My New House

Solar Expansion & NEC Code 690.64(B)(2) Issues

2011-01-20T10:01:00.000-08:00

It's been a while since my last post. Enjoying the new house immensely. We decided this past year to increase our solar system size on the roof in preparation for an electric car. I thought it would be beneficial to share our experience.

The previous system is a 36 panel (5.8kW) with 6000 Watt Sunny Boy inverter.

The new system is a 10 panel (2.2 kW) with 4000 Watt Solectria inverter. It has some room to grow to fully use up the 4000W inverter.

(I was quite amazed at how the panel costs have fallen to half of what they were in 2006! All of the new system was purchased from an outfit called Solar Depot in Petaluma. Although California's incentives are almost nothing now, the Federal 35% tax credit incentive is sweet to bring costs down even further).

When we connected the two systems to the 200A panel that we have, I was made aware of NEC code 690.64(B)(2) which is a fire code. The panel must have a main breaker that can carry the sum of both inverts and meet this NEC code. The code as it pertains to a residential installation says:

"For a dwelling unit, the sum of the ampere ratings of the overcurrent devices shall not exceed 120 percent of the rating of the busbar or conductor."

Here were our calculations of the circuit break requirements for our two inverters:

6000W/240V = 25, then 25 x 1.25 = 31.25A so a 35A breaker is used.

4000W/240V = 16.7, then 16.7 x 1.25 = 20.8A so a 25A breaker is used.

The current panel is 200A so 120% x 200A = 240A. If we just connected both solar systems into the panel with 35A + 25A breakers = 60A, then 200A + 60A exceeds the 240A maximum.

We struggled with issue for many months trying to find a solution that avoided us having to scrap the new 200A panel we put in when we built our house, which would require breaking stucco and rewiring the whole thing, or adding a new panel and again costing a lot to install it etc.

We were unable to get answers from the solar reseller, our utility PG&E, the City of San Mateo and various electrical distributors for the panels. It appears that runing up against this code issue is rare, but I suspect it will become increasingly problematic for those of you who put up large solar systems.

The solar reseller said "do a line side tap" to avoid the panel bus - how the heck do you safely splice together a solar system wire with the wire on the meter side of the panel and meet PG&E requirements? We looked into special splicing lugs, but none could be mounted safely within the PG&E side of the meter. The PG&E inspector had never seen or heard of anyone doing that and was not thrilled by the lug solution sitting on their side of the panel.

The City of San Mateo had no idea - they had not run into this before and had insufficient training.

The panel distributors could not recommend any parts to do a line side tap, no one had asked for this before at the couple of shops I called.

So I turned to an expert on this subject - John Wiles at University of New Mexico, who proved quite helpful. John published a series of papers that ultimately helped us identify a solution. Here is one called Supply Side PV Utility Connections and another called Making the Utility Connection.

What we determined was that, although not ideal, if we could downrate our main house circuit breaker, we could meet the 120% requirement without having to install a new panel and break stucco.

We did a load analysis of the house to show that the house only needed a 175A main breaker. So by switching out the 200A main breaker to 175A, the load would be:

175A (house) + 35A (solar 1)+ 25A (solar 2) = 235A which is < 240A and meets the NEC code.

Our electrician used a simple load analysis spreadsheet available from the Inspection Bureau (IBI) here to do the calculations, going room by room and listing appliances etc. Our house load ended up being about 150A.

We then got the City to sign off, which they did and were very appreciative of my assistance in helping them understand this important safety issue. PG&E signed off too since we did not have to do anything on their side of the meter.

My advice for any of you building a new home: plan in advance, if you expect to put up a large solar system, be sure to provision for a large panel size - my recommendation being 400A - so that you can easily connect the solar system to the panel and have room to grow, rather than deal with the complexities of a line side tap or switching out your panel in the future.

Net Meter vs Time of Use

2007-05-30T21:27:00.000-07:00

We received a letter from PG&E our local utility letting us know that they had re-opened Time of Use "E7" rate metering to electric customers who installed solar this year. They are allowing 5,000 new customers as part of a negotiation they reached with the California Public Utility Commission. My bet is that this was mandated by PUC as part of their monopoly conditions otherwise it has to be a money loser for PG&E and why would they do that?

I checked into the rates, which pay around $0.35/kW and up per minute for peak (noon to 6pm Mon-Fri) and $0.09/kW for off peak and compared this to our current Net Metering rates which simply pay a flat fee no matter what time of day. It turns out that most of our solar is generated between noon and 6pm each day, at least 60%. That means we will be paid for that generation at the higher $0.35 or more rate. We also don't consume much during that time with not much air conditioning or appliance use. I was told by our solar supplier that if you consume <25% of your power usage during peak, it makes sense to go to E7 TOU metering.

So we went ahead and did it. PG&E swapped out the meter at no charge and I've been keeping an eye on the readings. I think we will significantly improve our payback on the equipment as a result. Maybe by 1-2 years.

Keep in mind that they are closing this special "deal" rate when they hit 5,000 customers and you can only apply if your system was commissioned in 2007. The number is 800-468-4743. You are also locked in to that rate for a year so be careful to calculate accurately if it makes sense for you to switch.

It's been nice to see our system gradually generating more power each day as the days get longer. Yesterday we hit 36 KwH with our 5.8 kW system. We're selling back net net these days!

Landscaping

2007-03-09T21:34:00.000-08:00

It's been a while since our last post. We've been enjoying the new house, getting settled in and all. The buzz of people around working on things here has dropped considerably and the project is quickly coming to an end, although we keep saying that and there seem to be new things to do all the time on the landscaping front.

The past couple of months have seen the construction of our deck off the back of the family room, two new fences on each side of the house to create a little more privacy and the follow up on a punch list that is almost down to nothing now. We also upgraded our solar system to add another 1kw (now 6kw) as we were finding our electricity usage a little higher than originally predicted.

The vast majority of work is done on the hardscape. Our previous landscape designer abandoned us recently due to too many commitments but fortunately we connected with Nancy Higgins, a really great planting consultant, who walked through and guided us in 3 hours on our entire plantings list. After much shopping around, we ordered everything from a wholesaler in Stockton, Delta Tree. Normally they do not sell to the general public but we were able to get wholesale pricing through our relationship with our builder Structural FX - half the price of our local nurseries. The plants should arrive in a couple of weeks and that will conclude the landscaping part of our build.

Kitchen

2007-01-12T22:04:00.000-08:00

Here is the completed kitchen. The cabinets were Thomasville cottage in natural cherry (available at your local Home Depot, who have great free design services). The key in making them look custom is to add "skins" to the outside to finish them nicely on sides facing you. We also added light rail along the bottom to hide the florescent lights under the cabinets and a modified crown moulding along the top, making the band a little thicker be adding in a section of "skin" between the crown, thin scribe moulding to hide the gap between cabinet and wall and light rail. The same pattern was pulled all the way around the kitchen to give it a nice consistent look. All this courtesy of some clever designing by Structural FX on site.

The counters are Tan Brown pre-fab granite. We ordered these from EMG out of Concord, CA mainly because they were the only ones with the 52" x 9 foot pre fab island. I have to say, buying pre fab is a huge savings if you can find stone you like, at least 1/3 the price of a custom stone job. EMG did all the slab cuts and cut out the sinks, faucets and built one side of the island bullnose on site. The tile you see along the back splash and under the vent is a copper tile. It's real copper in squares covers that are fitted over a ceramic base. It takes a special epoxy grout and sealer combo to finish it and once that is applied, there is no further maintenance and the copper should not change color.

The appliances - Sub Zero 601R refrigerator with stainless steel door, Sub Zero 601F Freezer overlaid in cherry to hide the unit near our mini office area, Sub Zero 424S under counter wine cooler which has a neat two zone control for whites and red, viking 36" range top with griddle already used several times now to make pancakes, Thermador microwave/convection combo double oven, Miele Incognito dishwasher, Vent a Hood 42" chimney vent, KitchenAid trash compactor and an additional GE microwave in the island near the refrigerator to heat up leftovers.

A few observations: the Sub Zero 424S is a little noisy especially at night you here it clicking on/off. The fridge and freezer are awesome with their layouts for storage inside. The Viking range kicks butt on heat and quickly cools down. The Vent a Hood magic lung is unbelievably cool - the smoke goes straight up, curls around into the side "magic lungs" and the grease gets pulverized - no cleaning, no smell at all. It's superb and the sales guy was absolutely right to say this is hands down the best in the industry and puts our previous high end Wold vent to shame. The Miele dishasher is so quiet you really have to put your ear next to it and listen carefully to hear that it started up. The top utensil tray takes a little getting used to as you cannot just plunk the utensils down, you have to organize them into little holders all stacked one after the other. Once you get used to it, it's ok and it makes emptying the dishwasher a lot easier. The unit does a great job at cleaning. No rinsing needed before putting the dirty dishes in. Having the extra microwave near the fridge is really nice. We use it all the time. The Insinkerator pro SS units in the sink work great - very quickly mashing up the mess. We're glad we chose the Grohe Europlus II faucets for the main sink and island. They work very well.

Our cabinet layout is working out great so far. We arranged to have all the cutlery and zip lock storage near the fridge and dishwasher. It makes putting leftovers away and packing kids lunches really easy. The only thing we miss is having a slide out type drawer under the range top. We got used to this at our rental house kitchen and it could not be done in our new kitchen because the range top has to sit pretty deep in the cabinet. We still have two shelves under there so it's fairly easy to pull out pots and pans. The narrow cabinet that is in the indented part where we sit has become the liquor cabinet, a good spot. We have all the baking stuff on the back side of the island next to the wine cooler. Having two sinks back to back is also working out great. The main sink, a deep and huge Franke stainless, can hold a mountain of dishes. The smaller Franke stainless in the island is great for food preparation. The double can recylcing cabinet next to the trash compactor makes it very easy to recycle but it tends to fill up rather quickly as it doesn;t hold that much. I don't think there is any good solution to this but ours works well.

The bay window in the middle provides fantastic light but we ordered some faux wood shades that are on the way as we have a view straight into our neighbors master bedroom due to the set back of the house. The four Hubbardton Kakomi pendant lights throw off a lot of light and are very elegant. I hate to think what electricity they are using up. We're fortunately mitigating this with our newly commissioned solar power system up and running for two days now. It's nice to see our electric meter turning backwards during the day!

Having a big pantry is something we should have always had. Easy to see everything you have so you stop buying duplicate products every week at the grocery store and you actually use things up more efficiently. It has adjustable shelves and stores a huge amount of food, small appliances and various other sundries. Access to the attic is through our pantry with a pull down door. Not the greatest spot for the door as it bumps into a lot of things but we didn't have much choice.

Overall we're very pleased. The only complaint is that because we ordered our kitchen in advance of the framing of the windows, we had to be a little too conservative on the width of our cabinets to allow slack for the bay window. Now that the window is in, we could have had much wider glass cabinets and this is where we store our dishes. I'll forever be reminded of that now since we have to open two doors to put a dish plate into the cabinet - darn it. In retrspect we should have waited to order these two cabinets until after the window went in.

Cable Rail Staircase

2007-01-12T21:52:00.000-08:00

A photo of the completed cable rail on our staircase. We had a metal rail custom welded and powder coated in "antique penny" color. The posts were welded to the top section and a couple of T footings were bolted to the floor so the whole thing would slide into place and could be locked down with a screw in each T footing. That made it a lot easier to assemble and lock it down.

We sourced our cable railes from Ultratec sold by the Cable Connection. We used 3/16" stainless steel cable that had a "stud" swaged on one end (machine clamped on). The stud screws into a lock fitting that you can get of various lengths to fit through the rail post width you choose. At the other end, the cable has nothing on it and you cut it to length and put a self locking fitting on that end once it is in place in the rail post. Then you tighten the lock fitting with an allen key. It's a little tricky to do, especially trying to turn a cable 90 degrees in a post. You're not supposed to do that because it's really hard but Structural FX pulled it off. It looks really nice with the Hubbardton lights we chose around it and beige berber carpet.

