cliff, the design and build your own house cliff, was SO big and SO scary, really. But not a single day has passed since then that I haven't been glad that I did it, and not just because it all turned out ok and now I get to live someplace cooler than the plain Jane 747 garage door house.
The awesome thing about those big scary leaps, even the ones that were major screw-ups, is that it's made all of the other scary leaps of life that have followed a lot less than all that, and it's made it easier see how much that silly little thing called fear worms its way into so many parts of our lives where it really has no business being. It was and continues to be about much more than just building a house.

So what's your dream? More importantly, what's getting in the way of it? What are you not doing in your life because it seems scary? Are you really living, or just mitigating fear?

IT'S ALIVE!!

2009-08-12T10:01:00.000-07:00

Turns out the whole wood fired oven thing actually works as advertised!

I guess I shouldn't be surprised that the WFO project ended up reminding me of the end of our house build. Although on a much smaller and MUCH less stressful scale, once I finally got it to the point where it was done enough to actually be put to use I discovered, or rather I am discovering, that the way I think about it hasn't caught up. So here we are again, all of the sudden, with a mostly finished project that works and is usable and that we can enjoy while my brain is still playing that "when the WFO is done... " track.
Perhaps that explains why I've been a major loser in the photography department. It's either that, or, as I was just explaining to someone else, the whole WFO pizza cookery event is somewhat ill-suited to photojournalism, what with the timing issues invovled. And the smoke, of course.

So when I left you last, the build was complete and we were spending a few days on air drying. From there we progressed to a very exciting first fire. A wee one so as not to get things too hot while moisture might still be hanging around in the bricks and mortar that would cause havoc by expanding when it turned to steam.

Smoke from the flue=crazy exciting!

Even a wee fire is good enough for this sugar addict to cook up some marshmallows for smores:

Moving on to a bit bigger fire:

And finally, a bigger, hotter fire that was enough to get some serious heat in the hearth bricks and produce a couple of gorgeous calzones for dinner:

Those burnt ends are evidence of what happens when you step away from the oven just long enough to grab the camera from inside the house. Char, baby....wHOOHOO! And char, or more specifically a controlled, just-a-bit-of-char kind of thing, is part of what the WFO is all about when it comes to dough.
And seriously, is this not just about the best looking calzone you've ever seen? Check out that crusty browned goodness...and all from FIVE minutes of cooking:

and it got even better on the inside:

not bad for a practice, warm-up fire and literally 10 minutes of prep using whatever I could dig out of the fridge. Veggie for me, pepperoni and cheese for Boy. We were practically yelping with delight. I'm saying without a doubt these were the best calzones I've ever made or eaten, and I suspect it's only going to get better from here.

Boy was thinking maybe we need to take before WFO and after WFO pictures of ourselves so we can appreciate the effect all the forthcoming edible practice will have on our waistlines...
We'll title that essay "why NOT to build a WFO" :)

Ready to Fire!

2009-07-31T15:26:00.001-07:00

Think of this like a TV cooking show, where there's some babble and some stuff thrown about in a pan for a minute before the cut to the swap out reveals a finished, ready-to-go version of whatever they pretended to be showing you the process of making:

We have WFO! My apologies for being so completely lax as to not have taken a single in-progress photo since we last spoke. Turns out that masonry business is dusty and dirty and sort of consuming, and I sort of hand my hands full.
Of mortar, that is.
And I was preoccupied with trying to wash the brick dust out of my hair.

But as of now I am pleased to announce that we are just a few days away from starting to fire, and that means we're just a few more days away from a virgin WFO pizza event!

So there it sits, and so far so good with the dome and arches actually doing their self-supporting thing. The plan is to let it air dry for a week or so before swaddling it in a bunch of ceramic fiber blanket insulation and starting a series of small-to-big curing fires that culminate in a full on, white hot bricks blaze to get the oven up to pizza cookery temperature. At that point, in addition to cooking lots and lots of pizza and other stuff, and assuming no catastrophies, we'll start on finishing the exterior and making it look like something other than a tarp-covered lump.

I am SO excited, and so happy to have the masonry portion of the build over with, because honestly, all that negative space geometry was starting to make my brain hurt just a little and I'm sure my neighbors are totally over seeing me up on that platform bent over with my butt in the air looking like one of those redneck yard ornaments. Hopefully the pizzas I make them will be enough to make up for that horror.

And, as an added bonus, a WHOLE bunch of firewood just landed in our yard. Actually, some tree guys just happened to show up at the right time and with the right price and I gave them the go-ahead to cut down a big old oak tree that's been dead ever since we've been here.

A mighty fine cord or so of firewood, no? Huge, HUGE props to Boy for becoming our resident lumberjack and splitting everything you see plus lots, lots more. Because really, it's a lot to ask from a computer geek who's about as far from your typical wood chopping dude as a guy can get. But he was totally into it. He even geeked out on the equipment end of the chore and went out and found a local specialty dealer and bought himself some fancy axe from Sweden that he refused to tell me the price of which means it musta been sort of outrageous. But I'm sure not going to complain, because needless to say, splitting, moving and stacking all that wood has been a TON of work....work that brings me that much closer to a functional oven.

I need to make that Boy a pizza. Or several.

Oven Floor and Going Up

2009-07-12T10:41:00.000-07:00

Here's the hearth bricks cut and ready to set on the insulation base:

I'm building a 36" diameter oven so I just cut a paper template for that plus the area covered by the vent opening and landing, laid out a grid of bricks and then traced the pattern onto them to mark the cuts. It's recommended these hearth bricks be set in a herringbone pattern to make it easier to slide a pizza peel across the surface without catching.

Placing and leveling the hearth bricks on the insulation took a bit of time and a couple of do-overs. The ceramic fiber insulation board I purchased was claimed to be a flat, consistent surface but that was not at all what I received. Like At. All., which was sort of annoying, and I ended up having to put a layer of vermicrete (vermiculite+portland cement at about 8:1) on top of it plus a dressing of brick dust before I could set the hearth. So much for favoring time savings over cost. I'm sure the ceramic fiber board will be a fantastic insulator, but it ended up being a bit of a pain in my butt.

Anyway, on to the fun stuff! From here it's been a wet, dirty activity this brick laying business.
As suggested by some of those who have gone before me, I purchased a tool called "The Angleizer" to help me figure out the shape of the bricks for each circular layer. It's like four sliding, adjustable rulers attached together. Basically, you plug the diameter of your circle and the size of the bricks into a little computer program and it spits out the measurements of the trapezoid shape for the bricks in each course. Then it's just a matter of setting the tool accordingly and marking and cutting each brick. For a mathematically challeneged person like me, it makes things a whole lot easier.

Another handy, not thought up by me concoction is the rod and angle bracket tool you see. There's lots of ways one could make this tool, and I cobbled mine together with a hunk of threaded rod, some repurposed IKEA parts and a hinge. It's set up to turn 360 degrees and through a 180 degree arc. The angle bracket fixed to one end allows each brick to be set at exactly (or close enough) the right pitch and distance from the center, ensuring a perfectly-ish circular, dome-shaped dome. Another super deluxe time saver, plus it holds the brick in place for as long as necesary until the mortar sets up.

Bridge Slab on the WFO Base

2009-06-06T11:42:00.001-07:00

Almost to the fun parts!
The countertop height upper slab upon which the actual oven dome will be built is an unsupported "bridge" that spans the CMU base we just finished building. That means all that's there in the end is a heavily reinforced concrete slab supported on the edges with a big open space below. If you followed along with our house build, it's basically a variation on the construction of our front stoop.

Now, because construction of this type of slab presents the possibility of a ton or so of wet concrete on top of a collapsed form in the middle of a pour, constructing a sturdy support structure is critical. It needs to be strong and reliable to hold up all that wet concrete without sagging or moving yet still be able to be removed once the slab has cured.

Here's the preliminary form. On the top you can see the sheet of plywood that fits into the opening of the base and forms the main platform upon which the concrete will be placed. Before we proceeded, this board got split down the middle to allow it to be removed from below once the slab has cured. Underneath is a couple of stout 2x4 frames to hold the whole thing up, built with plenty of attention paid to ease of removal afterward. The outside of the form is 2 x 6's supported, braced. We shimmed the supports to make the top of th form, and thus the surface of the slab, completely level.

After the form was finished and verifiably sturdy, I cut and tied rebar in a 1' grid and topped that with a sheet of rebar mesh, all of which ends up embedded in the slab. Since concrete on it's own is an extremely brittle material, this is what does the majority of the load bearing, and what allows this bridge to be able to support a load above.
Fortunately, we had our weekend houseguest as helper for this pour. Unlike the foundation slab where we could just dump concrete from the mixer into the wheelbarrow and then into the form, the height of this one meant we had to shovel concrete from the mixer into five gallon pails to be hoisted up and dumped. It slowed the process down considerably, and between that and a hot sunny day, we were thankful for another set of hands to speed things along.

Another few hours worth of waiting on concrete to cure and finishing work, and a few days wait before we removed the supporting formwork, and the last of the boring bits are complete. There's something really exciting about bridge slabs like this, maybe because there's always just a little bit disbelief that it's actually going to hold itself up. So far, so good :)

So fast forward a couple of weeks, and here's the finished oven base, with the ceramic fiber hearth insulation in place on top of the bridge slab:

Almost ready to start laying bricks!
Eventually, the entire base will be covered with some sort of finish material and that opening will get some doors. Exactly what finish material I'll go with remains to be seen, but at this point I'm leaning towards a miniature version of the house, meaning cement board and corrugated steel with exposed faseners...

Big Progress on the Wood Fired Oven

2009-06-06T10:10:00.001-07:00

It's FINALLY raining here, for the first time in what seems like at least a month, so I figured I'd take a minute to get you caught up with the wood fired oven project progress.

At my last check-in, we had dug and poured rebar reinforced footings and completed the formwork for the foundation slab. This bottom, structure-supporting slab is thick and reinforced with rebar and mesh, and it's an important yet fairly boring, non-rewarding part of the project.

Since I had calculated this slab was going to require close to a yard of concrete, it presented something of a dilemma. Based on way too much prior experience mixing bagged concrete by hand, I was SO not feeling the idea by-hand mixing the 35+ bags it was going to require, but when I called around to the ready-mix plant to get the price of having what's called a "short load" delivered, and then to the couple of on-site, small batch concrete delivery services I could find, the price proved to be just a little too outrageous to convince me we couldn't do it ourselves.
So, conceeding that we were in for another couple of adventures with bagged concrete mix, my next step was to call the local big box store and arrange to have this and all the other heavy stuff, ~65 80# bags of Quickcrete, 40 or so concrete blocks, and a bundle of 1/2" rebar, delivered to the house. All in all, it amounts to several tons worth of material that, to move by pickup truck and human power would have meant lots of driving and many exhausting trips. For $69, (any size) delivery seemed like a small price to pay, and it meant the driver could pull the pallets off the truck with his forklift and drive them right to my project site in the backyard. It was money VERY well spent.

On our next free Saturday, I towed home the largest gas powered concrete mixer our local equipment rental place had, and Boy and I got to work mixing and pouring:

This slab ended up taking forty bags of mix. Not the kind of thing you can dilly-dally at, since the clock starts ticking on concrete curing from the minute you mix the first bag and it's critical to get all of the material in place while it's still fluid enough to be screeded and trowled. The mixer I rented could handle three bags at a time and while it was a slightly frantic couple of hours, the two of us managed to get the job done. Huge props to Boy for hoisting all those #80 bags up into the mixer. And props to me for being the only girl I know of that can wheel a full load of wet concrete. Fortunately the farthest I had to go with it was around the corner of the patio.
Here's all of the material in place, screeded and waiting to stiffen up a bit:

A couple of hours worth of curing later, all trowled up nice and smooth:

The next step was stacking the concrete blocks (CMU's) to form the base for the countertop height slab that actually supports the oven. These got "dry stacked" meaning they're set without mortar in the joints, and not having the mortar there to act as a buffer meant getting everything perfectly level was fairly tricky. Even the ~1/16" variation in level of the foundation slab made a difference, and we ended up putting a bit of sand mortar mix under the block in a few spots, (basically concrete mix without any gravel) to get the first course nice and level.
After that, it was back to work mixing concrete, this time two bags at a time by hand in the wheelbarrow, to fill every other core of the CMU's with a stick of rebar embedded in each. The remaining cores we stuffed with empty Quickcrete bags and leftover gravel to prevent concrete from falling into them when we poured the upper slab:

The angle iron you can see in the top photo is to bridge the opening in the base that will eventually be covered by a door of some sort. Rather than buy these couple of pieces of steel, I repurposed part of an old metal bedframe. Yay for recycling!

So there you have it. The boring parts are almost done, I promise. Next up...building the form and supports and pouring the upper "bridge" slab.

Summer Project #1 Commences: Wood-Fired Oven

2009-05-05T18:18:00.000-07:00

Spring is finally springing...time to get outside and get started on some fun stuff!

I think I've spoken before about how I get antsy when I don't have at least a couple of house projects in the works. Fortunately, even at 3 years present and accounted for here at Modern in MN and despite what I would call a fairly steady rate of dispatch with all manner of projects and finish-ups, I'm still managing to maintain a page-long list of items on my agenda for both indoors and out.
This one's been burning a hole in my brain since last fall...or technically, I guess it's been burning a hole in my brain for the last ten years or so. It's one of the few things from my kitchen wish-list that I didn't manage to pull off, and while it's not happening indoors, as of this past weekend, I'm on my way to having my very own wood-fired oven on the patio.

I'm following the downloadable instructions and friendly advice available at fornobravo.com, for the Pompeii oven and I can almost taste the deliciousness that shall (hopefully) issue forth already. Pizza anyone?

On Saturday, Boy and I got busy running our trusty shovels, stripping the sod and leveling a ~6' x 7' area next to our patio in preparation for footings and a foundation slab. It doesn't sound like much, but we've got crazy hard clay soil and it was slow going, that digging business. Once again I found myself insane with jealousy over those warm climate places where the work and expense of 48" frost footings would be unnecessary.
Anyway, fast forward about a half day's worth of dirt and sod moving, and another half day with the post hole digger and some bagged concrete mix, and we've managed some footings to support the 6" reinforced concrete slab upon which the actual oven project will commence.

On Monday I spent a couple of hours with power tools and a hammer and got the formwork set. Now it's just a little more sand and gravel and finding some more free time and we're ready to pour, and THEN the fun begins!

In the interest of full disclosure, I should point out that I'm not exactly doing things by the cold-climate building book. I made the executive decision to take a shortcut with the foundation and (perhaps stupidly), I'm proceeding from here with fingers crossed. What should have happened is a full 48" depth block or poured wall perimeter foundation, but that would have been expensive from a materials standpoint and extremely time consuming to excavate by hand. I'm hoping that the post footings we've poured combined with the super thick, extra reinforced slab with decent drainage will do the job.

Listing to Port, er...Starboard?

2009-04-14T11:01:00.001-07:00

It seems there is an unwritten rule here at Modern in MN which says that we must make a crazy dusty mess with drywall at least once every few months. That day came around (again) last weekend, when I decided I could live with the leaning media room pony wall not one second longer.
Not.
One.
Second.

Yea. That freakin' wall. It's a ~15' long by ~ 42" high pony wall that divides the media room space from the "balcobrary", and I've known pretty much since the moment I finished it that it was going to be a pain in my neck. Because, as I was told and I can now attest to firsthand, it's more or less impossible to build an unsupported, 15' long wall that just hangs out into space and have it be straight and plumb. And of course that wasn't taking into account the few hundred pounds of books that I hung off of one side of it after the fact, either.
So despite having blocked and screwed and glued the heck out of the framing from the outset, and then skinning the entire wall in plywood as an additional attempt to strengthen it, the darn thing just wanted to lean a few degrees to one side. The side loaded up with that few hundred pounds of books, if you couldn't guess.
And it has been one of those things that I just couldn't stop being annoyed by.

So, over the course of the last couple of years, I considered several options for fixes including removing the floating shelves and rebuilding a more permanent bookcase into the wall structure, but that seemed like too much work and, when it comes right down to it, I really quite like the look of the cheapo LACK shelves on that wall (bracket holes re-drilled to align with studs and therefore able to support more weight than their spec) despite having not ever intended them to be permanent.

Anyway, it's the kind of thing that no one other than me really noticed, the whole leaning issue (which explains why it's been this way for three years), but, when I pointed it out to one of our friends at our New Years brunch, he suggested just adding a small return to the end to prop the whole thing up, and....duh....that seemed like a great solution and one that would be about as painless as it could get.

So tear into drywall (again) I did, cutting and stripping it back to allow the grafting of a 12" deep return onto the end:

And just to be sure nothing is going anywhere this time, there's extra blocking and a plywood panel on one side and the whole deal got attached with A LOT of screws. Then, some new drwyall:

...an hour or two over a couple of days taping and mudding, a whole lotta dust (AGAIN, Argh) and at long last, a coat of actual paint instead of only primer, and the media room/balcobrary wall is restored to non-annoying. I even got a little bit into the very au courant "arrange books by color" thing when I put stuff back into place:

One more house project down, two hundred seventy-three to go. Next up is figuring out what to tile or otherwise treat that top ledge with. It's a fairly high traffic area between having the plants up there and the constant kitty explorations, so something more durable than painted drywall is in order. A glass mosaic maybe...

And if you must know, really, I'm glossing over that whole drywall taping and mudding part. There is nothing I hate doing more, and despite having way too much practice, I still seem to suck at it. Fortunately, the results are usually worth the mess and headache, and that is definitely the case here. In fact, I think I acutally like the whole balcobrary area better now that it's enclosed a bit by the new hunk of wall. Figures.

IKEA Hacking: Desk Lamps Into Wall Lamps for the Media Room

2009-02-09T10:50:00.000-08:00

So...wall mounted light fixtures.
I adore them for their functionality and clutter-reducing, space saving-ness. They're great for small spaces, and great at putting light exactly where you need it for reading or whatever, but it's one of those categories of lighting where there's just not that much available to choose from to begin with, and where to get something cool, you've got to spend a fortune.
And I say boo to that.

Now, you may recall that my quest for fixtures in this genre for our bedroom led me to one of my now infamous IKEA hacks, the desk lamp as wall-mounted bedside reading light, a nifty little adventure that's still one of my most favorite, functional and money saving tricks ever. And just about ever since we've gotten settled here at Modern in MN, I've been on the lookout for another pair of wall mounted lights for our media room to serve a similar purpose.
I had almost pulled the trigger on some from West Elm, but they weren't exactly what I was looking for and for the last few months I had been trying to find time to get over to the store and see them in person, which never happened (and checking just now, they're not on the website anymore anyway).

In the mean time, I happened to be at IKEA, looking at lighting for another reason, and came across some desk lamps, TERTIAL, for $8.99. It was a great deal that I couldn't resist, and although I ended up not using the one I bought in the art show display for which it was intended, it found a great home as a much-needed reading lamp clamped to one of the side tables in our otherwise task light deprived media room.

Here it is, the object of my latest affection, IKEA's TERTIAL drafting table-style lamp:

And here's what my single, original TERTIAL was doing before yesterday, installed as intended:

Love that classic, modustrial, form-follows-function look, and the twisty, turnie, bendy adjustability was exactly what I was looking for in task lighting for the media room.
Yet the second I took it out of the package, I knew it had potential way beyond an ordinary clamp-on lamp so I bought another one on my next IKEA run.

Let the hacking commence!

First, it just so happens that IKEA was genius enough to put a little hole in each corner of that bracket, presumably to allow one to screw rather than just clamp it to a table. And it also just so happens that the bracket was designed to hold the lamp either horizontally or vertically.
Dingdingdingding!
I took advantage of both of these points by screwing that painfully clever little bracket to the wall with the help of some drywall anchors (and Boy in his action hero gloves):

(I should note here that a less lazy person would have made a little backer piece to go between the bracket and the wall to cover up those anchors you see peeking out. I decided I could live with it as is.)
Then, just insert lamp into bracket and TaDA! Instant wall lamp:

Cool, huh? But it gets better!
That dangly cord situation bugged me, and although a bit of careful routing and tacking down would have helped, I wanted something that looked as tidy and as close to permanent as possible.
And then I spotted the perfect opportunity to elevate this simple hack to the level of fabulous, and I took a deep breath and cut the plug end off the cord:

This allowed me to thread the cord through the unused hole where the clamp part of the bracket used to go:

So now, instead of having to route the cord around the bracket from the top, it goes neatly through and comes right out the bottom.

One cord issue down, one to go.

Enter Wiremold, a wall lamp lovers secret. Basically, it's a paintable tube of plastic with a slot along one side that you can slip a cord into for a more finished look. It attaches to the wall via a sticky backing, can be cut to length, and is available at any hardware store or home center. They even sell elbow pieces:

Here's mine installed, happily concealing the lamp cord and waiting for paint:

Note the tidy transition from bracket Wiremold.

Looks almost like the lights were made for this, doesnt' it?

A quick trip to the hardware store for some replacement cord ends (if the wiring part of that scares you, check out this link, or this post for help. They cost just a buck or two and it's really a simple little procedure to put them on, trust me) and a bit of paint on the Wiremold, and it's a fabulous finished project:

I think for ~$25, this hack is pretty darn great...the lamps are exactly the look I was after plus they're perfectly, fantastically functional. Makes me want to curl up on the sofa with a good book right now!

Happy New Year from Modern in MN

2009-01-05T15:47:00.000-08:00

Despite the fact that my guest room is still working overtime as a furniture graveyard, and I've still got that room plus a few other walls that are dressed only in dirty white primer, we bit the bullet and had a real, more-than-six-guests kind of party. Hopefully the first of many!

It was the official Modern in MN New Years Day Brunch Open House, and I've already decided it's going to be an annual event. True, it's a dead give-away that we're not big New Years Eve partiers because I had to get up before the sun to do last-minute prep, but it was well worth it and it's a genuine pleasure to spend time in my kitchen, even at the crack of dawn. We (and hopefully our guests!) had a lovely day enjoying great food and the company of friends, some of whom we've not seen since we were mired in projects and construction debris. Many tours were given, the glass deck was party tested, and if our friends and acquaintences didn't think we were crazy just from the stories, they sure do now :)

Rumor has it that Modern in MN is a hit with the kids, and thankfully the glass deck held up just fine to their craziness. Whew!

Proof that I do, on occasion, get up early in the post-construction era:

The sun rises, and the spread awaits:

Happy New Year! Here's to my quest to bring you some more down and dirty DIY in 2009!

Our Weil-McLain Boiler Failure, Attracting Flies

2008-12-15T11:26:00.000-08:00

The good news is the heat is back! To be sure, it'll be a while before I take hot water, taking a shower and a warm house for granted. Bad boilers aside, we've also been reminded of how fabulous having radiant heat really is, and of how we just can't imagine ever living in a house without it. Kudos and at least a B+ to the contractor for coming out on a Saturday to do the repair after waiting all week for the part.

The ugly facts about Weil-McLain's service on our "issue" and my previous post seems to have attracted the flies. If you've Googled "Weil-McLain failure" or "Weil-McLain review" and read what you dig up, perhaps you've noticed that any time a negative review appears, they're always followed by a "I'm xyz contractor, I have xyz experience, these boilers are great, the service is great, it's the contractors fault" and my personal favorite: "xyz boiler only fails because of improper installation." Taken at face value, it's the (now) expected buck-passing blame game and the status quo attempt to maintain all things plumbing and HVAC as some kind of dark, forbidding art. But look closely. In the case of these contrary, glowing reviews on behalf of Weil-McLain, THEY'RE ALL WRITTEN BY THE SAME PERSON!
Somehow, that just sits a little wrong with me, but of course I'll leave you to form your own opinion on that.

Anyway, here's Modern in MN's own personal version of the oft-repeated diatribe from said person, Morgan Audetat of Badger Boiler Service:

"It's all about the support network. I am a certified contractor for several high efficiency boilers including Weil-McLain's Ultra and HTP's Munchkin. I have received excellent service from their products, their reps and their factory support.

