The Closing of Our Open Door Policy

Posted on February 23, 2015 by jamiebrunner

We must do a little time traveling for this post – all the way back to July of 2014. The average temp was about 97°. We had a few soul-crushing +100° days, but we were rewarded with a handful of glorious mid-80° days too. Timing is important and I am profoundly grateful we didn’t try to build a house in the summer of 2011. For those who’ve blocked that terrible time from their memory, that’s the summer of seventy consecutive days over 100°, Austin was literally on fire, and our farmer regularly offered cactus alongside the wilted (but delicious) vegetables in our CSA shares – so July 2014 wasn’t so bad, comparatively. This is what I told myself each time I reached in my pocket for a woe is me card. It worked; my bellyachin’ was kept to a minimum.

The front door area looked like this for a ridiculously long time. So long, we got a little too comfortable and a little too lax and some thieving bandits made off with a generator and close to a thousand dollars worth of building material. The break in – or the more technically correct term walk in – lit a fire under our butts to get the door installed and locks in place.

The house design dictated a simple but massive door. We didn’t expect it to be so difficult to find a plain slab 4’x9’ door, but every off-the-shelf option was too small or included panels, carvings, inlays, or other decorative accents—which work well for Colonial, Craftsman, Victorian, and Tudor style homes, but not so much for the mid-century modern meets Dwell-style home the architect designed for us. Resdoor of Fort Worth saved the day by creating exactly what we needed.

It doesn’t look like much, but that’s a colossal door right there. It’s seven months later and I still have an immense amount of relief that we weren’t responsible for the installation.

Good job, Ruben!

That’s where Ruben’s work stopped and we took over…

I filled every nail hole until the sidelights looked like a toddler with calamine covered chicken pox. The caulk gun came out about this time too, but it wasn’t as funny as the pox of the chicken so there are no pictures of that work. Does anyone else think the reflection in the window resembles space travel in the Millennium Falcon? No? Well, you could see it if you were high from caulk and paint fumes.

We thought the primer color was bright…

…until it turned the color of Silly Putty next to the real door color, Sherwin Williams Daredevil (SW6882).

Primer – we briefly considered just leaving it like this.

But after seeing the real door color, we’re glad we didn’t.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but based on the photos on my phone, we ate black lentils and carrots while we did this work. I’m taking this as proof of my greatest fear: I have a one-track mind and lack the ability to multitask. It’s a good thing I had neither the time nor the inclination to apply makeup during this part of the project because I was liable to walk away from the mirror looking like a Halloween costume.

While we worked on the door, the bricklayers started their work. The concrete guys poured the front porch too, which was bittersweet for me: I was grateful for the smooth, solid surface because moving a large ladder between the woven rebar was a major pain in my ass, but I also hated to lose our fake Grauman’s Chinese Theater…

…especially the little raccoon handprints.

I think our little raccoon friend might be a distant cousin of Gregory Peck.

image courtesy of alexander cunningham’s flickr page

Mark installed the door handle and we promptly locked ourselves out of the house. Or at least we thought we did. Turns out we just didn’t know how to work the door knob. I blame the paint fumes. Don’t worry, we’ve got the ‘getting into the house’ thing down now. Push button garage door openers are a godsend.

It was about this time that I realized I wasn’t happy with the white trim. The balance was off. It needed to be bolder. So out came the paint brush and the paint fumes again.

This is how the front door area looks today. It still needs work, namely another coat of Daredevil, a sweet starburst doorknob thingy*, a proper walkway from the street to the house, and some landscaping. Those things will have to wait until better weather or until our paint-addled brains fully recover, whichever comes first.

*Doorknob thingy

We get by with a little help from our friends.

Posted on October 30, 2014 by jamiebrunner

Technically it’s a lot of help from a lot of friends. A lot of family, too. We’ll talk about them all, but today’s spotlight is on a man with a very specific set of skills. Skills acquired over a very long career. Skills that make him a dream-come-true for people like us in a situation like this.