Slate Fireplace

2007-01-12T21:45:00.000-08:00

Here is a photo of the completed slate surround on our fireplace. It took two shipments from Vermont Natural Stone but the second time the shipper worked out great (Old Dominion) with no damage. It was glued together with some metal anchor hooks in the back of the main column and mantel pieces to hook it into the wall. Most of the pieces facing out are natural split stone (rough surface) and then we had a few edges honed like the mantel piece which is one long 74" slab that came out of Pennsylvania. The grey middle pieces are "J-grey" slate. We used a pewter colored grout and then covered the whole thing in a high gloss wet look style sealer.

The fireplace insert is a Napoleon NZ26. It's a superb unit that draws air from outside through heating tubes and has an automatic thermostat to blow hot air into the house. I've had a hard time burning 3 small California oak logs in a 3 hour period, that's how efficient it is.

All that remains is to put a metal trim bar around the transition from the slate to the fireplace insert where you can still see the drywall a little. I also need to figure out a way to get a screen on this baby. We like to hear the crackling sound which you cannot do if you close the main door. You are supposed to operate it door closed but it's nice to hear that crackling.

We're very pleased with the way it all turned out. Thanks to the Structural FX team who did the assembly.

We're Moved in!

2007-01-06T20:44:00.000-08:00

We're way behind on a blog post because.....we've been frantically unpacking and getting settled in. The movers arrived on Dec 22 and we got ourselves into the house, which was in great shape thanks to a hurculean effort on the part of the crews.

So lets back up and update you on what's been happening the past few days:

- Our slate arrived from Vermont Natural Stone, this time shipped by Old Dominion freight, a much better shipper than SAIA that wrecked our last batch. All arrived in order and was installed on Friday. I'll get a picture out soon enough, it looks terrific. We tried out our Napoleon fireplace during the holidays and it works just great.

- Our half bath granite vessel, automatic sink faucet from Faucet Decor and Toto washlet were all hooked up. If you have never tried a washlet before, I highly encourage it. We had to add a magazine rack in the bathroom...you have to love that heated seat and the warm air dryer.

- The cable rail was finished on the stairway. It was a challenge to get it all to connect right in a tight spot but Brian and Barney of Structural FX made it work. I have to say, it looks awesome and makes the staircase area really stand out now.

- The carpet was all installed just before we moved in. No problems and high praise for Paul Ondricek who carried out the work. He even came back on a Saturday to finish our stairway just before Christmas.

- Once we moved in, we logged a list of minor issues that needed to be addressed, pretty normal for a new house. Things like screws missing, trim pieces not quite sticking, plumbing switched around. Brian and team quickly addressed these and the list is getting down to almost nothing.

- Above and beyond the call of duty, the Structural FX team helped with a lot of other things outside the scope of their work - putting up blinds and bike hooks, helping move stuff in, cutting extra shelves etc. We're really thankful for that and it's made our move much more pleasant.

- Jason and the painting crew came through once more to touch up all the little dings made during the move and frantic days leading to our getting in the house.

- the deck work started with concrete being poured for the main pillars and the sub structure went up Friday. If all goes well, we should have a deck out of the family room patio door on Monday! This is the last major project being tackled, everything else is just wrapping up.

- the landscaping crew continues to make good progress. They completed the irrigation systems across the property, finished the bender boards for the planters and laid out sod which we sourced from the Grass Farm in Gilroy. We used their special blend of primarily fescue grass. The sod was well needed, providing a welcome escape from the mud. All that is left on the hardscape is to finish a wall hugging the house under the deck and complete some stairs cut into it. Next up will be plantings.

Speaking of fences, we had a nasty wind storm here the day after Christmas and it ended up blowing down one of our fences. We'll have to change that one early now and have talked to our neighbor about it, who seem willing to split the cost. At the same time, a huge gust of wind ended up lifting our landscape trailer and crashing it into our car causing some nasty bumper damage. I've never seen a gust like that and it makes you appreciate what it muct be like in a hurricane.

We have yet to connect our solar system to the grid. We've been disappointed of late with Ready Solar. The latest gaffe was that we have the wrong inverter designed into our system. We expect to have the proper one in couple of weeks although we've lost some 6 weeks already on hooking our system up and generating power.

Aside from this, the project is coming to an end. It will be sad to see the crew leave but what an awesome house they have left behind for us to enjoy! And what must be a record build - 7 months from complete tear down to move in. We could only hope to build another house with Structural FX!

The Office is Up and Running!

2006-12-17T17:18:00.000-08:00

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

2006-12-10T07:57:00.000-08:00

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

2006-12-03T20:35:00.000-08:00

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

2006-12-01T19:51:00.000-08:00

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

2006-11-25T12:38:00.000-08:00

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

2006-11-20T19:40:00.000-08:00

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!

2006-11-12T19:46:00.000-08:00

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

2006-11-03T19:39:00.000-08:00

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

2006-10-28T20:15:00.000-07:00

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

2006-10-27T19:24:00.000-07:00

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

2006-10-25T19:56:00.000-07:00

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

2006-10-24T19:59:00.000-07:00

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

2006-10-20T15:36:00.000-07:00

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

2006-10-14T17:10:00.000-07:00

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

2006-10-13T20:46:00.000-07:00

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

2006-10-04T09:38:00.000-07:00

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

2006-10-04T09:24:00.000-07:00

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

2006-10-04T08:58:00.000-07:00

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.

Windows, Electrical, More Dirt

2006-09-29T19:58:00.000-07:00

Another busy week at the site with at least 10 people doing various jobs. The windows were all installed in 3 days. This included strapping the walls to protect from earthquakes.

The electrical work continued with all the can lights in place and the wire pulls being done. We have a massive amount of cable coming into our utility room - the communications wires for telephone and Internet throughout the house and one of two electrical panels. We've all been putting our heads together with the Structural FX team, mainly John who is heading up the electrical work, to cover all grounds - landscape lights, Christmas lights with timers, outdoor lights, locations of light switches, electric plugs. It's important to get all this done now before the walls get closed up.

We had to order some special gear for termination of the communications and AV equipment. We went with a HDMI cable for the TV that will be buried behind the wall and pulled to our AVR receiver. That should over us for video and sound and clean up the wiring. We also went with Seimon S66 punch blocks with modular jacks for the telephone cable (also using CAT5e) connections. This allows a punchdown block for direct line terminations to dedicated lines like Tivo, fax, cordless phone, but also RJ11 extensions for our PBX which will run throughout the house (a small Lucent/Avaya Partner 12 extension system we picked up on eBay that handles up to 5 lines, does conference calling, intercom etc). We also ordered Leviton CAT5e termination panels for the Internet cables and a Terk 5 x 8 multiswitch for the coax cables which allows for 8 coax extensions connected to 2 satellite dishes and 1 TV cable. All of this will be elegantly mounted in some large in-wall electric panels that Brian/John bought including the cable modem router and Linksys router.

The HVAC installation is moving along, although I never really see this crew. They are buried under the crawl space of the house placing the furnaces and AC. We went over the optimal placement of all the vents to ensure a good flow of air. The engineering of this is complex and important to get the flow right.

We had our interior designer Nancy Linebarrier pop in to help with color coordination. All of this was prompted by an urgent need to pick a roof color. We decided on colors for exterior paint, roof, pavers for the driveway and back yard entertaining patio, retaining walls and trim. Whew! It was a good thing we looked around the neighborhood the past few weeks to determine what we liked and narrowed down the choices.

For our exterior lights, we ordered Hubbardton Forge 5893 sconces for the front and Minka Lavery Great Outdoor 71197 for the back.

Next week the plan is to finish up the rough electrical, plumbing (almost all done now) and HVAC to prepare for an interior inspection by the City. Also in parallel will be the roof and solar panel frame/jacks. After the inspection, the walls and ceilings will be insulated and the sheetrock goes up which will take about 3 weeks. The exterior stucco will start too. Then it's on to tiling and cabinets...the end is clearly visible now!

3 Month Milestone

2006-09-20T20:01:00.000-07:00

So here we are exactly 3 months after the demolition work was completed on the main house. This week so far the gables are up on the garage, chimney, windows are starting to go in, electrical is in full swing, HVAC started today and a ton of other little details I'm no doubt forgetting. It's impressive just how efficient the Structural FX crew is!

Roof is Up

2006-09-16T20:55:00.000-07:00

This week saw the completion of the trusses over all the roof and the sheathing of the roof with plywood. The progress has been absolutely stunning. It's an enclosed structure now and you can see how all the rooms size out and will look. See photos of front and back. The front garage doors are closed out right now in the photo as is the front door. We were glad no one was hurt doing the roofing as there was a serious amount of wind here in the Bay Area the past few days, enough to create mini-tornadoes out of the dirt in our back yard.

The Structural FX crew also completed the cutouts for all the windows, which are ready to be installed now. It's impressive to see the team working, about 9 of them on site Friday - 5 doing roofing, 2 on electrical and 2 on plumbing.

The rough plumbing continues to be put in and the electrical just started Thursday. In just 2 days most of the boxes and lights are positioned. The team has been very proactive in making recommendations on things we forgot - provisioning for Christmas lights and outdoor low voltage landscape lighting, additional light switch boxes for outside lights, slight changes to inside switches, and addressing our list of desirables based on the finishing we bought - e.g., electric plug near the toilet for washlet. We also went over the communications, alarm wiring and speakers throughout the house. It's relatively easy to modify things now but very important to get this done now or it will not be easy when the walls start to be closed up.

Next week the HVAC work should start, electrical continues for 2 weeks or so, window installations, bathtub placements and possibly some leveling of dirt and preparation for retaining walls in back. There are also a lot of "L" shaped frames to build for all the coffers in the ceiling, some 120 of them which will be a job in itself!

Raising The Roof

2006-09-06T17:10:00.000-07:00

The past week Structural FX finished the shear walls around the house and prepared the garage foundation for pouring the concrete slab. The slab turned out great.

Yesterday, right on schedule after the Holiday, the trusses arrived from Hopkins Truss company on a truck with a huge crane. I was surprised that it could be moved into the driveway area but clearly the fellow operating the crane was a real skilled pro. It was one of those cranes that has a long extending arm designed to lift the trusses off the truck and place them at various strategic points on top of the walls. They are then spread out by hand and nailed together with the cross pieces.

The framing crew is hard at work now placing the trusses and should be done by end of week, an amazingly fast 3 days to put the entire roof up. The windows should arrive Friday so the pressure is remains on! The electrical work will also start later this week.

Shear Walls are Up

2006-08-26T22:34:00.000-07:00

This week saw the construction of the shear walls around the entire outer perimeter. In addition, there was a lot of work to bolt down the framed walls to the foundation and "square" the walls using a winch. The outer shear walls are all plywood and the windows are mostly covered as they will cut them out with a saw later. The garage also got framed out. It's really looking like a house now!

We spent some time finishing off the items for our half bath. We ended up going with a black slate slab that will be suspended from the wall, sourced from our same vendor Vermont Natural Stone who are currently cutting our fireplace mantel stone. We will place a stone cut vessel from Stone Forest, their natural vessel sink with faucet mount, in green/grey granite. It has a nice rough outer bowl and will go well with a black natural slate surface. For the faucet, we chose the new Water Decor Bridge model with Radius technology, an automatic infrared sensor to start the faucet automatically. It should be funky cool with our Toto electronic bidet cover with remote control.

It's also been a busy week on the landscaping front continuing to clear out the back creek area as we have one more big demolition pile to remove. Unfortunately it's filled with 40+ years of crap being dumped in there - old water heater, clay flower pots, metal bins, pipes, etc etc. and a ton of dead branches. Fortunately we were able to get the great help of our previous gardener Vicente and his assistant Noela.

I was able to get a few more truck loads of free dirt delivered this weekend in preparation for back filling the garage area next week and pouring the floor slab. The week after the Labor Day the trusses should arrive and the windows too. It will be neat to see the trusses placed on the roof with a crane.

All our kitchen and bathroom cabinets arrived recently, taking a huge amount of space in our garage and shed. Luckily that should be it for voluminous stuff. We'll order the carpet in a few weeks when they can take it at the house.

It's winding down in terms of ordering things. All we have left are a few light fixtures, carpet, mirrors and furniture. Thank goodness, we're getting pretty sick of all these purchases in a compressed timeframe.

Speaking of furniture, a GREAT recommendation from a friend - House of Values in San Mateo. If you can live without a showroom and simply bring the exact specs on what you found elsewhere, they offer a 30-40% discount off most other stores. We saved about $3K spending an hour there. They can totally beat other retailers by accepting a lower margin and they have very low overhead at their store. But be prepared to have the exact spec beforehand - name of manufacturer and fabric codes. They can pretty much get anything you need.

