weekend update: review in brief(s)

The phase of our projects that allowed us to hire help is drawing to a close. The Contract is in punch-list, the work crews are dwindling and the backyard "shitter" is full and removed. The finish work has gone quickly (this is only 300 square feet of addition) and so I offer this quick tour the last months drywall and exterior cleanup...

The Michigan bottle deposit scam redux: Trains, Planes and Automobiles.

In this analogy, Alli's the one on the left.

As you may remember, with the help of some friends we tracked down the perfect kitchen tile a few weeks back. The catch was that it was in Albany NY and we are in Washington DC. Un-deterred by seperation of a few states we've been running the shipping numbers back and forth for weeks and I finally decided to give up and drive it back myself. A one way flight and a car rental ultimately priced out significantly less than any legitimate shipping operation. Keen observers may note that this equation only works out if your time is worth nothing, which I'm fairly sure I've demonstrated is true over the last 4 years of this renovation. Ahead of the trip I did some weight estimations one more time and for that I broke out the real science:

4 tile samples = 1 full tile = 1 enchilada sauce+ 1 jar of artisanal honey or a unit of measure expressed as 1 Artisanal Sauce Unit [ASU].

While not officially recognized by NIST I was none-the-less confident that my order would approximate 400 ASU or about the weight of 4 really fat people. Confident finally in my maths I set out to find a car big enough to fit and after explaining the conversion to equivalent fat people to the helpful folks at Hertz they found me the perfect American SUV for the drive home. And so the day began with a Train to the bus depot:

A bus to the Plane depot:

And a plane to the car rental kiosk:

And ultimately the car to the tile storage:

It may not look like much, but that pedastal sink was 7' tall!

All the while back at the house persons whose time was indeed worth something were busy wiring with wire and insulating with insulation:

I'm just glad they're consistent in their efforts to maintain a clean and organized work area.

Premature reflectuation; Teasing the finish line

the exterior work edges nearer to "Kim" status on the KSOPD

Before: circa 2006

After: circa yesterday

Past reflections; The return to inspirato.

We've recently dug up the old inspiration photos from a project we both liked when we began the work on our house. This house, from a photo spread in House and Garden January 2007, was the Treaty of Versailles to our initial design concept bickering. Looking back on these photos is a good reminder of how some of the concept similarities have worked out over time. And, since this has been a ever growing timeline of construction we've also found ourselves going back to some of the images to remind ourselves about some of our design concepts we agreed on. And while i'd love to reflect on the work we've done as some sort of pure architectural vision... the truth is we've pulled as much from the interior buff books as anyone else.

Building Systems: a lesson in professional methodology

4-4-2011 The hot water heater was taken out and thrown into the back yard.

5-22-2011 Hot water returned to the house.

I don't often pat my wife on the back... I'm usually too busy patting myself on the back through veiled self deprecation in a public forum... But credit is due because she stuck it out through 7 weeks of hot water-less days during the last two months. And didn't really seem to complain. To review, we've gone from this:

to this:

I can't tell you anything about it... actually that's not true, I can tell you everything about it because sat transfixed infront of the instruction manual with the installer for about an hour and a half but believe me it is boring and long winded. The important bit is that it's both the heating system and the hot water system and it works. However, to get here we had to do this:

That fancy new gas line that was run sort of didn't work so the nice new slab has had some tasteful modification. Installing something without testing it is the benchmark of my home improvement methodology but I really thought the plumber would have known better. And while on the subject of "measure twice, take lunch and then start another project" we have this little bit of electrical wizardry to match:

If a picture tell a thousand words than this one is indeed a novella of subcontracting half-assery. While pulling the largest electrical line i've ever seen from the front to the back of the house it seems two or three failed attempts led to holes in the floor and the wall. I like to think it began with the small hole in the floor and ended with a frustrated sawzalling of everything in sight. I'm sure there is an easy fix for that. It appears they were equally delicate at the other end as well:

I can only take from this some solace in that we are all in fact one clumsy step away from burning the house down be it done through professional or DIY.

Material discretion; Floor tile and the Michigan bottle deposit scam

Hello Newman.

Work is moving forward nicely and the trades are are taking over. Electrical, plumbing and the boiler guy are all on site daily so our focus has turned slightly towards finishes -- most notably the kitchen floor. The gc has been hired to deliver basically a warm lit shell. When he leaves we will have a painted drywall box without finishes so we can take over and fuss with them for the next two years. This fussing began in earnest this week with the discovery of of an abandoned stock of encaustic tile at the Historical society of Albany NY back door warehouse. According to Alli 'encaustic tile' is just like regular tile only heavier, more difficult to work with and with a lead time of about 16 weeks. it's also pretty much up to one guy named 'Gustavo' in the area to order and deliver it and he stopped returning our calls 3 weeks back. The minute you try to call in your designer discount the phones go off the hook the offices of Gustavo Inc. It all began via cryptic text message photo from a friend in Albany:

I'm pretty sure that's the lost Arc of the Covenant up there on the left.

On an off-chance we might be interested he snapped a photo of this abandoned stock of tile at the local salvage yard and sent it on. 10 minutes later he was pulling together an order over the phone while we looked up the color codes online. All in all we found and ordered about 29 boxes of this forgotten stuff from an old man in Albany who was glad to move the inventory. Apparently a distributer in the north east gave up on the local branch and after finding the costs to ship the inventory back to California too high - donated the lot to the Albany Historic Society, who have been pushing this boxes around the warehouse for months. All in all we saved about 75% off the Gustavo rate and we're supporting the smugness of re-use and rehab approach - but with one siginificant caveat. The original seller of these bailed on the shipping costs for a reason. these 8x8 tiles are incredibly heavy - so much so that only 13 fit in a box to keep the boxes manageable at around 40 lbs. The 300 square feet we've bought weighs in somewhere north of 1200 lbs - or just a little too much for most conventional shipping. In fact, it's a little too much to fit in just about any conventional car and since we now portage via volvo instead of the pickup truck this gets trickier... What has resulted is a calculation formula not unlike Kramer and Newman's number crunching to crack the michigan bottle deposit scam from Seinfeld. The weight, gas use, vehicle size and one-way vs. two-way rental agreements have locked me in the house Howard Hughes style trying to find the way not to undo the great deal with a ridiculous delivery cost. But, in the mean time Sean was kind enough to bottom out the Jetta to drop off a few boxes on his visit to town this weekend: