the Cadillac of Garage Doors

<-- Here's what the house looks like today.

We've replaced the pile of dirt and rebar that we apparently can't live without.. but take a look at that gorgeous garage door!! It goes all the way to the ground and everything!

It's not entirely done.. we still need to put siding in place above the door, but that's what 3 day weekends were made for.

From the street you absolutely cannot tell it's a rollup door. I think the vertical stiles help obscure the horizontal breaks in the door.. you can't see them at all unless you're up real close. But by then the awesome hinges and sweet lionhead door knockers completely distract you!

We couldn't wait to pull the car in the driveway, so I'll have to wait till the weekend to get a straight on shot (and with any luck, that shot will have a nice brick driveway at the bottom.. I'm actually afraid to climb back to where the bricks are now, because the edges of our giant pit are still collapsing. We need to clear a path so I can get them out this weekend. I still need to clean all the mortar off before I can lay them)




And inside the garage we have our first permanently mounted light! It even has a motion sensor so when you come in the side door it goes on.

There's a little more room to pull the car over to give the bikes space to get by. But this morning I pulled my bike out of the garage and right past the car in the driveway!! It's just very exciting.

And quiet. You can barely hear the motor at all! And the tracks are solid and aligned perfectly, and.. not sure if you can see off on the left of this shot.. but the water line is perfectly placed with ~1/4" to spare.

Here's a closeup so you can fully appreciate that placement -->

Work on the patio is coming along, although it's (tell me if you're surprised here..) going to take a little longer than we thought. I'll take some pix and do a post on that next.

Work weekend

We spent a bunch of time this weekend running around and getting stuff done.. We bought a toilet and some doors (we thought we'd ordered doors 5 weeks ago, but apparently that order never went through and the woman at the lumber store isn't returning our calls.. so we went somewhere else)


And we finished up the stairs, which was really nice with the not raining and all. Couple coats of primer and some caulk, and these stairs should last 10 times longer than the ones built in 1996 which had already rotted away.






While I was on the stairs, Dan was rerouting the water supply line in anticipation of our garage door (which was ordered from someone else, and therefore was actually ordered) which is getting here tomorrow!

Note the motorcycle inside! Strange how much smaller the garage seems with 2 bikes inside.. by the time all our tools and workbenches are in I wonder if we'll have any room left to work!

We got a rollup door so we can have our car in the driveway and still get the door open to get our bikes in and out, and of course it needs to be hung exactly where the copper pipe was. But that's ok, because Dan LOVES soldering copper. And the solder loves him ;)

Here's the finished run.. that's more than $100 in copper right there!

<--Here's the view out back

The water doesn't seem to be getting any worse.. we were worried the hole was filling up with groundwater, which would mean whole different things for our drainage plan. But that top left corner is the low spot, and the ground is wet from all the rain, so that's just the surface water (at least, that's the hope)

But take a look at that top middle caving in section. If that collapses any further, the tent with all our garage stuff is going to go tumbling into the pit.

So, on the negative side, we need to get that taken care of asap, which means we're going to need to bring someone in to do it since it's not going to get done fast enough on weekends and the odd day off. On the plus side, that means we're going to have our patio done really soon!

We finally got that swimming pool we've always wanted..

It's time to play What's Missing in this Picture!

I won't make you scroll down to see the answers, but there are bonus points if you can find the 2 extra things in the picture:

• No porta-potty!
• No concussion-inducing plywood on the porch!
• No giant, flappy blue tarp!
• No rain!!

Extra credit: There's a bobcat pulling out with a load of dirt from the back yard.

Extra, extra credit: Our motorcycles are IN the garage! (that's worth extra points because it's such a crappy picture)

On what's likely to be the last Saturday we're woken up by people working on the house (mostly because we'll be dragging our butts out of bed to do everything else ourselves..), we heard the happy hum of a bobcat scooping out the dirt in back.

As you can see here, the back door is quite a bit lower than the ground level, which doesn't really work out all that well for a door. Everyone was very concerned about digging it out now, because if the rain returns before we get the retaining walls in, we'll have a giant swimming pool with the sides sliding/caving in. But we want to get started on that next, and the last part of these guys' job for us was excavating the area.

And here it is all dug out and shored up. It is very swimming pool like.. especially if when you jumped up and down on the bottom of a pool, it undulated out like a bouncy house. It's pretty worrisome actually.. there are pools of water which are gradually growing, and the ground back by the tent has caved in to about a foot away from the tent. We need to get the retaining walls in soon.