Clint Stapp can go from a hospital board meeting to deftly working his comedic chops at a raffle table during a homebrew competition. His number crunching skills are only rivaled by his mastery of culinary arts. He can climb a Jeep up the cliffs of the Moab desert as easily as he bikes to his neighborhood grocery store. But that’s not what we needed from him (well, the comedic chops bit came in handy since we were hot (we did most of the work in this post in late August), tired, and utterly worn out from this project – laughter is an exceptional salve). What we needed from Clint was his MIG welder and Darth Vader helmet. Several years ago Mark designed a bed and Clint welded it for us. His work is exceptional – just look at those smooth joints. We knew he was the person to help us with the balcony.

For the curious, that’s Emma Louise, the only dog I know that won’t get out of bed before 1pm.

But before we could call Clint into action, we had to do some prep work…

Painting the underside of the deck was far more painful and annoying than I expected. I hate painting ceilings – mostly because my arms are most comfortable at my sides or at the very most raising a cocktail glass to my lips – but the slats and nooks and crannies that make up the balcony put ceiling painting to shame. In my mind, this work was not so different from 15th century hang-a-prisoner-from-arm-shackles-above-his-head torture. There are no pictures of this work because other people were off on their own projects and I could not focus through the tears AND hold bags of ice on my shoulders. I’m not sure if he felt sorry for me or just wanted to shut me up, but Mark bought this brilliant tool and it made the work go so much faster:

image courtesy of amazon.com

A week’s worth of painting right there – pre-crevice tool.

By the time I finished my work, Clint (seen here with his lovely bride, Dana, whose eyes are too beautiful to photograph) was ready to start his.

photo courtesy of Dana Stapp

First angle bracket permanently in place!

It was a long day for Clint, who was nursing an injured foot, but it was a great day for us. We ended up with the foundation for a remarkably safe and secure balcony railing and the added bonus of catching up with good friends we hadn’t seen in eons. We can’t thank you enough Mr. and Mrs. Stapp!

photo courtesy of Dana Stapp

After Clint finished his work, I picked up the paint brush again. Painting the steel around the balcony was a bit more comfortable than painting the underside, but it still had its issues. I won’t bore you with the details – instead, here’s a picture when I still had the semblance of a smile on my face.

Fast forward through the gnashing of teeth and pulling of hair to this:

It looks so easy. Sigh…

Once I finished my work with the paint brush, Mark and his dad took over.

The levels got a workout.

My fear of heights got a workout too.

To tell the truth, my fear of heights is almost gone. I credit immersion therapy. And drinking (but NOT while you’re on a ladder!).

This part of the process was slow, but that’s just the way it should be – check, double-check, then check the bolts one more time.

They eventually made it all the way around the balcony, and then came the fun part…

…railing!

Then the not-so-fun part…tension cables.

Correction: Mark says it’s not that this part wasn’t fun, it was just tedious.

And voilà! The finished product!

Here are a few more shots because she’s so pretty and I like to show her off.

Now, instead of feeling the throes of vertigo when I step onto the balcony, I get the calm and comforting feeling of being in a playpen – but unlike a baby, I can hold a cocktail and watch the turtles from up there and fully appreciate how wonderful the thing on which I stand is. Also, a baby would never consider using “on which” so I’m definitely an adult. I feel I must make that clear because there were a lot of tears during the painting part of this project.

Up next (in a more timely manner, I hope) – the front door.

She’s Mighty Mighty

Posted on September 28, 2014 by jamiebrunner

This post is at least a couple of months overdue. Things moved along at a brisk pace during this time and – much to my displeasure – sitting in an air-conditioned room on a soft chair in front of a computer screen wasn’t an option.

We spent nearly ten months staring at pallets of bricks. They were delivered in October 2013 – back when the whole team had optimistic thoughts about how quickly this house would go up. We’re all older and wiser now.

Here are the bricks back when they were new and clean and hopeful (they do look hopeful, don’t they?).

Unlike some of the crews before them, the brickmasons were marvelous. Skilled laborers who showed up on time and worked their arses off in the heat – you can’t ask for more than that when building a house.

They found ingenious ways to make shade – and let me tell you, it was needed. White brick + white sand + blazing hot white sun = blindness and heatstroke.

