The Office is Up and Running!

I'm typing this blog post from my new home office! Yes, we did a partial move in over the weekend and it's been great getting set up. It's been pretty much a seamless cutover with phones and Internet both working perfectly. The downstairs part of the house has a little work left to finish up but that will be done soon enough.

This week the carpet went in. This was carpet we had purchased from Owens Wholesale Carpet in Dalton, GA. Recall a few posts ago we had been strongly warned by our local carpet shops against buying our carpet this way - we won't know what we're getting, there will be no servuce, blah blah blah. I have to say, we could not be more pleased. All the carpet and pad was in perfect order. The installer, Paul Ondricek, really knows his stuff on seams. He is about 90% done now with just the stairs left for Monday. The job took about 4 days in all.

While carpet was going in, Barney of Structural FX finished up the cherry crown in the kitchen. I was pleased with their recommendation to make it a little wider than the standard Thomasville crown piece, adding some light rail that ran around the tops of the cabinets and some filler between the light rail and crown. It makes for a nice thick craftsman like band all around the kitchen. By the end of the week, the last of the cabinet doors were up and the kitchen was given a good cleaning and ceremonial unwrapping of the granite island.

The door handles also went in throughout the house. I was able to mobilize the shorter 2 3/8" backsets and full lip strike plates air shipped from Omnia. Home Annex were quite good at turning all this around. These all fit perfectly and I just shipped all the replaced parts back for credit.

The painters returned on Friday and continued through the weekend touching up. They say they will be done inside by Wednesday. There is still a lot to do outside but that can continue into the new year without disrupting us.

We put the new TV up in the media room and Brian framed it up nicely with help from Charley who did some rapid plaster work there and in other parts of the house. The Harman Kardon AVR arrived and I tried hooking it up this weekend but the instruction manual is a little complicated so it will have to wait before we get the full surround sound effect.

The staircase rail is still in process. Joe the wlder was here (a friend of Brian's from United) to build us a custom metal frame. It's ready to go for powdercoating Monday and then back to install the cable rails hopefully in time for the move in.

The outside yard has been a mud pit the past few days as the rain was quite heavy all week. Despite that, our outside crew was able to make some progress on bender board and irrigation system. We hope to bring in a load of sod on Thursday - a green Christmas.

In fact, if all goes to plan, we will be officially moved in on Friday! There's a lot of little details to finish inside but I am confident in the Structural FX crew. We loaded up the fridge again with snacks and drinks to keep everyone going.

2 Weeks to Move in

We arrived to a nice surprise on Friday with the Structural FX crew putting up Christmas lights around the house. All nicely connected into the eaves outlets and on the electronic timer controlled from the garage. We had also re-loaded up the fridge and snack bar to keep them all going in these last few weeks of intense finishing work.

It was another blazing week of interior finishing work and bonus exterior landscaping while the weather has held up here. I'm writing this now as it's just pouring outside and our street is like a river. The rains have finally arrived to the Bay Area! Here is an update on this week:

The last of the upper cabinets were installed in the kitchen and we ran copper tile along the entire backsplash. The tile needed a special epoxy grout but hardened nicely and at the same time sealed the copper nice and shiny. Charlene baked Christmas cookies for the crew on Friday for the first time using our Thermador double oven and dropped off a case of beer and taco chips with salsa. Up for next week is to finish the crown moulding and trim.

The carpet arrived from Georgia. I had purchased this from Owen Carpet in Dalton, saving at least 30% over what we could get it here in the area. They held it for about a month until we were ready and the day has at last arrived. The garage was cleared out and it was dropped off in there. It actually takes up less space than I had imagined but that is probably because the carpet is so tightly packed up in the rolls. The installer Paul Ondricek will be here Monday. All the room are ready and cleaned up.

The Shoji cherry door from Cherry Tree Designs in Montana was installed in the dining room. The door and track look great and make for a nice transition that will match up with our cherry dining room set. You can also see it from the front door which makes for a grand view.

The interior speakers got put in the ceilings. We went with Bose 191 which have a pretty big box but fit nicely between the trusses. All the speaker wires come in to one point in the family room and we also ran them down to the media room in th eventual hope that we will be able to hook everything up to a media pc with remote control. I don't think the technology is there yet to do this properly and cost effectively but should be in a couple of years. We would want to try to re-use as much of our amplifiers as possible when we do this. As for the media room, we were not able to get speakers in the ceilings due to the TGI joists which are very tight. We will place exterior mounted Cambridge Soundworks Newton speakers around the room.

