Well…..maybe the Coffee House Blend II will not work. Now we are looking at the Bungalo Blend from Modwalls for the backspalsh. Very cool and right for our house.
I saw a link to Schoolhouse Electric on House in Progress. They have some very cool light shades that ride the line between nerdy and atomic in just the right way.


Update: I added a rollover to see the image above. Put your mouse on it to see the previous design over the new one. It’s not quite there, but I think it’s progress. More opinions?

Slowish week. Rain sent the framing crew packing, and I think they were waiting on windows anyway. In an ideal situation, we are at the halfway point. 9 weeks down, and 10 weeks until Christiane’s due date.
Saturday: AC guy started putting in ducts
Monday: Framing crew started putting up trim, finished Tyvek wrap
Tuesday: Rain
Wednesday: AC guy finished ducts and “buckets”. Siding delivered.
Thursday: Windows delivered. We’re short one. My fault. Got a new bid for computer and audio wiring. Think I’m going to have to do it myself.
Friday: Nobody there. Eraugh.
The siding they delivered looks like lap. I wanted lap-and-gap. We are using both lap and lap-and-gap and the contrast is important to the design of the house. It sent me into a small panic which was resolved this morning when I snuck onto a neighbor’s property and shamelessly groped his house. They have the same Hardie Colonial we ordered, except we will have the smooth finish and they have the fake wood grain.
The Colonial appears to sit flat on the house. It looks like lap-and-gap. (The best photos of Hardie siding are in the Media section of the web site (go figure)).
(theirs) (ours)
But it’s an optical illusion. These planks sit at an angle overlapping each other like normal lap planks.

There is just the slightest ridge that catches the light and makes them look flat. The effect is so good, you might have to grope your neighbors house to see that they are not lap-and-gap.

Our bank has managed to be consistently disconcerting. From getting the loan amount wrong on the paperwork at closing and then saying it didn’t really matter, to the events of today.
On Thursday Ace told us he was requesting a draw. We had about a week of delays in the first draw, so we wanted to be on top of things this time. On Friday, he got the money.
Nice expediting, but wasn’t I supposed to sign something? Wasn’t I supposed to see something? Like, the amount? I called them today and low and behold, they did need my signature, and they didn’t have it. They faxed a request for like $XX,XXX.XX (insert a respectable year’s salary in there) for me to authorize.
Good thing the work was done and everything is cool.

Dear Ace,
I am afraid that we are going to have to request a change order. Since it has rained forty-billion-hundred inches of rain in the last 24 hours, and it is supposed to rain forty-billion-hundred more inches in the next two days, and since nothing is happening at the house right now (except for everything getting wet, wet, wet) and I’m kind of freaking out about mold and mildew, and since we haven’t bought the rainbarrels yet or done our drainage-friendly landscaping… I am thinking that we need to reassess our design goals.
Please see the attached schematics which will turn our new home into a large Ark. We will need to get started on this right away so that we can load two of every animal onto it before the existing structure floats away.
Smooches,
Christiane

I just discovered Autostitch. It’s perfect for interior shots, and for a house that is out-growing it’s exterior “before” picture vantage points. Each of these panoramas are combined from about 20 individual photos.

I have not had an attic since I lived with my parents. It’s been dorms, apartments, rental houses (you just don’t go into the attic in a rental house) and then I bought the little flat-roof house on Grover. So when we designed our house, there was very little emphasis on the attic. We put in just enough for the AC and a few boxes.
Still it’s my first attic. It’s the space above the master closet and bath. It goes from about 5ft of headroom to about 3 feet. I took some pictures just to show how small it is.

Again, note to self: Don’t tell wife how I got up there.

On Saturday we popped over to the Tile Guy. The place was teeming with pregnant women and toddlers. We picked up our backsplash sample (CoffeeHouse Blend II). It was browner than we expected, but we decided to make it work. We picked out the floor and paint color in a flurry of decision making. Bamboo floors, white cabinets, almost black counter tops, and yellowish on the few walls.
I mocked it up just to be sure. To my eyes it doesn’t quite gel. I’m not sure why. Maybe the cheesy 3D texture of it. Maybe the Ikea pendant lights, but we’ve already bought them.

I’m amazed by the difference in building quality between our house and the scaffolding that the framing crew uses to get 25 feet up. None of the boards line up, half the nails don’t hit the other piece of wood. Do these guys dare each other to get on this stuff?
On Friday I saw a guy putting up plywood above the second floor. He had a nail gun in one hand, was holding onto the edge of the roof with the other, and was using one leg to hold the board in place. His left boot was barely gripping the edge of the scaffolding, the end of the 2×4 support bouncing up and down off the ground under him.

Note to self: Don’t tell wife how I got that shot.

I dropped by the house late on Friday night and caught the framing crew playing cards in the downstairs bedroom. It was a chilly night and they had blocked the door with a 4×8 sheet of plywood and had run an extension cord through the window for a light. I didn’t disturb them. As I drove off, I saw the light glowing and shadows moving in the windows.
Life is coming back to the house and the first people to do some living there are the people who built it. Cool.