A Blank Slate (and A River Runs Through It)

Plastering is complete!  This weekend:  Met with the trim/stairs guy and went over the entire house window by window, door by door, stair tread by stair tread.  Jeff and I installed the garage-house doors.  Amy and I started prepping the upstairs for painting (sanding and cleaning).  I was also able to tie in all the circuits to the breaker box. 

After working all day with the power off, Amy and I turned the power on to test the basement lights that I had installed...  Short circuit.  Not a good first try at powering up all the wiring I had done.  Troubleshooting found it was just the switch for one side that shorted the breaker.  Too tired and hungry.  Quick dinner (thanks Sue), made a cardboard box airplane with Ella, quick trip to HD (4th one this weekend) to get door knobs and a new GFI breaker to replace the broken one that someone had snuck back into its original packaging and returned so that I could buy it, back to the house.  Further investigation revealed that the $1.37 fixtures from HD that don't have a ground terminal also do not have insulation over the hot terminal.  On one of the fixtures the hot screw was in contact with the loose ground wire and it shorted to ground as soon as it was turned on.  I took them all down, isolated the grounds, insulated the hots, and reinstalled.  Works like a charm.  I spent the next ten minutes standing in the stairs turning the lights on and off like it was the first time I had seen electricity.  It was very gratifying.

Started the weekend with a welcome night off: Father-Daughter Sweetheart Social.

Swing dancing with Ella.

Slow dancing.

With the plastering complete, the entire house is a blank slate.  Can't wait to start painting and installing finishes.  This is the balcony over the family room.

Nice kitchen table.

Dormer in the play room.

Our bedroom.

The attic.

Spent a lot of the weekend battling ice.  When opened the garage door Saturday morning the entire garage turned into a big fog bank as the cold air hit the humid air inside.  The humidity was from the water that had seeped in overnight.

I dug this trench to redirect the water.  It seemed to be working....

But on Sunday morning the garage was back to being a river.  You could actually see the current coming under the far door and running out the near door.

Dad came by with panty hose and salt to try to re-open the frozen trench.  No luck.

This is what happens when the river runs out on to the driveway and re-freezes.  He parked the car at the top, came in to get me, and when we came out the car wasn't where he left it.  It slid all the way out into the street... in park!  Maybe not surprising since the day before, Amy got out of her dad's truck and it started sliding then Sue got Amy's car stuck when she slid off the side.  Lots of pushing and sand got it out okay.

Amy scraping plaster off the window frames.

And scrubbing plaster dust out of the window locks with Q-tips.

Sunday 7am.

Sunday 7pm.

All circuits tied in and ready to be closed up.

Colors and Commutes

A week of decision making has resulted in the selection of the cabinet color, flooring for most of the house, and wall colors for most of the house.  Meanwhile the plasterers have nearly finished the entire house!  Picture of that to come.

One hour into my morning commute and the scene looks remarkably similar to the beginning of it.  I stopped at the house at 5:45 to shut off the heat for the plasterers.  Tried to leave and couldn't make it up the hill.  Got 3/4 of the way on my 4th attempt, but by then I had packed all the wet snow into a greasy sheet of slush-ice, so all future attempts were worse.  Finally called Amy (who had a 2 hour delay!).  She had to come and push my up the hill with her car - bumper to bumper.  Nothing makes you feel manlier than sitting in a Pontiac Vibe being pushed up your street by your wife in her Ford Freestyle.  Anyways, got on the road by 6:45 and took an additional 2 hours from there.   Fun.

The building where our cabinets are being made.

This is all of our kitchen cabinets.  The stack on the left is all of the drawers!

Some of the cabinet doors.  The gridded ones in the back are going to be glass doors.

And we finally got the color right!  It's the darker blue on the top half of the door Amy's holding.

The last sate of my de-Manuary-ification.  I felt a little ridiculous dealing with the plasterers looking like this....

The color palette.

A few of the flooring selections.

Manuary ends, Snow day again, Plastering continues

Another snow day today.  Again, well timed for when I need to get work done.  

Shoveled the snow off the porch roof Sunday.  Will shovel off the back of the garage roof today.  Will also take a trip to Oxford to try our 3rd and 4th attempts to find the right cabinet color.

Plasterers finished the attic and have moved on to the bedrooms!  The huge transformation in such a short time is amazing.

Prior to shoveling the porch roof.

Drilling rig even deeper in the snow.  Still no action except another promise that we'll start "this week."

No new icicles since the insulation was finished.  This is an old one that's still hanging on.

Our old trash barrel used for kindling storage back in the woods.

An attempt to capture the chaos created by the boarders.

This is my attempt to capture the amount of dust in the air.  And none of these guys wear masks!

More chaos.

The "sturdy" staging they set up to board the family room ceiling.

More chaos.

Attic boarded.

The recess I built into the wall of the girls' bathroom using the space in the chimney chase.

Manuary is over.  I decided to shave in stages (De-Manuary-ification).

Stage 1: Mustache.  Time to move to Intercourse, PA.

P.S. forgot to include in the last entry that we tried to save money by buying faucets at the Maki Budget Barn in Lunenburg, only to find out that the two we bought were actually different from each other when we got home.

Interesting exchanges

Thursday-
Fortunately timed snow day allows me to get over to the house to stay one day ahead of the blueboarders - insulating stair well (insulation company stopped returning calls...) and building boxed beam in family room to add strength to the cathedral wall.   While snowblowing a license plate clogged the blower.  I pulled it out and saw it matched the plasterer's truck so threw it in the driveway behind the truck.  One hour later I get a voicemail from the plasterer,  "Ummmm...., Erik, I'm not sure if you know a guy with a red truck but he just came up the driveway and stole my license plate.  If you know who that is could you call him and have him bring it back?"  The guy (my father-in-law) with the red truck (to borrow my snowblower) was trying to be helpful (by bringing me back my license plate that he thought fell off my car).

