Dear Tile Guy,
I regret to inform you that I could not convince my husband to install hard tile flooring in the kitchen and dining areas. I have amazing persuasion skills, yet he was unmoved. I promise to give it one more go at the last minute on your behalf, but don’t hold your breath.
Nevertheless, we are looking forward to going retro in our upstairs bathrooms just as David had done previously in the downstairs bathroom.
And your expertise has once again proven invaluable. I love the Coffeehouse II Blend and I would like to order a sample just to make sure (although I feel quite positive already) that this is our ideal kitchen backsplash.
Thank the heavens you are across from Genuine Joe’s and next to my favorite bridal alteration shop.
Sincerely, Christiane

One thing I did not expect during this project was the rash of petty crimes. Potty borrowing, dumpster borrowing, peeing with the lid down, raccoons in the toilet, shyster tree trimmers (not Ryan, Ryan’s cool), and last night our Port-a-Potty was tipped. Exactly how bored do you have to be to push over a Port-a-Potty?

The clouds have parted, the sun is shining, a hint of sawdust lingers in the air, and there are trusses piled in our front yard!

No rain in the 8-day forcast. Should be an exciting few weeks.

I looked it up. I’ll be damned, there is such a thing as a truss machine. And they look like they break all the time.
Today? Trussmas?

Before I start talking about the kitchen we ordered, I should say a few words about Chuck, our neighbor-cabinet guy. He’s local, he’s a small business, and he’s got tons of experience with custom cabinetry and historic restoration. He’ll be doing the trim for the interior of our entire house, for sure, as we want to match the original trim (which is so unique that a special knife will have to be created to cut it) in our ongoing quest to keep the addition from looking like an addition.
He’s also busy, so it stands to reason that we probably came to him a little too late to place the order for our kitchen rush job In any case, we made the trek to Houston this weekend mostly to visit my parents who were down from Colorado on a business trip. It seemed like a good time to squeeze in a visit to IKEA so that we could place an order on site.

The cabinets won’t be an exact fit. We’ll have 9-ft ceilings in the kitchen, and I really didn’t want space inbetween the tops of the wall cabinets and the ceiling. I’m short. I can’t dust that high. But IKEA doesnt make 17in high cabinets to fit in that space. At some point, we will prolly need to have them made. That’s okay by me. It means we can (when we win the lottery) have some with sliding doors, a la Eichler.
The good news is that the feet on the IKEA cabinets are somewhat adjustable, meaning that I can have a few counters here, and a few there, that are just short enough for moi.
David will install the cabinets himself, but we’ll need to hire someone to do the countertops and backsplash. So, if you have any recommendations, we’re open! I’m going to drop by The Tile Guy today to see if they are able to order (and possibly install) the backsplash I’m currently coveting.

A long rainy drive to the big box on the highway. In 3-4 weeks we should have 2000 lbs of wood, glue, and hinges delivered.

I dropped by the house on the way to work. No trusses of course, but there was a bunch of not-our-dang-stuff in the dumpster.

• a small table
• a few mops
• toy tunnel
• two cots
• igloo cooler
• flower pots
• a propane tank

Worse than a stocking full of coal on Trussmas morning.

Every time I see a flatbed truck with wood on it, I check to see if it is heading toward our house. If there aren’t any trusses in our yard by the time I come home from work, it’s going to be a really long weekend.
Update 11:00pm: No trusses. Truss machine broke. Monday. Fee fie foe phooey.

While talking to people at our open house I was reminded of a few basic things that I learned while designing our house. Here they are.

• In Crestview, houses cost about $150 - $200/sqft, and you can build for about $100 - $175/sqft.
• A construction loan is based on the value of the property after work is done, not the current value.
• Pools and decks return about 40% of what they cost in resale.
• A small bedroom is 10 ft by 10 ft. You really shouldn’t go smaller than that.
• 13×13 is nice but not a big bedroom. 14×14 is ok. 15×15 is great. 16×16 is crazy big.
• A shirt on a hanger is 2 feet wide. If you want to hang stuff up on both sides of a walk-in closet, that’s 2 feet on each side, and 3 in the middle. 7 feet.
• A hallway is 3 ft minimum, and that’s really small. 3.5 ft is ok. 4 ft is nice.
• Stairs take up about one full bedroom of space. Stairs in a straight line take up 60 sqft out of each floor, for a total of 120 sqft, but if you start to fall at the top, you’re going all the way downstairs. Add a landing (is that why they call it a landing?) in the middle and it’s 180 sqft.
• 8 ft ceiling is low, 9 is high, 10 is, well, just get out a ruler and see how high that really is before you spec it.
• Closets and bathrooms can have kludgy shapes, but bedrooms should be rectangles.
• Exterior lights look better if you can’t see the light source.
• Every room should have windows on 2 walls.
• Sometimes a window has to be in an odd spot inside, to be in a good spot outside.
• It’s not how many feet of pipe you have that drives cost, it’s how many times it pops out of the wall. Sink? 1000 bucks. Tub? 1000 bucks. Another sink? 1000 bucks. It’s enough to make you rethink those his-and-her toilets.

Speaking of reducing those energy bills…
David and I have tried hard to design the house for eco-friendliness. Although the house will be pretty conventional in form, we decided to:

• Angle the roof for the best access to capturing solar energy
• Reduce the amount of windows (and thereby heat) on the west-facing portion of the house
• Plan for as much rainwater capture as possible
• Reuse as many of the materials in the existing home as possible
• Create comfortable outdoor spaces instead of increasing indoor square footage
• Use environmentally-friendly materials whenever possible, like Marmoleum and IPE

The solar panel thing has had us stumped, it seems so expensive to break into this market when it seems like fuel cell technology is right around the corner, but it turns out that going solar little by little might not be as expensive as I had originally thought. The comments on that post are enlightening–just as many great ideas and experiences shared as in the post itself.