And that's the task for the coming week.. Coming soon: our sunken outdoor living room!

Hurray for Concrete!

Chez Neumansky had another visit from the concrete fairy!

Much as the 8am on a Saturday concrete delivery was probably not loved by our neighbors, I'm sure they'll be as happy as we will to have the porta-potty off the sidewalk and no more tarps flapping in the wind!

As you can see, we passed our inspection for the radiant heat and got the go-ahead to pour. The last odds and ends were taken care of yesterday: put rebar down in the driveway, broke up the sidewalk to encase the sump pump's discharge pipe and repair what had been broken, and everything up off the floor/ground to make way for the concrete.

Bright and early this morning they rolled up and got to work.



Look at it oozing in!

<--You can see the outline of our bathroom here. Although the pex is fairly indestructible I'm still sore from putting it in (remind me to buy stock in zip ties.. with those and some duct tape, there's nothing that can't be built), so they've been humoring me by stepping in between the tubing as much as possible.

I'm happy with how deep the tubing is in the concrete.. it needs an inch of concrete above it, or there's a possibility of cracks when it heats up. In some places it looked like it might be pretty close, but it all seems very nicely embedded.





The teamwork is really impressive.. one guy holds the tube spitting out the concrete, one shovels it around to make sure it gets everywhere and sometimes there's someone else with a trowel getting it into the tight spots, and they all stomp it around with their rubber boots..

..then one guy makes a pass with a 2"x4" to smooth it down, and then two guys screed it for real with a longer 2"x4"


Then they let it set for a little while, and for the larger areas someone comes back in and cuts control joints to limit cracks in the wide expanses of concrete.





And then it's all gone over with a float to make it nice an smooth and pretty.. "mirror finish" they've been calling it.
















I'm also a little surprised with how much work is done by hand, especially around the stairs.


See that box on Dean's belt? That's a remote controller for the concrete! So he can be in the back of the house and be able to turn the flow on and off as needed.. pretty cool stuff






<-- The front steps are almost done.


It's very exciting to think that soon we'll be able to go in and out our front door! and I bet there will be no trudging through mud to find our newspaper ever again..





<-- Here are the two steps we need to get down to the new level at the front of the house. Aren't they lovely??

In back we have a much larger difference in level, which we'll deal with as a separate project.









Back out front we have the sidewalks getting smoothed down (moments before the rain showed up and left little divets everywhere.. it'll be good for traction.. yeah, that's it.. it's a feature!)

And the driveway is getting a broom-finish which is rougher than everywhere else. That'll make it easier for the mortar to stick when I put down the bricks.


And voila! We have to put doors up next, and touch up some paint.. but we're getting very close to having at least the outside of the house not be an eyesore!

No more leaks!

Hurray! the pressure has been sitting right at 80psi for more than 24 hours, with no sign of any more leaks! We were both pretty nervous because we'd checked every one of the connections already, and it was looking like the leak was somewhere in the tubing. Plus, we were repeatedly warned that overtightening the connections at the manifold is a sure way to cause leaks, and there weren't many threads left to tighten things down before reaching that point.



<-- This photo illustrates the problem very nicely, doesn't it?!



That gauge was screwed in pretty tight, but apparently not tight enough.. With both of us cranking on it (Dan holding the wrench, and me holding the manifold to not tweak it right off the wall), we managed to get almost another 3/4 turn. Which isn't enough to get the gauge facing all the way front, but is just barely far enough so it doesn't push everything out of alignment with the wall.


Everything is so delicate that knocking one piece of tubing can cause that line to start leaking (as we discovered while tightening the gauge, so we picked up some tubing clips to hold everything in place.



Now it's all nice and tight and leak free, so we're going to give the inspector a call and get this show back on the road!

Plan for 2008

We were inspired by our friends over at casa decrepit to sit down and write out our plans for the year. That, combined with a couple days off saw us hard at work at a borrowed office (at left). Here's a shot of us on the beach in Puerto Rico trying to relax. Dan hasn't yet put his blackberry down...

2008

1 - Brick in the driveway - We saved all the bricks from the chimney, which I'm going to turn into a driveway.

2 - Doors - We need to install a garage door and 2 other outside doors downstairs, since we dug down so much the old ones have giant gaps at the bottom. Then there are 3 inside doors downstairs, but we have to build the wall one of them is in first!

3 - Plumbing - We need to replumb the supply lines for the house before we can close in the walls downstairs. We're using pex tubing, so it'll go MUCH faster than copper. In fact, the worst part is probably going to be drawing up the whole plan for the permits.