And the Walls were Raised!

2006-08-19T20:07:00.000-07:00

It took the better part of the week but all the walls were raised on Thursday and Friday. The entire main floor is now framed! Wow, it looks great!!

It's interesting to see how the rooms look a lot bigger once the framing is up versus when the wall layout is placed only on the floor. I guess it is the 3D perspective that really alters perspective. I'm not sure what that says about reviewing your architect's design before the framing is complete. It might be better to trust your contractor's instinct on room sizes before making any drastic changes.

Also in the picture is a load of dirt we got for free on Craigslist. I posted an add requesting clean fill and someone who was digging a crawl space responded. They dropped off 3 dump truck loads, about 30 cubic yards, of nice stuff. However, it looks like that will barely make a dent in the front yard! Fortunately, one of Brian's crew - "framer Dave" - his father is in the excavation business and has set aside 150 cubic yards of great quality dirt for us which will be available in a couple of weeks. I guess we underestimated all the slopes on our property and the demolition took quite a bit of dirt away.

In preparation for the arrival of megadirt, I spent the day Saturday cleaning up the backyard creek. What a nightmare. 20 years of the previous owner dumping all sorts of crap back there - branches, flower pots, fences, metal, glass jugs, pipes, barbed wire etc etc. Some people just have no respect for nature which is really sad. We even had a full telephone post back there all chopped into 4 foot sections buried under the ivy vines. It's amazing how creosote preserves wood, it must have been 20+ years old and was still in decent shape despite being buried under a foot of dirt and roots.

Next week Structural FX will start framing the garage and put the shear walls (plywood covering all the frame) on the two floors. They ordered the trusses for the roof this past week which should be here in a couple of weeks. The windows will arrive almost the same time. The pace continues to be blazing fast. We're expecting a huge bonus on our garage trusses. Brian dropped these down and we should be able to get another 30 foot x 10 foot room up there! That should make a great artist loft or playroom for the kids.

One unexpected arrival this past week was all our kitchen cabinets from Thomasville, 2 weeks early. It was a huge load that took a good 4 hours to open and check and then stack in our storage gazebo. It looks like only one was damaged and we're missing 3 other parts which we'll follow up with the shipper and Thomasville. Our Kraftmaid cabinets are still outstanding but should be here in a week.

Also arrived: the door hardware from Omnia, amazingly took only a week; the Viking rangetop and Vent a Hood range hood - took 2 months - and the tile - took 2 weeks.

Next on the list: searching for lights - mini-pendants for our kitchen island, chandeliers, vanity lights for the bathrooms, scones, hall lights and outdoor units. We also placed the order for the fireplace slate this week - we ended up going with Vermont Natural Stoneworks who were 50% less than the other quotes we got. After getting their samples, we were content to proceed. Brian will get some local epoxy to glue these together. This will look fabulous when done!

Changeorders

2006-08-15T20:39:00.000-07:00

I recall having a conversation with Brian our builder recently about how most contractors make their money on changeorders. It's the dirty secret of the business and it's something you should definitely be aware of. We got into the conversation just as another potential customer was asking why Brian's quote was higher.

In bidding for a job, an unscrupulous contractor might specify a low grade of lumber, low quality windows, cheap carpet, low allowances for finishings and a whole myriad of tricks. As an unsuspecting home owner, you just don't know what you are getting in the quote because it is very hard to spec everything out in advance as you would want it and then compare apples to apples on quotes. Then you sign the contract and you are totally stuck. Everytime you are disatisfied with the material spec in the quote, its "changeorder time" and you can get totally raked over the coals on price with no choice now. Beware!

Fortunately, our builder Structural FX doesn't operate this way and we have not had to experience that. The changeorders we've had have been extremely well handled with very reasonable price changes - often none at all or simply materials, not labor, even on some significant items like additional foundation height and walls! That's what we really like about them, they are totally honest and willing to work with you to make the best of any issues that come up.

It's something you should ask the references for your contractor about - how they handle changeorders - and try if possible to get someone who knows about building to help you ask the right questions on the quote they provide - what kind of lumber, where from (call the lumberyard to ask if this is their best quality or what the tradeoffs are), windows, doors, roof type, electrical finishings, plumbing materials etc etc. Do your homework here and it will pay off big time.

Preparing the Frame

2006-08-15T20:36:00.000-07:00

Here is a photo of what it looks like as they are preparing the framing for each room. It is all laid flat until all the frame sections are ready and will be assembled in a day to keep it from blowing over. It was good to see the rooms laid out on the floors before the framing was done as we ended making a slight change to the master bathroom to open it up a little more.

Custom Slate Fireplace Mantel

2006-08-11T14:41:00.000-07:00

One of the neat projects we're working on to create some real uniqueness in our house is a custom slate fireplace. My father had built one in his house some 15 years ago and fortunately still had the original design in his files. We purchased the same fireplace insert from Napoleon (NZ26) and like the height that it sits in this mantel. The fireplace also carries lots of nice memories.

First step was locating sources of slate in Vermont and NY. After searching on the Internet, I came across these companies:

- Vermont Natural Stoneworks
- Sheldon Slate (this was where my father got his slate)
- Vermont Slate Depot
- Vermont Marble & Slate
- RMG Stone

Next I drew up a spec sheet of the different blocks I would need cut and whether to have the surface be "natural" meaning hand cut and with a rough natural look or "honed" aka "gauged" meaning cut and sanded smooth. Our mantel will have rough faces on everything facing you except the top shelf which will be honed, and the rest all honed.

Prices vary widely by manufacturer with Vermont Natural Stoneworks coming it the best so far. I've ordered some samples of their stone, black and "grey strata" aka "J grey" which is the grey with black specs/fossils in it. Unfortunately we're going to get hammered with high shipping costs all the way to California, but c'est la vie. It should be well worth it. Brian of Structural FX assures me it will be no problem to install this.

Floor and Framing Rooms

2006-08-11T14:40:00.000-07:00

Another brutal hot week on the job site but the Structural FX crew has been very busy finishing the main floor and preparing the layouts of the rooms to start framing these next week. It's really impressive to see the progress in just a few days. In addition to the main floor, they also completed the concrete pour for the garage foundation.

As for us, it's been a little less hectic as we've made good progress crossing a lot off the todo list. We placed our tile order after deciding to stick to one shop to buy it all, where we had taken our interior designer who helped us select matching tiles for our cabinets. It was probably going to be a wasted exercise shopping the tile around given there is just too much variety in this. We nontheless got the standard 10% designer discount.

After much searching, we finally selected our front door. We wanted something simple like a shaker style but with little windows along the top. It would have been nice to get this all in fiberglass, much longer lasting and less maintenance, but we settled for Brazilian Mahogany. We had to take an off the shelf door with 6 squares for light and have them replace that with an 8 square panel. A little more expensive but it will look better especially with beveled glass.

We bought it at www.wholesaledoorsource.com in Texas. It is a hybrid between this one

http://www.wholesaledoorsource.com/Doors/Door.asp?DoorID=165

and this one

http://www.alpineglass.com/doors/details.php/id/1566/type/door/

It's the same door as Alpine but with the 8 panels in the Wholesale picture. There will be no shelf. We're amazed at the very reasonable pricing for Brazilian Mahogany with these doors made in Indonesia.

We've also finished researching the granite. Last weekend I went across the bay to Hayward to check out Jerong. They had great (unbelievably low) prices for prefab granite and also granite tile. About half the prices I have seen here on the Peninsula. Unfortunately they do not deliver anything so I will have to get our contractor to help us pick it up since we decided to have the installation done by another company out of Concord (EMG) who will not do pickup of other granite. EMG will be supplying our kitchen granite, one of the only stores we've found that carries prefab islands in the large 4' x 9' size. We've already set those stones aside and put a deposit on them.

While driving back from Jerongs I noticed a lot of activity at another Costco like sized warehouse called Uni-Tile. I turned around and went back to check it out. It was total chaos in there with about 50 cars in the parking lot jammed in and 4 pickups loading granite continuously, forklifts zipping around back and forth, frantic workers moving loads of granite. Welcome to the front lines of made in China!

Their prices were comparable to Jerong, some cheaper some better, but they had a much larger inventory with over 120,000 square feet of warehouse display. I would highly advise making the trip to see both Jerongs and Uni-Tile. The prices are fabulous and there is no excuse not to do granite at these prices.

We selected the handlsets for all the doors inside the house. This was a hassle exercise as there are a lot of choices out there and few showrooms with complete collections to try them out. We looked at Schlage (too limited selection, but cheap), Baldwin (ok, not great for contemporary), FSB (super nice but privacy locks are lousy - separate mechanism not on the handle), Inox (nice but too new, could not get decent pricing on the Internet), Epitome (really nice, small line, but looks like a 1 man show and I'm not sure what sort of support we'll get if there is a problem). We ultimately settled on Omnia, great value and lots of styles. We went with the stainless steel model 32 to maintain simplicity. We're thinking of going with the Epitome front latchset, which is unique, and take a chance on service. Our local hardware store says they have not had any problems yet with them. I tried calling their HQ but it goes to one person's voicemail and I have yet to reach a live person. The Omnia was cheapest on Homeannex.com, about 35% less than my "discount" local hardware store even after they offered a 25% discount.

We also selected the interior doors from the same lumber shop supplying all our wood - Sierra Lumber. They are piggybacking it off the big wood order so prices are pretty attractive averaging about $200/door or so for MDF prefinished. We selected the TruStile Modernist TS1000 model- nice, simple, contemporary.

I also found a carpet installer who is willing to just do the install work! He was a recommendation from one of the crew members at Structural FX and very reasonable. He has no problem with me ordering it all from Georgia and will help take the final measurements for quantity.

Ceiling/Floor in Back & Garage Foundation

2006-08-04T17:25:00.000-07:00

It was truly amazing to see the speed with which the back floor was put up. All in a day's work with the limiting factor being some materials being shipped in from far away that did not make it in time. Several big shipments should arrive this weekend, including a massive load of 41 foot long TJI joists for the front floor on Monday. Next week will they be finishing the front floor and the walls on the main first floor from front to back of the house.

The Structural FX crew was also busy preparing the foundation for the garage in front, the last bit of foundation work remaining.

It was nice standing on the master bedroom floor and taking in the view at last.

Rat Proofing

2006-08-01T14:26:00.000-07:00

Here is Lance of Lucky Lance Concrete Pumping company pouring the "rat proofing" on the upper level of our house. This layer of concrete, about 2" thick, is used to seal everything at the dirt level and as they say keep the rats out. Lance did all our pouring so far and has been super at showing up on time and on quick notice.

The Structural FX crew was on hand back filling the foundation and preparing to work on the upper floor. Here's Barney working the mini backhoe.

A large order of joists arrived as well as plywood for the back section of the house. Unfortunately the longer front joists are only going to arrive next Monday, delayed because they are being made out of state. The team plans to install the back section en masse tomorrow. Brian said "we'd be able to dance on our bedroom floor Wednesday".

We're trying now to find free clean fill as we are missing dirt on the project site in a pretty major way. There seem to be quite a few postings on Craigslist for this and we are checking these out.

Framing Done in Back

2006-07-28T21:13:00.000-07:00

It did not take long (less than a week) but the framing is in place in the back lower part of the house and the Structural FX crew made good progress in preparing the front foundation for the single story that will extend all the way to the back over the downstairs part. Next week should be more dirt moving to fill in the foundation in front and finish digging the last of the foundation for the front garage.

We made another trip with our interior designer to a local hardware showroom to check out cabinet hardware, doors and crown moulding. It took about an hour to pick it all out. We spent another couple of evening hours searching on the web for cheap prices. There are tons of sites out there to choose from. The key is in marking down the model you want or manufacturer and checking their web site for the exact model, then entering that into a shopper site like shopping.com or froogle.com. Prices were about half of our local showroom.

The front door has been proving to be a little challenging. We want a simple shaker type panel door with squares at the top for light, 8 in all (not 6 like most of them come in). We ideally wanted to go fiberglass and Jeld-Wen had a nice model - Aurora, Craftman, priced around $2,600 but only 6 light squares. If the door faces south and is exposed to the sun (i.e., the porch should be as deep as the door is high to avoid light hitting it), a wood door will need re-finishing every 2-3 years, costly and a pain to do. Fiberglass is amazingly similar to wood grain and lasts much longer. Too bad we can't find the model we want!