The Omni stainless door "dummy" latches were put up throughout the house on the closet doors. There was a mixup on the strike plates and backsets for the passage and privacy latches and we are getting replacement parts sent over from Omnia. That has been a challenge as we had bought these on the Internet from Home Annex which meant first filling out a return authorization form, then spending a couple of hours on the phone with the customer service/sales group to get the right parts and air shipping. This is a drawback of Internet orders. If you don't get the right thing, it can be quite a frustrating exercise dealing with returns and exchanges. Anyhow, the right backsets are the 2 3/8" type, which are pretty standard for most doors, not 2 3/4", and the strike plates are "full lip" not "T" shape. I was surprised Homeannex had no option on their e-commerce site to specify full lip or T, very annoying.

The hot water heater was hooked up. Candice our plumber was back for a few days working on this and connecting the Jacuzzi which got dropped back in the newly grouted granite tile bath area which looks great. Barney did a great job laying that tile and polishing the edges with a grinding wheel. Trent was busy hooking up all the faucets and bathroom accessories, which really tie the look all together. We are very pleased with all our choices on the these.

On the outside, Brian was able to mobilize a crew of day laborers to do more work on the back garden walls, spread some dirt around with a bobcat (equipment thanks to San Mateo Rental), roto till the entire property and demolish the last remnant of the old house - a section of the white picket fence that was being used to hold up our mailbox. I told the mailman to deliver to our house now. We put our numbers up in a hurry, both lighted and the Design Within Reach ones we bought for the entrance area. The day laborers also dug the main trench for the water pipe that will feed the fire sprinkler system.

Next week's list: carpet installation, finishing the kitchen crown and trim, finish the half bath slate vanity/sink and painting touch ups. If the weather clears, they may tackle the deck and finish the garden wall and stair areas. I hope to also get the trenches doug for our sprinkler system and put in the bender board for demarcation of the flower beds so that we can finish bring in fresh grass sod. Our fireplace slate still has not shipped yet but is expected to be done this week, a month later after our delivery disaster.

3 Weeks and Counting

We are three weeks away from moving in. We had a major milestone this week - the porta potty and construction fence in front were taken away! We are packing at our rental house and getting ready to go. Our garages and storage shed here are nearly empty of house fixtures.

This past week we saw the installation of the double oven and vent in the kitchen along with the Hubbardton Kakomi light pendants over the island and copper backsplash tiling. We decided that rather than try to match granite tile for the vent area to the granite on the counters (nearly impossible), we would instead use more of the copper backsplash all the way up to the vent. It should make for a great look.

The bathroom tile work is just about done now with a little grout to finish up. Barney did a great job on the Jacuzzi area with granite and tile. It was nearly 4 days work. Jason and the paint crew are working their way around touching up throughout the house and painting the bathrooms. He will be done on Wednesday and then come back a few days before we move in to do final touch ups of dings. The faucets and light fixtures are all in. We were running around Home Depot stores to get toilet seats, door stoppers and closet shelving this weekend.

John our electrician from Structural FX is blazing through all the communications - alarm system, Internet and PBX extensions. We arranged for Comcast Internet and AT&T phone service to get put into the house this week to help in debugging/testing all the connections. We want our move to be seamless on this front to get our home offices up and running. At our last house, we spent around a month dallying trying to get all the communications to work properly.

Brian was able to mobilize a few extra folks to build the garden walls we had left to do in front and along the back of the house. I ordered extra McNear Versalok Mosaic block on Monday and was amazed to see it arrive that same afternoon, 14 pallets of it!

The slate started to be put up on the front steps - California Gold from India, which looks great with the colors of the house. The outside lights are all up. The front Hubbardton Forge lights look awesome. Brian put up a nice sign in front for some Structural FX advertising, with solar powered caps as the added touch.

The solar power is still not up but the delays seem to be from the PG&E side. They are backlogged on installing the meters. They are also being a pain on a bunch of rebates we filed for on furnace and insulation. They keep rejecting them but I'm sure with persistence sooner or later I'll get our check.

We're amazed the weather is holding up, sunshine for the past week, highs of 62 and another week of sun forecast for this week! If this keeps up, we should also make major bonus progress on our landscaping - installing irrigation, bender boards on the flower beds, fences and maybe even getting to sod by the time we move in. Wouldn't that be a thrill!

