Getting Stoned (Day 258 of 273)

Stones, specially tabular decorative rock (aka Eldorado Stone). It looks like rock, feels like rock and hefts like rock, but the stuff is concrete. Now that pains me in a major way, having made my living for 35 years looking at, beating up, and sampling real ROCKS. Ah shit!

It turns out that real rock costs a fortune to get and lay, and requires foundation support. Conversely, this fake rock (I always tell it like it is) is 1.5-2 inches thick and looks about 90% like the Real McCoy. The problem is if you have to cut the stuff to end a row or go around another object, then you get an attractive cross section of CONCRETE, with small (pebble size) aggregrate. The photo on the left is the rock we bought: Eldorado Stone Mesquite Cliffstone, see more about this geologic bastard at there website (www.EldoradoStone.com). Hope it looks as good as it costs. Its largely dry stack, meaning little or no mortar between stones (blocks, really), just behind holding them to the scratch coat. I expect to have a nice pile of blocks around the house after the next M9 Cascadia earthquake.

Nevertheless, it does look good from several feet away and only costs an arm, instead of a kidney. My price was about $7 a sq. ft for the rock, plus mortar and wire mesh (another $1 sq. ft). Labor to lay it by someone good (not me) is about $10-12 sq. ft, for a net cost of about $20 sq. ft. Doesn't seem too bad for an attractive addition to the house. We'll have a 3-4 ft high skirt around the house (where the tar paper is in previous photos). About 325 sq ft, and 20 linear ft of corners (L-shaped pieces). $6500, CA-CHING.

Our mason is Frank Ward, a local (PT) guy that does nice work. I put up the wire mesh (extruded metal) by stapling it to the asphalt, tooth side up. The mesh provides a bedding surface for the scratch coat of mortar. When this mortar is dry, Frank will start laying out the stone and laying it from top-down. This way, the stone stays clean and the mortar (butter, they call it) will hold the stone in place.

The trick is to keep the rows horizontal and make the bottom come out even. That's the $10-12 sq ft of magic. He should start the job just before the upcoming 4th of July holiday and finish in 2-3 weeks. Stay tuned for more discussion of getting stoned.

Stairway to Heaven (Day 253 of 273)

Now, you have to be in your 50s to recognize that reference to the famous Led Zeppelin song, now 37 years old but sounding as good as the day it was released.

"Stairway to Heaven" is a song by the English rock band Led Zeppelin. It was composed by guitarist Jimmy Page and vocalist Robert Plant for the band's fourth studio album, Led Zeppelin IV (1971). It was voted #3 in 2000 by VH1 on their list of the 100 Greatest Rock Songs. It is the most requested song on FM radio stations in the United States, despite never having been released as a single there."

Now you're probably wondering what the hell is Machette talking about. We'll my wood cutting friend Bill McCutchen had offered to loan my his scaffolding a couple of months ago, and made good on the offer this week. I called to borrow it: OK he says, then proceeds to deliver it to the house and set it up for me (I dropped off a case of beer at this shop this afternoon; way cheap rent).

After the shingling is about 7 ft above ground level, you're going to be on some sort of elevated platform, hopefully scaffolding, but more likely ladders or combinations of saw horses and other devices. Let me tell you, the scaffolding is way safer and much easier to work from. I managed to lay about twice as many shingles yesterday, depleting my painted stock. So Nancy had to dip another couple hundred this am for the next bout of shingling, probably on Friday.

So the catch line is that every time I climb up onto the scaffolding, I may be finding my way to Heaven, especially if I tumble off of the 9 ft ladder I'm using to reach the peak of the garage roof. Wait til I have to stack the scaffolding two layers high and use a ladder for the rear gabled roof line and corbels (damn them things).

If you are prone to acrophobia, stop here. I attached the upper corbel by standing on the 9 ft step ladder (yellow). Need I say more.

Evil Knevil.

Shingles (not the disease) (Day 251 of 273)

We're waist deep into the shingle game, as you'll see from the photos. Its quite a production line, limited only by places to stand up the dipped shingles. (To save Steve Cooley the time, just let me say it: "I'll be dipped").

Nancy gets a couple hundred shingles off our little stack of 8,000, and dips them deep in the 5 gal can of Cabots stain (semi-solid, Pewter Grey). Then they go into paint roller pan covers (to drain), then get stood up against the walls, the stack, and anything else of a vertical nature in the garage. She'll dip til she drops.