As an armchair anthropologist, I marveled at the way these men ate on-site. Unlike other groups of workers, there were no fast-food bags, no cold/stale leftovers, no generic box lunches. These men ate fresh and they ate well. Every single day.

They had a workhorse of a microwave that went everywhere with them. If they were inside, it was inside.

If they were outside, it was outside.

If they were both in and out, it was in the garage.

It survived more than one night in the rain too. It’s possible it was caked with magical supernatural goo to keep it running – I don’t know for sure because I was never brave enough to open the door.

We had no electricity at this time, so everything that required power, including the microwave, ran on a generator. The thing was obnoxiously loud and it’s a testament to the patience of our neighbors that we never received a noise complaint.

Avocado peels, lime wedges, tomatoes, and cilantro leaves littered the ground where they ate. BEST TRASH EVER!

Bricklaying is messy work. I recommend thick-soled shoes.

Working over the pond presented its own issues.

How many bricks do you think ended up in the water?

All buildings with brick facades use a metal support beam called a lintel to run bricks across doorways, windows and other openings.

They aren’t typically visible but the architect who designed this house decided to make ours a bit more prominent. This idea was great on paper – in the cool comfort of the builder’s office – but then we had to paint those bad boys with primer and black paint on some of the hottest days of this summer. I still bear the burn marks on my forearms from accidentally grazing the blazing hot metal. Side note – the lintels sat on-site for many months without any issue, but just a few days before installation someone decided to steal ‘em. Such is our luck.

My brain started swelling from the heat so there are no pictures of the black paint, but believe you me, it went on right after the rust-colored primer.

Here they are in place.

They look much better now that they’re clean and touched up by a professional painter, but you’ll have to wait for those pictures because I can only focus on one thing at a time since the whole ‘heat-swollen brain’ thing.

Mark requested a 1/3 running bond brick pattern for the house. If you’re clueless like me, here’s a handy visual tutorial on brick patterns (many thanks to http://www.triton.edu for this image).

Mark decided a large brick wall featured prominently on the front of the house was not aesthetically pleasing so he designed four “soldiers” to guard the garage. Once again, I was clueless and would’ve never thought of turning the bricks to make a more interesting pattern. Our soldiers look great now, but I think they’ll be truly stunning with some landscaping and lighting in the future.

The crew did a decent job of cleaning up after themselves, but I’m pretty sure bricks are like rabbits and multiply exponentially. We will never finish picking them all up.

Jordan, our neighbor’s not-confined-in-a-fenced-yard dog, stopped by to inspect the brickmasons’ work. This visit was important enough for her to bring a friend – a pug my mother-in-law started calling Monsieur. I don’t know if it’s the dog’s real name or not, but it stuck. Now I find myself yelling “Monsieur! Go poop in your own yard!” regularly. Sometimes I use a fake French accent to keep things interesting. I really wish their owners wouldn’t let them roam. I worry for their safety.

Mid-July rain caused a few delays and made maneuvering the site difficult. I may or may not have made “walk the plank” jokes in a ridiculously bad pirate voice around this time. My jokes may or may not have been ignored.

Here’s what it looked like after the brickmasons left, but before the roofers finished their work.

Up next: the finished roof, the front door area, and the balcony! After that we’ll move on to posts about the inside.

Rainy Days and Mondays…*

Posted on July 30, 2014 by jamiebrunner

I never expected to have to work around rain delays when we started this project. Partly because this project began two years ago – smack dab in the middle of one of the worst droughts in our state’s history – but also because, droughts aside, summer in Texas is not known for its rain showers.

I like to think this project got the attention of the weather gods and since they have silly, mischievous senses of humor the lakes around North Texas filled up a bit while they inflicted rain upon our little project. You’re welcome. For the record, we will not be able to help out during the next drought. This is it for us.

The last storms that affected us directly happened when we were painting the outside of the house. Mark took a week off from work and two full days of painting were lost to rain. He figured out a way to salvage the time by building the framework for the fireplace himself (relatively easy work since he’s the one who designed it). Take that, weather gods!