Cable Rail Stair

We've decided to put a cable rail type stair banister inside between the main and lower floor. After a bit of research on where to get the components, we narrowed it down to Ultra-tec out of Carson City, Nevada (www.ultra-tec.com)

The code here is the maximum distance between cables is 4". We will need 7 cables running down each section. The cables usually come with one end already assembled (called "swaged") on that has a tension adjusting bolt/receiver combo. The other end usually gets a field installed self gripping receiver.

Ultra-tec has a nice product line. The can make custom cable runs in any specified length and can "swager" the tensioner on the one end for you. We're using 3/16" cable. For each cable, we need a swaged threaded stud and Invisiware Receiver for one end, a push lock fitting for the other. We will also add grommets in each post to make a nice finished look. We're also getting a grommet tool from them to properly install the grommets. Brian our builder will use a high speed wheel to cut the cables to exact length.

I asked about the tools necessary to do the swagering ourselves but these are pretty expensive, about $3K for the air tool swager end and air over hydraulic pump. We could rent them from Ultra-tec but again this is overkill. Maybe if were building a lot of these it would be worth it.

We are having the posts custom welded by one of Brian's contacts and plan to have them powder coated in "penny" color. I'll post pictures when it's done.

The Granite is In

Earlier this week the installers from EMG Home Supply showed up to install our granite. They had a crew of 4 and it was all they could do to lift the 4' x 9' island into place after cutting the sink holes and faucets on site. They completed all the work (kitchen, 4 baths and laundry room - 7 slabs plus island and backsplashes in all) in a long day, finishing up at 8pm.

The quality of their work was good. I had done some reference checks on them and each reference recommended I ask for "Ming" to do the installation. He was the lead installer on our crew.

I thought the cutting on site would be messier but with a water saw the dust was kept to a minimum and it was done in our driveway out front. The edges around the sinks were very nicely finished as were a couple of edges they needed to bullnose on site.

My only complaint was their cleanup was not very thorough. I know they were rushed at the end to finish up as it was getting late and they had a 1.5 hour drive back to Concord, but that was no excuse. There was water and granite dust in the under cabinets that should have been vacuumed up and had to be done the next day by our builder.

It was a short week, with Thanksgiving and all. The Structural FX crew continued to
work on tiling up the bathrooms and spent a day thoroughly cleaning up the site. Painting continued on the outside trim detail. Electrical finishings - ceiling fans, sconces, light covers, electrical outlets are moving right along. Our neighbor to the left also decided to clean his side of the creek.

We were very pleased to drive onto our driveway on Thanksgiving day! 4 more weeks to go. We are 6 months into the build now.

The Instant Exterior Color

Among other things in the works the past week was the finish stucco coat on the exterior of the house. This was a very nice product called DryVit which is stucco mixed with acrylic paint in the color of your choice. They mix the paint into the final coat of stucco, which makes for a very rapid exterior paint job that is resistant to scratches since it is literally the thickness of the stucco coat.

I was amazed to see half the house done in just under a couple of hours on Friday. They started the second coat the same day and finish the next day. Clean up happened on Sunday and the scaffolding is gone for the most part.

We chose Sherwin Williams 6388 Golden Fleece, which has a nice deep golden color and really shines compared to the many washed out colors around us (the typical grey, taupe, light yellow and beige). The second coat darkened it quite a lot and we were very pleased with the look of the stucco with the fine sand grit.

Other progress items include:

- the charcoal/grey Mcnear Old Country Cobble pavers are all in now, front and back. They look fantastic and solid, a much better product than the Calstone which was half as thick.

- the main garden walls are done in back. Next step - bring in some labor to prepare it for plantings. We also need to build a couple of walls in the back hugging the house and one side of the driveway

- the cabinets are all in and ready for the granite installer who started today. We went with EMG out of Concord who are supplying our Tan Brown kitchen granite but using the countertops we bought at Uni-Tile for the bathrooms and laundry room.

- the tiling work in the bathrooms continued, about 75% done now. We ran diagonal tile on all the floors with 1/8" grout line and that looks really nice. The tiles up the walls are square on up. I had to run around on the weekend chasing some additional quantities of tile which were fortunately in stock, as we made a few changes along the way. Brian had a great suggestion to run a decorative trim of the santa cecelia granite cut from some of the tiles we bought to cover the Jacuzzi. He and Barney trimmed them in 4" squares and laid them in a diagonal pattern mid way up the shower so that it will match the Jacuzzi.

- the final paint coat is pretty much done throughout the house in all rooms including doors and moulding. We are very pleased with how the rooms turned out. Thanks to the help from Nancy Linebarier our designer (believe it or not, it took us less than an hour to choose all the colors in the house) and the great work by Jason Kanbic and his painter crew!