Saturday-
With not much to do while plastering stage is being handled we packed the kids up in the car and headed to NH to look at mantels, flooring, walls, and ceiling options at a lumber yard.  Saw a great place with elaborate showroom and lots of options in Brookline, NH.  Decided to stop at another place in Groton, MA on the way home.  The sign off the road was almost nonexistent.  The "lumber yard" looked like a house.  The only clues we had were the vast amounts of sawdust in the snow behind the barn and the little sign on the door that said "office."  I got out to investigate only to find a man in a bathrobe staring out the window at me.  I turned for the car when he came out in the bathrobe and told me the store was closed on Saturdays but he'd be glad to show me around.  So I got a tour of the sawmill and pine board stock by a guy in a bathrobe and snow boots.  To be fair, he had a broken arm and couldn't put on a shirt by himself, so the bathrobe was his all-day attire.

We also stopped at the Maki Budget Barn in Lunenburg.  Found a great pair of American Standard faucets for the girls' bathroom, the only two left.  When I took them out of the car in Auburn I saw that they were actually different.  : (

Sarah moved in to her house today!  Congratulations Sarah!  Tonight we helped her get her last few things set up then spent 3 hours cleaning and rearranging over here.  Bed time.

Excitement and Fear

After an apparent long standstill during which I've been working constantly with little to no change in the appearance of the house things have started to accelerate.  First the insulation, which took about a week, and now the blueboarding has started.  I'm excited to finally see noticeable progress with the walls getting closed up, but for the past week I haven't been able to shake this gripping fear that I've missed something. Have I overlooked some crucial step that I should have taken before covering up all the work that's been so far.

With that paranoia driving me I spent this past weekend going through the entire house again and again making lists of every little thing that I could do before closing up.  I took a personal day on Monday to be there for the delivery of the blueboard, to meet with the plasterer, talk to the inspector at the insulation inspection, coordinate a dumpster delivery to not interfere with blueboard delivery, talk with the insulators when they did their final clean up and touch up, do all those jobs on my paranoid list.

My Personal Day:

5:30 AM (Monday): -10 F.  Car barely starts.  Go turn on heat then get a coffee.
After that it was a blur.  Here's what I remember:
Framed attic kneewalls to hide ducts but provide access doors to key spots. 
Built in shelves, nooks and crannys, window seat to hide HVAC and chimney.  The attic may turn out to be the coolest room in the house.
Caulked all sill plates and double studs in walls.
Foamed spots missed by insulation crew and trimmed excess foam from areas where I got carried away with their Hilti foam gun.
Blueboard and plaster delivered - truck showed up early in the am and couldn't get up driveway.  I tried to get Jeff to sand it.  No luck.  Tried to go to his gravel pit to get my own sand.  Everything frozen.  Ken was on his way and luckily had 2 buckets of sand in his truck.  Blueboard delivery went smoothly after that.
Dumpster delivered.
Passed insulation inspection and talked about what to do about firming up family room wall.
Loaded foam scraps into dumpster with dad.  Ran around in it for a while to pack it down some: Exhausting.
Ran thermostat wire from ERV to bedroom just in case.
Straightened a couple bowed studs in the front hall.
fell though the ice up to my shins in the back yard while trying to break the ice dam to get the water to drain away from the house.
Ate breakfast at 5:30. lunch at 3. never ate dinner.
Cleaned attic and picked up house to prep for blueboarders starting Tuesday.
The insulators never showed- claimed their trucks had trouble with the cold.
Gave up before reframing the wall in the kids' bathroom for recessed shelves and just hoped they wouldn't blueboard it first.  I got lucky and was able to do that today.
12:30 AM (Tuesday): -8 F. Came home and spent another 1/2 hour looking at weather forecasts on the computer hoping for a snow day Thursday.


Enough text, here are some pics.

Central vac rough-in in the dining room/family room wall.

Insulating in progress.

Proof that the foam finds every little nook and cranny.  This is what squeezed through some studs.

The expanding foam on the garage-house wall pushed the blueboard right through the screws and bent it into the house.

My ever-growing glacier.  Best guess: 12-18" of ice/water thick.  Sanding it is useless since the sand gets buried in a few hours.

Would this be classified as a stalactite or stalagmite?

No dumpster yet.

The marshmallow attic ceiling.

The physics nerd in me was amazed that the center of gravity wasn't shifted far enough to make the whole rig tip over.

50 pounds of plaster (dry weight) per bag.  Approx. 100 bags in the house. ~5000 lbs.

5/8" drywall - 105 pounds per sheet (Answers.com).  Approx. 40 sheets in the garage. ~4000 lbs.

1/2" drywall - 82 pounds per sheet.  Approx. 250 sheets in the house. ~20,500 lbs.  For a grand total of nearly 30 THOUSAND pounds of material just loaded into the house.  And that's not including the water that'll be added to the plaster.  This is why I'm glad I'm not installing it all myself....

More bags of plaster.  Notice the foam cutting "sword" made from a hockey stick and a 3-foot length of band saw blade.

Who says you need a pick up truck?  You just have to be willing to put up with a slightly tilted drive home from Home Depot.

Attic kneewalls.  Access doors for blower and ERV.   Window seat to the right.

Kneewalls around the chimney and the braced and reinforced kneewall at the top of the stairs.

Physics nerd speaking again: Here's proof that aluminum conducts heat WAY better than wood or foam.  Below zero outside. 60 degrees inside.  The little bit of humidity in the house formed a thick layer of frost on the fine edge of the aluminum door pan inside the house.