We still have much to do with the fireplace, but the pictures at the end of this post will give you a good idea of how this thing will look.

In the beginning – father-in-law cipherin’ measurements very early on Day One of Project: Fireplace.

Then the fun stuff starts!

Disclaimer: No fathers-in-law were hurt during this construction.

Mark works out the depth of the columns (real world applications are sometimes different from CAD drawings).

Building the structure vertically.

Inspecting the work at the end of Day One.

Day Two – it gets wrapped in OSB (Oriented Strand Board – not Oriental Strand Board) for strength…

…and Mark sorts out brick placement and the width of mortar joints.

By this point, the rain let up and we were able to return to our paint buckets.

Several weeks later, sheetrock went up and the concrete guys built a frame for the hearth (they were also on-site to build frames for steps outside the sliding doors and the front porch – but we’ll talk about those things in a future post).

A couple of weeks after that, they poured the concrete.

Around this time, the brick masons started their work on the outside of the house. They, too, felt the wrath of the weather gods, so they, too, moved indoors to work on the fireplace during rain (it’s important to reiterate that this is JULY IN TEXAS).

Instead of a pre-made firebox, the brick masons custom-built one to Mark’s specifications. We lovingly referred to the fireplace as the ‘pizza oven’ during this phase.

Once they finished the firebox, Mark started his work on the placement of the cement board to hold the tiles that will eventually be the focus of the fireplace.

Right around this time the plumbers ran a line for gas.

Side conversation: No, we don’t plan to use wood logs in this thing. It’s meant for decorative purposes 98% of the time. The other 2% – Thanksgiving and Christmas – should not be spent cleaning soot and ashes. Yes, we love wood fires and plan to have a proper fire pit outside, where homemade marshmallows stuffed on the ends of twigs can melt into sticky, stringy globs and water from the cement pond can thoroughly douse any burning embers.

Back to the plumbers – Mark was not happy with the location they chose for the cut-off valve. Please note it is now both lower and centered squarely on the corners of the bricks. I could dedicate a whole post to OCD tendencies.

In case you’re wondering: Yes, that’s dirt on those bricks. They sat on-site for eleven months. I think they’re pretty clean considering.

Here’s a peek inside. I call this its Mullet Phase – you know, business in the front/party in the back. If you’re curious, the brick masons used the busted up pieces for fortification purposes.

Work on the cement board fittings continued as Mark and his dad added braces followed by the board.

The masons then covered the “party” brick with “business” brick, effectively killing any links to the mullet/pizza oven.

Here’s how it looks today. There’s still a lot of work to do – namely, we must make the ceramic tiles to fill the center. I’m looking forward to that part because we’ll work with our dear friend Keith Thomson from the Firehouse Gallery. We own some of his work already, but I like the idea that he will be a permanent part of this home.

In closing, I give Mark my most heartfelt thanks for his infinite patience as I vacillated between we-must-have-a-mantle(!) and do-we-really-need-a-mantle(?!) exactly twenty times a day for the past fourteen months. The man is a saint.

* Blatant use of a Carpenters song seemed appropriate for this carpentry-heavy post.

Deck, Part Deux

Posted on July 25, 2014 by jamiebrunner

The last time this blog visited this deck, it looked something like this:

Mark took two weeks off recently. That’s in addition to the week he took off when we painted the outside. He has a ridiculous amount of vacation (that’s one of the reasons we thought we could tackle such an ambitious project).

He spent Week One on the deck while the crew installed sheetrock, taped, and textured inside. He spent Week Two painting indoors, but you’ve already seen that.

Here’s Day One of Deck Work. A lot of prep happened before they laid the first board. Mark wanted a specific type of wood and he didn’t want to see screws. Those stipulations turned a 2-day project into a full week’s worth of work. It was worth it, though. The thing is gorgeous.

Side note: We all have well-earned farmers’ tans now.

In the picture below, Mark shows us how to use the biscuit joiner.

You make a small incision in the side of the board then insert a clip and nailed it to the joist. The board next to it gets an incision too and it’s pushed onto the clip that’s already nailed in. They say a picture is worth a thousand words:

This process is both painful and time consuming, but it results in a surface free of visible screws or nails, which makes Mark happy.