"It's all about the contractor. He is responsible for bringing in the required resources to fix your problem."

"I recently received a next day HX from WM and last year replaced a boiler for them 'same day'."

"Both boilers suffered from improper installation."

"Finally I wonder who designed and installed your system and why they don't seem to be in the picture now? And was the unit serviced annually-per the installation/users manual?"

Hi Morgan. Gosh, you found us fast! Either you and "Badger Boiler Service" are located in a cooling-only state or business is slow, because you seem to have a lot of time on your hands to spend scouring the internet for negative content about the products I presume you make money from. From what I can tell, my post doesn't even show up on a Google search yet and I've only posted reviews on small and unimportant websites so far...

But to respond to your comments, first, you said:

"It's all about the support network."

I couldn't agree with this more. Unfortunately, the biggest player in this support network. i.e. Weil-McLain, didn't or doesn't feel the need to participate in their game, as illustrated by the fact that THEY DID NOT HAVE PARTS AVAILABLE FOR THEIR PRODUCT AT THEIR FACILITY OR ANYWHERE ELSE IN THE COUNTRY....during heating season....for a product they're still selling.

Next, you said:

"It's all about the contractor. He is responsible for bringing in the required resources to fix your problem."

So you've already changed your mind on who it's all about and now we're on to passing the buck, huh? Your industry seems to excel at buck passing, or more specifically, buck avoiding, to the point that it makes me wonder if it's actually a course in HVAC tech school. You sound just like Mike Peck, the WM rep who couldn't be bothered to call us back for a day and a half, did so only after numerous phone calls and an exchange of unpleasant words with his assistant, and then couldn't tell me enough times that "it wasn't WM's fault, there was nothing he could do, I needed to talk to the contractor about this", and that he "has no control over what the contractor does or how long they take". Oh, and that I didn't need to "yell at" him.
Ohkeey Dokeey Mikey. Sorry about that getting cranky part, but not having heat or hot water for a week in the middle of winter will do that to a girl, and you sort of tried to slime the wrong person with your complete bullshit faux helpfulness. Here's a hint: next time, don't try to sell something the customer did that should have been your job as something you did for her. It makes us mad and makes you look like a sleazy, lazy, incompetent ass.
I'm just sayin.
So yea, if the part the contractor needed to fix our boiler EXISTED WHEN WE NEEDED IT, I'd agree, but in this case, the contractor was UNABLE TO BRING IN THE REQUIRED PART in a timely manner, BECAUSE WEIL-MCLAIN DIDN'T SEE FIT TO HAVE THOSE PARTS AVAILABLE. Furthermore, even after this fact was brought to the attention of Weil-McLain, they didn't see fit to find a suitable work around, i.e. replacing the boiler entirely or pulling the part from one of the two Ultra boilers on hand in the state, a solution which would have solved the problem in one day (yep, my idea...you know, the one Mike Peck then tried to pitch to me as his great help after he finally got around to returning our calls?). Instead, they chose to ignore and/or deny the fact that their parts inavailabilty was leaving us with out heat or hot water for a week in the middle of winter. They could have cared less. What wasn't in short supply, however, was the endless stream of slow or returned not at all phone calls and "it's not our fault, we're the greatest, you have to deal with the contractor" from Weil-McLain.

You said:
"I recently received a next day HX from WM and last year replaced a boiler for them 'same day'."
and
"Both boilers suffered from improper installation."

Which I think begs the question: What is the heat exchanger failure rate on WM Ultra boilers?

Anyway, good to know that whatever relationship you have with WM gets you the parts fast! No wonder you want to spend time searching out and refuting every negative review. Looks like you've got pretty extensive industry ties. Hopefully those relationships serve you as well as you serve them.
So If you're a contractor and I had called you for this repair (you should really consider taking out an ad in the yellow pages, btw) and you couldn't get the part for six days who would you be blaming? Just curious.
Maybe you should share your magical wholesale source with the rest of your industry, because Ferguson and their 'accountable to no one' model could really use some competition. I place at least a little of blame for not having a part with them, but as I said, they're accountable to no one so why should they bother?

And as far as improper installation goes, yea, I've heard that one before....from you, in your repetitive posts on review websites. Maybe it would be useful if you could tell us how many Weil-McLain Ultra boilers you've had to repair or replace that were installed according to spec. I'd also be curious to know the stats on how many failures there's been on systems that included domestic hot water heating via an indirect water heater? Or maybe that's revealing too much. Or maybe WM's install spec is neglectful or incompatible with their product design and the price I get to pay for having a properly installed system is a cracked heat exchanger every few years.

What was improper was choosing to have a Weil-McLain product in my home at all because in the end a product is only as good as it's service and above all, after four solid days of numerous, unproductive phone calls to them, what is overwhelmingly clear to us is that Weil-McLain can't be bothered with customer service and has absolutely zero interest in after-sales support. They're like OZ, spending all their time and resources cultivating an image that is, based on my experience, a complete and utter farce and then deluding themselves into believing their lie, all at the expense of their product and their customer.

I think the punch line to this story has yet to be delivered. As I've said, our boiler is three years old and as such is supposed to be fully covered under a 5 year "Homeowner Protection Plan", a 5 year all-inclusive warranty from Weil-McLain, administered by TAW, Inc. This means that the $700 or so we paid in labor for this repair, not counting the cost of the part which we had to pay for up front and, in theory, are waiting to be reimbursed for, would be covered by warranty as well. All in all, another stellar example of buck passing but where it gets really hinkey is that the contractor has to submit the claim for us, and when we mentioned this to the tech he just laughed....
I'll keep you posted.

Why NOT to Buy a Weil-McLain Product, EVER

2008-12-11T14:00:00.000-08:00

A calling out, with the hope that you will learn from our mistake.

You'll recall that we use a hydronic radiant system for whole-house heating and have a super high efficiency boiler as our heat source for both that and our domestic hot water. Our Weil-McLain Ultra boiler is the one and only heat and hot water source for our house.

Or it was up until Monday afternoon, when it catastrophically failed by cracking its heat exchanger at just over three years old.

Which wouldn't be so bad if if weren't for the fact that it's now Thursday evening, 72-plus hours and countless phone calls later, and we're still without a working boiler/heat/hot water because Weil-McLain, an American company that claims to build the highest quality products and be one of the best manufacturers of boilers out there, apparently doesn't see fit to have parts available to repair their products.

So we're here, in the middle of a Minnesota winter with a broken boiler, WAITING FOR THE FACTORY TO MAKE A PART.

Yep. You read that correctly.
And as an added bonus, we get to pay $150 in extra shipping to get it here "faster".

Best case, we might have a working boiler again on Saturday (almost six days from when this began) but I'm not holding my breath because so far the service, or more specifically, the COMPLETE AND UTTER LACK OF SERVICE OR ACCEPTANCE OF RESPONSIBILITY FROM WEIL-MCLAIN, has been astounding.

But it gets better.
The part we need, the heat-exchanger manifold, basically IS the boiler minus a couple of electronic components and pipes. And there is not one but TWO of the exact same model boiler right here at the Weil-McLain distributor in Minnesota that they could have authorized a swap-out with (or gotten the part from) on Tuesday, and we'd have been warm and happy by now. As it went, this was never even suggested by Weil-McLain. They were content to tell the HVAC contractor we're working with they'd get back to them with the date the factory could "start making" the part. It was my trying to come up with a work-around that discovered, to my insane frustration after a day and a half of unreturned phone calls, that what we needed was only an hour from the house.
But getting a part or a swap-out from an hour away instead of putting in an order at a factory for a part that has to be made and then shipped here would have made sense and been easy, and as I have been so painfully reminded these last few days, the plumbing and HVAC industry is wholly allergic to doing anything that makes sense or is easy.

To quote Boy, after yet another long and frustrating day of dealing with Weil-McLain and getting absolutely nowhere:
"I don't trust the Weil-McLain warranty anymore. They are masters of redirection, excuses, and outright lies."
I couldn't agree more, and as far as I am concerned, I would pay double to have their piece of junk Ultra boiler out of my house. Products fail and things break, yes, and that I can forgive, but any company who's business model is this neglectful and ignorant of the customer and this inattentive to after-sales support while touting their high quality, "15 year warranty, American made" as a selling point, is, IMO, selling just that.
JUNK.
I've had better service and gotten parts faster for a $30 blender.
Rest assured, if (or when?) it breaks again, I'm going to mount it on top of my roof parapet with a big flashing arrow and sign declaring what I think about both it and Weil-McLain.

Long Drop Shower curtain

2008-07-14T12:59:00.000-07:00

A cheap and easy alternative to the boring old shower rod and curtain.

Rather than the typical, enclosed on three sides type of surround that is common with a tub/shower combo, our world famous (or not) NYT-featured guest bathroom has a tub/shower set up that is open on two sides.

On purpose.

I haven't shown you much of it in the past because I still haven't decided what to do with the tub base which means that yes, it's unfinished, but hey, progress has been made. And the shower has technically been usable since we moved in, with the exception of not having a shower curtain, that is, so the impending arrival of a recent weekend houseguest (our first!) forced me to get going and get it together in the curtain-ing department.

The room has ~9'+ ceilings so between that and the open on two sides thing, I needed to get a little creative. Sure, there are 90 degree bend curtain rods out there, but they're ugly and cumbersome and..well...usual. Plus then I'd need "special, extra long shower curtains that still wouldn't be long enough and can't just be bought on a whim at Target (where I noticed you can now get PVC free liners!).
Not liking those options led me to investigating hospital cubicle curtain track systems and I had sort of decided that's what I wanted, but every time I sat down to get serious about buying the stuff, it seemed like it was going to be either too expensive or too ugly or too complicated when it should be simple...because it's just a shower curtain, not some OSHA approved industrial strength kind haz-mat, antibacterial kind of thing.

On the other hand, IKEA's awesome KVARTAL drapery hanging system has parts that allow a 90 degree bend and a ceiling mount application just like a hospital curtain track plus it's a nice, sleek look and I could go and buy it at the store instead of having to order and wait.
Problem solved.
So, a couple of hunks of the straight rail, one 90 degree elbow and some of the ceiling mounts that go with it all, and I was almost there.
Like any work that involves arms-above-head for extended periods of time, getting the track mounted on the ceiling was a bit of a pain and required two people, but it's a very simple system and a fairly straightforward, according-to-the-directions install. Just remember to feed the proper number of the little plastic glide thingies (see below) onto the track before you attach it to the mounts. (FYI, a regular shower curtain has 12 holes)

Then, on to actually hanging something from the newly installed track (while I let my arms rest).

The KVARTAL system offers a few different options for attaching the drapery depending on what type of panel you are using. In my case, I bought a package of these pictured below
and used both the glides and the hooks as IKEA calls them.
And from the hardware store, some bead chain and end thingies:

I was originally thinking I was going to order the chain online, in bulk, but I was pleasantly surprised to find my hardware store carries bead chain and a large variety of styles of ends in several different sizes. A little more money, but I could buy just as much as I needed. They keep it by the key stuff. Your mileage may vary.
Anyway, I got the largest gauge bead chain they had (this is totally an aesthetic choice as I'm sure even the finest gauge would be plenty strong) and enough of the eyelet shaped end pieces to use two per strand. The bead chain is easy to cut with a wire cutters, and the ends just snap right on and off.
When I got home, I cut my 36 feet of bead chain into appropriately sized, even lengths and snapped on the ends. Then one eyelet on each strand got a clip from the package of KVARTAL glide/clips. These end up just snapping right onto the glides you already installed in the track:

ignore the photo and leave the other end eyelet-free until you can loop it through the holes in the shower curtain. Then feed the end through the hole in the eyelet and attach it so that you've created a loop with the chain through the curtain hole:

Repeat. In my case, repeat 18 times, using one and a half shower curtains and liners:

and be sure and keep the other half of the cute, heavyweight stripey cotton shower curtain to make something else. Guest towels come to mind...

Modern in MN Meets Miami Beach

2008-06-27T11:55:00.000-07:00

Remember this, from this post?

I finally got around to getting an after photo of this mystery project. Not that it's done, mind you, but I figured since it seems to have reached a state of stasis I may as well show you what I've got and maybe get some opinions.
Here's the full view of the $20 worth of re-purposed IKEA shelf parts made into a frame skinned with white Acrylite on both sides:

It doesn't look like much and that's not really it's final destination as far as location, but like I said, it's a work in progress. The white sticks I just threw in there offhandedly one day but they seem to have stuck and ever since I've been torn between trying to figure out a way to get them to stand up in there all permanent-like or rigging the frame to hold planter boxes for some kind of living sculpture/space divider/random weird white box thing.
But the real point of the deal was to make a light sculpture, so here's the night view:

Neato, huh?
Actually, quite a bit less so in photos compared to real life, but you get the idea.
Inside the frame is a length of 3 color LED rope light that was subjected to a little electrical hacking courtesy of Boy. It can be programmed to cycle through the color spectrum, change colors or just display one color. I think the effect is pretty cool and it makes for an interesting visual element in the room at night but again, it's just not quite all that I want it to be yet...
Suggestions welcome!

STORDAL Hack Revisited

2008-04-28T11:15:00.000-07:00

A while back, I posted a little DIY write-up on turning IKEA's STORDAL closet doors into a nifty room divider. But it ended a little abruptly and I was not as thorough as I would have liked with that post because once we got the hanging stuff in place and the doors installed, a little framing error I made way back when and then promptly forgot about came back to haunt me.
We got the doors up and it was a satisfying to see another long-imagined project so close to completion, but as we were standing back admiring our work, things started to seem just a little wonky. As it turns out, the walls on either side of the opening were not in the same plane.
Oh yea.
I remember making that screw-up. And I also remember deciding to ignore it.
Oops.
So, just as we were reaching the point where I was starting to feel like we had banished new construction drywall dust forever, we had to go and do some demo and some rebuilding and make a whole bunch more.
Sigh.
But after much procrastination and foot dragging and misery, the offending wall was torn down and rebuilt and re-drywalled and taped and mudded.
And then a whole bunch more dust was created and vacuumed up from every possible surface.
Again.

And then, finally, we re-hung the doors and I was forced, once and for all, to pay some attention to getting them to hang and operate as if they were made for the space, and that information is what follows. I know the original has been a very popular post, so hopefully I've made things clear and do-able in this addition, but if not, please feel free to leave me comments or questions and I'll address those as best I can. And also keep in mind that there's no reason you'd have to use this particular style of door. IKEA offers several varieties of sliding doors for PAX and this hack would work exactly the same with all of them.

In the original incarnation, I rejected using the bottom rail for this hack, but after some looking and seeing, I decided that the only way to achieve a satisfactory install and get the doors to operate and hang perfectly was to figure out how to incorporate the bottom rail...which I did, but I also had to concede the fact that to achieve the above AND leave the threshold clear, I was going to have to live with only one door being operable.
But trust me, it doesn't matter, and the hack is 100 times better for it.

So, how to address the bottom?
First, here's what the whole deal looks like from the back. It's hard to tell, but I ended up moving the STOLMEN post so that instead of being centered in the opening, it's about 4" to the right of center, the reason for which will be revealed shortly. Other than that alteration, the top rail set-up remains unchanged from my previous post. Keep in mind that in the photos that follow, the operable door is on the right, and the left door is fixed. (From the front, the operable door slides in front of the fixed door.)

Notice the rail across the bottom of the inoperable (left) door? Normally this would run the full length of and be attached to the lower edge of the PAX carcass for which it's intended. For my purposes, it's cut down from it's full length to be the same 4" longer than half the opening width and since we are carcass-less, it's attached to the STOLMEN pole and the side wall of the opening:

I used the clamp thingie on the STOLMEN post as a standoff, and a small L bracket screwed into the wall to hold the rail up at the same height as it would be were it on a PAX carcass.
A close up of the wall attachement with L bracket:

And a close up of the STOLMEN pole and clamp that holds the other end of the rail in place:

Putting that rail to use and getting the doors to hang and slide perfectly means the fixed door has both of it's lower brackets attached and in use, slotted into the the lower track just as they would in a normal install. The operable door uses only a single lower bracket at the corner where the two doors would overlap. The bracket that would normally attach to the front edge of the operable door (the edge where you would grab the door (or place a handle) to open is not used. The length of the bottom rail and the position of the STOLMEN pole described above are very much on purpose, so that when the doors are in place and the operable door is fully closed, the lower bracket is still slotted into the bottom rail. And because you wouldn't want that rail sticking out all by itself into nowhere, the STOLMEN pole is positioned behind the end few inches. This arrangement is shown in the last photo, above. Note that the operable door is closed and its lower bracket is retained in the track.
It's a little trick to get the door brackets slotted into the rail and get the rail fixed to the wall and post and at just the right height, but a little patience goes a long way, and once everything is in place and adjusted, the doors hang perfectly and the operable door works exactly as it should. And since both doors are supported entirely by the top rail, nothing catastrophic would occur if the "fixed" door is moved but it would be a bit of a pain to thread it back into the lower track so for a little insurance, truly fix the fixed door in place with a stop screw through the upper or lower bracket.
And then celebrate your super cool, clever and perfectly useful new room divider...on a budget! Hurray!

More Master Bedroom Decor

2008-04-24T14:50:00.000-07:00

The second incarnation of the fabric wall hanging:

I know I never showed you the first incarnation, and I purposely didn't show you the bed nook with the original bedroom reveal just because I wanted to get something on the wall there.
Yes, it's orange.
Again.
And I don't heart it and I want to change it but I just don't have the energy for more painting right this minute.
Anyway, I did this with a bit of fabric and some of those metal strip wall hanging thingies from CB2 . They come 58" long and are sold in a set of two, but I opted to use only one at the top and I cut it down to ~44" with a hacksaw.
As I said, this is incarnation number two. I originally hung just a panel of the print but then decided it needed a little something else so I went back and added the red and orange stripes. It's still not exactly right, but it's easy to change and I'll ponder it a bit more before I do anything else. My other idea was to giganto-size the print from the fabric and do a tone on tone stencil of it on this wall, ala the bike room, but that was seeming like it was going to require more energy than I have at this particular moment and I needed the room to be one step closer to done RIGHT NOW. Plus I need to decide what color I'm going to change the wall to first.

Because I love the fabric ever so much, I made a couple of coordinating pillow cases for the bed. In theory, this is the lead in to an entire bed-sized quilt project which I hope will be the focal point of the room, but I've been saying I'm going to do that forever and I'm sure by the time I decide where I'm actually going with it, I'll be on a completely new track with the fabrics. But as I said, the wall hanging is easy to change and for now, will do.

Playing on the Flor

2008-03-27T15:36:00.000-07:00

I remember when this product was first introduced. I thought it was fantastic then, and it's just gotten cooler and cooler. The problem was, for me, that I could never commit to a pattern or a texture or a color.
But finally, after all these years, I was able to choose...

ahem
...a few.

For about a hundred bucks, I got a perfectly sized and perfectly colored and durable new "rug" for our mudroom. Because, believe it or not, there's just not that much to choose from in orange, red, blue, turquoise and green :)
Yay for FLOR!

Tight White Pants in the Bedroom

2008-03-25T14:29:00.000-07:00

I have had an epiphany about the color orange: It's the tight white pants of the paint world.

Yes, these are the life changing revelations that reveal themselves to me when I least expect it, whether I'm ready or not.

What can I say.

But you know the way that there is a rather specific and limited type of anatomy that will look good in tight white pants, namely, nothing less than perfectly sculpted and cellulite-free thighs and butt? Like those pants, orange paint requires a certain type of house anatomy to work as a wall color.

And if you've got it, you've gotta work it.

Maybe I'm making up for not being a tight white pants girl.

Anyway, that all does have a point, I promise.

So I've been working on the bedroom, and I went into the whole project intending to provide you with full disclosure and the down and dirty before pictures that always seem to make the after pictures that much more satisfying.
But I sort of flaked on it until I was almost done unloading the room, so this is all the before I have:

Fast forward almost two weeks (I caught a nasty balloon-head-attached-to-body-by-string cold), and I am about 2/3 done:

As usual, the wall color proved difficult to get an accurate read on in photographs, but it's Benjamin Moore Blue Nova, kind of an inky, purply blue.

I'm not 100% in love with it yet, but I think by the time I put on the finishing touches and get the room accessorized, it's going to work.

Constant State

2008-03-04T10:26:00.000-08:00

I guess it's testament to craziness and the constant state of half-done around here that my friends can come over to hang out and eat and chat and not bother to ask what the deal is with this stuff and why it's in the middle of our livingroom:

They're used to it...or perhaps they are just too polite :)

I thought I would have (and should have) had this done and ready to show you long ago, but once I got the basic idea out there were just too many delicious possibilities presenting themselves and I lost my focus in a sea of indecision.
Again.
But an even better excuse is that there's a healthy dose of Boy-gineering involved, too, so I was waiting on him to work his magic...which is actually prelude to some even neato-er magic he's been working on (and off) since we moved in.

Full disclosure shortly...I hope!

"I have not seen equal pies from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory...."

2008-02-07T18:12:00.000-08:00

I promise I will have something neato to show you very, very shortly that falls into the categories of lighting and sculpture (and IKEA hacking...um...duh?) but right now I just have to share this because it is completely cracking me up.

I noticed via my stat counter the other day that Modern in MN was getting a lot of hits from a particular Spanish language website, so I went to it and thanks to the help of AltaVista's Babelfish, I've been following what is turning out to be an extensive discussion about my house. What makes it funny, however is that web page translation ends up being more than a little vague...or wrong...and it leads to sentences like the title above.

Other than the understanding that my pies apparently exceed those in classic film, I can gather I'm not too big a loser. My favorite comment was something to the effect of "good thing the gringo can't hear us" !! In all fairness, I tried chiming in at that point but got bogged down in the log in stuff (I don't speak Spanish if you haven't already figured that out).
Good or bad, I wish for a way to get a better translation of the discussion. Perhaps the problem is the difference between Castilian Spanish and North American Spanish?
Anyway...hola estiloyhogar.com and thanks for visiting! The language of design is universal, no?

The whole thing reminds me of my trip to Spain in '04 (immediately following...like leaving the same day as...our closing on the lot for Modern in MN) , riding around and passing construction projects in progress on "the motos", and having the unquenchable desire to know what the Spanish equivalent of Home Depot might be like.

"To hell with the Prado, take me to the hardware store."
Safe to say my traveling companions probably wouldn't have been down with that detour! :)
Proof of my infection with the DIY bug even then...

Bike Room Wall Bling

2008-01-07T10:45:00.000-08:00

At last, our first completed project of the new year!
I guess it was a little post-holiday DIY urge that led Boy to take the initiative and paint the bike room pretty much solo. And I'm left celebrating the disappearance of some more of the nasty white and wondering how it happened that he's had me thinking he was an unqualified, incompetent painter all these years...

The color is BM's Timberwolf (aka, the color I started with and aborted on for what is now the Naples Blue big wall) and it's is a nice change from the glaring white, easier on the eyes and a nice clean yet still bright enough background for motorcycle maintenance. But it just didn't seem like plain old gray walls would be enough to do this room justice, so when I was out buying paint, I picked up a quart in each of the next two shades on the color card and charged Boy with the task of coming up with "something" he'd like to add to perk things up. That's right. Modern in MN has jumped on the design bandwagon of the moment, otherwise known as the stenciled wall:

Whoohoo! Painted wall art!
OK, so yes, I guess "art" is rather generous given the fact that all I did was use the free overhead projector Boy scavenged for me from his work trash to project clip-art images into the wall for copying which basically ranks a zero on the artistic talent scale. But hey, I've done plenty of freehand, original art mural painting to get me off the hook for a little brainlessness now and then.
Anyway.
It's a little Ducati-centric at the moment, and I'm thinking I'll add something Aprilia just for the sake of equal love for all our Italian babies, but I needed to take a little break from the tediousness that is getting all those letters right, or at least getting them not wonky looking. Here's to my newfound respect for those old skool sign and window painters.