After a day or two of drying (not entirely, just enough to handle them), I staple them up on the exterior. I'm using a Porter Cable narrow crown pnuematic stapler, currently my favorite power tool. I started with the garage, which is the closest part of the house to the road and most visible part of the house. After a little gerplutzing with string lines, I built a 8'-long ledger board that holds a row of shingles. I'm using a 6" exposure, mainly because its easier to keep track of the row heights (1/2 ft intervals). After a row is finished, I move the ledger board up 6" and do it all over again. Laid 200 shingles the first afternoon in 4 hours, then another 200 the next day in 3 hours. That's probably my most rapid rate of getting (them) laid. 200 shingles covered about 50 sq. ft, or 1/2 a square. So after two shots (7 hours) of shingling, I've laid one square (100 sq.ft) and have 19 to go. 6 hours per square x 19 squares, go figure (14.25 days). Then add some time to build and move scaffolding for the upper courses and some time to cut the angle for the gables. Looks like 3 weeks to go.

Perhaps its just a coincidence, but a 5/12 pitch (which is what the Richard Berg spec'd for the house) is 22.62°, which is pretty close to 22.5° which is a preset angle on my chop saw. Some things work out, no matter how much to try to screw them up.

Troy Ellis has about 1/2 of the Hardiboard laid and its looking good. Straight as an arrow, caulked tight, and uniform (7" exposure). He's at the point where he'll need to build scaffolding and hang board for the upper 3 ft.

Gotta go staple and dip. Doesn't get any better than this, or does it? That Catamaran in the Caribbean with Bahama Mamas (to drink) is going to feel pretty good—Crone, Creber and Knott.

Har, Har, Hardiboard (Day 246 of 273)

You know that old saying: Money talks and bullshit walks. Well, we decided to pay to have the 1599 sq. ft of Hardiboard installed on the rear of the house so some real progress is being made now (to placate the Arch. Comm). Troy Ellis (of framing fame) gave us a bid that worked out to roughly a $1/square foot plus $100 for layout of the Hardiboard. Hired and underway. It will take him about 3 weekends to finish the job, which frees us to hang shingles. So far it looks great. Straight even rows, which isn't easy since the north side of the house is 88 ft long. 1/4" of deviation shows up like a sore (festered) thumb.

Nancy started dipping these yesterday and got a little more than a square done (there are 20 squares to do). That is 150-200 shingles, which are now lying up against anything vertical in the garages (walls, shingle stack, sawhorses, etc.) After these dry in few days, I put them up and she'll dip another batch. At this amazing rate, she'll have them all dipped in about 6 weeks, are around our Aug 5th deadline to complete the exterior of the house. Meanwhile, I'm putting up corbels, diddling with the electrical, and completing some loose plumbing ends. The septic system is due to be installed later this month, so dirt will be flying soon.

Mikey's Miters (Day 243 of 273)

Friday and Saturday I worked on putting up the cedar cap rail that will be above the rock veneer and below the shingles on the front and south sides of the house. The rock goes over tar paper and a coarse wire screen, which provides a base for the mortar (scratch coat) and rock. Bill (Bubba) McCutchen made the cedar cap for us, about 120 ft worth (not cheap but knot-free and straight). Its 2.5" wide, 1.5" thick, and has a 15°bevel on the front edge and a little groove on the bottom front, which serves as a drip guide. The cap rail wraps around the house at the same elevation, just below the window in the sunroom and bedroom. On the garage, the cap rail intersects the windows so we had to picture frame these by dropping the rail about 8".

Now it may seem to be an easy job to just nail this stuff to the side of the house, right along the top of the tar paper. But not so quick. Did I mention that there are 13 corner miters and 3 splices involved. Thank god for power miter boxes, like by 10" Dewalt. You can cut at 1/2° increments, but luckily most of the corners came out at exactly 90°. A few were 1-2° off, not because of poor framing, but wood shrinkage and twisting. So these miters became a bit more of a custom job. Nevertheless, with about 10 hours of labor I got them all up and looking good. Screwed the rail to the siding and studs with 3" square drive screws, angling up through the cap so that the screw head is buried in the rock and mortar and doesn't come up through the rail. Mr. Bill the cabinet maker would even approve of this job, I hope. Check out the photos.

Corbel, not Korbel-the champagne (Day 239 of 273)

On our house plans, I spec'd out some roof brackets (corbels) for the house. Most of these are decorative only, but give the house a nice Craftsman look. No problem, Darlene (Richard Berg's former associate) drew some up from a corbel I saw online. Turns out that there are 24 on the house (why not, its just money). For some reason, Home Depot doesn't stock these, so it looked like an extra week to build them. This was starting to be a small construction project of its own. I asked one of my cooking group buddies—Jim Quandt—if he wanted to take on this little job. Jim retired from Weyerhauser last year and started his own little home-repair company called Jim's Tool Time. (Funny, he doesn't look anything like Tim Allen.)
No problem said Jim, should take about
a week (~$1k) plus materials.