Jeld-Wen has a Mahogany door with 8 windows but it's a little steep around $4K. We found a few web sites with Brazilian Mahogany (fabricated in Indonesia) with 6 panel doors selling around $1,300 delivered. We're having Wholesaledoorsource.com take out the 6 panel top and swap in an 8 panel beveled clear glass for about $2,000. Not bad!

We're just about done shopping for our granite. Some great deals to be had splitting the material order up to take advantage of best pricing by stone across the Bay Area. We'll consolidate the shipments at our house and found an installer who will just do install and doesn't care where we buy the materials from (New Art Stone in Stockton). We called a few of his references to check out there work and all looks good. By shopping around this way, we're finding our granite cost should be half of what some of the other single source Bay Area locals charge!

We're also just about done ordering tile after our blitz visit with the designer last week. This is probably not worth shopping around for. You could spend tons of time and end up saving very little. Better to focus elsewhere.

A friend pointed me to an excellent interior door supplier in Ohio - www.interiordoors.com Great prices on hardwood doors and the construction is really nice. We're not sure we'll ultimately go with them as I think we're settling on a paint grade MDF door.

We placed the order for all our windows. Pella provided our contractor with some nice pricing and they should be beautiful. They will be here in about 4 weeks.

Thomasville and Kraftmaid called to confirm our cabinet orders are being built. They will both be ready in 4 weeks, quite a bit faster than I thought. I'll have to make some serious room in our garage and outdoor gazebo now!

Last but not least - the fireplace mantel. We're now leaning towards doing a custom slate mantel in black and dark grey. My father designed and built his 14 years ago and it still looks superb. We think it will fit in well with our contemporary style interior and be a "piece de resistance". It's just one of those great warm reminders of home and we'd like to replicate it. I've been researching and calling some of the slate quarries in Vermont and NY to get quotes on custom cutting. More on this to come later as I sort out best pricing.

Home Depot Cabinets

2006-07-23T21:02:00.000-07:00

We placed our order for the cabinets, having finalized all this at last. We ended up changing our door designs several times and even some of the colors. The most helpful aspect was bringing all our tile samples and granite one last time to the store before finalizing the order. We ended up changing 3 of our choices by doing this exercise.

After finalizing, it was time to check out. We placed the order and managed to use a 10% off Lowes coupon which was price matched. In addition, Home Depot was having a gift card rebate providing another nice saving. And last but certainly not least, we redeemed the stack of gift cards accumulated through programs like BuySmart (unfortunately no longer available), Everyday Priveledges Gold, purchasing some on eBay at 90% face value and a via a card trading club my brother in law belongs to. We had consolidated these into high denomination face value cards to make it easy for the cash register operator. All of this saved us about 25% in all.

Interior Designer

2006-07-23T20:56:00.000-07:00

We engaged an interior designer, Nancy Linebarier or Habitat Enhancements, who had helped us with the staging of our previous house when we sold it. We really liked her work and felt she understood our taste very well. We had an initial meeting to brief her on all the choices we were making and she helped us finalize our cabinet selections.

Last week we made a trip down to the tile store, a task I was dreading, where she promised to make it a fast process. We went to the store a half hour early to browse and figure out some things we liked, then she showed up and wisked us around. We brought our cabinet door and granite samples and that helped I a lot in matching things.

I can't stress enough how much I would HIGHLY recommend having a designer help with pulling the various colors and elements together. It's a little expensive but totally worth it, both saving you time and making you feel great about your choices. We picked all our tile for the kitchen, 4 bathrooms, laundry room and mudroom in 2 hours! She also helped us pick some really creative things we never would have thought of.

Our next meeting will be to pick doors and cabinet hardware.

Framing Starts

2006-07-19T20:39:00.000-07:00

A nice milestone hit today - the start of the framing! The Structural FX crew poured the front foundation, 6 big cement trucks in all. Fortunately the weather was not as hot as the last couple of days. While that was going on, the framing started on the back of the house. We're seeing our first walls being built up! Tomorrow they will be taking the forms down and preparing for the last foundation work on the garage in front of the house. Now the big checks are being written as all the lumber starts to arrive.

Foundation Ready to Pour

2006-07-17T21:15:00.000-07:00

The Structural FX team have once again hit their target having the front foundation ready for inspection tomorrow and it will be poured on Wednesday. They were great at adjusting the height of various walls to account for the slopes and try to make the land as level as possible in front once it is backfilled. Hopefully the weather will turn a little cooler and not be a repeat of the brutal hot day like when they poured the back section foundation. If all hardens well Wednesday they will be pulling forms off on Thursday and ready to backfill early next week.
We will probably have to find some additional dirt to fill in the missing spots but I see a lot of this on Craigslist, especially this time of year in the peak of construction season.

Carpet

2006-07-17T20:36:00.000-07:00

We've been wanting to find the same carpet that was installed in our last house. I was able to save a piece from when the installation was done before we bought that house and brought it to a local carpet store to get a match. It was unfortunately no longer available but we found an almost identical product made by Shaw, berber style with a high wear factor of 3.75. We beat that carpet up at our last house and it still looked great.

With the manufacturer name, style number and color, I set out to find the best deal on the web. It turns out there is a huge concentration of carpet production in Dalton, GA, "the carpet capital" of the US. If you search on "Discount Wholesale Carpet Dalton" in your search engine, a lot of the direct to the mill companies will come up. None of them post prices as far as I can tell but you fill out a form on their site for a quote and generally they get back within a day to quote.

I was able to get 7 quotes in no time and they were at a substantial discount to what my local carpet store could do, about 35% less on materials even with shipping costs. I was told be a friend who experienced the same that it's a strange industry where you as a consumer can more than often get cheaper prices than the local carpet store because of all the middlemen they go through. These mills are all able to make or source the exact same thing so there is a big advantage to buying online and finding a local installer. Every one of them also offered to store our carpet for as long as necessary at no charge until we needed it here.

Try this site to get multiple quotes at once:

http://www.carpetbuyershandbook.com/

Here are a few of the companies that quotes and were particularly great on price for us:

American Carpet Wholesalers
Becklers
Advantage Carpet
Georgia Carpet
Carpet Wholesale Outlet
Owen Carpet

Snapshot of Todo List at this Stage

2006-07-10T22:25:00.000-07:00

Here is a list of things keeping us busy on evenings and weekends on the project at this stage:

- Researching faucets and fixtures

- Seeking out prefab granite sources and matching color patterns

- Completing the kitchen and bathroom cabinet choices with our Home Depot designer

- Completing our solar rebate forms with the state of CA (our panels and casings should arrive by end of July)

- Finding a front door (uugh! too many choices out there)

- Gearing up to look at tile (even bigger uugh! way too many choices)

- Seeking out a designer to help us tie various elements together like tile, granite, cabinet colors and paint (expensive but probably well worth it for a few hours)
- Keeping our eyes open for examples of exterior house colors we like
- Rounding up the last of the appliances: rangetop, ventilation, microwave, custom trim kit for microwave to fit in Home Depot cabinets (nice resource: www.microtrim.com, good and cheap!)
- Seeking out a landscape architect who can do a master plan at reasonable cost so we can figure out where to place dirt that's piling up. Listing what's important to us for the yard that we want to incorporate.
- Tracking expenditures on the project and dealing with the increasing accounting issues

Foundation in Front

2006-07-10T21:27:00.000-07:00

Work has been continuing on the front part of the house the past week. The forms are being laid out to prepare for a concrete pour middle of next week. The Structural FX team also completed the slab floor on the back section, which looks terrific now that it has all hardened and the dirt has been piled back up against the walls. The next concrete pour will complete the front section leaving only the foundation around the garage in the very front to do and a pour of "rat proofing" concrete on the ground under the front section of the house. We're all eager to get to that point because it will mean moving on to framing the walls, something that is expected to take about a month but will be highly visible, and the arrival of the roof trusses.

More photos at the link.

Here's the rough schedule according to Brian:
- Next week complete the concrete pour in front
- Start framing the back section of the house week after that and work on the remaining garage foundation
- mid July to mid August framing
- mid August arrival of trusses, about a week to install
- end of August install windows, roofing
- September: HVAC, plumbing, electrical, sheeting, solar power
- October inside finishing work like kitchen cabinets, flooring, bathrooms
- November final finishing work

I also got some additional good resource recommendations by Brian:
- Bedrosians for a huge tile showroom 650-876-0100
- 30 or so shops off highway 101 Bayshore exit to buy tile
- Jerong Products in the East Bay for mantels, marble, granite 510-782-2888
- Sincere Hardware for granite in Oakland 510-835-9988
- Imperial Marble for granite
- Pederson & Arnold 650-343-5603 for custom cabinetry - we might need to get custom cabinets for our master bath and kids bath which are shaped oddly and don't work so well for off the shelf Home Depot cabinets.

I've also had a tough time finding large prefab granite for our island - 4' x 9'. I've found two places that sell it, Grandstone out of Rancho Cordova (916-635-8889) and EMG out of Concord (925-680-6188) but stocks are limited. If anyone knows of others that might carry this large prefab, please let me know!

Filling in the Foundation

2006-06-28T21:19:00.000-07:00

The foundation forms were removed on Monday and Tuesday the Structural FX crew brought in a Bobcat and a mini-excavator to move the dirt around in front. Right on schedule, they filled in the foundation in back, first adding in drains along the bottom over crushed stone, and wrapping the concrete exterior with a plastic membrane.

The demolition folks fom Peninsula Demolition came back Wednesday and removed the remaining debris in back that they could not get when the huge CAT was here a few weeks ago. Brian said this was the first project ever that they were short on dirt. We're going to need more clean fill here as soon as the front foundation is done, hopefully I can locate a bunch for free on Craigslist. I missed one fellow a couple of weeks ago in Walnut Creek who had like 50 dump trucks for free. Surely there will be more like that one.

Follow the link for more photos.

Pouring the Concrete

2006-06-24T09:34:00.000-07:00

The last of the house is now gone and it is one big dirt patch in our back yard. There will be a smaller excavator coming back mid next week to take some last things out of the very back of the yard. The last of the foundation was ripped out and hauled away with 5 trucks working in sequence most of the day Wednesday. There was a lot of contrete to move out of there.

The very next day after the demolition was completed, our contractor Brian and the Structural FX crew did the first concrete pour into the back section. I was really impressed with the crew when our engineer from ASI came and decided a change would be necessary to the back foundation to make the wall deeper. That change was needed to make sure the wall would be solid enough to handle all the weight of the house and unfortunately came after the foundation had been all ready to go.

So the crew on Tuesday, while the demolition was going on and the temperature reach 100 degrees, ripped the back foundation forms off, rented tools to dig out the trench deeper by hand, and rebuilt the back forms, all in an amazing 1 day. I was blown away at how fast they were able to react to what could have been a significant delay.

They poured the entire back section all of Thursday afternoon, 6 cement trucks in all! The cement truck could not back in so they had to pump it in and Brian and a fellow from the cement company handled the 400 lb hose all day. When I caught up with Brian at the end of the day, he was completely wiped out and covered head to toe in cement muck. He said he had not done something like that in 10 years! Reminded me of the work I did a few weekends back ripping out the overgrown shrubbery above the creek. John and Barney of the crew also looked like they had also had a really long day but they were still cheerful despite it all. I can only imagine that this is probably some of the toughest work to do on a house and the 100 degree weather did not help.

Monday they will be tearing down the foundation forms and bringing in a Bobcat to start leveling the dirt all around and preparing for building the front forms. Wednesday the demolition crew will be back for one final haul in back of branches and remaining old sidewalks.

10 Minutes Flat - Part 2

2006-06-21T08:11:00.000-07:00

After a grueling and agonizing process with the City, we've finally got the complete set of approvals of our building plans and the necessary permits. I'm really not impressed with how the City seems to have no regard for who is paying the bills for all these delays. The person who was supposed to sign off on the plans went on vacation without telling us or leaving someone else to push the paper. We had to resort to chasing it through the system.