This one's my favorite. For you non-Eurobike gearheads, that's the desmo valve, aka what makes a Duc a Duc:

The good old flying D:

And in case we forget what one spends most of their time doing with a Ducati:

So now we're on to figuring out what kind of cabinetry we want for in here. I'm looking for something durable and unique with which to construct a workbench and storage along the back wall, among other things.

Table and Associates

2007-12-10T13:30:00.000-08:00

I'm just catching up a bit on project updates around here and realized I never showed you the fully completed cool red casters table and associated project, so here you go:

I was able to decide upon and purchase eight new chairs just in the nick of time for Thanksgiving, and with the table pulled out from it's nook and another two chairs placed on either end, we were able to seat 10 comfortably. That's still two seats shy of my original dream for this space, but I guess I can live with it since big sit down dinner parties here will likely be occasional at best.

The red cubby is IKEA's PERFEKT, transformed from its stock wood veneer finish with the same color paint I've used on a few of the walls, Valspar's Starfire Red. It came out surprisingly well and I think it really helps to tie the whole table, sideboard and island area together.

A return to fabric-upholstered furniture means LittleKitty has staked her claim and that puts me solidly back in the furniture vacuumer's club. A bit boo, but I'm loving the red chairs none the less. They're IKEA's HENRIK and they're slipcovered which appeals to my itchy decorating feet. They're also comfortable, an important and often overlooked dining chair issue IMO. The other chairs are IKEA's GILBERT, also surprisingly comfortable and stackable so I can store the two you don't see here all tidy and compact-like.

And the added bonus from the table building project, two of these nifty, sturdy benches on wheels for flexible seating or coffee table duty. I've got the supplies to make pads for them but haven't managed to get to it yet.

So I guess I'm calling this project done. Still on the kitchen/dining to do list is deciding on and installing a backsplash. Gotta let that one simmer a bit more I think...

STORDAL Doors as Room Divider: IKEA hack #597

2007-12-05T12:45:00.001-08:00

added 4/28/08: Please see my updated post here for new info and instructions and a more detailed account of how I addressed the bottom of the doors to get them to hang and operate perfectly.

This is so ridiculously overdue that it's already collected dust. More on that later. Meanwhile...

At long last, I bring you the great closet-doors-into-room divider project, something that had been on the agenda here at Modern in MN since the early, early, pen and paper planning stages.
This is an idea that has come up pretty regularly in hack-dom, and I'm certainly not the first person to execute it. I guess that's one of the extraneous benefits of being on the ten year building time line, that sometimes other people get down to the figuring out before me!
Certainly there are many different ways of getting to this same end product and the specifics depend largely on the circumstances of each application. I owe a big thanks to someone in an old Apartment Therapy post for the genius use of the STOLMEN post in this deal, and to huku at IKEAFANS for further comment.
So if only for inspiration, here's how Boy and I turned a set of IKEA's frosted glass and aluminium STORDAL closet doors (for the PAX system) into a room divider. Because they're just too cool not to repurpose!

Now, as I said, this project had been on my agenda since very early on. Because of that and because I was the head carpenter for all our interior wall framing, I was able to size the opening to perfectly accommodate the planned STORDAL door hack. Here's a shot of the opening. It's the pass through between our guest room and gym:

If you're working with an opening that is narrower than the width of the doors, never fear, you'll just need to mount a cleat to the wall to allow you to attach the stock top rail to the wall surface and you'll end up with something like my recycled sliding bath and guest room doors.

So, aside from the STORDAL doors in the size of your choice (they come in two heights and three widths), this little hack also required a couple of the sturdiest looking 4" L brackets I could find, one STOLMEN post and two of the metal clamp "end fixture" thingies that go with the STOLMEN system.
The general gist of this set up is that it uses L brackets to support the stock IKEA sliding door top rail on either end and an additional center support point for the rail via the use of a STOLMEN post and bracket.

Start by assembling the doors. I dunno why, but it came as a bit of a shock to me that they come unassembled. But they do, and they take a few minutes and a spot of clean floor space to get together.

The first door assembled:

If you want to install the doors in a framed-to-fit opening like mine, figure out where in that opening, front to back, you want the doors to sit, and install an L brackets on either end. I placed my brackets so that once hung, the face of the doors would be flush with the face of the wall. Make sure both screws go into studs:

To determine the correct height for the brackets, I added 1 /2" to the height of the doors. If your floor is perfectly flat or very uneven, you can fine tune this amount of clearance accordingly.

Once the end brackets are up, install the STOLMEN post. They're height adjustable to fit virtually any ceiling height and work sort of like a shower curtain rod in that they're held in place mostly by tension/friction. Basically all you've got to do is plunk it into place and twist to lock.
And remember that little clamp for your STOLMEN post? That's going to support the top rail in the center, so you're aim here is to set the post so that once the clamp is installed, the tab ends up in the same plane as the L brackets you've already got up.
Here is our post installed and waiting. Keep in mind that the post will be BEHIND the doors.

(the picture below shows the rail already bolted to the clamp, but you get the idea...)

Set the post, lock it into place and put the clamp on, but don't screw anything down too tight yet because you want to test fit the top rail across your opening first.

As I said, you want to test fit the top rail next. Set the rail across the opening, resting either end on the L brackets you already installed and sliding the STOLMEN clamp up on the pole so that the tab is just touching underneath the lip of the rail as shown above. Once you're sure it's level and straight, use a pencil to mark the rail for drilling at the clamp and both L brackets. If you're using 4" L brackets, you should have two holes per side plus one in the center for the clamp. These marks indicate where you'll drill the top rail so you can bolt through it to attach it to the L brackets and the center post.

And while you've got that rail up there, fine tune the position of the STOLMEN post, double checking that it's plumb and centered in the opening. Once you've got it perfect, it may be helpful to mark the location of the ends of the post on the floor and ceiling, just in case.

Take down the rail and drill out all the holes you've marked. Reinstall the top rail using a short nut and bolt through the brackets and into the rail. On the STOLMEN bracket, you can use the nut and bolt that comes with it. At this point you can also secure the round ceiling and floor brackets for the STOLMEN post in place using the appropriate fastener, i.e. screws if you live in a normal house.

Once it's up, tighten everything so it's nice and snug. All that's left to do now is hang the doors:

Now, if you look closely, you can see that the doors are not hanging perfectly plumb. As it's produced, the IKEA mounting system for these sliding doors uses a bottom rail which I chose not to incorporate. But remember that I told you to buy two of the end fixture brackets for that pole? Mount the second one at the very bottom of the pole and make yourself a standoff/bumper for those doors to get them to hang straight by sticking felt furniture glides to a smaller angle bracket and bolting it to the clamp. Alternatively, make a U shaped guide lined with felt and attach it to the floor at the center of the doors.
Unfortunately I still can't show you the finished room in living color but it's coming soon. Or just as soon as I work out an issue with that head carpenter I mentioned earlier...

Fun with Cord Lights

2007-11-12T15:34:00.000-08:00

What does the combination of a hacked up 50 foot extension cord, a few light sockets and some 25 watt bulbs mean for Modern in MN?
Light fixtures for the bedroom, at long last! HURRAY!

The basic components:

As I said, that's just a hunk of extension cord, a porcelain light socket, and some low wattage bulbs. All of this stuff is available at hardware stores and home centers. Or, if you're buying in bulk as I was, you may find it worthwhile to look online for better pricing.

Above is what the inside of the porcelain socket looks like...
Don't forget to put that little metal escutcheon on the cord BEFORE attaching the wires to the screws.

I wired up a bunch of cords in a variety of random lengths. In my case they were getting hardwired into ceiling boxes so I left the opposite end alone, but you could also wire a plug on here to allow them to plug into a receptacle, like this:

And, leveraging the steel-decking-as-ceiling feature that figures so prominently in the decor here at Modern in MN, I found some neato little magnetic hooks to hold each of the cord lights up, making the fixtures endlessly and quickly reconfigurable.

In a regular house I'd either screw a steel plate to the ceiling wherever I wanted to put a cord and magnet, or use a stick-on hook instead. A screw-in cuphook would work too.

Now, if you think I'm crazy and that this is the ugliest answer to lighting you've ever seen, you can stop reading here. If you're someone who is likely to be inspired by this or wishes to have your own fun with cord lights, keep in mind that there are some safety points you'll want to be aware of.
Most importantly, understand the watts/amps equation and figure out how many watts of lamping you'll have in your finished project, making sure that the rating of the circuit you're using can accommodate what you plan to do. BRIEFLY, a standard, 15 amp household circuit is allowed 1440 watts, (but this does not mean that you can or should add 1440 watts of lamping). Also mind that electrical code dictates the number of wires you can have connected inside a box based on box volume and gauge of wire. A basic-ish primer on this can be found here.
When in doubt, consult a professional.

Custom Modustrial Table

2007-10-18T13:35:00.000-07:00

Since the very beginning stages of the conception of our house, I knew I wanted a kitchen/dining area that could accommodate a long, narrowish table big enough to seat a crowd. And I designed and planned the space accordingly but until recently hadn't really brought the idea into being simply because the table and chairs brought from our old home were working fine and there's been (and still are) a lot of other, more pressing projects on the schedule. But recently time and progress got me to the point where living with our make-do table was at odds with the table that was kicking around in my head and the imaginary table won. Finally the moment arrived where creativity, motivation and time all landed in my lap at once and I was able to get to work on giving birth to a table suited to the space.
Now, don't get me wrong...it's not like I had this crazy urge to build a table that I felt it necessary to act upon. I probably would have just gone out and bought one but I looked and looked and never really found anything that jived or was even close to what was in my head. And to further complicate things, I've had these cool red casters stashed away and earmarked for the 'big table' forever and I just couldn't let idea go. So design/build it was.

As I said, I've had these cool red casters for ages, squirreled away waiting for their debut:

and I wanted to plunk them onto a chunky, square leg that mounted flush to the corners of a tabletop. I had toyed with the idea of using wood posts for legs but ultimately opted to use steel, and the great crew over at BW Welding, the same guys that did our stairs and our railing framework, were a great help.
The finished leg is 4" square steel tube, with an "L" shaped flange for bolting the legs on flush with the corners of the top:the close-up photo above shows the opening cut into one face of each leg. It's just enough space to get a wrench on a lag bolt head and allows for an attachment point in the far corner of the tabletop.
Here you see the legs with casters attached, the slot just visible at the top. And speaking of the top: that's the same basic construction method and materials I used for the BigTV bench I told you about a while ago. It's a triple thickness of 3/4" plywood, glued and screwed together and then sanded and sealed into laminated plywoody deliciousness. In this case, I wanted a 30" wide tabletop so I purchased three sheets of finish-grade ply and ripped them down. I'm going to use the remaining 18" offcuts to make a bench to match.
I'm extremely happy with the finished product. Because it's 8' long, I was worried about the plywood being able to support itself across that length but so, far so good. Placing it perpendicular to the island like I have it here is a compromise and not what I had originally planned but I've decided it works and I like it. Plus it rolls around like buttah so it's easy to change :) Now I need to reconfigure the cabinetry on that side of the island which I hope to be able to show you shortly...

Next Up...

2007-09-26T12:21:00.000-07:00

The impetus for bike room finishing has arrived:

That, friends, is a brand spanking new pneumatic bike lift courtesy of moi, in celebration of Boy being another year older. Kind of one of those gifts that's a bit of a cheat since I'm sure I wanted one just as much if not more than him, but what guy is going to complain about being gifted swank stuff for motorcycle maintenence? Am I the best Girl ever or what?

And of course, just like all the critical design details around here, it's red :)

Now, what to do with those walls and what should the cabinetry and workbench space look like?
I can't wait to get started on this fun space!

The Big Reveal

2007-09-06T14:19:00.000-07:00

Didya see it? Did ya? Did ya?

eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!!!!!

I must say that aside from being more satisfying in the way that only a real newspaper can be, the print version is also better in that my photo caption actually contains information (and the modern in mn blog address) about what's in the photo. In the online slide show, you rather pointlessly get only my name with the bathroom vanity photo and because the article text lacks any associated reference to the cabinet hack, I think it leaves one wondering WTF. On the other hand the desk lamp hack is captioned better in the slideshow (if you can ignore the typo).

Cubby Completion

2007-09-03T15:36:00.001-07:00

At long last.
After a few weeks' delay, I finally found time to take up the paint roller again and finish up with the foyer cubby project:

It would have been finished sooner, but I had originally painted the inside orange, and, after four painstaking coats, decided I didn't like it and went back to clean, gallery white which took another three coats. Truthfully, I'm still not super in love with it in white, but I think it provides a nice backdrop for what's in there and whatever I may decide to display in the future. It's still missing something for me, though, so if I get some time during the week I may experiment a bit with hanging some fabric panels. And if I'm feeling extra ambitious someday, I'm going to try a dark charcoal/blackish paint or a rasterbated image in there. (Now that I look at it in pictures, I really don't like it white at all so that may happen sooner than later.) So the only remaining detail is to treat the "floor" with something more durable than paint on sheetrock, probably either black VCT or large format tiles.

Anyway.

The slight fiasco with the orange cubby was the result of a previously completed but as yet unrevealed decision to go out on another orange limb for the upstairs bath/guest room wall:

Like most things in this house, it's nice to have it actually painted, but I'm not sure I love it. Since it was so dang much work, those four coats and all, I'm forcing myself to live with it for a while, but I suspect that eventually it will succumb to the Naples Blue of the foyer, et. al.
There are a few select views where I think it looks great, but my overall feeling is that it's looking just a bit too circus-ey for my taste, like a color wheel vomited, particularly when seen in context with the red (since it's a holiday and you're probably relaxing, I am going to refrain from scaring you with that view right this second).

Sigh.

And speaking of Naples Blue, (I never thought I'd be so embracing of such a color), it's also making an appearance in the media room, where my most loved stained glass panel is now safely and soundly installed, rescued from it's three years in storage in perfect shape. Of everything we packed up, moved and stored from our old house way back when, it's THE thing that completely stressed me out so it's a huge relief to have it back and properly displayed:

And yes, the TV cubby could use being painted a charcoal/black and tidied up a bit, but there are just not words to describe how much I hate screwing around with electronic equipment and the cord jungle that goes with it so that's just going to have to wait...

In The Blink of an Eye

2007-08-17T14:25:00.000-07:00

Whew. Have you checked in over at Splatgirl Creates in the last couple of days to read all about the very exciting developments that caused me to have to bust a move last week? It's completely whack.

I was already knee deep in three colors of paint trying to finish the foyer and nook (which, as of today, I still haven't wrapped up to my satisfaction), but then The New York Times called (Ha! Never in a bajillion years did I ever think I would utter those words) and the ensuing conversation caused me to drop all those brushes and get to work that very evening on the guest bathroom that had been languishing in primer for much too long.
Paint was slung, accessories were purchased and sleep was lost, but just like that it's a real room!

The bonus of the whole deal, really, as if it weren't enough that the NYT wanted ME and my Splatgirlieized IKEA locker vanity, which, to tell you the truth I never really thought was that big of a deal, is that the room is nearly finished. Still on the to-do list is tiling or otherwise addressing the tub surround and as you may have guessed, I'm on the fence about how to treat it.

Anyway, here's the room!!

Look for us in the Home and Garden section on Sept. 6th! Whoooohooo!

Half Way to a Finished Foyer

2007-08-06T15:11:00.000-07:00

aka, progress on the upstairs:

Much better than white, no? This is the same Naples Blue from the huge east wall, and despite my dislike of it paired with the red that I talked about previously, I think the addition of another layer of decorating really has it working in the foyer.
The Kandinsky poster is a leftover from our old house, and I think it ties what I've got going on so far together perfectly but it's a little small for this wall. So, in lieu of acquiring the original "Yellow, Red, Blue" which it appears is owned by Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, (ha! can you imagine?) I think I am just going to replace it with a nicer, larger giclee of the same painting. I'm also still considering a narrow table for under the print since, as has been pointed out, the room lacks the all important landing strip. And hurray for the cheap big plants and pots at IKEA. The sturdy old corn plant may not be my favorite, but I like that they're tall and didn't cost me $300 each.

I'm still working on the cubby over on the other wall so I'll have to keep that under wraps for a while longer. I will tell you that after retrieving some of the last of our stuff from storage over at Boy's mom's house, I've been reminded that we had the most perfect collection of cool, relevant chachke for the space all along...not that the trike isn't a great addition.

(OMG. Was that me admitting to having chachke?)

Stay tuned for a finished room, coming soon!

New Ride

2007-07-23T12:39:00.000-07:00

A while back I submitted a request to one of my favorite sites, Apartment Therapy, soliciting advice and ideas on what to do with the sort of strange nook in the foyer. AT was kind enough to post my request, and I got a ton of great suggestions that really helped me start thinking about this space with a fresh perspective. (Thanks AT!)

Among the replies were a couple of suggestions for wheeled things and that seemed particularly fitting. I really liked Art's motorcycle idea but just couldn't see how I could possibly execute what he was proposing. Another good one from Alana, " a rusty old trike" struck a chord with me as well, but when I seriously considered that proposition, I figured I could shop for ten years and never find a rusty old tricycle that would work. And even if I could, that type of organized, purposeful search for such a random thing ruins part of the charm of it for me so I filed the idea away in the back of my head thinking....'if I ever run across an old trike'... and proceeded to ponder.

Then yesterday as we were on our way out of the neighborhood on a errand, we passed by one of the older homes nearby that's recently been sold and is sitting vacant awaiting what I can only assume will be a tear-down. And lo and behold, there at the curb at the end of the driveway sits a genuine rusty old trike. No kidding.
I just about flipped, and breathlessly had to explain to Boy why that was just the most amazingly perfect coincidence EVER and "holy crap I completely can't even believe it". Despite my excitement, Boy, never quite knowing what he's going to be in for with me on any given day, was SO not feeling me insisting that he turn around and go back. I believe there were a few eye rolls and loud exhales involved, but turn around he did at the same time handing me his wallet (and wondering how much this little coincidence was going to cost him, no doubt). I jumped out and looked at the sign that was attached and flapping in the wind:

FREE

Whooohoooo!! But for the record, I would have paid at least $50 for it because it's that cool.

So, I bring you my newly triked foyer cubby:

It's still needing paint, the cubby walls, I mean, and I'm thinking I'll take the advice of suspending one or all of the windows from the ceiling and adding something organic, but the hard part appears to be over...and for free!

Paint color suggestions, anyone? I'm presently thinking a dark charcoal gray...

I wish I had some way to thank whomever put the trike out on the curb, because I really, really love it and it looks like it's got some great history.
I'm so happy I can give it a new home!

Complimentary Colors, What a Concept!

2007-06-28T12:45:00.000-07:00

I had been agonizing over what color to paint the pantry for months and although the source was somewhat strange, inspiration hit just as I was using up my last drop of tolerance for the dirty white primer.

I glanced over from the living room the other day and noticed this:

and it struck me how much I liked the orange of the randomly tossed dishtowel and handbag against the turquois-ey jade of the Rendezvous Bay color of the kitchen walls (which, incidentally, is still photographing nothing like it looks in person). Ten minutes later I was on my way to buy some paint.

Either I'm getting better at making decisions or getting reckless....

It sure transformed the room, from blah and a little unpleasant (dirty white primer...go figure) to bright, welcoming and exciting and a part of the house I don't mind hanging out in. Just what we needed for this busy, multi-purpose room.

The insides of both entrance doors still need to be painted (probably just white), and the current rug was a cheap stopgap that is a little too narrow but working for the moment until I can find the perfect replacement.

So officially, only our bedroom and the tiny outside walls of the powder room remain on the painting roster for downstairs, but I'm still so at a loss about this stuff and the rest of the upstairs that lately I've been joking that by the time I get it everything painted it will probably be the avocado green, harvest gold and shag of the double oughts. And with orange rooms #1 and #2, I suspect that moment may arrive even sooner, but for now I'm absolutely loving it.

More Painting

2007-06-06T15:36:00.000-07:00

An accomplishment.
The other acre of wall wears color!
Welcome Benjamin Moore Naples Blue. It's growing on me, particularly since I've completed the upstairs media room part.

At first I thought it was too dark, and I still do think it's a bit dark for the living room at night, but I love it so much in the media room that that makes up for my uncertainty about the downstairs quite a bit.
My current plan is to concoct some kind of lighting or light sculpture for the big part of the wall that is without windows. Since this spot kind of needs art anyway and is the biggest offender in the "too dark" category, I think lighting, possibly along with some great (big) art, will be the perfect solution.
I'll add that to my arm-long to do list right away.

So the part that I'm not loving is where the new blue abuts the red of the bike room wall. I love the red, and I sort of love the blue down there, but together they are sort of making me want to barf, so I'm now considering repainting the red wall something more Naples Blue-friendly. But I really love how the red downstairs ties into the red upstairs in the foyer.
Anyway, the thought of painting over this red makes me want to cry because it took oodles of work to get the up and finished, and I really truly love it. But if it all doesn't work, it'll bug me forever, and I'd sooner change it than the huge wall which I am definitely not repainting anytime soon.

Now if only I could decide on the perfect coffee table and more seating for the media room I could add it to the almost completely finished list.

T+365: A Year of Living in Modern in MN

2007-04-10T11:26:00.000-07:00

It's been a year today.
Hard to believe, really, and I find myself in this weird state of feeling like we've always been here and thinking it was just yesterday that we were dirty and sweaty and exhausted every day. The crazy part is I'm not sure which of those feelings I'd like to hang on to more.

I miss it. The construction process that is, so I guess it's a good thing that we'll have plenty of projects to keep us busy around here for years to come.

I've toiled away the winter with odds and ends, trying to wrap up a bunch of little but time consuming things that were put off in the scramble to get occupancy.

There's red paint in the north, on the foyer and bike room walls:

Oh yes, and that's our most chic accessory of all, our beloved greyhound Mast, aka PupCake who is the best most enjoyable addition to the house that I could ever imagine.

The range hood, with it's gigundo big 10" duct and external blower, the installation of which was the jackhammering adventure from hell, is functioning (and doing a great job), although the range wall still waits for me to decide on a backsplash of some sort:

I think I've decided that I like the look of the exposed duct, and my current inclination is to tile a vertical section from range top to ceiling that's the same width as the hood. With what you ask? Who knows.

After much playing around with arrangement, I think I've embraced the diagonal with the living room furniture:

For now, or until we decide on furniture and function for the other half of the room...
And do you notice I'm still on the fence about paint color for that huge east wall? I thought I was all ready to pull the trigger on that deep blue/green there in the corner and then a moment of hesitation brought me back to square one. Because the wall in question is shared between the living room and the media room, and these rooms are so different in terms of light and use and feeling it's a real challenge. But since I was so sure about the Naples Blue earlier that I even went and purchased the paint, I think I'll just have to go with it and re-evaluate next year :)

The guest room remains empty. The guest bath has been the focus of my attention most recently, although I'm stuck on a paint color hump in there too.

And in less interesting categories, the hydronic radiant heat system has been an absolute joy. Instead of feeling cold and shivery all winter like I have in the past, we were snug and cozy and had delightfully warm feet all winter. The decision to heat with radiant is one I'd make again a million times over. It's FABULOUS, and I can't imagine ever, ever going back to forced air. In fact, that alone may be what keeps us in this house for the long haul.
And speaking of winter, I can't say enough how the abundance of natural light in the house has helped get us through the doldrums of the north. While the energy efficiency of not having to depend on electric light at all during the day makes us feel good, it makes us feel even better to be able to soak up all the beautiful bright daylight we can during the winter and it makes spending a lot of time indoors so much more bearable than it used to be. Another point in the couldn't bear to ever leave or sell category.