- the hardwood floor is all in. We had just enough to cover all areas. Fortunately we ordered 15% more than budget, which was originally a provision for scrap. It turns out almost none was wasted but we needed more than we estimated. The WFI American Red Oak engineered hardwood is a very nice product. Brian our builder says it's the best of all brands he has installed so far and they do a nice job at the factory cutting the wood to display its grain.

- Our slate supplier Vermont Natural Stone got the shipment back to the east coast. This was the shipment of our fireplace and half bath counter that got wrecked by the nimrods at SAIA freight. They say all but 2 pieces are ruined. They might be able to salvage the large mantel piece but only if they shave it 1/4" off the end. I can't believe it took 2 weeks to get it back to the other coast. They had no ETA on new shipment but were going to expedite it. This is becoming an increasing annoyance as we are trying to finish out rooms and stop making dust inside.

- The Martin Flushline garage doors were installed by a Home Depot subcontractor (Bay Area Overhead Door Co.) who did a nice job. They both were installed in a day with 1 person doing the work. The Martin Quietdrive openers are ultra quiet. Our painter Jason offered to spray them to exactly match the rest of the house and our design advised us to paint them the same color as the body to not draw any attention to them with some white trim around the canterbury windows that are inlaid in them. So Golden Fleece it is.

This week:

- electrical finishing work including light covers, switches, electrical, cat5, chandeliers, pendants, sconces and outdoor lights

- remaining tile work in the bathrooms and granite installation

- spray and install the baseboards

- assembly of closet organizers for various rooms - garage cabinets (Home Depot Do-Able line will work just fine), closets - Closetmaid from Lowes.

- some outside cleanup, moving dirt around. We'll take measurements to order more pavers for a couple of other sections and some remaining garden walls that we preferred to have Brian handle when he has a chance.

- order some maple butcher block tops for the garage cabinets (to make a workshop area). I found a good source at Grainger, which we used back in 2000 in a dot-com startup to make workstation desks. Nice and relatively cheap.

- Finish sanding out the scratches in the front door, our most disappointing purchase which came from wholesaledoorsource.com. Hopefully Jason can fix it up.

All that in a short week with the Thanksgiving holidays!

The Kitchen Will be in by Friday!

I could not believe it when I heard it, but needless to say the kitchen was in by Friday! On Tuesday Brian and several helpers from the Structural FX crew came to take a massive load of stuff out of our garage and storage shed - kitchen cabinets, appliances and tile. We were pretty excited to see it go while at the same time a big load of new furniture arrived to take its place.

It's been another very busy week with a lot of people deployed. The hardwood floor was installed in the family room, kitchen, dining room and living room. The floor was "floated" which means it is installed over a "silent floor" plastic membrane and glued together. This was the engineered hardwood (American Red Oak) floor that we bought a few months back from WFI and it looks great.

Brian and Barney tackled the kitchen cabinets - installing all the lower base units, island and placing the appliances. The Sub Zero freezer, fridge and wine cooler all fired up ok. The double oven should be installed this week. The sinks are in place. We had purchased a lot of extra "skins" for the outside of the cabinets - basically 4' x 8' sheets of cherry - which are being used on the ends of the islands, appliances etc. This makes the kitchen cabinets really look like a custom job - superb. The upper cabinets will be installed as soon as the painting is done.

Angel and the crew from Design Interlock Pavers worked away on leveling the back yard and placing the crushed stone base for the pavers. We will definitely need another wall along the house to try to keep the yard level. It's all hard to plan this in advance until you actually do it, but we're pleased we can finally see how the back yard will be shaped. They started laying the pavers Friday and made good progress in the back yard. Hopefully the weather will hold up. Last week was incredibly nice summer like weather but we had rain on the weekend. Nothing like Oregon though.

We finalized our exterior color - Golden Fleece 6388 by Sherwin Williams. It's a yellow with some gold and brown in it, a nice deep color. It should go well with the black roof, white swiss coffee exterior trim and the grey/charcoal pavers. This color was matched by the stucco company and will be mixed in with the stucco (a product called "Dryvit"). We chose their smooth sand "Sandblast" finish. The nice thing about this product is that while it is a little more expensive than regular stucco, it does not need 21 days to dry before painting since the paint is mixed in with the stucco and if you scratch it the paint will still be there as it soaks all the way through the stucco. We'll also save $ by not having to paint the exterior so net net a savings. All good planning while the rainy season is hitting us.