Anyhow, here we are at last ready to put the pedal to the metal. A day after our permits were granted, here is the arrival of the Beast Part 2 ripping down the last of the house. It was so fast that my contractor barely had time to call me and let me know it was happening. All told, 10 minutes and the whole thing was knocked down and being ground up by the giant metal treads of the CAT.

What was frustrating again was that the inspector had to show up before the demolition could proceed and he gave a window of 9-noon. Of course, the demolition folks showed up at 8:30am ready to go, but had to sit around until noon when the inspector finally showed up. He gave his blessings and they went at it with a vengeance.

In the mean time, the back foundation has been finalized and will be poured on Thursday. The work on the front foundation will start next week.

We also placed our order for our solar system. They filed our R1 permit for the CA rebate and our panels are on order to lock in pricing. We wanted to get the R1 in asap as we heard rumours that CA was going to reduce the rebate rates. We were never able to get any concrete information on this, despite a lot of e-mails and calls to the rebate center which were never returned.

There is also a little flux right now on re-upping the ceiling cap on the number of households PG&E is required to buy back power from on the net metering basis. They will be hitting that ceiling soon this year after which they have no obligation to buy back any more power from new applicants, but there is legislation working its way through CA government to extend the ceiling. It would be darn silly to cap this and thereby ruin the payback economics on a solar investment.

Foundation Work

2006-06-08T20:57:00.000-07:00

It's been a little slower to watch the progress the past couple of weeks. The team at Structural FX are working on the foundation in the back of the house which involves a lot of calculations, careful wood construction and rebar work. They are expecting to pour cement next week.

In the mean time, Brian has been chasing the City getting the last of the building plans through the various departments and making slight modifications to meet their requirements. The final approval for the building plans should be granted next Friday at which time the main house is scheduled to be demolished and the last of the debris in the front of the house cleared.

I've taken the opportunity to further advance our kitchen cabinet and other cabinet designs with the Home Depot kitchen designer who has been great. We're almost done with this now. One more iteration of minor changes and it will be final.

We received our hardwood floor very quickly. It is already taking up a lot of space in the garage but that was expected. It turns out that the same company that quoted me at $10+ sq/ft was the one that delivered it for the company on the Internet that I bought it at $6.50 sq ft. Go figure how that works!!

I also ordered our fireplace. We chose a wood burning fireplace model made by Napoleon, the NZ26. It's the same one my father has and I've seen it in action, it performs superbly. No smoke when you open the door. Totally sealed door. The wood burns with flames rolling all over the top, it looks really neat when a log burns in one of these. It has an automatic thermostat that turns a blower on when it reaches a certain temperature. And best of all, there is no leakage of your warm air from the house outside after the fire burns out. We bought it from fireplacewarehouse.biz in Colorado. It will take a week to get here.

Kitchen Cabinets

2006-05-25T20:55:00.000-07:00

We've been working through our kitchen design, now that the construction plans are finalized and dimensions set for the kitchen. We chose to work with Home Depot's design center. They have some terrific design resources (our contractor recommended we work with Shannon at Home Depot San Mateo, she has been GREAT) and excellent product at very reasinable prices.

First choice was cabinet maker. We liked Thomasville as that was what we had in our previous house. Solid and lasting. We only had one drawer in 5 years that came unglued in the seams and that was because we overloaded it with bakery stuff. We also checked out Kraftmaid which is priced a little less, $1.50/sq ft versus $1.55 for Thomasville. Kraftmaid has more door and stain choices and also more cabinet choices. We're going with Kraftmaid for our bathrooms as we're in need of more flexible cabinet options for the spaces we have there.

For the kitchen, the choice is Thomasville Cottage, simple shaker design. I like the doors better than the Kraftmaid - they are beveled and there is also trim on the drawer doors versus flat on Kraftmaid. We're going with the "light"stain which creates a more even finish versus natural (light is actually darker than natural).

In addition to all the appliances we need to accommodate, we wanted to address these issues in our design:
- recycling bin to hold 2 weeks worth of newspapers and plastics/metals etc (our recycling only comes by every two weeks). Put a slideout unit near the main sink next to the trash compactor.
- dishwasher and trash compactor on either side of the main sink
- drawers and upper cabinets near dishwasher for easy unloading
- mini pantry to hold cereals, everyday dry foods (versus bulkier items going into the main pantry) - next to the fridge
- drawer set for tupperware/ziplock type plastics - in the island
- Lazy susan for big bluky stuff that needs to be close by - put it in the corner
- drawer for cookie pans - put it under the double oven
- cabinets near rangetop for condiments and spices: we wanted a pullout unit but the model Thomasville makes had no flexibility on shelf heights so most of our bottles would not fit, darn. We'll have to use the wall cabinets above the rangetop.
- drawers near rangetop to hold cooking utensils. Two sets either side for symmetry.
- roll out drawer cabinet to hold pots/pans. Under the rangetop.
- second sink back to back with first sink. Often one person is chopping while the other is washing so back to back makes a lot more sense than having to walk around the island.
- small microwave built into the island near the fridge to heat up leftovers easily
- nook area on opposite side of kitchen for the laptop (on the counter next to the freezer) and our two inboxes for mail and paper (tucked neatly in a cabinet under the counter) and side drawer for misc nick nacks like batteries, rubber bands, pencils, tape, etc etc
- larger roll out drawer cabinets for pots and pans. One in the island near the rangetop.

It's all coming together thanks to Shannon! We're using every inch on both sides and a 4' x 9' island in the middle! I had some negotiation to do with Brian our contractor to avoid eating into my space with "spacers" to build in cushion (usually you want to add 1-2" in case the wall is not straight). he said he would reduce the size of the walls from 2x6 to 2x4 giving me two extra inches.

One big piece of advice for you: most cabinets come in increments of 3 inches. If your wall space is exactly a 3 inch increment, you'll lose out on space efficiency because you should build in some spacers. For example, having an 11 foot space (132 inches or 44 x 3" increments means you will lose 3 inches to spacers because there are no off the shelf cabinets that are 1 or 2 inches wider). So my advice would be to build to 11 foot 1" giving you a 1" spacer or 11 foot 2" giving you 2". We got nailed on that issue in several places.

Laundry Sink

2006-05-25T20:40:00.000-07:00

I had the hardest time finding a bog deep laundry sink. I'm really sick of those times when you have to clean out a big cooler, fish tank or other big objects without having to go outside and use the hose. I wanted something made of white ceramic or granite, single bowl rectangular, BIG and DEEP, fits in a 36" cabinet, relatively low cost, undermount and flexible on holes (to accommodate a faucet and pump soap dispenser).

The best I found was a Moen - model 25275 in white. It's meant for a kitchen but measures 30" x 16 5/8 x 10" deep. I would have loved to see one 12" deep but could not find one. I picked it up for $385 at www.homeannex.com

If anyone out there knows of a better model please let me know!

Wood Floors

2006-05-25T20:29:00.000-07:00

I had a chance to visit a showroom in South San Francisco called Golden State Flooring and check out my contractor's recommendation, WFI (Wood Flooring International). They also had Mirage and BF111 models.

The short of my information gathering:

- All three companies are targeting the same higher end market and make a very nice engineered hardwood.
- engineered hardwood is much more durable and scratch resistant than regular hardwood. It is coated in aluminum oxide which provides extra scratch resistance.
- if you have a concrete floor, engineered is the best choice as it is best glued down. It can also be nailed or glued to a wood floor base but it is cheaper to use thick hardwood over this subfloor.
- you are not supposed to sand the engineered hardwood unless you first remove the aluminum oxide coating with a chemical and then reapply it afterwards.
- very important to make sure your crawl space under the floor is sealed from the ground. If you have a crawl space, best to put a 6 millimeter plastic sheet across all the ground and stapled up the sides with bricks to hold it down. This keeps humidity from hitting under the floor and causing floorboards to bend.
- 1 month leadtime on order for the type I want - American Woods Collection red oak.
- you need to leave the wood a week at the new house to "climatize" - i.e., adjust to the moisture content where it will be installed.

Since my contractor highly recommended WTI, having installed multiple brands, I think we're going to go with this one. Even though it will be attached over a wood subfloor, that should still be ok. Golden State quoted me $10.78/sq ft which is way higher than prices on the Internet at $6.60 sq ft - check out

www.hardwooddirect.com
www.hardwoodinstaller.com
www.fastfloors.com

Foundation Prep in Back

2006-05-24T20:55:00.000-07:00

Barney and John of Structural FX have been hard at work leveling the back, packing it down and taking measurements for the foundation. With the lines marked out, I can get a really good idea now of how the house fits into the yard and the various views from each window. This picture is the back section of the house, the basement level, which has the media room and two home offices/bedrooms on the lwoer level. The family room and master bedroom will be located over the top of this section too.

Great Big Sandbox

2006-05-24T10:09:00.000-07:00

The last few days we've seen a lot of dirt being moved around to prepare for the foundation work. The plan is to finish the digging today and start to build the forms for the back of the house (basement section). The rain over the weekend certainly did not help with the backhoe getting seriously stuck in the mud on Monday. Fortunately it dried out later that day and they have been at it for two days now with a backhoe and Bobcat.

I asked the crew to try to flatten out the lower back section of the yard which they have been doing but I have to say I am a little perplexed on what to do back there. I have yet to get a landscape architect to take a look.

I mentioned in my last blog post the shenanigans at City Hall for approval of the demo of our main house. We're still working through our building plan application and hope to clear that hurdle next week which will allow us to get the demolition permit to tear down the main house.

Follow the link for more photos.

2 Hours Flat

2006-05-16T20:04:00.000-07:00

Finally got the permits sorted out. Today was the big tear down day.

The crew from Peninsula Demolition arrived, what a great team! One fellow, John, operated the crane while two others hosed down for dust control and guiding. There was a parade of 40 foot trucks pulling into the driveway to be loaded up.

They demolished 75% - the back illegal structures - and left the main house intact for phase two of the demolition permit (see my last post on Shenanigans at the City). They will be back again next week to tear the rest down. John the crane operator was itching to rip it all down. He said it would have all been done in one day, but he had to settle for just the back nine.

It was amazing to see it go. Within 2 hours, all the buildings in back were knocked out. That huge excavator was perhaps overkill but wow did it ever rip and haul! A lot of our neighbors came out to see it - most unaware we were planning to demolish, despite their receiving three mailings on this fron the City - go figure.

We're just 4-5 more truck loads tomorrow morning from it all being gone in back and now the lot looks absolutely huge and fabulous. You can suddenly clearly see the potential. The excavator will be taken away tomorrow and they will finish the job with a smaller bobcat and digger next week.

There is NO turning back now!!! Exciting.

Click on the link for more photos.

Shenanigans at City Hall

2006-05-16T19:51:00.000-07:00

Once again, the wonderful bureacracy of our city comes into play.

Our contractor called on Friday morning May 12 to say that the city was going to hold up the permit for our demolition, scheduled to start on May 15. The "building" group had not seen the letter from the "planning" group approving our project, even thought they sit 25 feet from each other in eyesight of each other's desks!

In addition, the new demolition permit costs would be $4,000, surprise surprise, because of recycling fees. Luckily our contractor was able to figure a workaround on the fees. If we tear down the illegal structures (aka apartments) in our back yard first, then all that square footage would not be included in the recycling cost. All that we would pay recycling on would be the original footprint of the house, $500, to be torn down in a second phase.

In addition, the Building group through another obstacle in our way that they were no longer granting demolition permits until the construction plans were approved. Luckily these will be ready Wednesday and we'll only lose a week because of this nonsense.

I also had the royal run around trying to meet the "conditions" o f our plan approval that we needed to file a "Notice of Project Restriction" with the county, with no guidelines on how to do this. So off I went to the County (different building altogether than the City) to get guidelines.

Upon arrival, the receptionist had no idea what I was looking for and handed me an 8 page list of their documents - "here, you find it in this list" she said. First I looked under "Notice", nothing, then "Project" and "Restriction", nothing. I scanned the whole list for 5 minutes, nothing. I then told her it was not on the list.

She proceeded to lead me to a computer and said "now you will need to look for a needle in a haystack" and pulled up a list of the last 2 weeks of recordings others had filed at the County. "Here you go, let me know when you find it". Unbelievable.