Mini-conference – most likely regarding the length of the next board.

The part of the deck you see in the picture above was easy peasy work. Sure, it was a pain to high step over all those joists – many a shin scar earned here – but compared to working on the section over the water this was a cakewalk.

See, using the ground as leverage to get the boards in tight on the ‘land side’ was good.

Doing the same thing over the water – not so good.

They made their way, slowly but surely.

The Cement Pond god requested sacrifices so we offered up a couple of tools. Not sure what harm he could have inflicted upon us if we chose not to contribute to his cause, but better safe than sorry, right? (I’m really curious to see what turns up when we do a proper draining and cleaning of this thing…at least thirty years, or four feet, of muck in the bottom should make for a fun archaeological dig.)

This little part of the deck was trickier than I ever imagined.

While taking a break from deck work, father-in-law spotted a large soft shell turtle digging a nest on the “lake” side of the property. She spotted him at the same time and her attempt to quickly and gracefully high tail it outta there failed as she slid down the bank and landed on her back in a couple of inches of water. Fortunately, one of the deck planks was long enough for Mark to reach her and flip her over without having to get too close. Since Mark saved her life, I told him he earned naming rights. So everyone, meet Cat the Turtle (or more specifically, Cat the Turtle’s belly – or, if you want the anatomically correct word, her plastron). I’m hopeful this experience didn’t mess up her egg laying process. I plan to keep an eye out for her kittens in a couple of months. Had I been on hand for this li’l adventure, you would see pictures of the rescue itself. Instead, you just get this:

Back to the deck – who knew walking on a solid surface could bring such joy?

Once they attached the trim pieces the next phase of this project started – painting the structural steel to help protect it from the elements and to make it look pretty. Although, if we do our job right it won’t really look pretty, it’ll just disappear.

First we cleaned the metal, then Mark ground down nails used to hold the joists in place then came the primer. This is nasty stuff and I apologized to every minnow that thought a tiny drip was an insect landing on the water.

I have a newfound appreciation of the men and women who paint bridges. This is not easy work.

My arms were too tired to snap an action shot of the final coat of black paint going on, but here’s a good before and after:

Even though it’s nasty stuff, we’re quite happy with Rust-Oleum® industrial strength rusty metal primer – specifically, the way it adhered to the steel. Fingers crossed it holds up well because I do not want to paint this thing again.

But that’s not all!

Work began immediately on the balcony. Fortunately, Mark’s stringent wood and screw requirements didn’t cover the upper deck so this work went remarkably fast.

This is how we worked on the balcony before:

If you look closely at the picture above, you can see father-in-law’s hand while he caulked the board and batten. I took this photo during one of my ‘spells’ – which is just code for taking a break, lying flat on my back and staring up at the sky for a while. I’m not cut out for the work of a day laborer.

This is how it looks today. Yes, railing is planned. We’re not crazy.

It’s so much easier to work out there now!

Here’s the view from another spell.

The team who put the joists in place made a few placement mistakes, so Mark used the grinder to smooth the holes and his dad filled ‘em in with Bondo®. Once I painted the beam with primer, it’s practically impossible to see where they were.

I’m confident it’ll look even better with the final coat of paint. There’s a lot more work to do – most importantly, welding pieces meant to attach the upper balcony railing. We have a special guest star for that job, so check back in a couple of weeks to see how things turn out.

Then we must finish painting the underside of the balcony and stain/seal the wood on top too. Finally, we will sand and oil the ipe on the deck below but that won’t happen until the brick masons finish their work.

In the meantime, I leave you with a picture taken yesterday:

One tiny step at a time.

Neither Rust-Oleum® nor Bondo® sponsored this post but we give ’em both our seal of approval.

Insulation, Sheetrock, and Beer Bellies

Posted on July 17, 2014 by jamiebrunner

A lot has happened in the last few weeks!

For many months the walls looked like this:

The framers constructed the exterior walls with both normal vertical supports and these great little horizontal pieces (we’re not 100% sure, but I think the horizontal ‘studs’ are there for fire retardation…building code stuff).

