My feeling about lawns is that they are only as nice as the time you’re willing to put into them, and I can’t say I’m willing to put a ton of time in. Evergreen ground cover seems like a really attractive option, although I can’t say I know anyone personally who’s tried it yet. It doesn’t seem to look quite as good as a nicely mowed lawn, but I’d settle for decent looking if it meant zero maintenance… especially if I could walk on it to release an awesome minty fresh scent.

This stuff is called “Blue Star Creeper”. Sounds smokable.

The railing above is from the catwalk, and there are also rails lining two flights of stairs. Photos of those are available in the gallery. It’s a bit unfair to Olda to show these photos at this stage because the railings are still dusty and the stair treads are only temporary (homemade thick bamboo treads will be going in shortly) but I’ll post plenty more shots when everything is all cleaned up and fully fabricated.

If you look through the shots in the gallery, you’ll notice that the stairs are made with one hot-rolled steel stringer on each side attached to the cold-rolled steel railings. This was a bit of a surprise to me as I was expecting a single steel beam down the middle supported the treads from the center. The communication between Build and me could have been a lot better here, but in the end, I think the two stringer system may be a better overall look, especially considering one is recessed into the wall, providing a nice viewport through the treads to the panaromic view behind them.

Build has talked about choice and how too much of it can actually lead you away from happiness instead of towards it, and nowhere is this more apparent than in kitchen and bath showrooms. There are thousands of tiles, thousands of countertops, and thousands of faucets, sinks, and towel bars to choose from. It’s so overwhelming, in fact, that I don’t even have another life experience to compare it to. If you were remodeling and you just needed to pick a new floor tile, that might not be so bad, but when you’re starting from scratch, you need to pick somewhere between 5 and 20 products, all of which must go great together. An employee at one of the tile stores told us to expect five trips to the store for every room you have.

After 20 or so trips to different stores, we found ourselves still at square one. A few ideas had emerged, but we lacked the confidence to try and put everything together on our own.

It was at this point when we finally cried uncle and sought the help of an interior design firm. Through the recommendation of a friend, we called Nancy Burfiend and Lana Noble of The NB Design Group and asked if they’d be willing to give us a bit of a last minute triage for our problem. Nancy’s firm is very high-end and usually comes in a lot earlier in a project, but given that we just needed to make a quick decision on tiles, countertops, and a few other things within a couple weeks’ time, she agreed to provide us some overall direction, answer our questions, and present a couple of options, all within a compressed time frame and on an hourly fee schedule.

This beautiful shot from The NB Design Group’s portfolio was one that attracted us to working with Nancy.

Aside from providing some excellent tile options, NB also gave us some great advice we wouldn’t have otherwise considered, including:

• When you’re dealing with a small space, as we are in our bathrooms, you should try to use big tiles. Big tiles make small spaces seem bigger.
• Use the same color tile on the floor as you do on the tub surround in order to keep the space from looking broken up.
• Don’t be afraid to run tile clear up to the ceiling.
• Use similar elements in all bathrooms in order to keep the house from feeling too “novelty”.
• Be careful not to use too much overhead lighting in bathrooms as it’s poor for applying makeup.
• Frosted glass on shower doors can make bathrooms look smaller.

In retrospect, it’s a bit silly to think we could have done a great job designing our kitchen and bathrooms without at least a small amount of help from interior design professionals. I have a self-service mentality about a lot of design work, but it was a major miscalculation to let this important element go so long without dedicated, professional help. In the end, we took a lot of NB’s advice and selections while at the same time providing a few materials of our own, as well as following Build’s advice for much of the rest of the interior. We won’t know for sure until everything is installed, but by seeking out a great interior design firm, our confidence has gone from about a 1 to maybe a 9.

If I have any advice for aspiring home builders, it would be to not overlook this step. It’s extremely difficult to get perfect and should not be left to last minute. Whether you seek out a full-service firm like NB or just use a solo interior designer, the end result is bound to be better than what you’d do on your own.

Via Freshome, however, comes this nifty piece of technology:

A holographic display to aid in the visualization of your new home. Very interesting stuff. It still doesn’t solve the spatial problems I’m looking to solve with my idea, but it’s interesting and potentially useful nonetheless. How much would I have paid for something like this during the design process? Probably only a grand or two. Seems useful though.

Thanks to Israel Avalos and the hard working crew at PJJ Construction, drywall work is now complete. The crew will be back to fix any damage caused by ongoing construction, but as of last week, all drywall is hung, taped, and mudded, and it looks great. Israel’s crew has done such a good job over the last two months since drywall work began that we are using them for a good amount of interior carpentry as well.