As part of the whole process of living in something I was completely responsible for the design of, I spend a fair amount of time reflecting on what I would do differently, what works and what doesn't.
What comes to mind first is the concrete floors. This was a major factor that drove our design from the get go, and while I love them, their durability, looks and low effort, they also present a cleaning nightmare when compared with an all carpet environment. I realize that having four pets doesn't help, but it seems like I spend way too much time looking at dust and crud and even more time cleaning it up.
It's never ending.
On the other hand, at least I know what's there and CAN clean it up vs. carpet where one often wonders what nasties lurk year after year...
My hope is that the cleaning issues improve (or the dirt stays better hidden) with the addition of a few more area rugs for spaces like our bedroom and the media room.

Much like the concrete floors, I have a love-not love with the open floorplan kitchen layout. I can't say as I would do it any differently because I really love working in the space and not being stuffed away in a separate room, but it drives me crazy because I find we're looking at mess more often than I'd like. I think most of that issue comes from the fact that, to me at least, the kitchen is such a focal point and I really do enjoy it from a design perspective so I naturally want to always be looking at it in a pristinely clean and organized state. Tough to do when you're someone like me that's always got a cooking project going.

And of course I have projects galore up my sleeve for outdoors and in. As spring springs, we're starting to think about outside stuff, namely installing the decking material and railing on the lower roof deck and building an outdoor fireplace/wood burning oven somewhere in back. Also high on the list is getting our planned ductless AC system installed along with some kind of awning or shade sail system over the deck and patio areas.
And since we went the minimalist route with landscaping last season, we have plans to expand and improve that as soon as we nail down the hardscaping plans.
Sounds so fast and easy when I put it in writing, but I'll be happy if one or two of those projects gets done before the snow flies again...

Overall, it's been a fantastic year, and we've enjoyed every single minute of being here. We can't imagine NOT having gone through the whole crazy affair of building and we can't imagine being happy in any other house. And it's amazing what the crazy, hardcore work of building one's own house does for confidence with the day to day DIY projects that present themselves as a part of homeownership. Nothing fazes us, and our friends have been quick to learn that if they have questions or need a hand or just a confidence boost, we're the go to people...the down side of which is watching them make the same mistakes we made despite our warnings and attempts to educate.

So stay tuned, and rest assured there'll be bloggage aplenty as the Modern in MN saga enters year two (or should I call it year four?)

My Friend the Wire Rope

2007-03-20T12:01:00.000-07:00

Behold the steel cable (aka wire rope), ferule, turnbuckle, and eyehook. Four of my favorite interior design secrets.
In this first application I've used these basic supplies, available at any hardware store, to construct a minimalist techie looking drapery hanging system that allows me to span a long distance, in this case both the length and width of my bedroom, with a few simple and inexpensive pieces of hardware and twenty minutes worth of effort.

Below you can see the whole set up: my DIY cable system with heavy outer drapes and under it the IKEA version of the tensioned cable, the DIGNITET, which works and looks great for lightweight fabrics or sheers but gets easily overwhelmed and saggy with a fabric that's even remotely heavy:

What's the big deal, you say?
The tensioned cable allows one to pull any number of drapery panels all to one side or another instead of having to split them to either side of larger openings because of those unfriendly center support brackets that most drapery hardware requires. And that, in my world, solves a huge and frequently encountered design dilemma that used to make me crazy.

Not your style, all those industrial looking metal bits? I've used this little trick in lots of regular houses too, except there I keep it a secret by covering it with a valance. I love love love doing this for sliding door treatments, because almost without fail, I find that sliders look much better when the panels go all to one side when open, (usually to the inoperable side so as not to interfere with traffic in and out the operable door), but that is nearly impossible with anything but a formal drapery traverse or a large diameter rod because of the dreaded center bracket. But I almost never like the look of those kinds of things or I'm doing a valance anyway and it seems stupid to go spending a bunch of money on something that's just going to be covered up.
So in situations where you have a longish distance to span and: A. you don't care for a big, decorative rod, B. you want to spend like $4 instead of $400, C. the rod would be covered by a valance anyway, or D. you like the minimalist-industrial thing, the tensioned cable is your best friend.

But it doesn't stop there.

This friend also served me well in the stair and balcony railings in our house. I knew I wanted a horizontal cable rail (fortunately it complied with code here but that is not the case in a lot of areas so check first) but I didn't like the look, materials or cost of any of the commercially available cable railing systems. When I was looking, these ran on the order of $110 a linear foot and up, which at my house would have meant $10,000 minimum in railing alone. Do I need to tell you that wasn't a Modern in MN budget figure?

Instead, I had a basic steel framework welded up and installed and then spent a couple of very sweaty days wrestling 1/4" cable to do the infill myself. One thousand feet of cable, turnbuckles, ferules and the ~$300 swageing tool to put it all together cost me less than $1K, or one tenth the price of the commercially produced kits that are made from lesser materials and that I would still have had to install myself. Now THAT was definitely within my budget and I think it looks a hundred times cooler.

The basic components of a wire rope rig-up I've already mentioned: wire rope, ferules, turnbuckles and eyehooks. Four simple and cheap little piecesparts that do so much.

Wire rope comes in a whole range of gauges and construction, but unless you're hanging humans or several tons worth of stuff, don't worry about the construction or strand count of the cable. Just get some that's the size you like, keeping in mind that the skinnier stuff is easier to work with.
Most decent hardware stores will carry a range of gauges of rope that will be fine for household use. They'll also have the ferules or the little metal sleeves that are smushed in place to make a loop in the cable. It's important to get the ferules that correspond to the size cable you choose, because the ferule is all about using friction to hold things in place. Likewise, you'll also find eyehooks and turnbuckles at the hardware store, and you can choose these based on looks alone or, if you're suspending something heavy, based on duty rating which I'll discuss below.

If you want either the cable or hardware in a specialized metal, like stainless steel, check out marine supply stores or look online for "rigging" or "swaging" equipment. Stainless costs a bit more, but this is the way you'd want to go if you're doing anything outdoors or in a wet area like a bathroom.

A few words about "swageing", which is the term used to describe applying the ferule to the wire rope. Like ferules, the tool used to swage, ie the hand swager, is sold in sizes that correspond to the ferule size. From what I can tell, one swaging tool is typically suitable for two or three consecutive sizes of rope and ferules, and they also have a nice bypass cutter on one side for cutting the cable. But unless you're doing something really heavy duty with thick cable, forget the specialized tool because they're expensive. All you need to smush those ferules on and make a nice sturdy loop is a good pair of pliers and a strong grip or a bench vice that you can whack shut a few times. A heavy duty wire cutter will cut smaller diameter cables with a bit of effort. If you're using thicker gauge cable, you can ask them to cut it to length for you wherever you buy or use a hacksaw with a metal cutting blade. For the latter, wrap a piece of masking tape around the rope before you cut. This method has served me well for many wire rope projects, and again, unless you're making something that your life depends on, don't worry too much about the how and the what of the specialized tools. But for the sake of knowing our stuff, here's what a swager looks like:

This one works on 5/16, 1/4, and 5/32 diameter cable and ferules, otherwise known as pretty heavy duty stuff. It's roughly the size of a large bolt cutter.

In the picture above, you can see an alternative style of turnbuckle. It works exactly the same as the open ones shown in the previous picture in that the body turns on the screw eye and hook to either shorten or lengthen itself. Turnbuckles have load ratings just like wire rope, so be sure the turnbuckle you choose has a load rating that meets or exceeds the weight of what you want to support. I tend to buy bigger turnbuckles than are necessary just because I like the way they look, but having a nice strong turnbuckle can never hurt when you're doing something that will require a lot of tension on the cables.

The picture below is of the cable railing I installed here at Modern in MN, and you can see the individual components I've mentioned. The ferules I swaged using that big fancy tool (that crimp mark on the ferule is from the swager) because these cables have a fair amount of tension on them. In a critical application, each ferule would be crimped three times, and then this gauge cable and loop could support something like 6000 pounds. Considering it took all my strength to operate the swager and that my cables have something like 1/10th that amount of tension on them at best, I opted to crimp each ferule only once:

Below is another of my favorite ways to use wire rope. In this application, I used very thin gauge rope and a couple of eyehooks to suspend an old window from two hooks in the ceiling:

Wire rope works great for things like this because it's visually unobtrusive and it hangs nice and straight and neat looking.

Anyway, there you have it, and introduction to my friend the wire rope and a couple of ideas. Now run free and swage :)

Floating Shelves in the Closet

2007-03-13T13:15:00.000-07:00

Back to the guest bathroom, where the tall IKEA PS cabinet that matches the one in this post, also in the guest bathroom, just happened to be an exact fit for the closet nook:

I love happy accidents!

I wanted to continue the wood theme over from the vanity, and since this is a closet I figured why not use the same NUMERAR oak butcherblock to make shelves? It was quick and easy enough to cut up into shelf-sized chunks, but I wanted them to be floating, because I've never met a shelf bracket I got along with. Acheiving that required a little domestic engineering, and with the help of Boy, here's how we got float:

First I located the studs in the walls of the nook. In my case, the closet only had three, one in the back wall and one on either side. I marked their location carefully and drew a vertical line that extended up at least to where I thought I wanted my uppermost shelf. Then I figured out how high I wanted each of the shelves and used a level to carefully draw a level line all the way around on the three walls.

Next I cut pieces of 3/8" oak dowel, 2 1/2" or so in length. In my case I needed three for each shelf because there are three studs. Using the level line I just drew and the previously marked studs, I drilled a 3/8" hole through the sheetrock and into each stud about an inch or inch and a half, being careful to drill straight and level. Then I pounded one of the pieces of dowel into each of the holes:

The dowel is now snug in the stud and is sticking out from the drywall about an inch. (I could have glued them in just in case.) After the dowels were all in place, I measured the distance from the back of the nook to the dowel and marked this distance on the piece of butcherblock that will become the shelf.

Using a table saw (a circular saw would probably be easier), I cut a slot into either side of the butcherblock. It took several passes through the saw to achieve the necessary width, and what I was looking for was a channel just slightly wider than 3/8", centered within the thickness of the wood and extending along the edge of the shelf just a bit farther than the distance from the back of the nook to the dowels on either side:

In my case, the dowel pegs stuck out from the wall about an inch, so I set the depth of the saw blade to cut slightly deeper than this, maybe 1 1/4".

Using the same 3/8" drill bit I used on the walls, I drilled a hole in the back edge of the shelf that exactly matched up with the location of the dowel peg sticking out of the back wall:

The shelves just slid right into place, with the side dowels slotting into the saw cut channel. The pin on the back wall fit into the hole drilled in the back of the shelf to keep everything nice and snug. I didn't glue any of it because my shelves won't be seeing a lot of activity but it probably wouldn't hurt.

Below you can see the shelf in place and the dowel that's holding it up there peeking out of the gap:

Now for some paint and accessories!

Kitty Powder Room

2007-03-01T10:04:00.000-08:00

What to do with the litter box? It's a chronic question if you've got cats, and one I chose to solve once and for all.

This, my friends, is the door to the kitty powder room, my solution to the where to put the litterbox.

At Modern in MN, this feline size portal goes from the living room into the bike room (where one day, hopefully, the boxes will be inside a cabinet to completely hide them), but in a normal house I think this idea would work great to allow you hide a litter box away in a closet or other room and not have to worry whether the door is open or closed.

Basically, you'll need a drywall saw, some scrap drywall and 2 x 4 lumber, corner bead, some drywall mud and paper tape.

First, figure out where you want your opening. Use a stud finder to locate the studs in the wall. You want to plan your opening to fall between two studs, making sure you're not directly in front of or behind an electrical outlet. To make things simpler later on, locate the bottom edge of your hole 3 1/2" off the floor and then use a drywall saw , also called a keyhole saw, to carefully cut out the hole. Duplicate the marks on the other side of the wall and repeat the drywall cutting procedure.

My opening is about 8" x 10", but you can make yours as wide as ~15" (the usual amount of space between studs) and as tall as you'd like, keeping in mind that the dimensions of your opening will shrink by an inch or so once you add drywall.
I made my opening slanted at the top, which I'll explain later, but a square or rectangular hole would be easiest to execute. Feel free to do a trapezoid or a parallelogram or whatever Dali-esque shape you can think of, but don't forget that you're going to have to come up with a way to finish out. From what I can tell, cats aren't picky when it comes to interior design as long as they can fit through, any shape will work.

Next, cut a scrap of lumber to fit inside the wall in the bottom of your hole. If you got the height right, this piece of 2 x 4 should sit on the walls' existing sill and below the cut edge of the drywall by about 1/2". Screw or glue it into place.

Now, get a small hunk of drywall and cut four pieces to fit the size of your opening. You can typically buy scraps at the home center, and lately I've noticed they're selling half and quarter sheets already cut. Make sure the pieces you cut are as wide as the wall meaning they'll probably need to be about 4 1/2".
Starting with the bottom surface, position the drywall on top of the opening. It should rest on top of that scrap of 2 x 4 you already put down there. Either screw or glue this piece down.

Next cut eight pieces of corner bead, four for each face of the hole. For the vertical sides of the opening, you're going to need to use the corner bead to hold the drywall in the opening. Position the first piece and get someone to hold it in place while you staple on the corner bead. Repeat for the other side and the top face and then on the other side of the wall.

Now, put on your patience and get to work with the mud and the tape. Fill the edges of all of the corner bead with mud, and tape and mud the inside corners of your opening. If you've never done this before, it's going to suck, but you can always sand things down and put on another layer. If you're good, it will probably take at least two or three applications of mud to get things nice and tidy looking. On the outside of the wall, you'll want to feather out the drywall mud at least 8 or 10 inches to get everything nice and flat.

Carefully sand everything down and repeat as necessary until you have nice smooth surfaces on the inside and outside of your opening.

Add the paint and trim of your choice. I painted my opening orange and applied a little slanted door, because after all, it is the kitty power room and I figured it was only fitting that it coordinate with its' human counterpart:

I should tell you that I was loosely inspired by this, so if you've gotten through this whole post and decided it's just too much work, save yourself from the DIY fun and go pay the $30. I won't be offended :) Another, possibly simpler alternative would be to frame out your opening with wood instead of drywalling it...

Bathroom Vanity 101

2007-02-28T11:31:00.000-08:00

A little DIY tutorial about how to make a bathroom vanity out of almost anything.
**********************As seen in the NEW YORK TIMES!!!!!!!************************
(See an updated post with the finished room here)

If you've been paying attention at all, you know that I really love IKEA. They've just got so much stuff that is great looking, practical and well priced, it's hard not to make the monolithic blue and yellow my first stop on any design mission.

In the case of our guest bathroom, I wanted something completely unique, which, when it comes to bathrooms can be really hard to do on a budget. There is just very little out there for fixtures and furniture that suits my style and doesn't cost thousands of dollars.

Enter IKEA's PS cabinet which suited the style of our house so perfectly and which I loved so much that I just couldn't resist buying. At $99 bucks, it's hard to go wrong.
As it turns out, it was a great size for our guest bath, so with a little tweaking, I turned it along with a piece of oak butcherblock countertop, IKEA's NUMERAR, into a spare yet interesting vanity.

This was really quite simple to execute, and the basic concept can be used to turn pretty much any cabinet shaped thing into a functional bathroom vanity. For those of you that subscribe to a more traditional style, this is how those cool antique dressers are turned into custom bathroom furniture and given outrageous price tags.
Anyway, here's the dirt:

The IKEA PS cabinet itself is freestanding, basically just assembled and plunked into place, but at ~25" high, it wasn't tall enough to serve as the vanity on it's own. So to raise things up a bit, provide some material contrast and a mounting surface for the vessel sink, I suspended the oak butcherblock countertop about 8" above the top of the cabinet, using heavy duty shelf brackets from the home center to hold it up:

Because the 1 1/2" thick butcherblock is rather heavy and it also needed to support the weight of the sink and faucet, I lag bolted the brackets into studs.

Then, on to the plumbing. Using a jigsaw, I cut a hole in the countertop to allow the sink to be slightly recessed, and then I dry fit the sink tailpiece (the straight piece that connects to the sink) and marked the location on the top of the cabinet. Then, using a 2" hole saw, I drilled a hole in the top of the cabinet for the tailpiece to stick through, down into the inside. In the picture, you can see the tailpiece extended down from the sink and into the hole in the cabinet:

Next you need to measure up from the floor to where the waste pipe for your sink comes out of the wall. Transfer this measurement to the back of the cabinet and, again with the 2" hole saw, drill a hole in the back panel of the cabinet that corresponds to the height of the PVC waste line coming out of the wall.
Once you test fit everything to be sure it's all going to line up, you can attach the P trap to the tailpiece and to the PVC waste line from the wall. Position the P trap so that the horizontal part that goes through the back of the cabinet and into the wall has a slight pitch toward the wall. It might require a little futzing to get everything positioned properly and snug, but when you're done it will look something like this:

Now, because the IKEA cabinet is rather shallow, I didn't want it set back flush with the wall. This meant I had room for the water shut offs and the waste outlet in behind the actual cabinet, between it and the wall. If you're using a dresser or something deeper that you want flush against the wall at the back, you can drill holes to allow the water lines and shut offs to be located inside the cabinet like you'd see in a typical undersink cabinet. This would make getting everthing hooked up quite a bit easier.

Here's what it looks like behind the cabinet:

Keep in mind that these directions would be applicable to a regular drop-in sink as well. You'd just need to cut a hole in the top of your cabinet to accomodate the sink and then follow the same procedure for placing the trap inside.

Livable and Done Are Not the Same Thing

2006-07-08T11:10:00.000-07:00

Where to start? The when of when we began this project seems like a forever ago, and I feel like a different person in a different world. Crazy what housebuilding can do to a girl.

We passed our final inspection, took occupancy and closed on our permanent mortgage the first week of April, 2006, almost exactly two years from the time we closed on our land, and 16 months from groundbreaking.
Whew.
Financially, a HUGE relief after paying the insane penalties that went along with extending the term of our construction loan so many times, but emotionally, kind of a weird anticlimactic no mans land. Yes, we were thrilled that the house was, at least on paper, livable, but also a little delirious from the all out effort we had been putting in for so many months. Honestly, it's been hard to switch gears and I think we're both just now feeling like things are mostly back to normal. Which is not to say that we're not still working our butts off. At least now it's at our pace, on our terms, and without an hours drive each way.

We pretty much sat around or slept away all of our free time in April. It was delicious, and I'll never forget that first weekend when we DIDN'T have to get up at the crack of dawn and drive an hour to work on the house. At first it was hard to remember just how to be lazy, but I think we've got a handle on it now :) So we've been off to a slow, new start, but we're gradually crossing off all those items on our self imposed punch list.

As I've told many of our friends, a weird thing came over me once we finally got moved in. Instead of wanting to celebrate and share our progress and achievement at every stage, I turned picky and selfish and started feeling like I want everything to be perfectly the way I see it in my head before I'm willing to show it off. Realistically however, I think it's going to be YEARS before I feel like we're done, so I'm trying to get over it. And yes, eventually, I'm going to cave and plan a party.

"Livable" is a relative term to be sure. There's still plenty of work to be done, and a distinct lack of furniture which started to suck about two months ago. So far I've only been able to manage to decide on one piece, a sectional for the media room, which, if I'm lucky, will be here in three more months. Everything else is still waiting to be discovered and until then, one of us is enjoying the BO Concept chaise I got for half price at a local going out of business sale and the loser of the coin toss gets their pick of one of the four kitchen chairs. But hey, they do have upholstered seats :)

After spending two years of my life making decisions, I'm really over it. "They" say this is the part that's supposed to be fun. "They" being all those people who have "built" their own house by calling a builder, choosing a couple of fixtures and some tile and complaining that it's taking too long. My reality is that furniture shopping seems like such drudgery at this point that I really can't bring myself to do it, but the bigger the pain in my butt gets (those kitchen chairs, you know) the more motivated I become.

So in between not sitting down and lounging on nice new furniture, I've been busy pecking away at the million loose ends, and painting and rediscovering just how satisfying paint can be when it's not acres of white primer.

Here's the master bath, the one room in the house that's pretty close to completely done, with the tile job that nearly put me over the edge and took FOREVER, but that we absolutely LOVE.

My studio in Racer Pink (tinted primer plus FOUR coats of paint!) and still needing some major organizing.

The bike room, waiting to be pimped out with a lift, some cabinets, paint and beauty lighting, but with our dear friends the motorcycles happily parked:

The reading nook, aka the balcobrary:

Outside the back doors:

A year ago today:

and now:

Discussing the Details: Concrete Ofuro

2006-04-04T11:09:00.000-07:00

The idea of a concrete soaking tub is one that seems to generate a fair amount of interest, so I decided to dedicate an entry to describing how we went about constructing ours.

Despite what were obviously serious doubts on the part of our plumbers (and others, come to think of it...), the concrete ofuro has turned out to be a HUGE success. I really could not be more pleased with the end result and I can't wait to dip my toes in. After the craziness of the last year and a half, I need it!

The specifics: Outside dimensions of the tub are 42"L x 42"W x 36"H The walls are 4" thick rebar reinforced concrete. The seat inside is about 13" high and the back is slightly reclined for comfort.
As with any concrete pour, the formwork is what really matters and what takes the most time. This was my first foray into anything cast concrete, but you'll recall, I've just built a concrete house so I had plenty of opportunities to pay attention in class during the course of that work and I never missed an opportunity to ask questions and learn about the material.
Here's the form, ready to go:

The inner and outer form panels I made using 3/4" melamine. This was basically just an exercise in visualizing negative space and a lot like forming a stoop, although slightly more complex. What required the most thought here was figuring out how to hold all of the panels together, not screw through the inner melamine surface, and still be able to get everything apart and out once the concrete hardened. I used blocks of scrap melamine screwed together in a lengthwise "L" and then screwed to the form panels.
I also braced the melamine panels with scrap lumber to keep them from bowing and reinforced the corners with plumbing strap.
Because the tub needed to have a floor, the inner form needed to be held up higher than the outer form. This was accomplished by basically hanging the inner form from the walls of the outer form, again using scrap lumber and plumbing strap.

Regarding the plumbing rough in: I had the drain roughed in slightly lower than the intended height of the tub floor to allow for a pitch of about 1/4"/foot for drainage. The overflow pipe was roughed in so that it ended up within the 4" thickness of the tub wall. You can see the circular hole in the form wall in the pictures. This is the PVC collar that the chrome overflow trim screws to, and the flange of this PVC piece fits into and extends just slightly into that hole to prevent concrete from filling the overflow.

I had originally planned on getting ready mix for the tub and the concrete counters, and pouring all of this stuff at once. Fortunately, I came to my senses and realized that was going to be WAY too much of a panic to worry about all at once, and I decided it would be better to DIY our mix using bagged materials. I was also concerned about having very tight control over the amount of water in the mix, and I decided that ready mix would be too unpredictable and likely too wet.
I rented a portable, electric mixer for this event which turned out to be not as useful as I had hoped. We found that mixing two bags of material at a time using a wheelbarrow and mason's hoe worked a lot better. Having two great friends there to lend a hand was a huge bonus as well. Here's the form all filled, showing the slanted back and the bracing inside. The cross pieces with the strapping on them are suspending the inside form off the floor.

It was helpful that we were pouring up against an existing wall, as that was one less side of form to have to brace and worry about keeping square. There was also a temporary wall on the supply side of the tub (built to soothe the plumbers and give them somewhere to place their rough-in), that provided a backer to a second side of the form. The other two sides we braced to the walls of the bathroom, shown here:

Any good concrete guy will tell you you can never go overboard with bracing. A yard or two of wet concrete all over the floor inside the house would have been a huge drag, and while we got a little bowing, the bracing and form reinforcements did their job.
In this regard, our slow process of mixing a few bags of material at a time, by hand, was a boon as it allowed us to keep a sharp eye on the form and make adjustments to the bracing as necessary. We also made an effort to mix the concrete with as little water as possible, both because of the effect of this on the cured product and because less water equals less pressure on the mold.
Here's a shot of the newly de-molded tub. The concrete is still slightly wet and very green. We've also removed the temporary pony wall here, and you can see the water supply lines.

Find your complimentary swiffer slippers at the door

2006-02-19T11:08:00.000-08:00

I hold my breath as we set the glass deck panels into place, followed immediately by the first of what will be an eternity of dusty footprints!