Fortunately, the second document I pulled up was exactly what I needed and I printed it off (for which she charged me $5 for 4 pages) and went off to replicate it. I noticed on this person's application that the City had filled it out on the Owner's behalf. What the heck, now the City is pawning off this work to the Owner? That made me really mad.

Anyway, I replicated it as best I could, headed to have it notarized the next morning, filed with the County and gave a copy to our contractor for the City Building application. Whew! You have to love the City for throwing obstacles in your way. Needless to say I will recommend they have a copy of what the Notice should look like to give to future Owners like me.

Arrival of the Beast!

2006-05-12T20:36:00.000-07:00

Wow, the demolition folks dropped off this massive CAT which is going to make quick work of the teardown on Monday! It's so big it barely fits in the driveway. It's amazing to me how they got it under the electrical wires. I can't wait to see it in action next week.

Follow the link for more photos.

We also confirmed a few other details with our contractor:

- we are adding two fans to the attic which will help blow hot air out and keep the house cooler in the summer. He thought it was a very good idea.

- We are going to go with a slightly higher efficiency Carrier furnace for the upstairs part of the house - 92% instead of 80%. The extra cost is about $800. It's not a great payback - maybe 8-10 years - but we feel better about better efficiency over the long haul if we stay in the house a long time. We are also going to add two air filters, one for each furnace/floor.

- I can tell our contractor is going to be a fighter for us. He called this morning in a very ticked off mood that the City was going to throw more obstacles in our way to get our demolition permit. He said he was going to spend the day down there and would not leave until he had his permit. It's ridiculous since the City has already approved the project and not a single neighbor has said anything about the plans. Sure enough, he got the permit by end of day. We are on for Monday!

Now I just have to get the last of the people in there who wanted things from the old house - one more window in front and the garage door. That should all be gone by Sunday and we'll make one more pass on trying to save some more plants.

San Jose Home Show

2006-05-09T20:26:00.000-07:00

This past weekend I attended the San Jose Home Show. What great timing! I have to say this was perhaps the best three hours I invested to learn all about a multitude of products. Some of the things I was able to check out:

- heating and air conditioning system: I've asked my contractor to upgrade from the 80% efficiency unit to the 92% efficiency unit. The payback will definitely be there on natural gas savings as we plan to be in the house for the long term. I also asked him to add electronic air filters to the system which will help with all our dust allergies. We're going with a Carrier system. Interestingly enough, Carrier is offering a nice cash rebate on its Infinity line and so is our gas company PG&E. We will be buying our system in May to take advantage of this deal.

- driveway stone: I saw Belgard, Country Cobble, Calstone, McNear and Home Depot. Mcnear seemed best value for $5-7 sq ft installed on the Belgian Cobblestone. The top end Calstone runs $15 sq ft installed, absolutely beautiful. I will check them all out but curious if anyone out there has any recommendations. I like the 3 stone pattern type.

- hardwood floor: our contractor has installed several different manufacturer products and he is recommending the WFI brand. I saw Mirage at the show which was highly recommended by a few vendors. I will check out both.

- garage doors: Martin seems like good value for the money with plenty of choices.

- deck composite wood: I really liked the Fiberon “Tropics” line better than Trex – www.fiberondecking.com Jatoba color. It’s maybe 10% more than Trex at $2.65/sq ft non-installed but looks a lot like our previous real wood deck which was Brazilian Ironwood.

- garage floor: I saw a couple of vendors of epoxy urethane/poly urea chip floor coating. www.thegaragefloorcompany.com is one of them. It's about $4/sq ft installed. My contractor discouraged us from going this route. He claims they are hard to keep clean and don't hold down very well. He is recommending a linoleum tile, more expensive but easier to replace tiles if damaged and easier to clean.

- landscaping architects: I had the chance to see several and samples of their designs and work. Ultimately I think the choice here really rests on your personal taste and how the designer's work matches it. Landscaping is a work of art.

I also picked up a foot thick pack of literature and ideas on bathrooms, kitchens, landscaping, tiles and other finishes. I absolutely recommend any home builder should visit one of these shows and ask lots of questions!

Bathroom Fixtures & AC

2006-05-06T20:24:00.000-07:00

I'm finalizing my list of bathroom fixtures. I like the Grohe brand and am focusing on the Seabury line. Grohe makes really elegant, European design and extremely reliable fixtures. Their web site is very nice, easy to navigate and make selections of products and get MSRP.

We're going with a brushed nickel for our master bath and guest bathroom, chrome for kids (lighter granite counter top to notice the mess less, chrome will go better with this) and chrome for our downstairs bathroom. The kids bath will also have an adjustable shower bar with hand shower to make it easier for us to rinse them off. They are still little and this was a nice feature at our last house.

I'm having to combine a few different lines (e.g., Movario 5 way shower head) since Seabury does not have everything. I'd like to get the list in one shot so that I don't have to amass bits and pieces of this order and possible get things like brushed nickel and satin nickel mixed up. I'm finding in general that the deals on eBay for faucets and fixtures are not that great. I can find better pricing across the board by going to Shopping.com, Shopzilla, shop.com and Amazon.

For the Grohe line, shower-faucets.com seems like the most aggressive on price but I like faucet.com which did a great job shipping my recently arrived Franke stainless kitchen sink. So I'm asking faucet.com to match. They also have a free ship promotion which is great.

That reminds me that I am in the middle of also ordering my bathroom sinks. We're going with the Toto LT597G Dantesca undermount in cotton white. We like the Toto sinks because they are nice and deep, great for washing your face or little baby's butt. We debated going with the LT511G Supreme self rimming (over counter) mount which is what we had at our last house, but I think with granite counter tops the undermount will look better and provide more counter space. Toto does not have as many dealers carrying their line, so low price hunting is a little more challenging.

However, I did find the best deal on shopping.com with Amazon pricing at Homecenter.com. They would not do free ship so I typed in Google "Toto Free Ship Price Match" and got a few sites. One of them, standardplumbing.com, seems to be able to match and ship free. You have to love that my toilets are arriving next week on a free ship deal, a 500 lb pallet with 4 toilets on it all the way from New Jersey! That had to be expensive. Unfortunately, I did not find a free ship deal on my Kohler Villager bath tubs. They are on the way now but faucet.com still gave me a great deal with a still subsidized ship rate.

We also decided a while ago to go with Carrier for our HVAC. I've actually never owned a Carrier AC before, we had Lennox in Boston, but our contractor highly recommends it. They also own the Bryant line of furnaces which we had at our last house and were very reliable, zero maintenance. I noticed there is a $1500 cash rebate for Carrier this month in the newspaper and told my contractor to check it out so we're buying it early and storing to take advantage of the great promo.

Last of the Teardown Sale

2006-05-06T20:15:00.000-07:00

We just completed our project approval with the City and ended the week with the porta potty and electrical feed being brought to the site. We also had a high fence installed around the front for security. That was the trigger to call back a lot of folks who had put deposits on windows and doors this weekend. We're just 8 days away now from the scheduled demolition.

It was a very tiring day, helping the various folks get their windows out. I had never taken a bay window out but fortunately had some good tools - essentials were hammers, sledge hammer, mini sledge hammer (to break the stucco around the outer side of the windows), a heavy duty wrecking bar (straight with a chisel on one end and a pointed tip on the other, about 5 feet long solid steel, wow was this useful!), crow bar, claw bar (extremely helpful for pulling nails out from the flange that surrounds the window nailed to the outside frame), ladder, sawzall reciprocating saw with demolition blade and 2-3 other people to help ease the window down.

The best way I found to take the windows out was to just remove as many of the 2x4s the frame was attached to (whack them with the sledge hammer or wrecking bar) especially the left, right and lower side. Try to cut the nails along the top. Then push the window outward and bend any remaining nails along the top. A couple of the bay windows we removed needed 4 people to lift. Uuugh!

Well they are all gone now and it's pretty breezy inside with no doors or windows left! I'm extremely pleased that we were able to find new homes for these windows, all of which were still in pretty decent shape.

I also made some great contacts in doing this. One fellow I met, who I gave some plants to, returned to trim my pear tree and offered to help me with our landscaping design on the back end. What a find!

Wow am I ever sore tonight! I never get a workout like that at the gym.

Online Gift Card Deals Home Depot & Lowes

2006-04-27T21:25:00.000-07:00

Be sure to load up on some special deals:

- Everyday Privileges Gold allows you to sign up for the purchase of gift cards at 20% off. Good at Home Depot or Lowes along with many other stores. You can only buy $100/month and a maximum of $500/year for each retailer. Every bit helps.

- Dealpass allows you to buy $500 of gift cards from each retailer in one shot at 20% off.

- Check out eBay for Home Depot and Lowes coupons 10-20% off your purchase. They usually have total savings limits but I have seen a 10% off at Lowes that allows up to $1,000 of savings and that is usually price matched at Home Depot. People sell these all the time on eBay for very cheap (not selling the coupon, which is forbidden, but selling their time to post and ship it).

General Contractor - The Contract

2006-04-27T21:05:00.000-07:00

I spoke to a good friend who is building another custom home. He spent considerable time and expense negotiating a very detailed contract with his general contractor. I talked to him about the key things he thought we might want to make sure were included in ours and he highlighted these:

- He used the American Institute of Architects AIA Document A101-1997 as a starting point (Standard form of Agreement Between Owner and Contractor) and AIA Document A201-1997 (General Conditions of the Contract for Construction). This might be overkill but has some solid clauses protecting you as the owner and makes for a good place to get language from. You have to buy it from the site.

- Is it a fixed price bid or time plus materials? Fixed is better - it forces a cap on your costs. However, any change orders will cause the line quoted for the fixed bid to change. Typically this is where the contractor makes a lot of money. We added a schedule at the end of our contract to list all the charges per hour for the general contractor, electricians, plumbers, carpenter etc along with material costs and equipment costs.

- make it clear that the GC passes on any rebates they get or their subcontractors get back to you. We put in a clause requiring the contractor to show us all their quotes and invoices and specifically to pass any savings back to us.

- decide what you want to tackle as part of the project. We decided to buy all appliances, granite, carpet, plumbing fixtures, hardwood floor, alarm system, light fixtures, pbx, cabinets, tile, patio stone ourselves and specified this up front so that those items would all be costed out separately in the bid and we would carve them out as we bought them.

- dispute resolution...we opted for binding arbitration following JAMS rules. Much less expensive than a lawsuit. We also put in a clause allowing for the project to continue even if there is a dispute in one area, which can be revisited at the end of the project. This should avoid holding up the project.

- Any changeorders or increases in cost over the contract price must be in writing.

- the contractor is responsible for completing the project in strict compliance with all laws, ordinances, rules and regulations of the applicable authorities, the uniform Building, Plumbing and Mechanical Codes, National Electric Code or other codes that may apply.

- request your contractor to get at least two quotes for each major line item. Insist on shopping around as their own supplier network may not have the best prices. At the very least, they can use better pricing as leverage with their preferred supplier network.

- explore the possibility of payments up front for certain big ticket items like lumber that may have seasonal fluctuations in price. If the supplier can lock in the price up front and get payment for it, you might be able to save 10% from them having to build in a cushion to cover variability

- At each stage of your payment or a sub contractor payment, the payment should be accompanied by a Release Form - basically a release of any lien against your property for whatever was just completed. A lien that is unresolved could force your home to be sold in order to settle any payment due a contractor.

- Onsite storage is the contractor's responsibility.

- Contractor indemnifies you for any hazardous waste brought about by materials he or subcontractors brought on site that were not properly handled. I could just see what a disaster it would be for someone to wash out their paint can in the creek in our backyard!

- weather delays are not to be considered changeorders

- contractor is responsible for fixing any issues found not to be up to code.

- you should be informed whenever a change is made to the specification. Contractors may cut corners by swapping in cheaper materials that you might not be able to see.

- you should be allowed to terminate without cause at will. You may have to pay a partial profit if that is the case (10% is pretty standard on remaining work).

- all work to be done to best industry standards.

We made substantial revisions to incorporate the above in our contract. It was about 5 pages in length. Our contractor was quite pleased with the final product and was going to use this as his new template.

Appliances

2006-04-27T13:06:00.000-07:00

I was determined to find bargains for our appliances, even though we were targeting high end items. It has taken me about 2 months now but I have almost completed all my needed purchases and all of this on eBay.