Regardless of the reason they’re there, we grew to love those useful little nooks.

We loved them so much we added more of our own. Here’s Mark building shower niches into the wall.

When someone said, “The bug spray is in the medicine cabinet” we knew just where to go. For a long time it felt as if we had moved in. Who needs proper walls? Who needs electricity? Who needs running water when we have all these bottles of the stuff (and a port-a-potty)?

Homebuilding, the way we’re doing it, will make you crazy. Specifically, this definition of schizophrenia: emotional blunting, intellectual deterioration, social isolation, disorganized speech and behavior, delusions, and hallucinations.

Delusions ran high at this point.

(Disorganized speech comes later – don’t worry, you’ll get to read about that too. I expect to be in full hallucination mode by the time this thing is finished. Social isolation is the worst though. We miss seeing our friends. )

Then insulators did their thing and we were snapped back into reality.

The crew sprayed a radiant barrier on the interior upstairs roof and it dropped the temperature immediately. Radiant barriers rock.

A member of our team had a bit of food poisoning, but carried on like a trooper regardless. Pepto-Bismol® and traditional insulation are practically the same color. It took an hour to find those tablets.

We insulated the garage ourselves. I’ve never lived in a house with a properly functioning garage. I am all sorts of excited about this thing.

In the meantime, the sheetrock arrived…

…and it went up.

Well, a lot of it went up – a lot went down too. This is very messy work, folks.

There are no pictures of the taping & bedding process. Mostly because finishing the deck consumed our attention while they did their thang, but also because they were incredibly large, half-naked men on stilts (thankfully it was the top half). Unlike some other tradesmen who shall remain nameless, these guys always showed up on time and they did a great job. After they wrapped up their work, I realized how much I miss their falsetto sing-alongs with techno mariachi music. It’s a quieter and less interesting place without them. I do not, however, miss the sweaty, naked beer bellies at eye level.

Next up, the texture guy – who remained fully clothed the whole time. He had his work cut out for him because we paid for completely smooth walls. It might not seem obvious at first, but the smoother the wall, the more work is involved. Texture covers up a multitude of sins.

By this point, we finished the deck and were ready to start our next job – painting inside. The texture guy was a fountain of knowledge and we’re grateful he shared some of it with us. For example, who knew buying plastic sheeting and tape at Kelly Moore was considerably cheaper ($11) than The Home Depot or Lowes ($25) for the same products?

And he gave us a tutorial on how to make quick work of prepping.

I don’t want to relive the nightmare of our first round of paint (it soaked straight into the walls, gallon after gallon after five gallon bucket – who knew painting new construction would be such a freakin’ headache?), so I’ll just skip right to the fun pictures.

Father-in-law worked the paint sprayer in about fifteen layers of clothes on a 100 degree Fahrenheit day. God bless that man.

Gunfight in the hall.

Teamwork.

Still smiling (and looking ridiculously cute) at the end of a long day. We’re so fortunate to have this man on our team.

It’s coming along. Slowly but surely.

All Hands on Deck

Posted on June 20, 2014 by jamiebrunner

In September 2013 , I posted a little note chock-full of foul language after we discovered the survey company got their measurements wrong* and our new home was to be built practically on top of the spring – not four feet away from the spring as intended. Fast forward nine months and here’s our solution.

It’s not quite finished because we’re waiting for the lumber to acclimate itself to the environment before it’s installed, but this will give you a good idea of how the thing will look.

Steel beams delivered.

Steel beams welded in place.

The beams are secured to the side of the house and (if I remember correctly) 4′ deep concrete pads.

Extra fun working conditions for David (in red) and Ruben (in orange).

Looking down at the deck from the second floor (my intense fear of heights is less than my desire to catch a cool breeze and that doorway on the second floor is – by far – the best place to cool off).

A view from inside.

We unloaded the wood for the top of the deck by hand.