Strong arms ease the first panel into place:

See it?

The overall effect of the clear glass is exciting! It's strange and a little scary to walk on at first. Aside from the obvious weirdness of walking on glass, all of the panel edges are bound by the steel framework, so the sense is that it could be just a thin pane. The framework sits about 7" higher than the beam that supports it, and upon which the uprights bear, so there's also a weird sense that the entire railing side is just floating out in nothing.

Welcome to Modern in MN.
Adrenaline rush and elevated heart rate our pleasure.
Skirts prohibited.
Please keep legs and feet inside the railing at all times and keep walking until you've reached your destination.
Grab on and enjoy the walk :)

More Interior Photos

2006-02-14T11:07:00.000-08:00

This is the fun part! Now, if only the dust fairy would pay us a visit and clean up her mess.

The newly grouted shower wall with floor in progress:

Cable lights in my studio. I wasn't sure about the combination of these and the exposed joists, but now that they're up, I love the gallery-esque light they give off, particularly at night.

What to do when you don't have $800 in the lighting budget for the reading lights you REALLY want? The $6.99 IKEA desk lamp, MacGyvered into a wall fixture for our MB bedside reading lights. For a total of $14, I'd say it's a fair trade.

*****As seen in the NEW YORK TIMES!!!!!!!!!********

R&D on the dining table chandelier. Having a 24ft steel beam over the table makes for some intersting options. These are made from porcelain sockets, cut up extension cord and horseshoe magnets. I'm still working on the details of the final product.

A sip of orange juice and things to come

2006-02-09T11:05:00.000-08:00

One of these days I'll get a chance to compose a proper update, but in the mean time, here's some peeks at whats been going on (and up!)

The Orange Juice powder room. Love it or hate it? It about gave me a seizure putting it on but I think it's growing on me now.

Some of the great work by BW Welding and Fabrication:
Framework for the transparent deck ready for glass and cable.

My DIY cable rail. I think it's turned out beautifully.

A look at the "Farm and Home" lights, fans and balcony.

Some of the pantry cabinets. Hate that IKEA deco strip? Me too, so here's my answer: Aluminum angle from the home center, sanded and waxed to refine the finish a bit and installed to conceal undercabinet lighting.

The long awaited concrete ofuro, ready to pour.

Plain white 4 1/4" x 4 1/4" tile meets my passion for glass art. I think this is going to be one of my favorite rooms in the house and I can't wait to see this shower completed. I've got a couple of other neat tricks up my sleeve for in here, too.

I have so much more to share but just not enough time. Lots of this stuff is wrapped up now and should be ready for beauty shots very soon!
Stick around :)

Duct tape, drywall and a driveway

2005-11-14T11:04:00.000-08:00

Can you see that light at the end of the construction tunnel? I think maybe I can.

What's been happening? So many things that I've had a hard time remembering them all, but I think we're finally getting to the point where we can start to think about a move in date.

Drywalling has commenced after finally getting the electrical finished. Wiring took so long that I can't even remember when it started. Part of this included us running all the RG 6, phone lines and other assorted media-specific items and wiring all five of the thermostats for the radiant zones.
UPDATE:
Before I could get this post up, the drywallers finished and taping has commenced as of today. This is costing us a small fortune because of all the detail work with the window jambs, trimless doors and visible top of wall edges in the areas of exposed ceiling, but I think it's going to look amazing when it's done. Here's a look:

-Installing the air exchanger and bath fans.
May we never see a piece of ductwork again. The only high point here is that I can now claim to have used duct tape for it's intended purpose instead of only as an artistic medium.

-Our stairs arrived.
Amazing what not having to climb up and down a ladder from floor to floor does for making this project actually feel like a house. After tons of searching and a lot of frustration, I found a great welding and fabrication shop to make the stairs, railing uprights and handrail.
Getting the stair in place was a major feat. After ignoring my advice to try and gain access to the house via the south sliding doors and getting truck, trailer and 3000lb.+ chunk of steel thoroughly stuck in the mud, the stair was brought in through the west door, rolled into position on pipes, and then chain-hoisted from the roof joists into it's spot. It looks really cool.

The most labor intensive portion of that adventure for me was jackhammering and saw cutting a 4'x2' opening in the balcony floor. A mess to say the least. I started with the jackhammer to get as much of the material out as possible, lest we be dropping a several hundred pound chunk of concrete onto the slab below. Then I went at it with the masonry saw to give the edges a clean cut and allow the fascia steel to be placed.

This not only covers the exposed edge of all of the upper floor concrete, it provides an attatchment and welding point for the stair to hang from. Ultimately, the stair hangs from this fascia, welded to it along the vertical edge of the stringers. The remaining fascia pieces have not been installed yet, but will go on when the railing uprights and top rail are installed in a few days, leaving me with a support structure for stringing and tensioning cable.

As soon as the stair was in place, we got to work framing the powder room below. Hopefully I'll never have to frame another slanted ceiling room as long as I live, because I think this tiny thing took as long to frame as our entire upper level. Figuring out how to deal with the slope of the stair, a bar joist, the fan soffit and the bike room wall all converging in the same place was quite a chore.
I think it's going to look cool, however, and I've got a couple of interesting ideas for dealing with the odd angles it creates. That's the powder room there tucked under the stairs.

After a long wait that involved the payment for our heating equipment getting lost in the mail for two weeks, our boiler finally arrived and we're looking forward (or fearing) the challenge of getting it and all of the pumps, zone controllers and lines connected and getting heat in the house.
UPDATE: After soliciting several bids to get our system up and running, and realizing these radiant heating "specialists" were significantly more clueless than we are AND wanted ~$6-$7K to do this, we've gotten going on doing DIYing this. The hydronic stuff has been Vern's project since the beginning, and he's done an amazing job of turning himself into a hydronic heating expert. We should have heat just in the nick of time, as winter is threatening as I type.

A driveway!

When we were originally planning this project, we had planned on an asphalt driveway, but because these prices have increased drastically and our concrete guy has done such great work for us already, we decided to go with concrete instead. It's something of a splurge, but also more durable and longer lasting. I'm thrilled to finally put and end to the muddy ruts we've had for the last year.

As you can see, we're still not finished siding. My galvalume just showed up a few days ago after a two week mistake/delay, in addition to the four week lead time. I can't wait to see what it looks like once it's up.

Perhaps the biggest development is the sale of our home. We put it on the market at the beginning of October, expecting it to take a month or two to sell. Or agent even warned up that the market was seeming a little "sluggish" and that we might have to be patient. Well, four days later, we had a signed purchase agreement for cash, our full asking price and no contingencies. The kicker: the buyer wanted occupancy on October 27th.
We had always considered that selling and moving before the new house was completed was a definite possiblity, but moving in three weeks was a interesting plot twist. We agreed to this quick close, and I had a POD delivered a day or two later to start packing things up into.
While I've spent the last year gradually purging and getting our stuff pile pared down, we still had no problem filling the container. While not exactly cheap, using these movable, modular storage containers is extremely conveneient.
I'm really looking forward to being able to unpack from the POD on our schedule instead of lugging around box after box and then having to look at them for a month while we figure out where to put everything.

So we're staying with Vern's mom for the time being and trying to get as much done as we can from day to day. Lately that's meant 16-20 hour days at the new house for me and a regular work day followed by work on the house time for Vern. We had a ton of details to wrap up in preparation for drywall, but now that that's behind us, we can refocus our energy before the real fun of finish work begins.

A Much Overdue Update for Modern in MN

2005-09-18T11:03:00.000-07:00

Yes, we're still building a house...

Some of the things we've been working on in the last month (and a half, gack!)

-Furring out window jambs with EPS.
This took a while, but all the interior window openings are now set for drywall. Our windows have a built in drywall channel and all of the jambs will be finished with a drywall return. I'm looking forward to the clean, no-trim look this will provide.

-Bituminous peel and stick membrane affixed to all of the exterior window openings.
Although water intrusion is significantly less of an issue with an ICF home since there's nothing to rot and very little moisture migrates through the 8" of concrete and two layers of EPS, we still need to ensure the water tightness of the window in the opening. Dealing with long strips of super sticky membrane while up on a ladder made me wish we had built a shorter house with fewer windows!
While not physically demanding, this chore did require a lot of patience and wrestling of ladders in inconvenient places.

-Site clean up.
We spent about a day just picking up scrap lumber and miscellaneous debris and loading it all into a 15 yard dumpster. While it pained us to be throwing away all that lumber, I kept reminding myself that the overall amount of waste generated by our project was much less than if we were using more conventional methods. Clean up is boring but necessary, and the site is now pretty much ready for finish grading, the driveway, and eventually landscaping although right now it's hard to imagine anything beyond the giant weed farm we've got.

-Gas line, phone line and electricity inside the house!
It took four months and more than a few unpleasant phone calls, but we've finally got gas service to the house. Ironically, the week after this was done, the power company came out to transfer our service from the temporary box to the interior panel, and accidentally cut the new gas line! The result of that was a somewhat comical (and as I understand it, routine) production that involved the police, fire department and the gas company who came out to repair the line. I couldn't help but laugh.

-We've finally gotten a start on the siding.
The order of operations here begins with moving each of the 4 x 8 sheets inside the house to give two coats of paint, and then moving outside to cut and drill for installation. Not a fast process by any means but so far it looks pretty cool and we're finding the HardiPanel easier than expected to work with, aside from the fact that they're big and heavy. I'll probably be much less positive about the whole siding endeavor once we're on to the higher up sections.

My frustration with the plumbers persists. They got the rough in to about 60% finished and then didn't show up for several weeks until I called and inquired WTF?? At that point I was informed that they were under the impression that all that remained was piping for the shower heads in the master bath, and that they were waiting for me to frame the ceiling in there. This had been done and pointed out to their guy well prior to their last visit, and there were many, many things incomplete or incorrect so obviously they were misinformed. Apparently they're still suffering from an inability to communicate and I'm suffering the fallout from their choice to employ a chronic alcoholic and put him in charge of my job.
The whole thing is so unfortunate because the owner and his office staff are absolutely excellent and easy to work with but apparently they have not figured out that Mr. ETOH is not only not doing the work, he's not accurately representing the status of the jobs he's responsible for.

Electrical work is still in progress and still frustrating. As I've said, this is being done by one of my family members, or more specifically, I'm paying his employee what amounts to time and materials for the work, (which, incidentally, is nothing like our original agreement), and I'm at the bottom of their priority list to boot. To make matters worse, things NEVER happen according to the schedule said relative lays out, and I'm lucky if I get 8 hours worth of work from them in a week. At this rate, I figure our cost is actually double or more what we'd be incurring if I had just hired a stranger, so I'm pretty pissy about the whole thing but I'm letting it ride since I'm not ready for drywall yet anyway.

In between all of this stuff, I've been hard at work on the phone as usual. The one drywall contractor that's bothered to get back to us did so with a $26.5 K bid which is WAY more than we budgeted, but I suspect the other guys I'm meeting with this week will be similar because of the amount of detail work our job requires. That I'm insisting on smooth ceilings in the few areas we're using them doesn't help.
We're going to have to get creative to find the money in our budget to deal with this.

After weeks and weeks of agonizing, searching and sending out drawings, I think I've finally found a steel fabricator for our stair and railing. I'll be meeting with him this week and I desperately hope he works out since were way behind on getting this going.

I still haven't made a decision on our garage door. We need an 18' x 7' door, and with frosted, insulated glass, a full view door becomes insanely expensive. Since we don't have the 6 or 7 K in our budget for this, I've had to reconsider and am still weighing the pros and cons of a door with one frosted view section (still more expensive than I'd like) vs. the more commercial looking corrugated door with the narrow oval windows (cheaper and not as cool but may go with the overall look better anyway). Another option would be to get a full-view door with clear glass and then apply a frosted film, but I haven't been able to verify that the adhesive on these films will stay stuck in our cold cold.

Reviewing my last post, I found it difficult not to get bummed about the small amount of progress we seem to have made in the last month and a half. It's on the verge of fall and we thought we'd be getting ready to move in around now but as it stands, the end appears to be just as far as it was a couple of months ago. We've been faced with some difficult events in the other areas of our lives including the death of a very good friend recently, and I think we've both really been struggling to maintain focus and keep up the momentum with our project. It just seems so insignificant and selfish in comparison with the other more serious events in the world that we can't help but pause and consider.

I forgot to mention this, but I spent a few hours with a rented jackhammer extracting concrete from around the shower drains in our master bath to accomodate the drain and waterproofing system I'll be using. It's hard to tell, but this picture also shows the sloped mud bed I constructed as well as the bench seat that will get skinned with plywood and then drywall prior to applying the waterproofing membrane.

This is the east wall with the first course of siding installed (it's dusty so that's why it looks a little weird). The dark band around the bottom is the acrylic stucco that I applied over the EPS to bridge the gap between grade level and the siding. (There will be a partial course of cement board below the one you see). Installing the stucco was another thing I overlooked in my review. Not difficult, per se, but a little tricky to get the hang of and physically demanding work due to the materials and the location.

Just for fun. This is the sink for my guest bath that I brought in to get a fix on counter top height, etc. I guess my Little Kitty Angela approves, since she immediately plunked down in it for a nap.

Walls, Plumbing and a Stoop

2005-07-31T11:02:00.000-07:00

Things are moving ahead, although not as quickly as I'd like. I think I've reached the "just get it done" phase.

Vern and I finished the interior framing and managed not to kill each other in the process. Actually, we had fun deciding the what and where of everything and thinking about what the finished spaces will look like. I can't imagine having to try and communicate what we wanted to a hired crew...we would have driven them crazy.
We're tentatively planning on ceilings only in the bathrooms, media room, kitchen and pantry, so there was some thinking to be done about whether we wanted to close these off completely by framing all the way to the top of the deck or framing these spaces to a height that would allow one to see up and over the top of the "roof" of these rooms. It's going to be fun to see how everything takes shape with sheet rocking.

We hadn't really realized the effect of only two structural walls in the whole interior (the garage walls) before we got to framing. Not only is this a beginning framers dream since nothing we did had to hold up anything else, we'll also be free to reconfigure, move or knock down walls whenever we feel like it in the future (which, honestly, is an odd parallel to our lives).

The Hardipanel siding has been delivered and awaits painting, drilling and hanging. I'm also waiting on some Galvalume and flashing to go along with this, and I have 2000 screws and washers at the ready.

The plumbers have finished the waste and venting work and have started running the water lines. The core drilling for the toilet vents on the upper level was completed without incident. The pictures and meticulous notes we took of the PEX installation came in very handy, but even this wasn't enough to keep the plumber from freaking out on me about it. I was rewarded with the head plumber/owner throwing a a temper tantrum when he refused to trust my three way documentation and diagramming of the location of the PEX in the upstairs bathroom floor.
I'm a little frustrated with these guys overall. Despite my proactive efforts, they communicate scheduling very poorly and then freak out when I'm not on site the minute they show up and have a question, and continually refuse to take me seriously. They were making plans to core drill through the garage walls in two places to tie in their waste and vent stacks when I pointed out that knockouts had been placed for specifically this purpose, but they didn't seem to believe me until I went and cut holes in the foam myself. That they seem to work in fits and starts doesn't help, and the ironic thing is they were one of the more expensive bids, but I hired them because they were they were extremely professional and helpful during the bidding process.

This is the kitchen wall with the pantry/laundry room (right) and master bathroom (left) behind.

The nice bookend left from core drilling the toilet stack. This is done with what amounts to a floor mounted drill press,a $600 diamond bit, and lots of water.

I've been waiting for the gas line and meter installation since April. It's getting a little ridiculous, and every week I call them and get an alternating series of excuses as to why the work hasn't been done. Hopefully they're getting as sick of me as I am of them and they'll get around to getting it done before I have to get crabby.

We're still waiting on the two frosted glass doors for the front and side entrances, as well as the two eight foot sliders for the south wall. That these items are missing is becoming more and more of an inconvenience, since we're at the point where we really need to start leaving/installing things that could easily be stolen, and we can't lock up. It's also going to be inconvenient to try and put up the siding without these doors so I'm hoping like heck they show up this week.

I've been waiting on our electrician for over a week. Wiring was one of the things I called in a favor on from one of my family members, so I can't complain too loudly, but I haven't got a lot more time to wait around and I'm getting a little nervous about him coming through. I'm going to be pretty pissy if we continue to be at the bottom of the priority list since I've spent countless days and hours designing and working on fabulous interiors in his house and gave him more than fair notice about our schedule.

I installed our first doorknob :) It was just the utilitarian one for the garage-to-shop double door, but I was celebrating it as a milestone. I'm waiting on the much more exciting Omnia ones to be delivered from handlesets.com.

The cabinets have been ordered along with the remaining plumbing fixtures, kitchen sinks, etc. etc. I'll be ordering appliances this week which is pretty unbelievable. I've been dreaming about the "new house kitchen" for what seems like ever and putting in that appliance order is going to be CRAZY exciting.

We finally got our front stoop. You may recall that the original form had been built by the sub of the contractor from hell, and that they failed to finish the job. Although the resolution to this is likely to involve us becoming the plaintiff in a legal proceeding, I'm SO glad that it didn't get done as planned. Our new concrete guy critiqued the original form work and explained to me that since two of the three steps weren't supported by the footing and only tied to the main stoop by a thin section of concrete, it was a good possibility that they would break off when the ground under them met with freezing and thawing. He ended up tearing apart most of that form and rebuilding it to bear entirely on the footing, and then spent a very early Saturday pouring and finishing for a very reasonable price. This is the same guy who showed up with a great crew and did an amazing job on our lower level slab, and he's definitely worth his weight in gold. We'll ask him back for a forth time when we're ready for patio, parking pad and sidewalk.

Based on the very limited number of line items left on our SCS, we must be getting down to the end of things, but it sure doesn't seem real. I keep telling myself that I'll believe that we've made progress when we accomplish "X",but then I seem to forget to give us credit once it's done and tend to keep believing that we're months and months away from the end. Maybe we need to start a "guess the closing date" lottery :)

The roof we thought would never happen and other exciting developments

2005-07-11T11:01:00.000-07:00

After what seems like FOREVER, we've got a roof. Ironically, it's also stopped raining.

The new roofing company we hired has really been great. Not only were they extremely easy to work with and very professional, they showed up and got the job done when they said they were going to. We almost couldn't believe it was happening after the fiascoes of the last couple of months.
All that's left of the roof chapter now is the scupper flashing, parapet cap and downspouts, which they'll return to install as soon as we have our exterior finished up.

Please pay special attention to the plywood on those parapet walls. Vern and I hauled all 23 sheets of that stuff up there by sliding it up ladders a sheet at a time. (Exhausting and hot, yes.) This was necessary to provide a surface for gluing the roof membrane, as the adhesive and the EPS foam of the ICF block are not compatible. As I've said before, we intend to turn the upper roof into a garden/greenroof/outdoor living space. These greenroof materials will also act as ballast to hold the roof membrane in place instead of it being mechanically attached (which would have been redundant and was also cost prohibitive due to the thickness of the roof insulation).
Unfortunately, time and money prevent us from installing that system immediately so we've just done the absolute minimum at this point which amounts to putting a few hundred dollars worth of concrete stepping stones up there until we're ready to dig into the entire greenroof project.
I chose a plain, gray 24"x24"paver that I think will work great with the future garden. As an added bonus, they were cheap ($7.65 ea.) and are the ideal roof ballast in lieu of gravel. I'm already dreaming of all the cool stuff I'll be able to do up there.

Since we're now dry and puddle free thanks to a roof, we've been able to start on the interior framing. As house-building activities go, we're finding this one of the less exhausting and most rewarding, since the results are instantly visible and we're finally getting a glimpse of what the rooms will be after all these months. We're almost done with the upper level and I expect to finish the lower level in a day or two. Once that's done, we'll work on the exterior while the plumber and electrician work inside.

Here's the first of the framing completed...the view looking out from what will be my new studio. I'm silly with excitement, especially since it's going to have a sink!

Roofless

2005-07-03T11:00:00.000-07:00

The events of our past month can prety much be summed up in four words: still not dried in.

Windows: With Herculean effort, we got all the window openings roughed out and the windows installed in about a week and a half. As I suspected, those up-high big ones turned out to be monsters, but their placement went surprisingly well considering there were only three of us and we were working with some pretty simple equipment.
We ended up rigging a rope and pulley hung over the parapet wall with a steel "U" bracket (well, actually it was an old hose hanger from Vern's parents house, back from those long ago days when things were well made instead of disposable...). Anyway, it was the perfect size to slip over the top of the parapet and had a hole on one end we could slip a carabiner through to attach the pulley.
We put a strap around the window frame and a friend on the ground hoisted the window into place while Vern and I, on extension ladders on either side of the window, eased it into the opening and removed the strap. Then, while Vern held the window from falling out of the opening, I would run down the extension ladder on the outside of the house and up the ladder on the inside of the house to shim, level and check plumb, and then he fastened. I wish I would have been able to take a few pictures but I was too busy, and the sight of a ~250lb window dangling from a rope 20 feet over our heads had me too freaked out to think about much else.

Roof: I fired the roofer, aka, The Contractor from Hell (yes, the same one). When I fired this guy from the flatwork, I informed him of the length of his leash and my expectations with perfect clarity. He assured me up and down that there would be no problems, that the roofing crew was ready and waiting, and that they were experienced and professional. Not surprisingly, that story lasted about two days, and then we were right back to the different day, different story routine. He screwed around and hemmed and hawed for two weeks. Then, when he did finally set a start date for the work and I called him two days later on a Friday to confirm for the following Monday, he played his usual denial-that-it-was-ever-agreed-upon game and tried to change his story and delay another week. Furthermore, his "experienced, professional crew" had now turned into "his (one) guy" meaning the same loser flunkie that he's got doing flatwork by the hour who turned our roof slab into the work of a fourth-grader, and who, it should be noted, has zero roofing experience.
If I hadn't been so freaking frustrated, it would almost have been funny...like trying to work with a hamster running around clueless in one of those little wheels and never getting anywhere, and just so damn predictable.
The best part was that he had the gall to blame ME for the work not having been started by saying that I "keep changing things again and again". HA! That was the end of my patience for idiot contractors. I decided he needed to be fired on Monday and turned the whole thing over to Vern to settle the issue of him having been paid for around 2K worth of work on our front stoop that hadn't been completed.

CFH and I had worked out the details of this previously and agreed that he would finish the stoop in lieu of him returning our money, and now, with the very generous and patient Vern, he agreed again, of course with several changes to the story and us now paying for part of the concrete. Again, this was extremely generous of Vern, IMO, and done in good faith with the desire to just get resolution. We could have just as easily (and perhaps more sensibly) demanded he return the payment, threatened to sue, etc. etc. etc., and we didn't under the apparently false assumption that we should all be able to settle our business civilly. Anyway, he scheduled the work, committed to a date, canceled TWICE and tried to change the agreement (again) about five times. Finally, he scheduled the work and then didn't even bother to call and cancel, he just didn't show and didn't answer or return our calls. What a scumbag.
I've filed a complaint with the state Dept. of Commerce and if that doesn't produce anything, we'll have to decide how much time and effort we want to put into recouping our lost $.
Needless to say, I'm pissed that I gave the guy as much patience and time as I did and that he got ANY of our money, much less got a bunch of it for nothing, because everything about working with him was and is a big, irritating mess, including the quality of the work.

After all that, I had to waste another week soliciting and gathering roofing bids, and I'm now waiting on the second and so far vastly more professional roofing company we decided to hire to begin work. Let's hope for the sake of our sanity that attempt number two goes better.

Doors: We're still waiting on the doors because our supply company forgot to order them. Not a huge deal, since they can't be installed until things are watertight from above anyway. We're getting sick of dragging equipment like the table saw and compressor back and forth, so it will be nice when we can finally lock thigs up.

The never ending painting job: The weather continues to be a problem, with rain for at least a few days of every week. In between storms, we were able to work on painting all of the interior steel.