There isn’t a whole lot of detail to discuss about the process of hanging drywall, but we ended up going with a mix of “level 4″ and “level 5″ drywall around the house. Level 4 drywall installation essentially means that the finish is smooth, seamless, and fit for display in most public areas around the house. If you had an area you wanted to cheap out on like a basement laundry room, you might go level 3 there, which wouldn’t be as nice of a finish. Level 5 finish, on the other hand, is designed for areas with particularly harsh lighting conditions like huge art walls that are exposed to the sun. In a level 5 finish, the entire wall is skim-coated before it is primed. Since we have a lot of large walls that are heavily exposed to the sun coming off the water, all of these areas got the level 5 treatment.

There’s a gallery of some of the drywall pictures here.

Watching the crane operator from Plywood Supply gently position the spa into place with the help of several of the people on site was pretty amazing. It seemed extremely dangerous to me but stuff gets hoisted onto roofs all the time, I guess… usually without incident.

Three bald eagles showed up to watch as well, which was cool. The full photo gallery of “Operation Hot Tub” is available here.

Hot tub specifics

First let me say that comparison shopping for hot tubs sucks. There are a few web sites which claim to be “hot tub buying guides”, but most seem shady and designed to push you towards particular purchases. None seem particularly interested in taking a comprehensive look at the world of spas, from a consumer standpoint.

I made the decision to buy a HotSpring spa from Olympic Hot Tub Company several months ago for three reasons:

• Some friends of mine have a relatively new one and love it.
• HotSpring makes a mid-size model, the “Sovereign”, that fits into the space we had available and has a super-nice lounge seat inside the tub.
• When checking out just about every single brand of hot tub, all of the salespeople were very quick to talk shit about other brands, but none said anything bad about HotSpring. Some even specifically said things like “Well, I can’t compete against HotSpring, but besides that, we are pretty much top of the class.”

It was this last point that ended up pushing HotSpring to the top of my list. I really want the Honda of spas here; trusty, good performance, and no maintenance. Many other tubs had a lot more bells and whistles, but I just want something that will never have to be replaced.

I can’t wait to fire this thing up. As mentioned in a previous post, the cost to run it year-round should be only about $14 a month.

The big news of the week is that siding is finally nearing completion. Given how many different materials I’m using and how much detail is involved, it’s taken about a month and a half to side the house so far, and there’s still probably a week or two left. Brett Deerly and the crew over at Deerly Construction have done a great job so far, often working on weekends, and pounding away in the driving Seattle rain. Getting rainscreen siding to align perfectly is a difficult task and I’m really happy with the results so far.

The specifics of the siding are as follows:

The lower massing

The ground level of the house is clad in rainscreen paneling made by Cembonit. Although rainscreens have been used in Norwegian architecture for centuries, they only made it to the United States during the 1950s. Within the last several years, they’ve gained popularity in American modern home design.

The concept behind a rainscreen is that you have a waterproof, Gore-Tex-like fabric wrapping your framing and then solid panels installed over the Gore-Tex. The panels catch most of the rain carrying it down to the ground while the fabric catches and repels the rest. The panels have quarter-inch gaps between them so they effectively let the whole assembly “breathe”. The idea is that you concentrate more on letting water get out of the structure as opposed to keeping it from getting in. Sealed materials like stucco try to do the opposite: keep water out at all costs. The problem with this strategy, however, in a wet environment like Seattle, is that if it fails (which it often does), it fails badly. Water gets trapped inside the stucco and you have major problems. When you see houses or condos getting their siding replaced within ten years of going up, this is usually what has happened.

Truth be told, I actually prefer the look of well done stucco or wood siding, but the practical benefits and low maintenance of the rainscreen system made it desirable for this project.

We chose Cembonit because unlike the more commonly used HardiePanel siding, it is pure cement board. There are no cellulose fibers, and thus it is extremely rigid and durable. It also comes pre-dyed in several colors, so it doesn’t require any painting (although you can paint it if you’d like).

It turns out Cembonit is not being shipped to North America anymore, but we found a place in Kentucky that had a bunch of it and got a great deal at $4 per square foot. The siding is more or less the color of light concrete… a little warmer maybe.

The upper massing

We ended up going with locally-grown red cedar, stained dark brown, for the upper massing of the house. Although I love the look of wood, I hate the maintenance of it, so we limited our use of wood siding to areas mostly sheltered by eaves. The wood will clearly see a bit of sun and rain, but not as much as other, differently-clad areas of the house. We went with a semi-transparent stain in order to let some of the woodgrain show through but still maintain a reasonable amount of protection against the elements.