The corbels go on the gabled ends of the roof, where fake rafter tails (2 ft long) support the roof overhang. We have 4 large gables (main house) and 2 smaller ones, one each over the garage and upstairs bedroom. That accounts for 16 corbels. Then there are 2 each for the porches (shed roofs) and 3 for the pergola (a Nancy item). I drew up a model on the computer, refined it a bit, then re-sized it for each application. For example, the 2 corbels for the front porch needed to be 45" long (top dimension), whereas the regular gabled roof ones are only 24" long. The first two arrived last week and I bolted them up on the back porch. Looked great, so Jim started on the remainder of them. The remainder arrived today, so there will be some painting to do. I'll put up the front porch ones next, then work my way around the house. I'm beginning to wonder how I'm going to hold them up when I drill and bolt them to the house. On the back porch, I just used a 12' 2x4 to prop them up, but the ones on the second floor, back side are 25 ft up in the air. Looks like I'll need a space crane and sky hook for this job (honestly, anyone have an idea on this?).

Jim built the corbels out of doug fir (cedar was too soft and expensive). They are mostly 4x stock with 2x4 lateral supports. For the large ones on the front porch he used 4x6 overhead, 4x4 on the verticals, and 4x4 on the laterals. I suspect that these will weigh 60 pounds each; luckily there is massive timber in the wall to bolt these into.

When all the corbels are up, we'll celebrate with a bottle of Korbel Brut, America's America's favorite bottle-fermented champagne. Korbel for Corbels, sounds appropriate. Lets not have any comments about launching this little ship, Cooley.

Toilet Talk (Day 238 of 273)

Oh boy, this blog is going to get shitty. Our septic guy (Leon Gifford, Gifford Construction) is coming over today to discuss all things septic. We need to roll on this one. So we'll discuss where will the two holding tanks go, routing of the effluent pipe from the second tank to the field, and layout of the piping in the field. Then, how much fill over the field and when to do all this. I have to get the waste pipe out of the house, to the first tank, and supply two underground electrical lines for the pumps. We'll have a pressurized field, which means that every hour or so the pump will dose (fancy word for pump) the field with effluent rather than rely on a gravity-feed mechanism. Since our soil is not well drained (glacial till = mostly silt), the county requires a pressurized system, which is more expensive to build, to maintain, and inspect. Estimate is just under $10k for the entire system. Alternately, we could rent a porta-potty ($80/month) for about 10 years.

Who'd thought flushing the toilet would result in such a complicated outcome. So, just a short blog--gotta go as they say.

New Game Plan (Day 236 of 273)

To answer the blog comments about what the Arch. Committee can do (I can't comment directly for some reason), they can withhold or keep our $1000 application fee and reportedly fine us on a monthly basis. I'll have to investigate the penalties and see if its worth being a bad boy. Nevertheless, I shifted to a new game plan called "Make it look like a finished house". As I had mentioned, one of the holdups on the exterior shingling (other than dipping the 8000 little buggers) is that we had left out two upper story windows so the drywallers could load the rock (sheet rock, drywall, gypboard, etc) through the window openings.


Well, this morning I called Frank Feltes (Drywall and Painting) and asked him if we could order and load the rock now, rather than later. You'd think I'd rubbed the belly of a magic genie. By 10 am, Evergreen Building Products (Sequim) had a boom truck on the property and was loading 1/2" and 5/8" drywall into the Love Nest and the Man Cave (see photos). Man does that truck save some labor. Still, it took them 2 hours to unload the rock.

Talk about a dynamic test load. I figure there is about 6000 pounds of drywall sitting on those engineered joists in the living room, and 4000 pound up in the man cave. If its still standing tomorrow, I think we're good to go.So now the two remaining pentoid windows can go in and there won't be any technical reason to not finish the outside, except time. I spent 4 hours this afternoon adding the cedar trim that caps the rock. Lots of mitering and screwing from below so no fasteners show, but the 20 ft that I finished looks pretty good. 80 ft to go; looks like two days of work.

Playing hardball (Day 233 of 273)

So, I started to worry a bit about finishing on schedule (impossible) so I wrote a note to our Architectural Committee, requesting an extension to our finish date. Sent it off by email and got a quick NO. Here is the text from the chair, apparently they had been getting worried about our eyesore and talked about it last Tuesday and got my note on Wednesday.