I've nicknamed that the Hell Suit. Temperatures of 95 degrees and 90% humidity plus respirator, goggles, and hooded Tyvek suit makes for one miserable day (or six days, in my case) of work. Add in holding my arms over my head for six or eight hours straight and being 20 feet up on scaffolding with nothing to hold on to and walking on a little platform while craning my neck upward and you have the task in a nutshell.
Not.
Fun.
Actually, I forgot to mention being next to steel that's below an uninsulated, baking in the sun all day concrete slab. Make that temps of 110.

Since Vern is a notoriously not-good painter, I did 98% of the painting while he played gopher, rolled me around on the scaffolding and did the prep work. Fortunately he was great at that. We owe a huge thanks to one of Vern's relatives for letting us borrow the scaffolding, as we couldn't have done anything without it and rental fees would have added up very quickly. BTW, the painted steel looks great in it's new, neutral gray eggshell.

We thought we'd have our existing house on the market by now, but because of the roof-related delays, we've held back on listing it. I'm not sure exactly when we'll do this yet, but it's probably going to be soon and I'm not looking forward to adding that complication to the mix.

We're planning to start on the exterior finishing next, so I'm now under the gun to make a decision about colors and material placement(which is about the only way I'd be able to do it anyway). I also need to decide if we want to make the effort to paint the exterior window frames now or at a later date. I know I want it done, but I think I can live with them white for a while in exchange for focusing on what needs to get done to get to occupancy.

Windows and A LOT of insulation

2005-06-04T10:59:00.000-07:00

A short but busy week of dawn to dusk work hours for both of us and...suprise...the return of mud!

Tuesday our windows were delivered, and Vern and I were on site bright and early to unload them with the assistance of a very nice Canadian truck driver.

Over last weekend we started trying to set the 12x12 glass blocks by first building and painting 2x6 boxes, adhering the blocks to the boxes with silicone, and then setting and attaching them to the openings. We completed a few and decided we weren't happy with the results so we're on to plan B using laminated plywood.

We also got a start on installing our windows. All of the openings in the ICF need to be roughed out with lumber to provide a nailing surface for the window flanges, and we've spent most of the last four days cutting, gluing, screwing and power nailing toward this cause. As expected, the the upper level living room windows are proving to be quite a challenge. Fortunately, Vern has some pretty extensive rock climbing experience and very long arms, so he did the work up on the extension ladder while I acted as tool jockey and gopher on the shorter ladder. Getting some seriously heavy, 48 x 48 triple pane windows up 15 or 20 feet is going to be interesting, but at least we've gotten the more labor intensive part of the job done. Here's a shot of the front with a few of the smaller windows and glass block in place:

and one of the the big, south facing windows that looks out onto the lower roof deck:

On Friday we received our interior framing lumber and the acres of roof insulation panels. These were delivered in an almost full 18 wheeler trailer that I thought we would never find the front of, and again, it was just Vern and I and a nice driver there to unload. Although the bundles aren't heavy, they're 48" square and very cumbersome so we got our morning workout in while the neighbor kids watched and looked confused.

Since we supplied this insulation rather than our roofer as would be typical, we are responsible for placing it, leading to the dilemma of how to get it all up onto the roof. I think there are around 100 bundles, most with five sheets of 5" thick foam. Fortunately we had a great friend volunteer to help us out today, and a rainy-day adventure that was intended as a plan and organize mission turned out to be an all out effort, and the three of us got all of these bundles onto the roof in about three hours using the straps and a rope. And after a dry week (finally!) the rain turned everything into a mud pit again to make the job even more fun. An after-work dinner at the local drive-in drew quite a few strange looks for our little trio of mud people. This picture was taken after about half the bundles had already made their way up:

Tomorrow we'll get a start on placing the two 5" layers plus the layer of tapered panels that provide the pitch for drainage after we use the shopvac to pump off the few inches of water that's up there with nowhere to go. We hope to make a bunch more progress on the window installation tomorrow with some extra help and equipment, and we're scheduled for roofing and the stoop on Wednesday if the weather cooperates. Hopefully we'll be dried in by the end of the upcoming week and be able to start on interior framing and schedule plumbing and electrical rough-in.

Progress With Some Pain

2005-05-28T10:58:00.000-07:00

So much has happened in the last two weeks that it's hard to know where to begin. We have been working like absolute maniacs the past week, and last night was the first time all week that we've been home and clean before 10pm. The following is my attempt at a brief run down...

Our roof slab was poured following the steel placement. What a circus. The contractor from hell (CFH) proved himself yet again by showing up shorthanded by about four people, ordering a much-too-small pump truck, failing to supervise and coordinate his crackhead crew appropriately and instead wasting time and making a mess by attempting to learn how to finish concrete at my expense, almost killing the only experienced finisher on the job by nearly knocking him off the roof head first with a roll of rebar mesh, taking six hours to complete a two hour job, etc, etc.
Fortunately this was only a roof slab and not my finished floor, but the stress just about put me over the edge. There's just something wrong with me having to act as supervisor and quality control agent for people that claim to know what they're doing, particluarly when this was what the CFH (who, it quickly became apparent, knows absolutey ZERO about placing and finishing concrete) was supposedly getting paid for. It sure makes me thankful I've taken the time to educate myself and learned and paid attention, because I think I was the most knowledgable, experienced person on the job that day and it scares me to think how it would have gone if I hadn't stepped in and been the boss.

I really, really wanted to fire this CFH a while ago, but we were in a situation where he had been paid for work that had not been completed, so I held off until after the roof pour. The last straw started with his sub from hell (SFH) calling off the scheduled Wednesday floor slab pour two days before it was supposed to happen citing both the forecasted rain and that I told him we were cancelling (I didn't, and both excuses are ridiculous, since professionals never call off for rain until that morning). CFH failed to verify this with me, and instead took the sub's word for it, which I didn't find out until Tuesday afternoon when I called CFH to see what time he had scheduled concrete for. CFH, pretened all was well for Wednesday, but an hour later, SFH called me (presumably at CFH's direction) and said “you know, if you're pouring on Wednesday, I'm not going to be there, I have other plans”.

Fortunately, I was able to find another well-organized and competent sub the following day and scheduled the floor pour for Friday (yesterday). CFH was fired within the same hour in a rather comical conversation where he seemed shocked that my patience with his incompetence and complete lack of professionalism was at it's end. He just didn't get that he wasn't going to be doing any more concrete work for me, signed contract or no. Some people are just so frighteningly clueless.
Lesson learned: never violate your instincts and never, ever, hire a contractor who drives a crappy truck. Surprisingly, this seems to be a pretty good indicator of a “pro's” competence.

Our parapet was stacked and poured on Tuesday which marked the official completion of our ICF sub's work. We gave him his final check with thanks for a job well done and sent him home.

We were in a little bit of a daze the rest of the day feeling like parents who have just had their only child move out. It's a little scary,since the rest is now basically up to us.

Vern and I completed the sand prep and laid the vapor barrier, insulation, PEX tubing and rebar reinforcement for the lower level slab. This was a HUGE project that we spent pretty much every waking minute on for over a week, complicated by the fact that our truck broke down on the roof pour day from hell (as previously described) and limited our ability to transport the miles of PEX tubing that we've been storing in our garage and renting equipment and purchasing/moving additional supplies as we needed to.
We had planned on getting the whole project done over last weekend, but being truckless slowed us down so we didn't really wrap things up until mid week. On the good side of the recent concrete circus, the two day delay in pouring the floor gave us time to connect manifolds and pressure test the system, something we were unable to do with the upstairs.

Our “new” concrete sub showed up with a great crew and got the job done yesterday as promised. The only complication was a couple of the rainshowers that have been a Seattle-like daily occurance here this month (we've had only about three rain-free days the entire month). Since our roof is just a concrete slab at this point and not insulated or waterproofed, there are a few areas where water was able to leak in and onto the wet floor concrete...a bad, bad thing for finishing. Fortunately these areas are minor and mostly located where cabinetry or closets will conceal them. So we've conceeded a few areas of non-perfection on the floor but we're immensely relieved to have the slab done and will consider the added character a win given the natural and man-made events of late.

We have a floor and I feel like a huge weight has been lifted. Even though our role in the remaining construction is GIGANTIC, I expect it to be relatively pain free since the tradework will be done, with the exception of the rest of the plumbing rough-in, by my family members and us.

Our roof insulation was supposed to be delivered yesterday and didn't show. I'll expect it on Tuesday at which point roofing can commence. Our windows are also slated for delivery on Tuesday which should be interesting since I'm the only person that I know of that will be available to help unload them. Hopefully the truck driver will be accommodating!

Homeclick has made a bit of progress in righting their wrongs. My missing toilet tank showed up yesterday and the defective and used products have been shipped back with the promise of an exchange. I scored three cool faucets, two for our master bath and one for the guest bath, on Ebay. Since I won't be ready to install them for a while, I'll just have to hope they're going to work well. Despite the PEX tubing being out, our garage is quickly filling up with house parts. We hope to get a start on installing the glass block windows this weekend. So much for a relaxing Memorial Day.

Interior Photos

2005-05-13T10:58:00.000-07:00

May 13th: A few photos I took as the roof decking was being placed.

We're getting a better idea of the scale of the space and it's definitely starting to acquire a personality instead of being just walls and sky. It's very tall in there!
Looking north into the shop and the media room upstairs:

The master bedroom doorway on the left, kitchen/pantry/master bath areas beyond and gym and door out to the lower roof deck above:

The southeast corner windows:

I'm Juggling Five Balls and They're All Muddy

2005-05-12T10:56:00.000-07:00

There are not words to describe how ill-suited todays' weather was for outdoor activity. It was 35 degrees and raining and a miserable day was had by all. Where do I sign up for summer?

Yesterday, my head guy tried to call off for today after seeing the forecast, and I had to play the bad guy and tell him he had to show up and be ready to set steel by 7 am (keeping in mind he lives two hours away). It's not how I would have liked things to have gone for anyone, but I've had a crane scheduled for a week and canceling would have meant a wait of a week or more to be rescheduled and that's time I just don't have to waste. Needless to say, I was not the most loved person on the job today, particularly at hour two when everyone was soaking wet, muddy and freezing cold. It really is more pleasant to work in -20 temps than the cold, wind and rain we had today. To the credit of our crew, they sucked it up, got the crane work completed in time for morning coffee and then called it a day.

They're planning to return tomorrow to finish up with setting the decking and installing and welding the joist bracing and I'm hoping for some decent weather to soothe everyone. I had scheduled the roof slab pour tomorrow (Friday) but we've now had to delay that until Monday since the steel isn't completed. In the mean time, Vern and I have been working to get the foundation slab prep work completed so we can lay vapor barrier, insulation and PEX. Mostly, that means a lot of shoveling, wheeling and raking of sand, and yesterday we gave the wheelbarrow a flat tire which I take as a sign we're working hard.
We're getting close to there, and my hope is we can have our work wrapped up and ready for concrete by Monday.

The potential (and aggravating) wrench in those works is that the plumbers and the water/sewer guy STILL have not completed the under slab rough-in, despite my three requests and the fact that it's been sitting untouched and unfinished for three weeks. Apparently the problem stems from the 2" line into the house having been run slightly too short, their hammer drill being broken, and an apparent lack of communication between the water line guy and the plumbing guys. Or maybe because I can't expect decent service on a $14K bid? I'm going to have to get nasty with them tomorrow, which means everyone except the excavator is now officially on the record of unpleasant conversations. How fun.

And on another front: There's a fair chance I've just entered internet shopping hell. I ordered $2800 worth of fixtures from Homeclick last week, feeling reasonably confident because I've had decent experiences with them in the past. I think I may have pushed my luck. First, I received only one of the pair of matching sinks for our MB. I am told the other is on it's way. OK. The $75 soap dispenser I received has defective chrome, and tomorrow will mark day five of waiting for a call back I was told would be within 24-48 hours. The rest of the order, minus three toilet seats for my Toto Nexus toilets, was shipped by ABF and a stated total of 8 boxes. Only 7 showed up (missing one toilet tank), and I'm on day three of the "will call in 24-48 hours" routine.
Here's the best part. The two kitchen faucets I ordered (to the tune of $1K) BOTH HAVE BEEN USED!!!!!!!! That's right. They've both obviously been installed and removed as evidenced by torn gaskets, silicone scraps and parts attached that are not supposed to be there. They're dirty with kitchen gunk and drywall dust and still had water in the lines. I am shocked and more than a little grossed out. Same story as above when I called. Let me add that I got zero apology for any of these problems, and the person I got with call #3 about the used faucets didn't even sound surprised. I think we can safely say Homeclick is now on my sh*t list. I'm not terribly optimistic that there will be a smooth resolution based on their generally horrendous online reviews, but I'll reserve judgment on that for the moment. Are we having fun yet?

Upper Level Walls Poured

2005-05-04T10:55:00.000-07:00

Road restrictions were officially lifted at 12:01 Wednesday morning, and we managed to stick to our plan and get the upper level walls poured today.

Things went very smoothly even though the pour was complex due to the large number of window openings. The first load of concrete arrived at 9:10 am and our crew of four plus an excellent pump truck operator had the forms filled and the walls vibrated, plumbed and straightened in short order. They were wrapping things
up by lunchtime.

I'm sure that last one isn't an OSHA approved maneuver. This is the shovel method of troweling a difficult to reach windowsill. Talk about creative concrete finishing. And watching one of our guys trying to control the end of the pump hose and aim concrete into a window opening while perched on a 20 foot ladder was pretty scary. Situations like this are where the operator makes all the difference, as an extended boom with concrete in the line weights A LOT and a bad move could be dangerous.

We're scheduled to hang the steel for the roof in a week and then we're only a few days away from being ready to set windows and get dried in. I've ordered the first bunch of fixtures and the glass block and I'm starting to think about the schedule for interior framing, etc. I'm also (still) struggling with our concrete flatwork stuff. The guy I ended up hiring for our flatwork is a GC who I gave the job mostly because he showed up with the most competent sub of the bunch that I met with and convinced me he would be easy to work with. That lasted about long enough for him to get his contract signed and things have been going progressively downhill ever since. After the initial upper level floor pour, his sub quit with hard feelings about not being paid enough. This was beyond my control, since my contract was with the GC and he and the sub negotiated their own deal but it left me frustrated and more than a little concerned.
The GC assured me that he had "five or six other good concrete guys that can do the work" but as it turns out, that appears to be just talk. So far, he has yet to produce anyone aside from one guy that cancelled three meetings with me, two of which were on short enough notice that I had already driven the hour out to the site and was there waiting. (On the fourth try he actually showed up, but was an hour late with zero call, explanation or apology and then couldn't answer any of my questions about his experience with machine finishing and floor slabs.)
The best part of the story is that this sub lives in one of the GC's rental properties and just happens to owe $6K in back rent which he would supposedly be working off by doing my slabwork. He also doesn't have a drivers license...all of this as told to me by GC himself. Some people REALLY are clueless. Needless to say, this is not the kind of sub I'm willing to hand one of the most critical parts of my project off to and I'm shocked, angry and astounded at the unprofessional nature of the whole situation. To make matters worse, this GC failed to manage/do the wrap-up of the work that did get done, wrote a bad check to the concrete company who then sent a collection notice by certified mail to our neighbors (ridiculous, since I offered to handle the concrete purchase from the beginning) and has lied to me and changed his story numerous times.

Sadly, I could go on and on with the tales. So far this nonsense hasn't affected our schedule but starting Friday, he's officially wasting our time and I'm stressing about the whole situation. I'ts just so ironic. Up to now, me acting as our GC has gone really well and been nothing like the horror stories most people tell, and now I find myself tearing my hair out because of one person who IS a GC and who should have, IMO made things easier on me, not harder. UGH.

Victory over Mud and Other Progress

2005-04-25T10:54:00.000-07:00

When I left off, we were waist deep in mud and wondering what the heck we had gotten ourselves into.

Happily, the mud has abated and things have dried up considerably at our site. The slab plumbing rough-in is complete with the exception of the garage floor drains, and stacking of the upper level walls is in progress and planned to be complete by the end of this week in anticipation of road restrictions being lifted on or near May 1st.
We got our interior and exterior drain tile in place (finally!)

and I was able to call the excavator and have him come and backfill, so things are looking a little better and access to the house has greatly improved.

Most of our time at the site lately has been doing clean up and organizing materials and equipment in preparation for the foundation slab pour. The bracing for the upper portion of the walls in the living room will remain until the upper level concrete is placed, so we're working around that for now and planning to complete as much of the prep work for the foundation slab as possible in the coming couple of weeks. Once the bracing is down, we'll be in another mad race to get the under slab vapor barrier, insulation and PEX tubing in place. We're hoping to have the foundation slab poured by the second week of May, and assuming the wall pour happens on schedule, we'll be ready to hang steel for the roof at that point as well.

I'm feeling both excited and nervous that we're nearing a point where things will start happening very quickly, and it's a little overwhelming to think of everything I'll need to be taking care of in the next few months. Which is not even to mention what's ahead in terms getting our current home ready for market and preparing to move. Whew.

I spent a day last week with my builder uncle getting a lesson in window installation. Although he's a stick builder, it was good to get a handle on the basics and hopefully Vern and I will be able to install most or all of the smaller windows on our own. I'm also going to try and get in a framing lesson with him sometime soon so I'll be useful when it comes time to build our interior walls.

I've been struggling with finding a contractor for our interior stairs. It seems like metal fabricators either specialize in ornamental work (which we definitely do not require) and aren't interested in doing something basic, don't do residential, or never get back to me with a bid.

Also on my agenda:
Doing a few test slabs for our poured concrete countertops to get a better idea what's in store there and if I should start sourcing a plan B.
Drawing and planning for the poured concrete Ofuro tub in our master bathroom.
Finalizing the cabinet plan.
Finalizing exterior plan.

Homeowners vs. Mud

2005-04-05T10:53:00.000-07:00

Vern decided to take the day off from work today to take advantage of the nice weather so we were at it again bright and early this morning. I'm happy to report that we've got things cleaned up nicely albeit at the cost of being forever known in our town as the mud people.
Frozen frost blankets a little worse for wear, yes, but our footings are now accessible and ready for gravel and drain tile. Since the cost of gravel is primarily a hauling charge, and we're prevented from hauling anything more than a couple of yards at a time because of road restrictions, we're taking the DIY route and planning to haul it ourselves. It just didn't make sense to pay $130/load for a dumptruck to bring what amounts to only twice as much as I can haul in our truck, so I'll be off to the gravel pit tomorrow. Hopefully this will work out better anyway, since I think we should be able to back the truck up to the edge of the trench on the north side and shovel gravel directly into place instead of shoveling it from pile to wheelbarrow and then wheeling it all the way around the house. At this point I'm all about less shoveling. So the gist is that the mud problem from last week that we thought would prevent us from drain tiling and backfilling for at least a month is no longer a problem and we should have our dirt issues buttoned up in the next few days. Homeowners 1, mud 0. Moral of the story: even the biggest most daunting pile of mud (or project) can be moved a little at a time, you just need to start digging.

Standing Around is a Valuable Skill

2005-03-29T10:51:00.000-08:00

I learned early on that one of the essential skills of a GC is to be able to hang around and talk smart with the subs. There's a lot of good information to be had and it's a great way to learn things you might not even realize you need to know. For me, it's also fun to get some insight into how other people view our "unconventional" project.

As I've mentioned before, we're restricted from hauling concrete and other heavy things during the period of spring load restrictions. This rule, however, is apparently not as hard and fast as I thought. What I learned learned during one of my smart-talking chats with a very nice concrete truck driver on-site is that it's common for cities to issue an exemption permit (for a fee, of course) that allows for load hauling in excess of the restricted tonnage, usually during early morning hours. At this point, anything would be better than nothing, and I've been trying for the last two weeks to obtain such a permit, but unfortunately I'm getting nowhere. The public works 'supervisor' at the city claims he's never issued such a permit, that "we don't do that", and that he's never heard of such a thing. UGH! I'm intensely frustrated, since every time I've had to deal with city officials it's been an exercise in head bashing in one way or another. I intend to keep trying, but I'm not very optimistic since even getting a hold of anyone is a challenge unto itself. It certainly doesn't help that Vern was out at the site today and saw a city dump truck filled to overflowing with gravel (and therefore WAY over the 5 ton per axle restricted weight limit) driving down the very city street that they will not give us a permit to use. Oh, the cruel, cruel irony of $10K+ in permit fees.

Another of our current delimmas is a mud thing. We had to wait until our front stoop footing was poured before we could backfill, and in the mean time the exposed footings were covered with insulating blankets to keep the frost out. We were also waiting to place drain tile and gravel along these foundation walls, and now that we're ready to do that, we've discovered that the banks of the excavated area have collapsed in to the point that the frost blankets are covered with a foot or two of mud in some areas. We made an attempt to extract the blankets and expose the footings with hand shoveling over the weekend to no avail. We got about as dirty as we've ever been, but made no headway with the mud or blanket extraction much less placing drain tile. I feel completely defeated since we can't get a big enough backhoe in to dig it out because of...you guessed it....road restrictions...so we either hope it dries up enough to hand dig or wait at least five more weeks.

It's A Floor!

2005-03-22T10:50:00.000-08:00

We were in a race against time and the road restriction schedule to get our upper level floor placed, the radiant heat tubing installed and forms set to have the concrete placed and finished, and I'm happy to report we made it, and with barely a day to spare, as road restrictions will begin at midnight tonight. Whew!

Since the time this project was conceived, there was no question in my mind that I wanted to have concrete as the finish flooring throughout the house. It seemed like a simple, inexpensive wish, given the fact that there are acres and acres of poured concrete floor in commercial buildings, but finding a contractor that was willing and capable of this proved to be surprisingly difficult. The decorative concrete contractors weren't interested because I didn't want color, stamping or polishing, and the commercial guys wouldn't give a residential project consideration. I wanted a floor like those in any big box building; just a perfectly smooth, shiny, bare gray concrete slab in its natural state, and I had several contractors try and convince me that to get that I had to pay them $10 a square foot for grinding and polishing. NOT! And that was after patiently explaining to them that I wasn't interested in a multi-colored, intricately saw cut pattern. After a lot of phone calls, I finally found someone that got their head around what I was going for, and was happy to provide me with a simple, machine finished floor, and the finished product looks great. It's being heated from below and blanketed on top for a few days but as soon as it's had a chance to cure, I'm going to go up there and just sit and revel in it and hope that all of our PEX tubing survived the pour without getting kinked or punctured. Here's a look:

Unfortunately we're now prevented from hauling concrete for the next six weeks. My goal for that time is to push to make sure the upper level walls are stacked and ready to pour the minute we can get concrete again. I'm also planning on finalizing the plan for exterior materials and scheduling anything I can for inside in preparation for pouring the grade slab. Today I'm enjoying the day off and reveling in the fact that I can have dinner tonight in something other than my muddy work boots and ratty jeans.

We've Been Busy

2005-03-18T10:49:00.000-08:00

If I never see another roll of rebar mesh, spring sucks, and other rants.

Our project has been a full time job for both of us lately so I've had very little time to think much less blog. This week has been our busiest to date in terms of actual physical labor, not to mention the hours of phone time that is the norm.

We spent 13 hours on-site yesterday installing everything that will be contained within our upper level floor slab. We laid all of the PEX tubing for our radiant heating system and we were pleased that this ended up being easy and extremely DIY friendly. We finished in about two and a half hours. What made the day hell was that this tubing is sandwiched between two layers of 6x6 rebar mesh to reinforce the slab and keep the tubing in place within it. Cutting, hauling, placing and securing this mesh was the backbreaker and took from dawn to dark. If I never see another roll of that stuff as long as I live it will be too soon. We like to think of ourselves as in shape in that we workout on a daily basis, but I feel like I got hit by a truck this morning. We were scrambling to beat our own deadline to get the floor poured (today), so yesterdays sprint was unavoidable since the joists for this floor weren't even in place until Wednesday. We feel victorious in that we got our part done on time, but in typical Minnesota construction schedule style, we've been halted by a spring snowstorm. This floor slab will be our interior finish floor and needs to be machine-floated for a perfect finish. Because it's still open to the elements, we need dry skies to achieve this, and we're now on hold until Monday.