First step was to visit a few showrooms and figure out exactly what models we wanted. I wanted to get a couple of different options for each appliance so that I would have some flexibility on eBay. We ended up going with the following:

- Sub zero 601R/S stainless steel door refrigerator, we really liked this unit at our last house - great storage space, shallow depth, standup retrieval of items, crisper drawers.
- Sub zero 601F/O overlay freezer - Replaces the freezer in our garage and brings it into the kitchen. The overlay panel will hide it somewhat.
- Kitchenaid KUCC151LSS stainless steel trash compactor - we never thought we would need one of these until we had it at our last house. We pay by the can for trash removal here and this really mashes it down.
- Sub zero 424/S wine cooler - we already have a 250 bottle wine cooler but wanted a small one in our island to hold a few select bottles during parties. This cooler has two cooling zones for red and white.
- Thermador SJ302ZS double oven - stainless steel, it was a very high end appliance that was discontinued because it cost too much, we got a great deal on it. Convection/microwave top oven which eliminated us having to put a microwave somewhere else and a lower convection oven. 30" size.
- Miele Incognito G863SCVI Plus dishwasher - super quiet, love the adjustable cutlery rack on top. Our previous house had an Asko which ran great but Miele is even better from a quiet and functionality of the various racks. We could have settled for the model below this one (no water softener which we did not need) but a deal came up on this one.
- Wolf RT364G gas rangetop - our last house had a Wolf 36" gas range and oven. We found the oven very hard to get the right temperature, always +/- 10 degrees. The new version of the range is dual fuel which has gas top and electric bottom with very precise electronic control for the oven - much better. However, we liked the idea of having a cabinet under the cooktop to hold all of our kitchen cooking tools and having two separate ovens.

Our deals happened all over the place. Here is a summary:

-Sub zero 601R/S purchased from a person in Florida who abandoned their renovation project. Paid $2400 plus $800 to ship to CA. It is about 3 years old but brand new in box, not a single scratch and Sub Zero starts the warranty from when we will install and activate it so that is still good. We had to figure out how to ship it cheaply. I eventually found the quickest way to figure this out is to call a couple of local appliance stores near where you buy from and ask them who they use. They usually have done the research to figure out who is cheapest. Here were some folks that I liked:

eFreightline.com (priced $228 to ship my wine cooler from WI to CA versus best other bid was $394)

Anyfreight.com - broker who can get multiple shipper quotes. I used them to ship my Subzero freezer from Atlanta for $400. 508-425-7134

Freight Dynamics 800-883-8777, used to pick up Subzero in Florida, they palletized it for $170 and shipped for $700. Anyfreight had a better ship rate but could not palletize it. I worked with Cori 763-235-2266. This was FAST, about 1 week to get it, arrived on Fedex freight truck.

Complete Freight Systems - Catherine Anglea canglea@completefreight.biz 812-265-1245. Used them to ship double oven from TX to CA, were $279, super cheap and efficient. They were recommended by HighEnd Appliance 512-663-9103

- Sub Zero 601F/O: also eBay, this one was $2900 and $400 to ship from Atlanta. It had been hit in front by a forklift which bent a couple of the frame parts and the sub zero trim panel. I ordered the fixup parts for $200, including the stainless steel trim around the door which was scratched but the seller refunded to me. The hardest thing to fix was the back sheet metal which sub zero does not sell as a replacement part. I drilled out the pop rivets and took the piece to a local sheet metal shop (HVAC type sheet metal, plenty in the Yellow Pages) who made me an exact replica for $80! I bought a pop rivet gun at Home Depot and resecured it all. Looks like new now.

- Kitchenaid Trash Compactor - This was a showroom demo model that I bought on eBay from San Diego. They shipped it for me with their shipper who scratched the handle. The seller was a flake and did not offer to help resolve the scratched handle. I bought a new handle from Kitchenaid for $50.

- Thermador oven bought on eBay from Texas, was in a warehouse never used for 2 years. Paid $2750 and it had an MSRP of about $8k. They packed it up really well in a crate and it had just a slight ding in back when it arrived, I was able to knock the ding out and it is hidden anyway behind the cabinet. I was hoping to find a Miele double oven but I had a deal on eBay and it fell apart after someone else offered $1K more than me after the transaction. Too bad.

- Miele dishwasher I bought a brand new unit from someone on eBay that did not use it for their project. I unfortunately had a bad experience with shipping via Fedex but the seller did not pack it up very well. He simply left it in the original cardboard box. It was banged up in all corners and the stainless door and trim. If I were to replace all the banged up parts the tally would have been $1300 or so, almost what I paid for it. Fortunately Fedex refunded me for the damage. I bought two side panels to fix the worst of it and will live with a few not so visible dings. I would not recommend shipping any appiances by Fedex or UPS. I have had nothing but bad experiences with having heavy bulky objects dinged up.

- I'm still trying to get my Wolf rangetop on eBay and since I have some time will keep looking. I might instead buy a Viking rangetop with the sealed burners. It has the very nice vari-sim feature allowing super low simmer heat while providing the full 15,000 BTU high end.

- I also bought two Insinkerator Pro SS disposals for each sink. I found both on eBay for about half price. I like the pro model as it runs quieter and is heavier duty.

- As for hood, I'm also still looking for this and thinking of the Wolf Pro Wall Hood 36". I like the ability in these to put a 1200 CFM internal blower versus the more elegant Cooktop Wall Hood that has a narrower chimney. This one only has a 600 cfm blower. We tend to do a lot of cooking in a wok and the higher CFM is better. Anything more would probably be overkill and need to be installed externally which I think may be more exposed to the elements and might break down sooner. I might also get the Viking Pro Series 18" High and 27" depth to match a Viking range. I also note that at our last house we had a 42" hood over a 36" stove so it overlapped a little on each side. I'm not sure this was really necessary.

Kitchen Sinks & Toilets

2006-04-27T12:57:00.000-07:00

I just ordered our kitchen sinks online. I went with the Franke line Pro series in stainless steel. We like the idea of having a large rectangular sink that is deep instead of a couple of bowls. We had a two bowl sink at our last house and never used the second bowl.

The large rectangular and deep size will allow us to easily clean those monster pots and pans, along with other regular items like my son's hamster cage and frog tank. We went with the PSX-110-30-12 for the main sink and PSX 110-16-10 for our island.

I found best pricing on the Internet by going to www.shopping.com. NY Living had the lowest but my contractor had bad experiences with them on returns so I opted to go with faucets.com which had a 110% price match and free shipping.

For my toilets, I reviewed a Consumer Reports article on toilets. If you have not already done so, you should subscribe as there a lot of relevant articles on products you will be buying. It is $4.95/month. My choice was the American Standard Champion 2004.012 in white. It was rated best of the low gallon but non-pressure assisted toilets. The pressure assisted toilets (the kind you usually get in the airports) are great for flushing big jobs but are just not very small kid friendly - scaring the heck out of them. We had a different American Standard model at our previous house which did not work too well, about 1/5 flushes backed up. Hopefully this one will work better.

Best pricing on this one was at www.fixturesdirect.com. I also checked www.shopping.com. Faucets.com had a 110% price match and free shipping.

Windows

2006-04-27T10:45:00.000-07:00

My dad recently changed his windows and advised we consider various low-E coatings to shield from the sun on the west facing part of the house. At our previous house, we had brand new Andersen windows which probably had no low-E coating. At the end of the afternoon, the sun would beat into the west part of the house and heat it up to 80-90 degrees. We had no AC living in the San Francisco bay area so the only low cost solution was to install mylar coated blinds that would refelect some of the heat. We also had significant fading on our dining room chair fabric and oak hard wood floors wherever the sun would hit.

Windows that have a low-E coating are what you want to look for. The low-E coating was developed for the space shuttle and if you put it thick enough on a window, the window becomes like a mirror. So think of it as a mirror coating that, depending on the thickness, blocks the sun's rays. The higher the solar heat gain, the higher the insulation value too.

My dad's choice (for his house in northern Canada) was to go with windows classified as Low-E RLE2 which have a "solar heat gain coefficient" of 0.26. This means that only 26% of the sun's UV rays will get through. He put RLE2 windows on the west and north faces. He chose low-E LOF3 (which has a solar heat gain coefficient of 0.48) for the east and south faces.

The LOF3 with higher sun penetration was important for getting greater sun penetration in winter. The lower penetration RLE2 on the west side allowed less air conditioning use later in the day when the sun is strongest and the RLE2 on the north face was better for insulation in winter.

We are considering Pella brand Pro-line windows that have a solar heat gain coefficient of 0.37. They have product lines across the board for solar heat gain so be informed when you are buying!

For more info on this, see www.efficientwindows.org/energystar.cfm for your zone and solar gain recommendations.

Solar Power

2006-04-27T10:44:00.000-07:00

April 2006 – We are determined to get solar panels for the house. I found it very hard to get good information on the web about solar panel options. Here is how the process has worked so far:

Our base estimate is 1200 kw/month and I've been advised to aim for a system that would provide for 100% of our top three Tier electrical rates, a 5kW system in our case. I'll get into this dimensioning later.
I contacted a local solar provider. They answered a lot of my questions and gave me a quote. They sent a person out to do a visual inspection of our roof to determine where the array will best be placed and have the least blockage from other structures nearby or trees. In my case, we have a nearly perfect unobstructed South/West facing section of our roof.
Since mine is a new house, I provided them with the CAD drawings from our architect and from that they are determining where to exactly place them and they will provide drawings on how the installation will work.
My contractor wants to become certified in their product so they agreed to give him a tutorial. He doesn't need a special permit since he already has the appropriate general contractor license.

As far as planning goes, my contractor will need to run electrical cabling from the roof array back to the main junction box where I will have two inverters mounted next to my main junction box. The inverters will then feed into two circuit breakers in the panel.

In California, we can use PG&E's electrical grid as a giant battery. PG&E installs a special meter (either a Net Metering type or a Time of Use (TOU) type). You can pick whichever is more advantageous. The way to understand it is to try to estimate what your usage is during peak hours - take a meter read at noon and then one at 6pm, a couple of days to get an average use and probably best during summer if you use AC. Then compare this to your average daily use - divide your total typical monthly electrical usage by 30.

If you use anything more than 25% during those noon to 6pm peak hours, then it probably does not make economic sense to go with a TOU meter and instead choose a Net Metering type. It only costs $300 to switch out the meter with PG&E so you can always try one way and switch if you think you can save more. Basically, the difference is that TOU meter rates are much higher so if you can generate more power than you use during those peak hours and "sell" these back to PG&E at the highest rate, then buy back power at night or in the morning at the lower rates, you will be better off. Under Net Metering, you simply get a credit for each Kw you generate and send back to the grid and are allowed to take the credit back any time later on your normal average Kw rate.

As far as the economics go:

There is currently a California rebate of $2.80 per rated AC Watt. What does that mean? Well a 5KW system produces 5,000 watts DC and you multiply that by a factor of approximately 0.83 for equivalent AC so 5,000W x 0.83 x $2.80 = $11,666 should be my rebate. This is only an approximation as the real rebate is calculated based on the specific pieces of equipment that comprise my system and their efficiencies.

Unfortunately, the 7.5% CA state tax refund expired end of 2005.

There is a Federal tax credit and here is what my tax accountant sent me on it:

The residential alternative energy credit is 30 percent of the cost of eligible solar water heaters, solar electricity equipment (photovoltaics) and fuel cell plants. The maximum credit is $2,000 per tax year for each category of solar equipment, and $500 for each half kilowatt of capacity of fuel cell plants installed per tax year. Eligible equipment must be placed in service after December 31, 2005 and before January 1, 2008. In general, a qualified fuel cell power plant converts a fuel into electricity using electrochemical means, has an electricity–only generation efficiency of more than 30 percent and generates at least 0.5 kilowatts of electricity.
The residential alternative energy credit is a nonrefundable personal credit. It can be used to offset the excess of the individual's regular tax liability over any AMT liability, but cannot be used to get a refund if the tax liability drops to zero. Unused credits may be carried forward and added to a residential alternative energy credit for the succeeding tax year.

My tax accountant clarified to me that the credit only offsets any EXCESS tax you have for your regular tax bill over any AMT. If you are like a growing number of people hit with AMT, the tax credit does nothing for you except that you can carry it forward to use it in the future if ever your tax bill is higher than AMT.

