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.

Sprinklers

To meet code here with earthquakes and all we had to have fire sprinklers installed throughout our house. We had these done by JFK Fire Sprinklers and John did a great job, showing up on schedule and finishing in about 3 days. Here is a photo of one of the heads that sits above the sheet rock. The head will be flush with the sheet rock. When there is a fire, only the sprinler heads in that particular room or area are activated by the heat, popping down and water flowing out. Fortunately that would avoid sprinklers going off all over the house! Every room and hallway got them, even the larger closets.