One thing I’m not super excited about right now is the corner detail of the cedar siding. One side is just kind of butted up against the other side at the corner, exposing the edge grain, which is currently unstained. When the edge gets stained, it will certainly look better, but it seems like mitering the corners would have produced a slightly cleaner look. We’ll see how that one turns out though… could be perfectly fine once it’s done.

The west window wall

The giant wall of windows facing Puget Sound will be clad in anodized aluminum to match the window frames. This should produce a pretty dramatic, but hopefully not overly bright effect. Not that this is important to me, but I imagine this will make the house pretty unmistakable from the water and even possibly from Bainbridge Island.

The box

The box is the signature design element of the entire house. It’s the sort of thing you’d more often see in the design of a museum than a residence. For this reason, it was crucial we clad it in a material that was attractive and wouldn’t weather with the elements. Build initially pushed hard for brazilian ipe, but I was too afraid of what it would look like when it inevitably silvered. Part of the challenge of the box, is that some of it is inside and some of it is outside. Some faces east, some faces west, some faces north, and some faces south. Its exposure to the elements is very uneven and so it was important to choose a material that would stay as pristine as possible no matter what exposure it received.

I also didn’t want any more cold, industrial material like metal because I’m trying to keep the house warm looking (often a challenge in modern home design).

The only material that fit the bill perfectly was something called Prodema. Prodema is, according to the company, “a high-density panel comprised of a thermosetting phenolic resin bonded cellulose fiber core faced with natural wood that has been coated with Prodema in-house formulated acrylic resin-PVDF protective finish ensures a panel colour fastness of 3-4 in a 3000 hour xenon lamp test (by NEN-ISO 105-a03) and perfect resistance to loss of gloss (by DIN 67530).”

In other words, it’s a mostly synthetic panel with a real wood veneer that is maintenance-free and extremely resistant to water and sun. Real wood without the trouble of real wood. I’d seen Prodema on a couple of other houses in Seattle as well as some commercial applications and it always looks great. I’ve heard some stories about Prodema failing, but the warranty should take care of that if it happens.

Another challenge we had when deciding how to wrap the box was how it would carry through to the inside of the house. In the end, we decided to wrap it a couple of feet into the interior, on all sides. Carrying it along the entire interior of the box would have looked dramatic, but it was too risky and too ripe for looking dated more quickly.

And finally, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that there is a similar material called Ecoclad that is made less than an hour away in Tacoma that we could have used instead of the Spanish-made Prodema. Unfortunately, however, the company refused to send us any samples, and I’ve heard from others that they are very difficult to deal with. Such a huge wasted opportunity to use a local material. Thanks for making me ship over a $14 per square foot product from Spain instead.

It’s going to take me awhile to put together the timelapse of the siding but I’ll post it as soon as I have it. For now, there are photos in the gallery.

Before we took down the old house, there was a bit of discussion about keeping the old wood burning fireplace. I don’t mind traditional fireplaces at all, and the existing one carried with it the benefit of being able to heat both the basement and the main floor. In the end, however, the masonry just took up too much space and didn’t fit the overall design plans. I was not sad to see it go, but I think Build might have shed a tear.

The old hotness

In shopping for a new fireplace, it quickly became clear that if I wanted something that wasn’t going take up a whole lot of room, a gas or denatured ethanol burning one was the way to go. Although the ethanol burning ones were really sharp looking and flexibly designed, it seemed silly to buy one considering I’m already running a natural gas line to the house. The choice between never refilling my fuel supply and doing it every few/several weeks was easy.

When it comes to natural gas fireplaces, you can either go with direct-vent or vent-free. In a direct-vent setup, air is drawn in from outside the house while the fumes are blown out the same way. In a vent-free setup, air is drawn from the interior of the house, heated up, and then blown back into circulation. While vent-free fireplaces are generally thought to be safe enough, they do reduce the oxygen level inside a house, and some people point to this as a potential hazard. They are also a potential carbon monoxide hazard if improperly designed. For these reasons, it didn’t make any sense to go vent-free, considering running a vent was relatively easy.

Another important safety consideration is purchasing a fireplace that is “UL Listed”. This designation means that an organization called Underwriters Laboratories has tested the product for safety. Many insurance companies will not cover damage caused by non UL Listed fireplaces, so unless you’re not worried about burning your house down, it’s best to stick with UL Listed equipment.

If you’re looking for a direct-vent gas fireplace, your options are abundant. There are probably 1000 models to choose from. If, however, you want a modern looking one without fake logs or other distracting elements, your choice of manufacturers drops to about 4. Not only that but your price explodes into the ridiculousphere.