The interior painting continues with Jason pushing for people to get out of the way. He was spraying the interior doors and crown moulding with a semi-gloss Kelly Moore Swiss Coffee and priming all the walls and ceilings as well as marking imperfections in the drywall for Alliance Drywall to fix up. We're very pleased with the quality of the finish. I noticed Jason was using a SprayTech 0.40 gpm airless sprayer which seems to work very well.

As if this were not enough people bumping into themselves, John and Nado were working away on tiling up the bathrooms. We changed our mind on the half bath and decided to go with a Black Vermont Slate floor instead of the oak hardwood to match up with the slate sink counter top. We picked up some slate at a store in San Francisco called Echeguren, which has an unbelievable selection. John is just about done with tiling the floors and the cabinets will go in Monday. We should be ready for the granite work to start on 11/20 for all counter tops. The granite company, EMG out of Concord, called me up to firm up the installation date.

I have to say I was dissapointed with the mahogany front door we got from Wholesale Door Source in Texas. We were supposed to get a custom made door with 8 small windows in the top for light. After waiting about 3 months, they finally got the shipment out. My face dropped when I opened the crate, it was a 6 window door. I called and they said they no longer make an 8 window door and shipped me this one instead because it was taking so long to get the order filled...thanks for telling me before shipping! I managed to get them to knock some $ off the price as compensation and we can live with 6 windows. After staining the door we ran into yet another problem - the interior face has some pretty serious scratches on the mahogany, as if 50 grit paper were used to sand it. I called them again and they said "this is an unfinished door". Unfinished to me means you need to stain it, not sand the whole thing down for a day! I would not recommend using them again, they really screwed up this order. Hopefully our painter Jason will be able to make it look decent.

This week will see the completion of the tile work on the floors, completion of the hardwood floors, installation of the bathroom and laundry cabinets, installation of the garage doors on Monday through a Home Depot subcontractors, more interior painting, the exterior stucco/paint (delayed because of rain), completion of the paver work and maybe the solar panels.

The Slate Disaster

Well, we finally got our slate from NY today. This is the slate trim for our fireplace mantel and half bath counter from Vermont Natural Stone.

I've never seen such an incompetent shipping company as SAIA. Late last week, the shipment arrived and since it weighs so much we re-routed it to go straight to the new house scheduled for this past Monday. However, the dispatcher failed to notify the trucker and it was loaded on a truck Friday. The trucker called in a huff Friday afternoon to ask what was going on and I said we had rescheduled it for Monday. I should have known better. In fact, right after I hung up I got a real bad feeling and tried calling the trucker back to just have him drop it off but was unsuccessful.

The next thing I know, Monday rolls around and SAIA tell me they have lost our freight. I don't know, it's kind of hard to lose 1,000 pounds of slate but these nimrods did it. It took 4 more days before finally "locating it", after who knows where it had been, probably rolling around all over the Bay Area rattling in the back of a truck. My hunch was that it would be a disasater delivery.

Sure enough, it showed up today and my builder Brian calls me up to say you better get out here quickly, the slate arrived. Oh crap. I race over there and its sprawled out in the back of the truck with one of the straps holding it to the pallet broken and pieces all broken and damaged. I called Vermont Stone and they said to refuse the whole thing and they would take charge from then, which I did. That did very little to comfort me knowing it took two and a half months to custom make it and get it out here in the first place. It was scheduled to be installed right now and I'm sure this will delay us, especially the half bath that needs the counter.

Vermont Stone said they are working on another batch and they assure me it will be done in a couple of weeks on rush order. They certainly could have done a better job packing it up, instead of placing it on a pallet with cardboard between the pieces. I guess I'm angry on two fronts, but I have to say...NEVER use SAIA, they are incompetent. In my 20 years of shipping stuff now, only Fedex ground (my dishwasher that got trashed earlier this year) comes close on poor handling. Absolutely pathetic.

Other than this unfortunate incident, things have been progressing well inside the house. The drywall is all plastered and sanded. The crown and trim is up throughout the house - looks fabomundo. Our painter Jason is spraying the walls with a primer coat, actually a mud like coat first to smooth it all out to a level 4 finish, almost like an auto finish. The interior doors are all in. Brian spent several days putting these in...at one point saying he forgot how many doors there were in the plan, quite sick of it! Good job!

The garden wall work continues and massive load of paver bricks arrived but the rainy weather the last couple of days made a mud pit of the back yard. Despite the mud, they are still working away. The Structural FX crew also tackled concrete along the side of the house to finish putting the level back to original grade.

