WOW!

I can't believe it's JULY! We've had a lot on our plate this year and unfortunately the blog has been seriously neglected. I'm going to attempt to cover the last couple months in this update. We're still trying to be completed by the end of November but we won't be having our Thanksgiving house warming party as previously planned, instead we'll be preparing for a new addition to our family!

Ok, let's start with the doors. Jesse installed all the exterior doors. Including the bifold/swing exterior doors on the south facade. This was a bit of an experiment. Companies like NanaWall make these type of doors but they were way out of our budget. So Jesse did so research and found another company in Canada that makes heavy duty bifold and sliding door hardware. He was able to pick and match enough of the hardware from them to create a system for our doors. He's a genius! (I may be a little bias)

door prep station



stained door hardware prep



door locking hardware installed

hinge detail

Jesse's 'How-to-use' door video

Next we'll look at the screened in porch and south steps. These are under construction, the step treads are temporary, they will be replaced with a material similar to the floor decking at the screened and sleeping porch.

Oliver helping to survey the area prior to building

footings poured and framing beginning

there's a footing to catch each stringer

We'll fit a rain catchment barrel under this part of the deck to catch the downspout

It's going to be great to sit on these steps for movie nights next spring!

Next up the Polygal! This is the translucent material we worked hard to be able to incorporate into our project. I'm in love with the material and the application. Bubble wrap will be used in the wall cavities as insulation and another sheet will be applied to the interior. Special thanks to David Webber for the invaluable advice and tour of his home application!!

view from the office

 

The top panel is visible from the master bedroom while the bottom panel will add natural light to the closet

This section is above the dining area and stairs

view from the sleeping porch

Jesse's immaculate detail between the reclaimed cedar fence board, the polygal and the waterproofing membrane of the sleeping porch

detail at sleeping porch

 In Jesse's spare time he managed to renovate our existing house while I was out of town for a week. In exchange for a wall I received a dishwasher and garbage disposal for my birthday. Thank you Jesse!!!

Let the chaos begin! Half wall's down, kitchen is a job site

Remodelling my architect wife's house while she's out of town! What was I thinking???

Temporary support

Fridge relocated, threshold complete

Dishwasher installation

Wrapped and ready!! Surprise!!!

Plumbing begins...

Main bathroom plumbing with metal trough bathtub

W/C plumbing

Trenching! 15" trench from the new house to the street to tie into the sewer

These men banged this trench out in a day!!

Outline of trench

drain laid

Mj. Tom and Oliver think the trenches are their personal subway system

Thanks to the wonderful rain, it's a bit of a jungle out there.

Here's a picture or two the completed back gate. The panel the kids did at the work party looks great!

That's it for now. I'll try to stay more up to date with the posts. Especially since we'll be moving a bit faster in the ext couple months. Stay tuned for electrical, HVAC, drywall and siding completion!! Hope your summer's going well!

Pouring a pad for the back gate

Trinity wants a dog even more than she wants the house to be finished, and we've been working on extending our fences to enclose the yard completely so we can go down to the pound and get a pooch. As I've been saying, building a fence will be the first half of our security system, a big mean dog will be the second half.

Jesse measures the "glass mulch" into the mixer.

We have an alley that gives access to the back of the property, and we wanted to make a gate that can open up enough so that if we have to drive a vehicle through it we'll be able to. We have a bunch of salvaged doors, and we're going to make a giant accordion style bi fold gate with hinges and casters. To make it easy for the casters to roll smoothly on a level surface, we needed a concrete pad.

Pouring the mix.

Because the pad will not be required to do very much structurally, we decided to save some money and make use of local, free recycled "glass mulch" from the city waste services department. Basically, in addition to recycling glass, the city of Austin takes bottles that it collects and grinds them down into a fine gravel. It makes this available to whoever wants this, most people use it in planter beds or as a glittery ground cover. (Two years ago we used the same glass mulch to fill a succulent planter in the front yard, and the cactus seem to thrive in the sandy glass mixture.) So, after some discussion and research, we settled on a ratio of cement, crushed glass and water. In the top photo you can see me carrying a small bin to the mixer, we used the bin as our measuing cup for cement and glass and measured the water by eyeball. I think we probably would have gotten a stronger mix by adding some sand to help the concrete fill the voids a little better. The glass mixture is partially sand, but more would have helped. However, the pad seems like it has cured up nicely. I will post photos soon of the pad now that it's cured.

Trinity spreading the wet cement. You can see the pile of broken glass on the black tarp in the background.

I'm not sure where the materials in the concrete mix they sell here comes from, but the cement we bought was locally produced, and the glass aggregate was local as well, in addition to being reused. So long as the pad doesn't start crumbling in a few months, it seems for now like a successful experiment.

Stringers and Siding for the stairwell to the sleeping porch

The sleeping porch is our biggest waterproofing challenges, and no part of it is more challenging than the stairway leading up to it, which will be exposed to weather. The bottom of the stairwell has already been covered by a roofing membrane by a crew we hired, but they can't finish their work until the sides are finished.