To see what was out there and how much it would cost, I contacted three fireplace dealers in Puget Sound and was less than impressed with the results. Two of them had nothing modern and weren’t particularly interested in pointing me elsewhere. The third one, Kirkland Fireplace, was even worse. I called to explain what I was looking for, and the guy on the other end told me he’d e-mail me some models to choose from. After a week, I still had not received an e-mail from him. Then I called again, told a new guy what happened with the first guy, and after apologizing he said he would send me the information. One more week went by with no email, no phone call, and no other follow-up from Kirkland Fireplace.

I don’t understand how a place like this stays in business. It’s like I’m calling them up and saying “Here, I have $5000 I want to place into your hands” and they are saying “Thanks, but we’re playing X-Box right now.” Especially in the middle of a severe economic/housing downturn, it shocks me that a place like this would be so unresponsive to unsolicited business. If you’re looking for a fireplace, I would stay away from Kirkland Fireplace.

After researching the options from Montigo, Spark, and Lennox — the only UL-listed modern gas fireplaces available in the U.S. — I happened upon the spankin’ new Heat & Glo site.

“Heat & Glo” you say?!?!

Yes! The trusty old manufacturer of fireplaces your grandparents would own.

Turns out Heat & Glo now makes a line of sharp looking modern fireplaces at convenient sizes and lower price points than their competitors. There were two models that looked great: the Red 40 and the Cosmo SLR. Both models were similar in appearance but the Cosmo was less expensive and didn’t have the crazy LED stuff I didn’t need. At just over $4000 delivered and installed, the Cosmo SLR was less than half the price of some of the other options (again, I can’t believe how expensive a simple gas burner can be if it’s marketed as “modern”… non-modern models can be had for $750).

Upon deciding to go with the Cosmo, the only question was where to purchase. Thankfully, I found Bill at Fireside Hearth & Home who hooked me up, delivered and installed the thing within three weeks, and gave me great service along the way.

The new hotness (photo from Heat & Glo)

The fireplace isn’t connected yet because we’re still waiting for the gas line, but it’s sitting pretty, ready to light up the living room right now. We’ll be hooking up the gas line and installing the blackened steel fireplace surround in the coming weeks.

Roofing

The house has four roof surfaces: the south roof, the north roof, the roof deck between those two roofs, and the garage roof. The north roof and the garage roof are standing seam shed roofs in a warm grey tone. The roof deck will be clad with Trex Brasilia espresso synthetic wood decking. I feel pretty good about these three surfaces.

The only roof I’m still not quite feeling is the south roof. It’s almost flat so it wasn’t a good candidate for standing seam metal, so we went with a white single membrane surface. The white doesn’t look great but at least you can only see it from the roof deck. On the bright side, you can easily walk on the roof and it will also be easy to install solar equipment — which I’ve pre-wired for — when the economics make sense. My main concern with this roof is how the edges look from the street. The edges require a noticeably different treatment than the edges on the shed roofs, and I’m just not feeling the gestalt yet. The plan is to edge the south roof with the same Cembonit cement board panels we’re using on the rest of the house. We’ll see how it goes. I’m reserving judgement until the siding is up and I can see how everything meshes together.

My roofing contractor is Nate Dowers Construction and they have done a bang-up job so far.

Doors

There are a few different types of doors in this house:

• Solid-core interior hinged doors
• Solid-core interior pocket doors
• Raumplus glass sliders (for laundry, office, and media rooms)
• Standard exterior hinged doors
• Huge, super-awesome front doors

So far, everything except the Raumpluses have been installed. The hopefully interesting details are as follows:

• We ended up going with the Linnea Pocket door locks and they aren’t as bad as I feared. Quite acceptable really, as far as pocket door interfaces go.
• For the standard interior doors, we went with Karcher Cyprus handles. They are clean looking and feel good on the palms.
• For the huge, super-awesome front doors, we went with a double-door made of fir veneer. Veneer is apparently much stronger and more resistant to warping than solid wood so that’s what people usually go with these days. The doors are almost nine feet tall. They feel majestic. We’re waiting until the siding and a few other details are done before picking the exact stain color. Some people might choose aluminum framed glass doors for a house like this, but for some reason, I just feel like a house should have wooden doors. Aluminum with glass feels too much like a retail space to me.
• For the front door hardware, we’re going with the Omnia Urban which looks sharp and meshes nicely with the NanaWall hardware.

Scope additions and shifts

Several items related to carpentry, installation, and various other areas of labor have been shifted in the budget from subcontractors to Build as they’ve taken tasks on themselves. I’m happy to have team Build tackle this stuff because of the high level of work they’ve exhibited so far. Additionally, we’ve added $4000 to the construction management budget — bringing it to $99,000 — to cover a lot of the extra coordination that is going into this project. I’m happy to increase the construction management fee modestly in this way as I feel I’ve gotten plenty of value for the money.