4 - Finish the heating system - We're putting in radiant heat on the 2nd floor too, so we're using staple-up there.. and we still need to figure out how to heat the third floor.

5 - Wiring - We need to wire the bottom and top floors for electricity, and run cat-5 all over the place for networking. We'll also run some conduit so we can add things later.

6 - Gas lines - There are gas lines all over the house for gaslights which are no longer there, and for heaters and stoves in random places. We need to remove all the extra pipe and run lines where we actually need them.

7 - Build out the bathroom downstairs - This involves a couple walls, a shower pan, tiling the floor and shower, and installing the toilet, sink, and shower fixtures.

8 - Finish the downstairs - This is everything else downstairs.. we need to put up drywall everywhere, which is why we have to run all the wiring and mechanicals first. Once the drywall is up, we want to build some high shelves for storage. And then we can get all our stuff out of storage, hurray! We'll need to repair all the windows too, and possibly replace some that we can't fix.

After all that's done, we'll get started on the kitchen.. it's probably a little optimistic to think that'll happen in 2008, but you never know.

Now, it's time to squeeze the last little bit of warmth out of the ocean (although the rain seems to have followed us here!) before we head back home tomorrow and get back to work. We need to figure out where the pex lines are leaking from so we can get that slab poured!

Let there be heat.. someday

We lagged a little bit on making a decision about whether we wanted to put radiant heat in the slab downstairs, so we're currently holding everything up. These guys would've been ready to pour concrete last week, but we had some problems getting a permit (I know.. shocking, isn't it?!)

Dan knows a guy from an online newsgroup that works for a radiant heat place on the east coast. He designed the whole system and shipped us all the parts and plans. That, plus a weekend or so of manual labor is at a savings of about $8k from the quote we got for someone else to install the tubing!

<-- Don't these plans look beautiful?! Well, the city didn't think so.. at least not the section on the left where the garage and workshop have heat. Turns out, heating a garage is prohibeted in Alameda, along with even insulating one! Dan spent 2 days at the permit office, and talked to everyone on up to the head of the building department, but the answer was still no. We either have to build a wall to make a completely separate garage and then heat only the workshop, or no heat at all on that side of the bearing wall. Well, after all the effort to get a beam engineered to hold up the house so we could have a wide-open workshop, there's no way we're going to split it back up! Plus, we'd have to make it about 3 times bigger than the original garage was, because now that the wall is gone, we'd have to fulfill modern parking requirements. Needless to say, our workshop is not going to be as warm as we'd planned on.

So the plans were resubmitted with only the back part of the house having heat, and those were approved.

Everything we needed to install the tubing arrived within a week!

Dan assemled the manifold ->>

.. and then it was just a matter of zip-tying several hundred feet of half inch pex tubing to the rebar.. We rigged up a little spool on some sawhorses so the tubing wouldn't get all twisted up, and then pulled out enough for a loop at a time.
The only places we had problems were around some of the edges that were a bit too high.. the pex needs to be under at least an inch of concrete or the slab could crack. I ran the tubing under the rebar in those areas, and it's closer than I'd like in some spots, but according to the specs it should be good.

Check out my awesome blister! Someday I'll learn to wear my work gloves..

And voila!

Doesn't it look just like the plans?!

This is the bedroom, and it's on one circuit..

And this is the hallway leading to the back door, and the bathroom (in the yellow rectangle at the bottom right of the pic), and our spiral staircase (yellow square at the top right. The mounting points on the center column are market out so we don't hit tubing when we drill and epoxy in the bolts)

And here's the moment of truth.. the pressure test.

All the tubing is plumbed into the manifold, and then the system is filled with air. It leaked from a bunch of places at first, but with a little effort it seemed to be all good! Except that it's not holding pressure.. At 80 psi in about an hour it dropped down to 65 psi with no obvious leaks.

(handy tip for anyone looking to test for air leaks: get a bowl of soapy water and a brush. Brush the water onto all the connections and anywhere that's leaking will bubble up.)

Hopefully there's just a very slow leak from the manifold that's going unnoticed in the soapy water test.. because if it's leaking from any of the lines it'll be a looooong process to track it down.

We were hoping to get that inspected tommorow, and then the slab could be poured next week, but we need to figure out where it's leaking from and who knows how long that'll take.. Better that it leaks now than a year from now when most of it's embedded in concrete and it's impossible to fix.. but it sure would've been nice to have it be perfect the first time.