There's another hang up for our progress, as well... Rougly estimated, our house will contain between 250 and 300 yards of concrete (that's a lot) and we still have about 100 yards to pour. A concrete truck holds about 9 yards when full, and we've required as many as six full trucks on a single day. The arrival of spring in Minnesota also means the arrival of road restrictions, more specifically a maximum weight limit imposed on all roads to prevent them being destroyed during the time the ground frost is migrating out. Under these restrictions, we're prevented from hauling concrete, since an empty truck exceeds the limit of our city's roads. We anticipate these road restrictions will be imposed starting any minute, so we're scrambling to get our upper level floor in place before that happens to allow our ICF guy to proceed with stacking the upper level during the six weeks of restriction. We've also been dealing with extending the term of our construction loan since our one year term is up at the end of this month. Oh, and did I mention our site is one giagantic boot-sucking mud pit and half our materials are frozen to the ground in a puddle? This home building thing is sheer joy :) Some action shots: This is the first section of steel that was hung. It's the roof over the master bedroom which will be our lower roof deck. The concrete needed to be poured over this section before we could hang the steel for the upper level floors.
The beam that supports the master bedroom joists on one side and the upper level floor joists on the other. We had to close off and heat this room from below to allow the slab above to cure.
pouring and finishing the lower roof deck slab

A view from the entry hall looking south. The upright beam will support two huge roof beams that support the roof joists.

The PEX tubing in place, ready for a second layer of rebar mesh. The very expensive front stoop footing is visible in the foreground along with the north wall waiting to be backfilled.

Start of Lower Level

2005-02-27T10:48:00.000-08:00

We felt a hurdle had been overcome when we finally moved out of the dirt and into the air and our lower level walls started to be stacked into place.

After our newly poured frost walls cured for a few days, we had the excavator return to backfill and dump sand inside the building footprint.

Having our foundation complete felt like an accomplishment and like being back to square one all at the same time. Fortunately, stacking the lower level walls began almost immediately. This process is almost exactly like that of the frost walls except that the forms must be cut and placed in accordance with the location of the window openings. In our case, our print actually details the placement and size of every ICF block for the entire house which is supposed to make things easier for the contractor. In reality, good sounding ideas don't always work as well in application as they do in theory, and this schematic was out the window almost immediately for our house. I can see, however, the potential benefit here for an inexperienced contractor or crew, or for non-custom houses built from a stock set of plans where the schematic can be refined with experience. One of the more time consuming aspects of building with ICF is that the size, shape and location of every window opening must be established and accounted for during forming, and each of these openings needs to be constructed so as to prevent wet concrete from pushing it's way in and collapsing on itself during pouring. Needless to say, there's very little margin for error when you're talking about thousands of pounds of wet concrete. Window "placeholders" are built using bucks of various materials that are the same width as the wall, in our case 12", and that remain in place after the concrete has cured. Often this material is pressure treated lumber which has to be screwed together before it can be placed. A newer development, and method we're using is an extruded vinyl product called V Buck that's held together at the corners with plastic connectors so it only has to be cut to length and snapped together. Not only is this faster, it's also considered better by most pros because it will never degrade like wood. A couple of the bucks are in place in what will be the southeast corner of the living room in the photo below.

Every few courses of ICF, a frame-like wire ladder is laid down inside the form to provide more lateral stability, and rebar is added both horizontally and vertically according to the manufacturer's specs. In the case of the Logix product we're using, this rebar snaps into the plastic ties that join the two faces of EPS.

One of the small but annoying problems with stacking ICF in winter is snow and ice. Each form has a Lego-like set of buttons on the horizontal edges that needs to be kept free of debris in order to fit to the neighboring course. These buttons interlock very tightly to ensure the formed wall will be structurally sound enough to contain the pressure and force of the wet concrete without "blowing out" during pouring. And any little bit of ice or crud prevents these buttons from locking together, so to avoid headaches, our crew typically covers the exposed buttons on the top course of block with plastic sheeting strips anytime snow is expected or they aren't going to be around for a few days. The vertical edges of each block also have interlocking channels that slot into one another making the stacked wall amazingly strong, and in the case of our 8" forms, strong enough to safely walk atop. A little disconcerting the first time I saw someone up on a Styrofoam box.

This was also the day that a semi-truckload of forms, about half our house's worth, and other materials showed up from Canada. (It seems like 95% of what we're using is made in Canada.) One of the thing I hadn't considered in my pre-GC life was that stuff doesn't just magically jump off the truck that brings it and that it's my responsibility to have arrangements in place to greet and unload materials and to store them, to baby sit lost truck drivers, and to coach them on getting into and out of our site. Glamorous, eh?

There's really not too much more to the actual wall stacking than that, and it moves along pretty quickly particularly in areas where there's not a lot of openings.

Financing Our Design

2005-02-17T10:46:00.000-08:00

More comments on design and construction financing

Our lot is a walkout and our home design places half the total square footage at grade level meaning half the house is a basement. While this is not at all unusual in our area, it had been our desire from the beginning to build basement-free, i.e. slab on grade, and the idea of a walkout lot presented us with some points of compromise on design.

I've said before that I felt strongly that the kitchen and living room having continuity with the outdoors. I like to be able to blur the line between inside and outside as much as Minnesota's climate allows and this means having immediate access to yard and garden. The most sensible way to to accommodate this and still preserve the view and southern exposure on the walkout lot we bought was to place the kitchen and living room at grade level, or technically, in the basement. Normally I would consider this undesirable but in the case of the lot we bought, the topography allowed this “basement” to be full floor to ceiling daylight on three full sides which helped us retain the essential elements of our design without actually building slab-on-grade. We could happily place kitchen, bedroom and living room at grade level without feeling like we're spending our time living in a basement. It seemed like a logical and obvious decision, but in reality it raised several issues that were unaware existed and had the potential to change the character of our project.

Our design process was happening concurrently with our research of financing options and investigating the construction loan process. During these forays, several “professionals” and construction loan salespeople informed us that we'd never be able to finance a home with the design I had outlined for a number of reasons. As it turns out, this is apparently just another example of peoples' inclination to fixate on the negative and we're fortunate that we didn't automatically accept this as fact because that would have put an end to our project or forced us to settle on an alternate design.

The first and biggest “problem” that was brought to our attention was with the appraisal value of our proposed home. Part of the construction loan approval process is having your plans appraised to verify for the bank that you are planning to build what will become for them a reasonably sound investment. As I said, half our square footage is considered basement and in our case this “basement” contains the core functional elements of a home...the kitchen, living room and master bed and bath. From an appraisal standpoint, anything below grade is not factored in when calculating value for loan purposes, even if the intent and plan is to fully finish the space. What this boils down to is that in the eyes of an appraiser, our cost per square foot equals twice what we're actually spending, since he's only interested in the square footage of the upper level. To him, we're building a three bedroom, one bathroom house because only the rooms on the upper level count. The concession here was that we designed all these “bedrooms” to meet code for egress so that they could be called bedrooms even though this is not our intended use of the space. It could also be said that we're building a house without a kitchen, and this is where things got a little more complicated and worrisome.

We had settled on a construction loan provider despite having been offhandedly told by several people that we wouldn't get financing. In an effort to continue to move the process forward, we figured what the heck, lets just see where we get with the design that reflects exactly what we want which put the walkout level as main living space. Recall that at this point we didn't actually have a set of plans, but just a working print of a floor plan and elevation I had sketched and given to a drafter draw up in D size. Because we had nothing invested in this design other than my time, we figured there was little risk in attempting to get financing approval with what we had. The worst that could happen is that our design wouldn't get the OK and we'd have to be disappointed and start over.
Incidentally, the real estate agent who was representing us in the land purchase also tried to tell us we wouldn't get construction financing without a full set of buildable plans even though she had absolutely no experience with this. This is the same agent who tried to tell us we'd never find land to do with what we pleased that that we'd never get past local zoning restrictions with an unusual--her word-- design. Did I mention I dislike real estate agents?
So it was on to getting our plans appraised, and as has been the case before, stubbornness was my asset. I asked the bank for a referral to some of the appraisers they work with regularly because I figured a familiarity between the parties involved might help. I called one of the appraisers already known to our bank and explained our design to him. He informed me that putting a kitchen on the lower level of a home wasn't entirely unheard of in the area we're building in, apparently because of the high number of lakeshore properties, and that it shouldn't be a problem. Honestly I don't know if this is accurate or just his convenient reasoning, but I guess it doesn't matter. What any appraiser is working off of is “comparables”, or properties in the area that are similar enough so as to provide a baseline value figure with which he can estimate the potential value of our project. In addition to the proposed design of the home, they're also interested in what type of windows, appliances, finishes and mechanical equipment are planned, and what this all seems to boil down to is whether or not the amount of money one is asking to borrow is at least vaguely in line with the implied value of the completed home. I infer that it is unlikely that that any reasonable plan appraisal would ever be called into question in new construction and that as long as something gets built with the banks' money, that's roughly what was planned and not cardboard and tin, you're good, but I guess this remains to be seen since a final appraisal will be required after completing construction.
In the end, after receiving a lot of mostly negative input and spending a lot of energy worrying, we got our appraisal and plan approval without incident or question. This was one of the many times I've felt like calling everyone that had told us it wouldn't happen and gloating and shaking papers in their face, but again, the moral of the story is investigate everything for yourself regardless of who tells you what and don't ever take a single “no” for an answer.

December 8th, frost walls

2005-02-09T21:26:00.000-08:00

After some tenuous moments during the process of digging our foundation, the footings were quickly formed and poured and made ready to start doing their job. The next step was stacking and pouring the frost walls.
(originally posted to LiveModern 2-9-2005)

Minnesota requires a frost wall depth of 48” which means that exterior walls must extend below grade at to at least this depth (or be buried in at least this much dirt). Our footing is stepped up at the northeast corner of the house because the upper grade level will cover the north and the northernmost part of the east wall to a depth in excess of 48”.

The location of the frostwalls, actually just a below-grade extension of the walls of the house, is laid out using string lines and a laser sight and snapped as chalk lines on the top of the footings. Next the frost wall formed, in our case using the same ICF blocks that will be used form all of the exterior walls. They're stacked like giant Legos, interlocking very tightly at the vertical and horizontal joints, and with ties inside that join the inner and outer faces of foam to provide a fastening point for finish materials and snap-in channels for the required horizontal rebar.

The first course of block is glued down to the footing using foam adhesive to ensure the walls are properly located and once the blocks are stacked to the appropriate height, the rebar verticals are inserted and the walls are straightened by shimming and bracing them against the sides of the trenches.

Since the lower level foundation slab will function as finish floor in our main living space, rebar was placed and embedded in concrete at the top of the frost wall and will later be bent out to extend into the slab and tie the floor to the walls.

We're waiting until near the end of construction to pour the foundation slab, primarily because the finish quality of any concrete flatwork is significantly affected by weather and temperature and we want ours as perfect as we can get it. Pouring during cold weather would have necessitated that, at a minimum, we heat the ground under the slab prior to pouring and that we cover and insulate the slab while it cured, both of which would have been costly and difficult and would not have guaranteed perfect results anyway. Additionally, there's a lot of plumbing and mechanical piping below the foundation slab that requires moderate temperatures to be installed and according to the plumber, the entire structure would have needed to be enclosed and heated. This would have been nearly impossible and again, costly. There was no structural need to pour the foundation slab before proceeding with the walls and upper level so we were able to delay it until spring without holding up construction.

The actual pour of the frost walls was fast and uneventful and it was neat to have a sense of the footprint of the house for the first time. We let the walls cure for a few days and then had the excavator return to backfill the trenches and dump and spread the sand required beneath the foundation slab. While it felt like a big step to have a completed foundation, the bummer of it is that once everything is backfilled it looks like you've accomplished nothing and you're looking at a bunch of really expensive buried stuff.

December 3rd, Footings

2005-01-28T13:58:00.000-08:00

By the end of November we were ready to roll. Our permits had miraculously been issued after a few minor hangups and I raced to coordinate our team to get the ball rolling for real. What a thrill!
(Originally posted to LiveModern 1/28/2005)

In a previous post I talked a little about excavation and there's more to that story that I think is worth telling so I'll start there.

During excavation, first the the lower floor level grade is established and then the footing trenches are dug down from that to below the frost line. In our case, the backhoe took two scoops to get down to footing depth, saw the soil conditions and immediately stopped digging. Here's where I stopped breathing.

One of the things I had been emphatically advised to do by my GC uncle was to get soil borings done while the land was in escrow, to be certain we were purchasing land that was buildable. Borings and a soil report were bid in the neighborhood of $2-3k based on my phone calls to geotechnical/soil engineers which would be unrecoverable funds should the land sale fall through. Since the surrounding land is developed and this lot had never been bought or sold previously, I reasoned that the chances of the soil being unbuildable were slim, and decided against getting borings done prior to closing. THIS WAS A HUGE RISK, and I don't think I'd take it again. Discovering non-bearing soil conditions would have meant either falling out of escrow, tens of thousands of dollars worth of correction (i.e. digging out non-bearing soil, hauling away and replacing), or being stuck with land that you can't do anything with. (I've been told that non-buildable lots are actually bought and sold all the time by people who don't bother to investigate the soil conditions prior to purchase [ha!imagine that], discover poor soil after the fact and then re-sell the land to the next unwitting buyer.) For sane people, it would presumably be ideal to know you can't build on your $100k worth of land BEFORE you've got several thousands of dollars invested in design, plans, permits, digging, etc, and your whole team sitting on site at the ready. Maybe I'm a little more sane now...

As our story ends, my excavator happens to keep a soil engineer on call. After the two fateful shovelfuls by the backhoe, I held my breath and tried not to have a nervous breakdown while we all waited ($$ flying away as equipment and labor sits around) for the engineer to arrive and take soil samples. Two hours later, he announced that there was good bearing soil slightly deeper than our desired footing depth around the entire building pad, which meant we could proceed and just needed to dig a deeper footing. WHEW. So for the extremely agreeable price of $600 for a site visit and soil report by the engineer, and the few hundred dollars worth of materials for a taller frost wall, we dodged what would have been a very expensive, miserable bullet. Note to self: could have avoided this all by getting soil borings in the first place like uncle said. On the other hand, it turned out OK and we're building our house on a beautiful lot that we might have otherwise been afraid of buying if we had had soil borings done in advance.

Here's a few pictures of our footings getting set up and poured. For those of you from warmer climates, those big black and white floppy things in the trenches and piled around are frost blankets that are used to insulate the ground until the foundation is in and backfilled. One of the many complications of winter construction in MN.

Access issues meant the first of what has so far been a few visits by the pump truck which is the big boom/hose thing you see (the expense of a pump truck is one of the necessities of ICF construction as well). Basically a giant arm that supports a hose unfolds and extends from a huge truck designed specifically for pumping concrete wherever it needs to go. Concrete flow and the movement of the boom is operated by remote control just like a real life video game while a guy in the trench or on the wall holds the outlet end. Pretty neato and also very expensive. I've said several times that the greatest shopping trip I could imagine still wouldn't equal the speed with which money is spent when the pump truck is on site. You can practically watch dollars come out of the end of that hose.

Our ICF guy, Jeff Schultz of Concrete Building Supply formed and poured our footings using a cool product called FastFoot It's basically just a big three sided plastic bag that comes on a roll that's stapled over a ledger board to form the footing, replacing the much more labor intensive means of building footing forms out of wood. Once the stakes and ledger are in place, it's just simply unrolled into the footing cavity and you're ready for rebar and concrete, plus it's waterproof so it prevents the footing from wicking ground water up from underneath. It's one of the many products that's a huge improvement on mainstream methods but has yet to become mainstream.

Perfect Timing

2005-01-20T07:55:00.000-08:00

Does anyone else ever get those moments of panic where you're sure you're making a huge mistake? When doubt takes over and you wonder if you should just go buy a tract home like the rest of the world? I've always been a believer that when the time is right things will fall into place and that things happen for a reason. So far our project seems to be adhering to that belief...this is one of those stories.

There was a point last summer between the time we had closed on our land and before we started construction when I was having a period of major doubt and uncertainty about our entire project. It had started to seem more like just some crazy idea we took a few steps too far instead of something that we could actually make happen. Wrapping up our design details was taking longer than I had anticipated putting us behind schedule on our construction loan timetable and costing us a hefty interest payment every month, and we had decided to go ahead with the purchase of our lot (which used up around ¼ to of our overall budget) instead of accepting the gift of a recently inherited city lot being offered to us by Vern's parents. In terms of the actual logistics of getting the house built, there were just so many more questions than answers that I felt lost, confused and a little scared. I had been struggling to find a qualified ICF contractor, and my search for other subs was becoming frustrating as well. No one seemed to understand what we were trying to accomplish and why much less display the level of experience and professionalism that I was looking for. Then we came face to face with a reminder of what we were doing.

We were out riding our motorcycles on a scenic route we've traveled more times than we'd remember, cruising along the bluffs near the St. Croix river and enjoying the sights on a beautiful summer day. It's an area of mostly old Victorian homes and cottages, some renovated and some in increasing states of disrepair, a touristy, small downtown that plays up the historic river city genre to the max with antique stores and railroad memorabilia and turn of the century brick storefronts lining the main street. It's a place that's about as far from modernist as you'd think you could get. We were caught up in weekend sightseeing traffic coming into the business district and for whatever reason I looked up from the cars and road in front of me at exactly the right moment and spied this:

I was completely shocked. It was like this house had appeared out of no where at that exact second. I had been this way numerous times and never caught even a glimpse of anything like it before. I gave Vern the “lets turn around signal” and went back. He pulled over thinking I was crazy until I directed him to look above us up a steep street. We really couldn't believe our eyes. Here was a blatantly modern house smack dab in the middle of a place we had been hundreds of times and the last place we'd ever expect to see such a thing. It was like it had been built overnight.

We drove up the hill and stopped in the street out front to get a closer look and noticed that it was being worked on. My exuberance and surprise got me off my bike immediately and right up to have a chat with whomever I could find that was willing to indulge me.
As it turned out, the owners were working to wrap up what they said was “a total rebuild”. Apparently they had contracted to have the home built new five or six years ago and as it was put “nothing was done correctly and the whole house was practically falling down”. Our conversation went on to become a tale bad contractors, shoddy construction, lawsuits and “paying to build the house twice”. You wouldn't think this would be a reassuring or confidence inspiring chat given all my doubts at that time, but it was like a magic pill. I just couldn't get over the fact that out of nowhere and when we least expected it we had come across others who shared our vision and were willing to put their effort into into making it a reality.

This event may have been a simple coincidence and maybe I'm crazy, but it worked wonders on my psyche despite the horror story. Seeing a physical example of something in the realm of what we had been dreaming of for ourselves was exactly what I needed to buoy my confidence and reaffirm my knowledge that there are others besides us in this place that believe in something different and better when it comes to a home.

Side note: The owner told me he designed the home (I'm not sure if he is an architect or what) as a literal interpretation of a Mondrian painting which was a weird coincidence because I had just mentioned Mondrian to our architect the week before and this had been in my head as a jumping off point for designing our homes' exterior since the beginning. Apparently the major issue that forced the rebuild was mold and water due to improperly installed windows and a stucco exterior over traditional wood framing. Incidentally, this has been a huge issue with newer homes here for the past four or five years and has forced more than a few big dollar builders into litigation or out of business.

I took the picture with my phone's camera so it doesn't really show a lot of the architectural details that made it cool. The big blue wall on the upper part is curved and walks out onto a deck. There's a second story breezeway/sleeping porch between the two major volumes of the house and the shed roof barely visible on the back was a deep, inviting patio. Too bad they didn't invite us in to get a better look :)

Thoughts on being an owner-builder

2005-01-18T20:12:00.000-08:00

(Originally posted to LiveModern 1-18-2005)
I got up yesterday morning at 6a.m. to make the one hour drive to our lot to supervise the unloading of our steel floor and roof trusses, beams, and decking. The temperature was -18 and rose to a balmy -6 by afternoon. Standing around outside freezing my butt off prompted me to think about the pros and cons of self -general contracting one's own home.

First I have to admit that I am a control freak, so the decision that I was going to act as our General Contractor was almost a given. I also have the thirst for knowledge, and it would have killed me to know that I could have learned something and missed out by not being as involved as I could have been with our project. Now that we are nearing the halfway point in actual construction, I have some definite opinions and a better picture of whats involved with being an owner-builder that I hope others may find useful.

Skills: I'll begin with what I feel are a few indispensible skills for the self-GC. First, the ability to communicate effectively with people from a variety of different backgrounds is key. You'll talk to thousands of people while getting bids and during actual construction, and being comfortable and clear in communication is essential to getting what you want and getting things done right. On that same note, it's absolutely critical that you know as much as possible about everything that's going on and into the home at every stage. When you don't know something, you need to have the desire to find the answer or know who to go to that can give it. I think it helps a lot to be interested and curious. Third, you have to be able to go with the flow and not get freaked when things change or are vague. When we started this thing, there were way more questions than answers about the project itself and the actual process. As we progressed those questions got answered, but it was a huge effort and often very stressful to work around the gaps and not get too lost in the details. Likewise, trying to structure everything down to the last dollar and detail in advance probably has some advantages and might work well for some people, but I think it's just setting up for added stress in the long run. Fortunately this is not my style anyway, but I feel like the more flexible I can be, the better. Almost nothing has gone exactly as planned or cost exactly what we anticipated, and stressing out about it changes nothing. My motto is “accept and move on” and I'm getting better at it every day.

Time: I believe time is the biggest obstacle most people face with the decision to self-CG. It's a major commitment both before and during construction. I'm fortunate in that I can devote as much time is necessary to our project and have the ability to be flexible in terms of making last minute scheduling changes, getting on site on short notice and being there on an all-day, everyday basis. I consider it my full-time job and my first priority. Were it not for this, the process would be much more stressful and much less convenient. Having subs you trust makes a huge difference in this regard. We're fortunate that our biggest and most involved sub, our ICF contractor, is trustworthy, dependable and extremely hard working whether I'm on site or not. On that same note, it's a huge help to have subs that will work with you in addition to working for you. Even though you're the one writing their checks, I've found that a sub that understands and can be accommodating to your non-expert status and is willing to cooperate with all aspects of the project is worth a great deal more than the cheapest sub or one that just shows up, does his job and leaves. I look for people who seem interested and excited about what I'm doing and are willing to act as a partner in the project. Having to constantly babysit subs would make it a whole different project and experience. If we begin to see that side of things as we move forward I know I can make the time to deal with it but if that were not the case, I'd probably have chosen to hire a GC instead.

Costs: I've come to believe that much of the cost that one would save by choosing to act as their own GC is spent in other ways yet this is not necessarily a negative. A good, experienced GC has a pools of subs for any task from flatwork to finish carpentry, whereas I make ten or twelve calls or more just to find a sub that's interested in my job and seems competent enough to get the bid. A GC is likely to already know the sub and the quality of their work, while I have to investigate, check references or be blindly faithful that the end product will be of acceptable quality.

The professional GC is likely to get a better price and to have a higher degree of subcontractor loyalty because they're a volume employer. He or she builds homes on an ongoing basis and those subs want to be hired again and know they're likely to get repeat business which sustains their profitability. I on the other hand, am likely a one time only job.

A professional GC is in it to get paid, which from my perspective has the potential to force decisions prioritized as easiest and biggest profit=best choice rather than best solution for the situation=best choice. I'm a control freak, remember? I like to have as much information as possible and feel comfortable making decisions based on knowledge I've sought. If I was relying on a GC to provide that information I think there's a greater chance I may not hear the whole story. My experience with the construction industry thus far has revealed a huge knowledge gap when it comes to current products and methods. The technology exists but very few “professionals” are paying attention. I've learned to investigate (or exhaustively research) everything myself because 99% of the time, a contractors' “best” is really just whatever product they've got a vested interest in, are most familiar with or whatever makes them the biggest profit with the least effort. When it comes right down to it, construction tradespeople are mostly in the business of time equals money which is not always the same as the business of building the best house.