"Michael - The committee has been discussing your project and had decided to send you a letter reminding you of the completion date of 8/5/09 and requesting that you look at what we call completion. The idea is that the outside be finished so the that the site would no longer look unsightly. Unfortunately, this letter went out only this morning due to the pressure of the annual meeting. The committee is not inclined to grant extensions except in the most extreme extenuating circumstances. Your request will be taken up at the July meeting. In the meantime, please look at what can be done to meet our definition of completion." Ron Kubec, June 5, 2009

Extreme extenuating circumstances--Like we're doing a lot of the work to save some bucks in a down real estate and stock market. Guess I have to schedule a heart attack so something like that. Worse comes to worse, we'll move the exterior to the top of the schedule. That also means getting the second floor drywall supplies loaded through the two open windows (love next and man cave). Then I can install these windows and get the shingles going. By the way, I've been thinking a lot about these shingles and how they're going to get onto the exterior walls.

20 squares of shingles. That covers 100 square ft and we'll have 5" exposure per shingle. They average 6" in width, so that figures out to be about 400 shingles per square. 400 x 20 is 8,000 shingles, ONE AT A TIME!. The pros suggest hand dipping these buggers so their covered on both sides and won't cup (mine did in Denver, but it's drier than a popcorn fart there). So imagine getting a big tub (bucket, trough), dipping each shingle and then putting them somewhere to dry for a couple days. 8000 shingles stacked in line will go 4000 ft, or out to the entrance to Kala Point. Then again, maybe we could put them up domino style and set some sort of dumb worlds record for "shingle dominoes." Go figure. Still working on this little problem, typically from about 2-3 o'clock each morning. Wish I had my old day job back and I just had to deal with nonexistent budgets at the USGS.

Back to Electrical (Day 229 of 273)

It was a slow week, last week, with various diversions but progress is being made. Poured a 2'x4' concrete pad at the back of the garage, built the front and rear porches (no steps yet) out of pressure treated 2x6 and 4x4 lumber, attached more window and door trim, and cleaned up a bit.

Levi Ross came over and we went through the Aldes ducting system for the house. Because the house will be fairly air tight, you need to supply some fresh air on a regular basis. So the fan system draws air through some ports in the walls (adjustable) and pushes it out of the house at about 20 cfm. I suspect that the whole house air is replaced every 4-6 hours, but that's just a guess. Two of the exhaust vents are powered units, attached to fan switches in the bathrooms. Kick on the switch, and the motor ramps up to 100 cfm and draws from the powered register, not all four. So Levi and I went through the various types and lengths of pipe we'll need to hook up the vents and motor. While Levi was here, he fixed a leak in the copper piping attached to the hot water boiler. This leak developed after we had pressure tested the system and fixed two leaks in the Pex junctions. We repressured the system to 50psi and its holding after a week, so I think the whole radiant floor system, manifolds, and boiler (hot water heater) are ready for prime time.

Signed a contract for insulation. Only got one bid on this since the company came highly recommended and is local (PT). Stayed away from the fancy (and expensive) Icynene and BioBased 2-part foamy applications mainly because they are expensive (2-3x) and I don't like the way they drip down from the roof in the attic and crawl spaces, and the fact that you have to cut away the firmed up foam to make changes in plumbing and electrical. Rather, we went to a blown in fiberglass product and standard fiberglass batts. The blown insulation works well in crawl spaces and tight spot. The guys staple up a nylon webbing (looks like heavy duty spider webbing), then cut a small hole in it for a hose and blow in the fiber. Fills all the small nooks and crannies and you get a good insulation rating and a pretty tight seal. I budgeted $10k for the 2700 square foot house, 1100 square foot garage and attic, and the basement. Bid came in at about $6800, so I ran with it.

Our third drywall bid showed up so we did the math and selected a sub. We had a bid from Pacific Drywall in Brinnon (30 miles S of us) come in at $27.5k, which seemed high. Our friends in Quilcene had used a Tacoma company and did their similar size, but more open (less walls) house for about $14k, so we thought ours would be ca. $20k in the end. Then I got a bid from Franks Drywall (Chimicum, local) for $17.5k. He has good credentials and was recommended by several folks, including my framer. The main question came down to overhead drywall. Pacific Drywall was adamant that you need to use 5/8" overhead on 24" centers (vaulted ceilings in bedroom, sunroom, and kitchen) whereas the two other installers wanted to use a stiffer type of 1/2" drywall (CD board). The thinner board bothered me (sagging) and isn't as fireproof as 5/8", which is required in the garage by code. So, I made a counter offer to Frank for 5/8" on the ceilings, vapor barrier paint, and some modifications: we settled at $17.8k and everyone was happy.

Starting today (Monday, June 1) we have to get back onto the electrical work, starting with the kitchen and heading east. I need to get the plumbing, electrical and venting finished by the end of June for the insulation and drywall installers. Also the Architectural Committee is starting to worry about our progress, especially on the exterior. I say come on over for a shingling party, guys. So, it looks like there's no more time for farting around. Oh did I mention, we're going on a whale watching trip tomorrow and I have a 2-day race (Classic Mariners Regatta) next week end. There goes the schedule already.