We also spent a very productive hour with our interior designer Nancy Linebarier picking colors for all the rooms. We brought everything we could carry in a laundry basket - tile and granite samples, fabrics, cabinet doors etc since we have nothing at the house, to try to match things up as best as possible. It worked out quite well. We had picked up a color fan from Benjamin Moore beforehand and this allowed us to quickly narrow the choices. They cost about $10 at your local paint store.

Saturday we are picking up our granite counters from Jerong and Uni-tile with Brian's help. Next week - more painting, hopefully the solar panels go up, paver bricks for the driveway, completing of the scratch coat on the outside, leveling the back yard after the retaining walls are done, maybe some tile work will start in the bathrooms.

Any day now I expect there to be a massive outflux of finishing materials from our rental house garages. Brian is shooting for November 20th for the granite counters to be installed which means the hardwood floors and cabinets all need to be up. I'll be amazed if it all gets done by then, it seems like a lot of work still to finish on the inside. We need it to move, our furniture is arriving and stacking up in the living room!

Scratch Coat

Here are a couple of pictures of the "scratch coat" going up on the exterior walls. This is a coat of concrete like mix made of coarse sand (see pile of sand and mixer in one photo) which gets spread wet over the exterior mesh wire that was laid over the plywood walls. The mesh wire holds it all together. It takes about 7 days to dry and then the stucco can be applied over it for the final finish. The stucco takes about 21 days to dry before painting. It took about 4 people a day to do the entire house.

We have a Driveway

The week's still not over (the stucco contractor will be there Saturday doing the scratch coat on the exterior) but it's been one heck of a week.

There were plaster people there all week and Jason our painter, of Color Craftsman (www.colorcraftsman.com), even managed to do a first coat of paint in the garage, which we hope to finish shortly to be our "spray paint room" for interior doors and crown mounding. After that, we'll use it to stage finishing materials. It's really looking great inside with the paster work moving along at a nice clip.

The painters also put a coat on the exterior windows, gutters and eves. We matched up the paint the same as the Pella windows. The stucco folks were completing the preparation outside with paper and wire for the scratch coat. I noticed a daunting pile of sand next to the driveway ready for scratch coat work tomorrow.

The paver crew were working away on the back garden walls and finished packing down crushed stone in the driveway. We now have a driveway just in time for the rains expected next week when everything may turn to mud. Yeah!

Nest week: interior doors, crown moulding, continued work on the retaining walls in back, solar panels, finish the plaster work and spray paint the interior window trim. We also plan to pick paint colors with our designer.

Extreme Home Makeover Take 2

It was insanely busy today with about 43 workers on site - 20 doing sheetrock plaster work, 7 Structural FX crew on outside carpentry (closing in the eves), 2 plumbers, 3 HVAC, 4 on retaining walls, 4 on outside stucco prep work and 3 on exterior painting of the window trim. It was like watching Extreme Home makeover live. I was amazed to see Brian in a quite calm state but I guess I should know better, that's the way he always is. He was clearly tired of shuttling around getting little miscellaneous supplies to keep everyone going. At one point he called from Home Depot and I could here the auto checkout blabbing away in the background. Barney, who broke his collarbone this past weekend doing something silly, will get that fun job the next few days!

I liked the plasterer's fancy tool that fills in the screw holes with a metal end applicator on a broom handle. I never saw one of those before but boy does it work. Almost as good as that little drill tool they were using before to cut out the electric boxes. the entire house got plaster coated and is drying away overnight for sanding tomorrow.

The crown moulding arrived in a daunting pile. No problem to get all that up in a few days assured Brian. We're waiting on the interior doors tomorrow which will be spray painted in the garage. The 1,000 lbs of slate for the fireplace mantel has also arrived but we're holding it back for delivery until Monday when things are less hectic. That got here really quickly from the east coast - 6 days.

Sheetrock & Exterior Stucco

Here we are 3 days later and the entire house is sheetrocked up. It's hard to believe, 1 day to do the entire insulation (every single wall, floor and ceiling creating great sound proofing) and 3 days to rock it all up. It was especially impressive to see 10 people from Alliance Drywall here this past Saturday zipping through the rooms and tackling the exterior paper and stucco preparation. They were all very skilled and the cleanup afterwards could not have been better. Everything passed the City inspection once again on Monday. I think that's the last inspection we'll see before the final now.

This week will see the addition of solar panels to the roof, inside doors (which will be spray painted first in the garage), crown moulding and window/door frame moulding while the taping and inside wall plastering goes on. Alliance will also put the first coating of stucco on the exterior on Saturday. They are finishing up the corners, which will take a few days amount of time versus the metal grid over the large surfaces that took a day.