Trinity makes a crease in a piece of peel & stick underlayment to make it easier to apply it in a corner

The first step is to put up a layer of underlayment on the wall. This is the last line of defense in case water gets beneath the siding. The peel & stick variety we're using will seal around the staples that hold it in place, and also seal the nails that attach the siding.

This is the stairwell, finished... except for the stairs.

In addition to siding, the stairwell needed stringers which will support the stair treads. They had to go on first so that the siding could be fit in above them. Only four bolts were used per stringer to minimize the number of punctures in the underlayment.

Detail of the bottom of a stair stringer. Metal flashing was installed on the top of the stringer, and surrounding it are weathered cedar fence boards cut from discarded fence panels and layered to make siding.

 Now that the stringers and siding are in place, the crew we hired can come back and install flashing to shed water from the porch level (where jesse is crouching in the above photo) down onto the top of the siding we installed. Then it can flow to the bottom of the stairs where it drains through a floor drain. The drain is visible above- look for the ridiculously oversized leaf strainer thing at the bottom of the picture. I'm planning to replace the strainer with something a lot shorter.

Here's looking at you!

If you want to see a few photos of what this area of the house looked like just a few weeks ago, this post has a few.

Work Party Photos

Our recent work party began with moving some scaffolding, chopping down a tree, then firing up a rented chipper to start making mulch out of our construction debris.

With the dead mulberry tree gone, the whole yard seems much more open, and it's much easier to photograph the new house in its entirety

Josh and Liz feed dead branches and lumber scraps into the chipper to make mulch

A main focus of the day was re-purposing materials. Scraps of lumber were turned into mulch, panels of fence boards that someone was throwing out got cut up to make siding, and doors that were being discarded got a fresh coat of paint to help them stand up to being used as a folding gate. Thank you, Craigslist!

Manu and Isa paint one of the doors for a new gate at the back of the property

Jesse getting ready to cut the boards off a panel of fencing that was obtained via Craigslist. Stay tuned to see how these weathered cedar boards look once they're cut and attached to the house as free siding.

Mock up of stairs

Testing the mock up of the stair design

 All of our stairs are a little unconventional. The indoor staircase is steeper than code permits, the code compliant stair will be located outside, and the stairs to the sleeping porch don't have to be code compliant so we made it steeper to save space. But we wanted to be sure that it would still be comfortable to walk up. So, after Trinity came up with two schemes that would work, Jesse made a mock up of each using wood and cinder blocks (aka CMUs- Concrete Masonry Units). Then we got the camera out and started messing around with the self timer, trying to climb the stairs at the same time. It got a little silly...

Jesse examines the functionality of the stairs from all angles. The verdict: Looks great!

Work Party- November 12th!

Our flier will entice you to attend!
(Credit to Rafe for the painting we used as a background for the flier.)

Fall is upon us, and we are excited to put together our first true Work Party. We're going to be pulling old cedar fence pickets off of some fence panels I salvaged and turning them into siding. Also, I'm going to rent a chipper so we can turn lumber scraps and dead brush into mulch. Besides those two projects I've got a growing list of jobs that are a lot more fun when there's a bunch of people doing it together, having a backyard party at the same time. If the weather stays as warm as it is now, we'll have a dunk tank on site so our guests can play "Drench the Architect" and "Soak the Builder." Finally, we're planning on having a prize drawing- helpers will earn raffle tickets by working full shifts of a yet to be determined length, and the winner or winners will win yet to be determined prizes, or maybe just one big grand prize. Suggestions for the prizes gladly accepted. Also there might be some wheelbarrow racing. Who knows?!

Preparing the flat roof

Jesse is hard at work, putting final touches on the plywood decking

 Although the main roof of the house is finished, the upstairs deck, aka "sleeping porch" of the house, requires a flat roof underneath the deck boards. Flat roofs aren't truly flat, they are sloped very slightly to ensure drainage. You can read about how we created that slope in an earlier post, which is most easily found by clicking here. Flat roofs are also very tricky to install correctly, and can cause a lot of expensive damage if they fail, especially when they are installed over a living space. We've found a roofing company that is up for the job, but there's been plenty of work to do getting everything ready for them.

Our friend Richard has come out a few Saturdays to help with the last of the exterior framing

For one thing, a few walls hadn't yet been framed. These walls aren't structural, but they create the boundary between the interior and the exterior, and they have to be in place before the roofing material can be installed. That's because the roofing material needs to come up the sides of the wall about 4 or 5 inches all the way around. Several of these walls will be covered on both sides by Polygal, a translucent plastic panel, but the bottoms of the wall need to have plywood to which the roofing material can adhere.

Jesse measuring to fit plywood around the base of a column

The roofing material will be a product called TPO. It gets installed over a thin layer of rigid insulation which cushions and protects it from damage from below, and also helps the roofing material not be affected by any expansion or contraction in the framing. Around the perimeter of the roof, however, I put a band of 1/2" plywood to give the roofers a more secure means of attaching the first layer of TPO. The only place I didn't put the 1/2" ply is at the scuppers, where I used some 1/8" ply so there will be no danger of the layers of material building up and preventing water from flowing outwards.

Photo of scupper rough openning, showing 1/2" plywood perimeter and 1/8" plywood in the scupper itself.