The first step in dimensioning our system was to break down our typical 1200 Kwh monthly electrical bill by Tier:

Tier 1: Baseline 390 Kwh x $0.1143 = $44.58
Tier 2: 101-130% of Baseline 117 Kwh x $0.12989 = $15.20
Tier 3: 131-200% of Baseline 270 Kwh x $0.21314 = $58.19
Tier 4: 201-300% of Baseline 390 Kwh x $0.29007 = $113.13
Tier 5: Over 300% of Baseline 30 Kwh x $0.33039 = $9.91

You basically want to dimension the system to provide enough power to eliminate the three last Tiers, anything above 130% of baseline, since this will provide the best payback on the investment.

Here was how my dimensioning works:

Average hours of sun exposure/day = 5.5
Average days per month = 30.4
Number of Kwh system (DC) = 5.0 (this is the capacity they are recommending for me)
Average Kwh/month (DC) = 5.0 kW x 5.5 hours x 30.4 days = 836
Average Kwh/month (AC) = 836.5 x 0.83 = 694

So my 5Kw system should on average produce 694 Kwh which should cover everything in my Tier 3, 4 and 5 bands = 693 Kwh out of my total 1200 Kwh monthly usage.

By sizing my system this way, I should save all the cost in my Tier 3-5 bands = $58+$113+10 = $181/month or $2,172/year.

To calculate your payback or IRR, I looked at it this way:

Base cost of system $33,000 less CA rebate for 5kW system of $11,666 (see above for rough calculation) less federal tax credit of $2,000 = about $21,000 net
Annual savings of $2,172/year
Historical energy cost inflation of 5% per year
30 year life of equipment

My IRR is about 15% (usually it's not as good as this but I got a deal on my system) and my simple payback should be about 8 years assuming the 5% growth in electrical costs.

You might also consider staging your installations. Everything I see in the venture capital world is that the costs of these solar panel arrays should come down 50-70% in the next 5 years with a whole bunch of new semiconductor technologies under development in various start-ups. So maybe buy 3Kw now and add 2 more later. It might also make sense to stage it over two years to simply get more of a Federal tax credit - you can do $2K/year as long as the equipment costs at least $7K (30% x $7K = $2K).

Click here for a really good article on payback that I liked a lot by Andy Black.

As for reliability, I talked to a friend who has had a solar system for several years and he said his experience has been very positive in terms of reliability and savings. He has batteries installed to avoid outages but I don’t think we will go that route as our grid is pretty reliable. He also mentioned we might consider the latest technique to heat water on the roof and run the heated water through pipes throughout the house which heats things up nice and cheap.

The Teardown Sale

2006-04-27T10:41:00.000-07:00

April 2006:

Our contractor informed us that it would cost about $375 per 21 foot bin to dispose of the house and that there would be an estimated 40-50 bins full. We were determined to send as little as possible to the landfill and embarked on a comprehensive listing of all items we thought might be useful to others. Basically, I went around with my Canon digital camera while my wife Charlene logged a description on the computer of the item including any pertinent details size dimensions or color etc. It was an exercise that took around 3 hours to do.

We posted a main advertisement on Craigslist.org “Teardown House / Remodel – Everything Must Go” with a line by line posting of each item. We placed the digital photos (resized nicely with an application called “PixResizer”) on a shared photo viewing Yahoo site and posted the link to the photos in the ad. We organized the photos into categories – kitchen, doors, windows, fixtures, appliances, etc. We also posted some prices we thought were reasonable based on looking at some comparables on eBay and Craigslist.

Amazingly, the response from the public was absolutely incredible. We had over 500 people e-mail us for items they were interested in. Responding to all the messages was somewhat time intensive but most of the time we would just give them my cell phone number and tell them to come to the house at designated times – e.g., all day Saturday or Sunday. The truly interested would call, which was a shorter list. We had over 50 people come by over three weekends and a couple of evenings and buy stuff or take some things away for free. The conditions were that they undo things themselves (under my supervision, I would help sometimes) and haul it away asap. We even drafted a Release of Liability / Waiver form based on a couple of templates I found free on the web (Google search “release liability waiver form”). We made sure power and gas were switched off and tried to stagger people’s work to avoid too many people to supervise.

Whatever we could not sell, we subsequently listed free and the freebies went very fast. Here is a sample of things we sold and others we gave for free:

Sold:
Windows
Outside and inside doors, screen doors
Light fixtures
White picket fence
Driveway automatic gate
Garage door and mounting hardware
Kitchen cabinets, appliances, sink, fixtures
Bathroom fixtures, cabinets, mirrors, tub, toilet, shower enclosures
Built in cabinets
Furnace, central air conditioning, condenser, ducting (relatively new)
Hardwood floor
Family Room Wooden Bar
Back yard fence
Fireplace mantle, grill, trim
Hot water tank
Washer & dryer

Free
Gazebo
Shed
Some doors
Lumber on kids playstructure
Blinds
Copper pipes
Copper pipes, aluminum window frames, electrical wire (for recycled metal)
Larger built in cabinets
Koi pond rocks

It’s interesting that some items would just not sell – take the bar fridge for example, which was this circa 1950s model with imitation wood metal siding and a long chrome retro handle. I tried selling it for $10 but no one wanted it. I finally listed it free and within 12 hours had 30 people wanting it! Many people monitor the free listings more than they do paid listing and some have set up RSS feeds to notify them of new postings. It reminded me of our last move when we listed our moving boxes for free and it took all of 3 minutes for someone to claim them and 15 minutes later they were already picked up and gone!

There is also a site called Freecycle which works well too but we were happy with Craigslist.

Click on this link for some photos of the post teardown sale view inside the old house.

The Purchase & Planning

2006-04-27T10:19:00.000-07:00

This is the start of my blog on our new house. I'm a little behind on dates so I will bring you up to speed in the next few postings.

2/2/06 - We just purchased our new …sorry, very rundown….house. The lot is beautiful – it's a big L shape 300’ deep by 150’ wide at the widest part of the L and a babbling creek running through it surrounded by large California oaks. Very quiet and peaceful in close proximity to the city and all our routines. In short, a fabulous location that is a real hidden gem.

But… the state of the house is a nightmare. There is a main house, 2 illegal apartments in back, a large shed/playhouse, gazebo and old deck.

The illegal apartments look like they have been abandoned for at least 10 years. Rumor has it that the owner had a Days Inn nearby and sent his overflow clients here! The City shut it down back in 1993 from what I can make of the code violation posting on both units.

The main house looks like it has big problems too with dry rot, water leakage damage, termites, rats, trees damaging the foundation and other issues. The inside looks ok but the layout is poorly done with a wing of bedrooms on the right leading to a family room that requires you to walk right through a pink 1950s bathroom. The driveway snakes along the left side of the house to a 2 car garage, one of which cannot be used due to the angle behind the house.

Looking beyond the current state of affairs, we see a great way to transform this house and property – tear down the illegal apartments to clear the lot, build an addition on the back of the house and with the slope allow for a lower level basement that will be mainly above ground. Effectively a two story at the very back but all the main living on a single floor, very similar to our previous home floor plan which we liked a lot.

As part of the purchase process, our agent, Samia Morgan of Keller Williams, recommended we talk to a contractor she highly recommended about the estimated costs of the fixing of the fixer upper. We scheduled an onsite visit by Brian Smart of Structural FX. He was really helpful in giving us rough cost estimates of various renovations – kitchen, bathroom, adding extensions, demolition, city fees etc. He also seemed like a very efficient contractor that paid a lot of attention to detail, was on time and on budget - what a find!

Brian recommended avoiding a two story addition as this would take 9 months to get City approval. He advised that a one story total rebuild would take around 1 month for approval. He also advised that if we started moving walls around and he had to open walls and ceilings up, all the 1950s construction would have to be brought up to code and that it would cost slightly more, be much faster and end up with a much better house if we just demolished everything. By tearing it all down, we would also have complete freedom to build the floor plan we really wanted.

Brian recommended that we work with an architect and engineering firm, ASI Engineering, that he really liked to work with. He said they had a nack for transforming his building ideas into plans quickly, elegantly and efficiently. We also visited a few of the homes he built and a few that ASI had architected, which were beautiful. Everyone we spoke to opened their doors to show us the work and had nothing but high praise for Structural FX’s team craftsmanship, efficiency, cost and after build follow up. We met with ASI and liked their portfolio of work. We met the architect, Vanni, and the engineer, Amir, who would be working closely with us.

We did not really shop around the architect work as we felt comfortable with the personal references we got for ASI and cross checked pricing with a few of our friends who had built their own houses. Their rates were very reasonable.

2/4/06 We asked Vanni to come by and see our current house to get an idea of what we liked and disliked. He toured the house and took pictures. He said he would come back to us with a design in 2-3 weeks. We said that was not how we wanted to work. First, we wanted him to produce a few block diagram rough sketches that we could review to get the internal layout right.

2/8/06 Vanni produced three options in just a few days. We combined two and started iterations of this process – 6 times in all – until we got the floor plan we wanted. However, he then came back with the square footage and we were about 20% over budget. It was disappointing that he had not taken that into account when presenting us the options. So we had to do a couple more iterations to cut it back – squeezing some room sizes, changing the layout a little. Finally we had it right and to budget.

This process took about 3 weeks in all, very fast and efficient. We had to make a lot of the tough decisions right up front –how big the kitchen and family rooms (our two most important) would be, the orientation of our home offices where we would be working a lot and wanting to see the backyard, the location of stairs leading downstairs to be non-intrusive and little kid friendly, the number of fireplaces, location of windows and size of windows, skylights, closets (a big problem in our last house was insufficient storage for a family with kids), entrance area to facilitate dropping all that kid stuff, mail, groceries, computers etc when we would come home and a lot of other nit picky details. It forced a lot of long discussions up front and should ultimately save us on changeorders later.

We also found it REALLY helpful to have our contractor involved during the initial drawing phase. He was able to give instant feedback on what would cost a lot or save money in the design
He also helped streamline the design for faster build. We had our real estate agent Samia also comment on resale value for things we were planning to add or remove. That was also very helpful.

Vanni then worked his magic to produce the 3 dimensional layout – front, back, sides, decks etc. We were very happy with his first pass and made just a few modifications. All the work he was doing would be needed by the City for permit approval so we were processing that in parallel.

2/24/06 Then the dreaded call came from our contractor – “are you sitting down...? the City changed its permitting process on January 1 and it is more complicated now to get approval for a single story renovation that involves substantial demolition of the existing structure." We would have to send our plans to everyone in the neighborhood within a 300 foot radius (105 houses in all), hold a public meeting with them to review our plans, then file formally with the City, wait for their review, then re-mail everyone again to let them know of pending final approval by the City, wait for any comments again, then mail again that the final approval will be granted and finally get our demolition permit – a process taking 3 months. Fortunately we sold our other house before this and had just moved into a rental close by with a month to month term on the back end and a nice landlord!

3/1/06 After a few days delay when the City's label printer broke and the part time person who printed the labels did not get them out too fast, we finally stuffed the envelopes and mailed them out.

3/12/06 The town meeting ended up being quite nice – we met all our immediate neighbors, served up cookies, cheese and crackers and drinks to make it a social event too. Out of 105 mailings, only 5 people showed up - mostly immediate neighbors - and there was consensus that our build would be good for everyone. One neighbor had stories of unruly guests running around screaming at midnight and wiffs of pot floating over the patio during BBQs, all because of the illegal apartments. They were very anxious to see it all go and a nice new house raise the values of their properties! We were actually happy we went through this process - none of the neighbors would be surprised during our build and we got to meet them all right up front and ask their input.

3/20/06 We submitted our City application and I made a point of visiting the inspector to ask if our plans would be complete before submitting them. He said that 99% of submissions are not complete and get a rejection letter asking for the missing information delaying the process. I relayed this to my contractor who did not like hearing that and he took extra measures to ensure everything would be in order. We became the 1% that did not get rejected for incomplete docs and probably saved a few weeks in the process by investing this time.

4/10/06 We did the final mailing and had to wait until 4/22 for any further comments. No one had any. The City approved our plans on 4/25 and did the final mailing to everyone again that they approved and would be issuing our demolition permit on 5/10. We have scheduled demolition for 5/15 and a fence is soon going up around the property to secure it.