We're still into great weather here which should last into the end of next week, so the pace should continue to be balls to the wall inside and out. The back yard garden walls are also coming along nicely.

Ready to ...Rock

Internal work continued this week as Monday-Tuesday were spent finishing up on the electrical, plumbing, HVAC, patio and rear doors. There was an inspection by the City on Wednesday to check over all the framing and systems, which passed with flying colors, not surprising given the quality work the Structural FX crew is doing. Also on Monday the sheet rock arrived by truck and special forklift to place the bundles needed in each room.

Thursday morning, a crew arrived from West Coast Insulation to put insulation throughout the house. They did all walls, inside and facing outside, and ceilings. All in a day's work with 3 people. They will be back to finish the underfloor when all is done on finishings just to avoid any complications with having to pass things through the floor still.

Friday morning, a crew of 8 arrived from Alliance Drywall to close the walls up. I can say even just after a day they are moving at a mighty fast clip. They plan to work Saturday with a crew of 12 and Monday they should be done with the entire house!! I especially like their little dremel type tool to cut out the boxes and lights. I wish I had one of those a few years back when I was doing drywall.

Once again pulling his strings, Brian was able to line up a contractor to work on our back yard garden walls and the front and rear paver stone before the rains hit us here. I was impressed that the day after we agreed on price, they showed up with a crew and machinery and started. We're working with Design Interlock (www.designinterlock.com) and Angel is our foreman, who Brian highly recommends and worked on a magnificent previous house he built.

We are going with McNear Versalok wall, the Mosaic weathered stone in Serpentine color. We also chose the McNear Old Country Cobble pavers in charcoal/grey color which should look nice with a golden yellow house. We like the McNear cobble pavers better than Calstone as these ones are about 2x as thick. They also have a rough stone like appearance to them, similar to the Calstone Quarry but the ones we got were half the price.

Lastly, I placed orders for carpet - Owen Carpet in Dalton Georgia. We chose a Shaw Sutton Corinthian #18795, Color Ambrosia #00103, 12' width, 100% Nylon, 3.75 wear factor, berber style. Even with shipping, we saved 30% over local prices. It should be here first week of December and they will hold it in a warehouse until then. In addition, we ordered the garage doors. We went with Martin Flushline standard insulation with the ultra quiet belt drive in white color and with Canterbury windows to match our front cratsman door with similar windows. These should be installed in a month.

Next week the garden wall and paver work will continue. The drywall team will be spending 7-10 days smoothing and sanding the walls. The exterior stucco work should start.

Property Lines

I mentioned before that we are having all our property lines mapped out, something that has not been done on the land in many years. It's complicated by the fact that the only two markers remaining are all the way on either end of block so the surveyor essentially has to map all the plots to get to ours which is in the middle.

I took it upon myself to go visit the neighbors in back of our property. It's become evident now that they are far onto our land near the creek with their vegetable gardens, sheds and other unsightly things. Both neighbors are well into retirement and maintaining the plots is becoming a challenge. We hope to have the lines sorted out this week but then the inevitable question of what to do about their encroaching comes up.

We'll probably work out some sort of arrangement to allow them to do their gardens on the land but clean up the area and take on liability risk. Does anyone out there have a sort of lease agreement that would allow for this type of arrangement? I'd love to see that. We don't want to stress these folks out given their age but we do want to make it clear it is our land and it has to be respected while trying to be accomodating. It's on the other side of the creek so not all the easily accessible for us anyway.

Preparing to Close the Walls

Another busy week on the house as the Structural FX team tackled a lot of details on the systems - electrical, plumbing, HVAC and communications - while finishing up various remaining framing, stairs and trim work around the windows. It's not as dramatic a change as before but that's to be expected as there is a lot of detail covered here. Everywhere you look inside the house, something has changed a little.

I'm really pleased with the clean electrical work throughout. We are wired up the wazoo in the house - dual CAT5s to every corner for Internet and PBX, coax cable, speaker wire and alarm sensors. They also ran HDMI cable in the wall behind the HD TV.

I had a little trouble finding the right wall plate terminator to clean up the speaker wire but this site had a nice product that will cover all my zones upstairs (ChannelPlus WPW-D7.1)

http://www.channelplus.com/product_detail.php?productId=133

I also sourced the alarm contacts we'll use on the windows and door - Aleph DC-1651W magnetic recessed type. See www.Aleph-usa.com

Brian and John even prepared the house for fiber optic, running fiber lines from our utility room to the media room and two offices. I figured we might as well and that's where we'd need them most. Awesome! We're ready for SBC/AT&T when they get their act together running fiber to our house. If I ever start another hi tech business in our basement, we're ready! We'd even be ready to hatch the next Google in a shed out back if we wanted to.

