It's a House!

Geothermal Installation

This is the geothermal stuff. It comes in a ball and rolls out in this pattern. David says to tell you it is a refrigerator backwards. You bury the pipes in the ground deeply and the ground warms the liquid in the pipes to about 64 degrees. This goes into a pump and the heat is transferred in a closed system to the loops of underfloor heating pipe. (We have to top up that temperature with some electricity to make it warmer.) It heats the water for other household uses too.

Top-floor Framing

The top framing happened so quickly. Ben had a bigger team out this week to work on the top floor. Usually he has three people including himself, but for this stick framing he doubled the team and they did this in almost one day! The pictures are James' bedroom and the stairwell. Ray designed that to be very open-- bigger than just the stairs. We also said if we could avoid it we wanted no halls and he made everything open onto a landing upstairs.

Trusses

These are roof trusses. This is an end roof truss. The middle has storage trusses-- that is they are framed in such a way that you can use the attic space. We won't finish it properly-- just plywood floor, but Claire and I can throw a couple of paste tables up there and put our scrapbook and other craft stuff in the attic and use it permanently-- leave it out. We are very excited about that space.

Doors, Doors and More Doors

These are the fabulous old doors that we got in Walla Walla 2 summers ago. We just went down to visit Jan and Cliff (with Sean's truck.) David dropped me off at a lovely antique store and when he came back I'd purchased eleven 100-year-old doors from a Whitman college building!! (not sure he will ever leave me in an antique store on my own.) I didn't mean too exactly. The antique dealer had all this furniture made out of old doors and I jokingly said, "What I need is THE DOORS." and he sold them to me. I didn't even know if it was a good price-- $36 a door. We went back to Jan's and she looked on line at Home Depot and a new solid wooden door was around $200 a door-- for nothing too special. Of course, they haven't entirely ended up $36 doors. There is a lot of stripper and steel wool involved here!

The white door we bought in Seattle at a great place called Earthwise Salvage. It is an actual HOUSE front door from about the 20's. What we love love love about it is that it came with the original, mechanical doorbell-- that works wonderfully! The top door is James' bedroom door--Tardis. Yes I stripped AND REPAINTED A DOOR! It wasn't as painful as you might imagine, because one of the Walla Walla doors had a layer of terrible green stain on it after layers of paint. I am not sure I could have gotten rid of that stain even with the electric sander! So I painted over that door.

Then to make the doors complete we went shopping at various antique and salvage places for wonderful door knobs. (I much prefer salvage places -- cooler stuff at better prices!) We have found a wide selection of glass, brass, and black porcelain. Every door is different.

I have now stripped seventeen doors- I think. (I am really ready to be done with doors!)

Main Floor

Some pictures of framing the main floor, the big beams and James crouching in the entry window. Finally it looks like a box with a lid on it when the top floor goes on. My sister refers to it as the giant beer cooler! Is this better than Kate's name for the derelict house, "The banjo shack?"

Big Rock

The plumber made a ten inch mistake with one of the pipes set in the concrete basement floor. This called for a complete move of one of the walls. (Ben had figured how to sort this BEFORE he told me about it even though this was not his mistake!) However, this put the wall right under the fireplace upstairs. I looked at this and decided the mistake was meant to be!! I asked Ben if BIG ROCK could go IN the house and be a part of the fireplace with the extra support of the moved wall. Ben measured it and calculated the weight.

He waited until the crane guy had lifted all the beams up and into place, then casually asked if he would lift the rock INTO the house. The crane guy was not to happy about this, but when we assured him that we would take liability if it fell through the floor, he agreed. Ben's uncle was concerned I'd change my mind and how would I get it out of the house. Ben said, "I guess she'll cut it up." What really made me laugh was that we set it on the subfloor-- the underfloor heating isn't in-- the gypcrete isn't in!! I asked Ben about this and he said,"They just have to cement around it!"

I think the really funny thing about the whole operation was that the guys did it in almost complete silence. I think this might have been because I was standing there the whole time. I finally asked them how many beers they were going to get out of this story tonight to make them talk.