Overall Pros:

Control over who you pay and who does what

Complete control over materials and methods

Steep learning curve

You set the schedule

Immensely rewarding...I've put the plan into action, coordinated the team and gotten the house built. I'm seeing it grow from start to finish and had a hand in nearly every decision that's been made along the way (I guess this could turn out to be a negative as well).

Overall Cons:

Big time commitment: Countless hours on the phone and Internet sourcing subcontractors, materials and methods.

Steep learning curve

You set the schedule

The “it's better not to know” factor. Being one's own GC puts the many small and sometimes costly details front and center. If something goes wrong it's your fault, you'll know about it and you'll pay for it, with time, money, headaches or all of the above. A pro would presumably insulate you from this for better or worse.

Even more time: I've spent a lot of time educating and hand holding potential subs on what we're doing and how. This can be frustrating since they're the ones that are supposed to be the experts, but it also goes hand in hand with our deviating from the status quo and gives me a good idea of a subs' flexibility and cooperativeness.

I believe that if the time is there or can be found, anyone can be their own GC. At this point I'm still happy with the choice but it does require tenacity, resourcefulness and the willingness to ask a lot of potentially stupid questions without fear. I'd love to hear others' experiences and opinions on the subject.

The ICF Decision

2005-01-11T20:56:00.000-08:00

The rationale for and thoughts behind our decision to build with Insulated Concrete Form.
Orignially posted to LiveModern 1/11/2005

Having a basement in our part of the country is the norm, but no matter how much is done to improve the livability of the space and make it comfortable and welcoming, there's still always something basement-y about it that hinders the desire to spend time there. With our no-wasted- space tendencies, we started thinking about the possibility of building a slab on grade home very early on, a fact that directed our process and clearly defined our destination as ICF before we really even knew it.

Because my vision for our home was a somewhat industrial looking finished product and we knew we wanted to try to economize, I started to explore commercial construction practices with the thinking that this must be a more economical means of getting a basic structure. As it turns out, the commercial standard of building with concrete block doesn't make sense for residential OR commercial construction (that it persists is crazy, IMO. I attribute it to the power of the labor unions here.), so that option was quickly eliminated. Then I ran across Insulated Concrete Form, a product I was aware of but really knew very little about at that time. Like most deviations from the status quo (ie. stick building), I at first figured ICF was just another anomalous new product, here today and getting sued tomorrow, yet hearing my carpenter uncle lament about how the quality of wood building products has sharply declined while increasing in price certainly helped me to start believing in and looking for alternatives to stick construction. The more I read the more I started to believe that ICF might be a good fit for our needs. In my mind, the most important selling points were a high level of energy efficiency and weather resistance for our demanding climate and strength and feasibility for slab on grade in MN. It just made sense to me that if the means existed to build a stronger more weather resistant structure with a much higher degree of energy efficiency for nearly the same cost, why not do it? Humans started building things out of wood centuries ago because it was readily available and nearby, which is no longer the case, so isn't it time we start embracing the more sensible alternatives that technology has afforded us? A decent rant, right? Yet the decision to take the ICF leap was a little scary especially since most of the people we talked to about it, including my relatives who have been building homes their entire lives, had never even heard of it, and we weren't exactly planning a $50K cabin in the woods.

ICF presented many attractive features and made sense but I did expend significant time and energy on research before I was comfortable saying I thought ICF was a good idea. It was definitely helpful that we are both questioners of the status quo. The idea of not doing things a certain way simply because that's the way they've always been done comes naturally to us (this can probably be said of most modern enthusiasts). In our case, outside the box happened to mean choosing ICF, just as others have chosen modular, SIP's, rammed earth, straw bale or whatever. That we could have had our home built with wood for the cost of the materials only and my gracious uncle's free labor, yet chose to use ICF is a good indication of how strongly we felt it was the right choice.

I'm going to end with my floorplan sketches.

This is basically what we started with. I'm fortunate to have a relative who is a draftsmen who converted this floorplan into a very basic set of D size prints that we used for the plan appraisal required to get our financing. Our land purchase and financing all happened prior to our having found an architect so our final plans did change and I'm definitely NOT recommending doing things in this order because it was all a bit dicey. Fortnuately the plan appraisal process for new construction seems to be a "how much does it need to be valued at" kind of game. These sketches reflect my adaptation of a previous plan for slab on grade to the walkout lot we bought. Because of our dislike for basement space, I had originally planned to leave the half of the lower level unexcavated, put the garage on the upper level, and have a third floor for studio space. Once I met with an excavator on site, it became apparent that the result (and eventual demise) of this idea was that we would have had to pay to truck in several hundred yards of fill for a box full of dirt within the walls of those unexcavates spaces. In the end, we exchanged the unxcavated space for garage and shop on the lower level, put my studio on the upper level and deleted the third floor entirely.

2005-01-09T09:07:00.000-08:00

Excavation photos and comments on beginning the construction process
(originally posted to LiveModern 1/9/2005)
I thought I'd start adding some photos and stuff about the actual activities of building now that were in the thick of it. These are pictures I took on the day we broke ground, November 30, 2004. Exciting and unreal at the same time. Up to this point, I was still hearing a little voice in my head on an almost daily basis telling me that it wouldn't happen.

Starting construction November 30th was about six months later than we anticipated, but we feel fortunate to be cruising right along now thanks to the milder than normal winter this year. The biggest downfall to getting started late aside from being at the mercy of the winter weather was that we were required to make interest payments on the land portion of our construction loan beginning 60 days after closing which amounted to several hundred dollars, essentially wasted, every month. Not an ideal way to start out. Because we were expecting it to take a long time to find land yet we found what we wanted in a matter of weeks, we had barely begun researching the details of the various financing options and had to make a quick decision so as not to lose the lot. In hindsight, we would have been much better off getting a land loan but at the time, we (naively) thought we'd have our plan details wrapped up and be ready to start in short order.

Until the point that the guys show up with the equipment and actually start moving dirt around, it's really hard to visualize what the topography of the lot will be like with the house on it, especially when the lot is sloped and there's a basement involved. As far as the actual excavation goes, the top soil is scraped off first and grade is established a few inches lower than finished slab height using a story pole and survey laser. Next the footing trenches are dug, to within an inch of what is required for bottom of footing...I found the whole process really interesting... In our case, this amounted to about $7K worth of digging, not including what we'll pay for the remainder of the backfilling against the north wall and the finish grading in the spring.

Design Notes

2005-01-04T14:29:00.000-08:00

Designing a home seems like a daunting task and I knew I wanted to hire an architect eventually, but prior to that we put a lot of time into thinking about what we wanted our home to be and getting our ideas down on paper.
(originally posted to LiveModern 1/4/2005)

This project was born out of our desire to have a home that functions the way we want it to instead of adapting our lives to work with the house. Living in the Beaver Cleaver world of dining rooms and formal living rooms and the gym-meets-family room concept just aren't us. We're too practical (and hopefully sensible) for that. If we're going to spend the money to get it, every inch had better be useable and used on a regular basis and it had better support all our activities of living with ease.

I've always been a collector of ideas, and I knew I had a really good handle on what we were looking for in a home. I've built it in my head a thousand times. Keeping a general idea in mind of the size of home we though we needed and could afford, I sat down and finally put all my ideas on paper. It was a scary step because I felt this was our first move based on the belief that we could actually DO this. My thinking out loud on paper went through several incarnations as Vern and I discussed what we thought we wanted and I started to get a better grasp of how different combinations of spaces added up to a total square foot number. I was also working off the premise that simpler equals more affordable. I wasn't interested in complicated angles, circular dining rooms or lots of little nooks and crannies and this wasn't what I envisioned for the house anyway. I started designing simply in terms of a square box with a general idea of the square foot requrements I though were appropriate for the major rooms.

Some of the basic elements we considered essential to our design:

*A bigger kitchen with maximum functionality...a chef's kitchen. Truthfully, the entire house design started with what I determined to be my ideal layout and size for a kitchen, how I wanted it to relate to the other spaces and what I wanted to see when I stood in the room and looked out. I wanted continuity with the living and public areas and support for things like social cooking, teaching, and large-scale food prep. I love to cook, promote and share cooking. We love to entertain and do so frequently and I'm at my limit of tolerance for our currently trial-size tract house kitchen. Another requirement was that the kitchen have convenient access to the outdoors, preferrably at ground level since we spend a lot of time doing food outdoors in the summer and I love to gather from the garden to make a meal. (I also have plans for a someday outdoor kitchen, but it's just not all that practical in Minnesota.)

*Similar to the above, I wanted there to be a sense of enticement and unity to the outdoors, or as much as is practical given our harsh climate. I've always been atttracted to places where inside and outside are not clearly defined and where large doors or walls dissapear to blur the line between interior and exterior. I love the idea of outdoor rooms. Unfortunately most of the really cool ideas are too impractical for Minnesota winters, and if it wasn't that, it would be our mosquito issue. I feel like this is the biggest design compromise we had to make, and I sure envy all you warmer climate folks with your potential for overhead doors and outdoor living rooms. I'm also fanatical about having great light, so lots of windows was a given, yet this is another point of compromise because of climate.

*A place for motorcycle maintenance that could also act as a showroom in the off season. Did I mention that Vern and I are both motorcycle fanatics? Our summertime hobby is roadracing motorcycles and it's something we're both passionate about. We spend a great deal of our free time either actively riding or maintaining as many as six street and track motorcycles, so a dedicated motorcycle garage was a must-have. Also, when you live in Minnesota you've got to do something with bikes in the winter. We think of them as functional art, so putting them in the middle of the living space seems perfectly reasonable to us :) Plus, this would be the ideal place to utilize a service station door inside the house, which is an idea I've been itching to copy for a long time.

*A more private master bedroom and bathroom. This is one of the other major shortcomings of our current home. I wasn't looking for a grand master suite with sitting room, palacial bath and apartment sized walk-in closet, just something with a little space to move around in and our very own bathroom. I also knew I wanted a Japanese soaking tub and a big, walk in shower.

*A guest bedroom and bathroom. As much as I dislike giving up space to something that will not be in daily use, I dislike hosting overnight guests without being able to grant them their own private space even more. My hope is to make this room as multi-purpose as possible while still maintaining it as hangout for visitors.

*A dedicated art space for me. My current studio is a spare bedroom and while close to adequate in size, it's not as functional I would like.

*A general focus on ease of entertaining. To us this means an open floor plan, a great kitchen and an exciting, interactive and welcoming environment that we and others want to spend time in. I'm all about the feeling you get from a place, and I find myself more and more aware of both what attracts and repels people within a space. I love be engaged by an interior or exterior environment and I love creating a comfortable place to “be”.

*Flexibility. As I said, our point is to create a home that is designed around how we live, which is never a static thing for anyone. My hope is that we'll have something flexible enough to adapt to us when we need it to and that has decent resale appeal should we ever decide to move.

So, with that I give you the lower level floor plan:

and the upper level floor plan:

Reviewing the drawing now, I realize we updated the guest bathroom layout to have a door that enters directly from the guest bedroom. I anticipate a few other minor alterations to interior walls as well once I finalize interior materials, but basically what you see is what we'll live with. Note that the main entrance to the house is on the upper level, while our main living space is on the lower level. Our driveway/garage are downhill from the shared drive and entering the garage will require a 90 degree turn.

Getting the Land

2004-12-26T07:40:00.000-08:00

Here's some pre-construction pictures of our lot:

The first photo is looking northwest from about the center of the build site. The newly-constructed shared driveway is visible across mid frame. The second photo is the view to the southeast from the shared driveway, with the corner of the garage to our west just barely visible in the far right of the frame and the existing home visible to the east. Dimensions of the lot are 100 feet wide and ~260 feet deep.

This property was originally part of a ~3 acre site that belonged to the owner of the home to our east (visible in the second photo). In addition to the house, previous owner had built a garage on the west side of the property and was in the process of getting city approval for a minor subdivision to split the land into three separate lots at the time we came across the listing. The existing home and the lot with the garage had already been sold at this point, and our lot was .52 acre between these two properties.

With our initial drive-by, I was intensely interested. It was definitely the best that we had seen to that point after several weekends in the car and countless hours online. The north-south orientation was exactly what I wanted. There were beautiful mature trees all around and the street and neighborhood were quiet and relatively secluded. It was neither densely forested or a barren prairie, and it was reasonably close to work and downtown. Best of all, the property was bordered at the back by an abandoned railroad line and then wetland, so there were no backyard neighbors. It definitely stuck in my head.

What we didn't learn until our meeting with the seller's agent a few days later was that the land was still in the process of being divided, so the lot was not truly it's own entity at that point. As part of the subdivision agreement, the seller was being required to improve (pave) what was the existing gravel drive off the main road to provide access to all three lots with a truck turn around. Another requirement was that the sewer and water be revised to service all of the soon-to-be created lots. We were given a survey and proposed plan that suggested what the lot would look like once the development was complete and were told by the sellers agent that this work would take place “as soon as possible in the spring” (meaning the spring of 2004). What the agent failed to reveal was that we would not be able to get building permits until this work had been completed and approved, a fact I discovered on my own after calling the city to investigate the property prior to our decision to purchase it. That it was up for sale in advance of this seemed (and probably was) a little shady, but we were placated with the knowledge that the owner had been required to escrow 125% of the cost of the development work with the city which gave him a financial incentive to get things completed.

The second twist was that the sellers agent at first implied that the lot was controlled by a builder. The agent essentially tried to railroad us into contracting with a builder with whom he was affiliated for the construction of our house by conveniently choosing to discuss the details of the property within the context of this builders sales material and contract. After a few pointed and repeatedly asked questions, I did eventually get him to admit that the lot was not promised to or owned by a builder, but this was not information easily gleaned. (I often wonder if the seller he was representing had any clue about this tactic and how many potential sales of this same property were lost because of it). When it became clear a week later that we were serious about purchasing the lot and NOT contracting a home through him, the asking price went up by $5K with the statement of "the seller is being required by the city to pay more for the revisions to the sewer and water" . This was a blatant lie. The fees for that work had been established by the city and were known to the seller well prior to our negotiation, so basically this was just the label the seller or agent invented for the additional money we were going to have to pay to get the lot builder-free. We didn't argue because we still felt like we were doing the right thing and really wanted the lot by that point, but I would have felt much better about things if the facts had just been stated instead concealed with untruth. Unfortunately I believe this is a testament to the character of the real estate business in general. Add to it that the the sellers agent never returned phone calls and getting a straight answer out of him about anything was like pulling teeth, and that the agent representing us was uninformed and didn't specialize (or have experience?) in land transactions guarantees neither of us would look forward to doing this again.

The planned development wasn't finished and the subdivision wasn't approved until late summer which didn't affect our schedule, but we actually closed on the property before any of the work had even been started. This was not a situation we were thrilled with and a gamble to be sure, but it was also a risk we felt we needed to take to get what we wanted and it turned out to be a good one. That said, the moral of the story is to investigate everything for yourself regardless of who tells you what. Facts we discovered on our own could have had a huge impact on our project in any number of ways.

Now that all is said and done with the lot we're thrilled, but the entire land buying process was stressful and frustrating, and that's without even mentioning the financial component which is a subject unto itself. As I've probably made clear, the sellers agent was difficult to work with and the agent representing us was not the best choice so in hindsight we were at something of a disadvantage. Fortunately it all worked out fine, but if there's ever a next time, we'll seek out an agent to represent us who specializes in land and be certain to do our homework on whatever we're up against no matter how much we trust the person were working with. Our experience has been that more often than not, a "you can't do that" really just means that it's not the most profitable or convenient way for that person to do it.

Hunting for a spot to put it

2004-12-23T07:36:00.000-08:00

Our quest for the perfect piece of somewhere for our new home started with the internet. Have I mentioned that I don't think any of this would have been possible without the www?
(Originally posted to livemodern.com 12/23/2004)

The on-line MLS listings are a quick and simple way to keep an eye on what's for sale in any given area, and the better search engines are an indispensable asset because they allow one to narrow a search using many different criteria. I cannot say enough about how useful this was.
We initially set our budget for land at a very optimistic $50K. I say optimistic because I think we knew even then that it was a slightly unrealistic hope that we'd actually find something in that price range, but we figured we would at least try looking at the cheap stuff first. Doing this also helped put dollar figures into perspective. It's hard to know what's reasonably priced and what not unless you've seen what's out there.
As they say, location, location, location. For us that meant proximity to civilization and S.O.'s job, hopefully keeping the commute equal to or less than his current 30-40 minutes. While we would have done it if the conditions were ideal, we wanted to avoid being too far out in the sticks. We (primarily me), wanted something with decent access to the amenities that a big city and its large inner suburbs have to offer. I've spent some time living urban and I love the convenience and diversity of being in the center of things. Nothing makes me crabby like not being able to get good imported cheese, great bread or gourmet ingredients when I'm on a cooking binge so as shallow as it sounds, reasonable proximity to good grocery stores and ethnic markets was pretty important. I certainly wasn't going to be picky about zip code or neighborhood cachet as long as a few basics were met. I always figured we'd have to be flexible and take whatever we could find that would work, which is not to say that we would have purchased just anything with good location. We wanted to be comfortable and in a place we liked, and it had to have at least a few desirable characteristics. All of this really amounted to a “I'll know it when I see it” kind of thing.
As far as evaluating prospective properties, I found the on-line city zoning regulations extremely useful during this time. A MLS listing usually always includes lot dimensions so those numbers minus the minimum setbacks and building height restrictions specific to the location give a good idea of the maximum footprint and height a house can be.
It turned into something of a game for me. Once I spotted a listing that looked promising, I'd investigate the city code and then play around with my design to assess the compatibility of our needs with that lot. We also spent a lot of time driving around looking since it's hard to get an idea of something from just a photograph, and neither of us have any sense of what a tenth of an acre, or whatever, actually looks like. Using these two methods, it was pretty easy to weed out what wouldn't work right away, which was most everything we saw.
There were a surprising number of city infill lots which was exciting in terms of general location and what we were vaguely hoping for, but most were just too small or in bad neighborhoods. We looked at some larger rural lots, but those areas are, for the most part, overrun with developers so they rarely panned out and what wasn't already spoken for always had too many negatives. I spent a lot of time on the phone during this period as well, basically acting as our own real estate agent, inquiring about the details of properties (more on that later).
Needless to say, this was a lot of work. If it wasn't for the garage problem our lifestyle presents, we would probably just have bought one of the increasingly common city lofts and been done with it, but fortunately for us, the reward for our efforts was more than we would have hoped. To say that we got lucky with the property we found would be a drastic understatement, but I believe there is something out there for anyone with a little (or a lot) tenacity.
I have to point out that there exists in this phase a potentially frustrating catch 22. You can't really design a house until you know where it's going to go, and you can't judge the appropriateness of a lot unless you have an idea of what the house will be. I'm curious to hear how others deal with this situation. In our case, we knew we didn't have the luxury of looking for land to suit the home because: A. there just isn't that much available, and B. we're definitely NOT in the cost is no object budget category, so the concession was made immediately that if the lot was suitably sized and otherwise desirable, we would adjust our design to suit it. Also along this line is the problem of cost. Fortunately by the time we actually started looking for land, I had a good idea of what we were planning to do and the amount of space it would require. We also had a good idea of what we could afford for the project in total, so it then becomes a guessing game and weighing of options to decide how many dollars you're willing to concede to land. Of course there are guidelines available out there that address this, but most of what I found seemed like it must have been written before the crazy real estate market (I'm increasingly hearing it called a bubble) came into being. Our experience makes me believe that in general, building something outside the mainstream practically necessitates a larger budget for land because there is so little to choose from in the first place. I hope this isn't the case forever.

Where we started

2004-12-21T07:45:00.000-08:00

Our thoughts and ideas regarding the decision to build and how we got things moving ahead.
(Originally posted on livemodern.com 12/21/2004)

It had been established from the very beginning that we wanted to do something out of the ordinary. I was full of ideas and holding fast to my belief that we could accomplish anything we set out to even though the solid examples of “different” are few and far between around here. Out of curiosity and in the name of research, we spent some time at the beginning of this process looking at parade homes and perusing the existing homes for sale on the MLS. Nothing we saw in our price range or well above was even remotely close to what we were thinking of. We also considered somewhat seriously, the idea of renovating an existing commercial or industrial space so my real estate searches included these types of properties as well (yay for the internet). It became clear pretty early on that new construction was going to be the best way for us to achieve our goal.

In the Twin Cities metro area, probably like most areas, almost all new construction consists of large tracts of land purchased by a developer and then sold off in chunks to corporate builders who proceed to fill them with oceans of beige and gray vinyl siding, pitched roofs, and divided light windows. Although finding a development where the builder will do something “custom” (you can practically see the dollar signs in their eyes when you mention this) is not difficult, the architectural restrictions and covenants present in these situations are inevitably aimed at making every house conform to a certain bland “development” asthetic that we are all too familiar with. I think it would have been possible to make this work as others here are proving, but the design compromises we would have had to make, paired with the fact that the we'd still be living in a sea of beige cracker boxes ruled this out pretty quickly.
Another major deterrent to building in a development was our desire to have complete control over who was going to be doing our construction. Two members of my extended family are general contractors, one has a lifetime of building experience and several of my other relatives work in the construction trades. It was obvious from a cost and trust perspective that we wanted to utilize these resources as much as possible rather than contracting with a stranger for a complete, finished product.
So the hunt was officially on for land that would be unencumbered by neighborhood covenants and architectural guidelines and association-free. Around this time, I also cold-called a few Architects in the area whose work I admired. The response I got after stating our goal was less than encouraging. Aside from the expressed doubts about the reality of our needs and wants vs. budget, the depressing news was ”call me back when you find land” and land-finding tales of woe of clients with similar ideas. Pretty much an instant validation of the concerns I was trying to mitigate in my mind, with the problem of land being first and foremost.
Not easily discouraged and being the stubborn, willful people that we are (and undoubtedly somewhat naïve), we made up our minds that we would dedicate a year to the search for land. If we still hadn't found anything at that point, we'd reevaluate our options. That was December of 2003.

Got House?

2004-08-06T07:32:00.000-07:00

Elevations are not where this process began but I needed to start somewhere, right?

I'm going to begin by saying that I've been meaning to start this blog for a long time, and it's the inspiration provided by the other bloggers here that has finally given me cause to act. I hope you find what I have to say as interesting, inspiring and useful as I find your words.
We're nearly a year into the new home process at this point and we've officially broken ground as of a week ago. With future entries, I'm going to try and go back to the beginning of where this project began and work up to the present.

Here's some elevation drawings to give you and idea of what we're doing:

A general overview:
The north (front) of the house faces a shared driveway that provides access to three lots from the main road. Our lot is a half-acre walkout in the middle of these three, flanked by a lone garage on one side and an existing home on the other. Our private drive will slope down to the tuckunder garage shown in the west elevation. Visitors will park at the level of the shared driveway and enter the house from what we'll call the upper level or the north facade. I'll post our site plan and pictures of the lot soon.
The exterior of the house has yet to be finalized, so these drawings are mostly just representational. Additionally, there will be awnings or trellis over the front, garage and south sliding doors of style and material also to be determined.
The spiral stairs shown in the south elevation will access roof decks on two levels. The upper level deck will be almost entirely a "greenroof":http://www.greenroofs.com/ and the lower level deck will function as outdoor living and garden space.
We're building with "Insulated Concrete Form":http://www.icfweb.com/ the rationale for which I'll discuss in detail later on.

We're thrilled to have acutally started this thing. There was a period where we felt we may never get to this point so it's still a little hard to believe (and scary!) that we're acutally on our way to realizing our goal. I'm looking forward to sharing our experience.