The plumbing is just about done. All thanks to O'Reilly plumbing and owner Ciaron O'Reilly and Candice who have been putting in countless hours. They will be testing it out loading it with compressed air next week. In fact, the plumbing, electrical and HVAC should all be done early next week and tested in time for a City inspection next Wednesday. Our HVAC is being done by John Pane HVAC with Mark as the foreman on site working diligently through all the ducting challenges.

After that inspection, there will be a flurry of activity on the insulation and sheet rock. Brian says the sheetrock will be up over Friday, Saturday and Monday with a big crew he's outsourcing this to. More on this subcontractor later when I see their work.

Brian also lined up another subcontractor to do our driveway paver work, which should start next week. While the sheetrock goes in the Structural FX crew will tackle the garden walls we wanted put in the back and the pavers for our patio there.

Fortunately, we lined up a surveyor to mark all the property lines properly, something that had never been done on our property. It was a little expensive but we think worth it to avoid any question of where the property starts and ends. We're using Michael Mahoney of Professional Land Services who so far has been just great. This work should be ready in time to re-do all the fences on the property lines.

The trim around the windows is just about done, a couple of days work. It really makes the house look distinguished. We won't order our garage doors for another few weeks as these will need to be installed after the painting is done.

Our solar frames should be here early next week from Ready Solar. I hope they can be put up in a few days so we can start generating some power to sell back to the grid.

We also had some landscape work done on the side of the house to level the dirt and bring in some gravel surfacing. All in another day's work with a small rented Bobcat.

The City sent an inspector out this week to do a check on all heights, sizes etc per the plans. Everything passed with flying colors.

Last but not least on the list was getting all the rooms measured for carpet. I'm now ready to place our order in Georgia for the carpet to get here first week of December.

Roofing

The rains might be here earlier than normally expected and on Monday I got a call from Brian of Structural FX that the roofers were going to be there Tuesday morning. I'll bet everyone is calling the roofers right now to close up before the rains but fortunately Brian was able to mobilize and Hallmark roofing showed up with a massive crew. They put the paper on yesterday to seal it and today they have about 15 people up top putting the sheet metal and shingles on. Another fabulous sub contractor showing up on time and doing a great job!

We went with Elk brand 40 year shingles and chose their "sable" black color. The black should go well with our exterior color, a golden yellow, but should also be able to match up with just about any exterior we'd choose. It might create a little more heat in the attic because of the black color but our solar powered attic fans should address that. We went with 3 Solatube units - www.solatube.com

Monday was really busy putting in all the remaining items that protrude through the roof - electrical conduits, holes for the solar panel frames, plumbing vents, stove hood vent, flues for the hot water tank and furnaces, solar powered attic fans, a pipe to connect satellite TV dishes to, etc.

Fortunately, the weather is holding up!

Erosion Control

As the rains approach the Bay Area and we continue to work on our landscaping plan in parallel with the house construction, we took some extra precautions to prevent erosion of any soil into the creek.

Before we purchased the property, it was quite disturbing that the previous owner had basically used the creek as a dump for many decades. We extracted over 15 dump trucks of all sorts of junk - rusted old water heater, plumbing pipes, concrete, plastic containers, telephone post, batteries, cans, bottles, tires, refrigerator, barbed wire, sheet metal - along with a ton of dead branches.

We cleaned all this out over several months and are trying to restore the ivy the acts as a natural soil retainer. The trees should also thrive now that the dead branches are all pruned off.

Here is a photo of some heavy duty "jute netting" being secured along the bank. This netting is great for holding down the soil and allows the ivy underneath to grow through it. It has holes about 1" x 2" so we can plant some additional ivy in a few weeks when the rains start. It also biodegrades in a year. It is secured together with pegs. We purchased this at a local landscape building supply store called Peninsula Building Materials - a really amazing place where you can get great ideas on materials to work with landscaping. Home Depot unfortunately only has small rolls so best to go to the big specialized landscaping outfits. These rolls came in 6' x 250'. There are a lot on the Internet but shipping is expensive.

You can also see the bales of hay which are wrapped into tube like bundles that are used at the top of the bank to prevent any soil from leaking down. These were secured using 2 foot long rebar pounded through the bales and into the ground. Only the water can get through these from above.