It doesn’t look like much, but that’s 1684 lbs of ipe (also known as Brazilian walnut or ironwood). David and Ruben helped us unload it from the truck and even with their help I thought I might die under the weight of that stuff. Then, several days later, Mark and I moved the whole stack outside ourselves and I actually died. It might’ve just been a fit, not actual death – I have no idea because I blacked out after the last piece was moved. Have you seen these arms? They’re not designed to carry much more than a large bottle of gin…or maybe a small dog.

All that heavy lifting will be worth it after this thing is finished, right?

*It seems we’re not the only ones with survey problems – here’s a story about a home in Rhode Island that was accidentally built inside the lines of a state park. Their 4 ½ acre mistake makes our 4’ issue seem like nothing. http://www.aol.com/article/2014/06/18/why-a-million-dollar-rhode-island-mansion-must-go/20915250/

The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

Posted on June 3, 2014 by jamiebrunner

The Good

They installed the windows several weeks ago. It’s difficult to get a decent picture of them. Perhaps taking panoramic shots on a phone’s camera with shaky arms after a long day of physical labor isn’t best. Still, this will give you a general idea of how things look:

See the protective film on the windows? I will use a rudimentary knife fashioned from a flat head screwdriver to shank the person who tries to pull that film off before I get to it. Some people do bubble wrap. I peel film. It must stay on until the drywall is up and everything is painted. It’s killing me.

Continue reading →

The Mystery of the Upstairs Siding

Posted on May 4, 2014 by jamiebrunner

As might be expected, this project has infiltrated my dreams. The surprising part is how long it took to figure out the dreams were about the house. This week’s subconscious nocturnal adventures included special guest stars The Hardy Boys. Those of us who grew up with a steady diet of Nancy Drew and Trixie Belden know the boys as periphery players – something to read only if the Drew/Belden shelves at the library were empty. Why the starring role now? That’s a good question for a detective! The first clue is this stuff:

Our meetings with the architect originally focused on very modern designs. The first images in this website feature a house down the street from us: Studio Mud. This house attracted us to the neighborhood and it’s precisely what we expected to build. Then we spent more time at the land and we realized a Dwell-style home wasn’t the best fit. The house down the street works so well because it’s cantilevered from a hill, it’s surrounded by tree tops and it’s mostly hidden from the street. Our little plot of earth is flat, half of it is devoid of trees and the house is in full view of everyone who drives by.

After careful thought we changed direction – not a full 180 degree turn, but a fairly wide veer that honors the history of the neighborhood. It’s an eclectic street, with at least one home from each of the last six decades, but its soul is mid-century and that’s where we decided to focus the design. In a future post, I’ll take time to discuss how the architect took two very different styles – today’s super modern and 1950’s modern – and blended them into something we think works well, but for the sake of brevity we need to focus on the siding. As soon as we switched gears to the mid-century vibe we knew siding would be involved; specifically a style called board-and-batten. Around this time I had many dreams about playing very intense games of badminton. Oddly wired brain, clue number two.

I’ve learned that words are very important on a building project. For example, if you refer to bendy doors people will look at you as if you have a mild form of mental retardation. Say bi-fold doors and the proverbial doors of communication open wide and people start treating you like a functioning adult.

In case you’re interested, we are not using any form of folding door – bendy or otherwise. Those things are ridiculously expensive and the only purpose they serve in Texas is to allow mosquitoes the size of small cars inside.

Over the last week, the house has really taken shape. Roofs are up, some windows are in, and they delivered the hardie board used to make our board-and-~~badminton~~ batton siding. It turns out it’s not the hearty board I’ve been erroneously referring to all these months. Not familiar with the stuff? Here’s some information: Pros and Cons of Hardie Board

Closed:The Case of How Hardie Board Siding Morphed into Hardy Boy Dreams

Check back next week when we attempt to solve The Mystery of the Missing Plumber. (Actually, we found him…in a hospital, but that’s a story for another time.)

Here’s your chance to learn how to solve mysteries like the pros! This handy detective handbook is only ten bucks! Find it here.

Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters

Posted on April 24, 2014 by jamiebrunner

We have a roof!

It’s not the exact roof design we wanted, but this is such a First World Problem I won’t discuss the details. Instead, let’s focus on the good – a roof is up!