going in circles..

It's been awhile since I posted anything.. seems like it's been awhile since any progress has been made. We've been going in circles a bit with getting the radiant fins up because I didn't want to run them under the kitchen cabinets, but we're not exactly sure where that's going to be.
To that end, I wanted to hire some expert advice on planning the space in the kitchen, and in a couple key other spots in the house so we could have a long-range plan we could work from.

I asked around, we asked here, and I searched the internet for designers.. The first round of cold emails got about a 5% response rate. Of the people who did call back, most were very professional and either said up front they didn't want the job because they only do complete beginning-to-end renovations (most of these folks suggested other people that would be more suited), or made arrangements to come see the place.

Some of the people that came to do an onsite consultation charged, some said they would charge but didn't, and all were punctual and professional. I also went out to a couple places and worked from the house and kitchen plans Dan made up.

One place in Berkeley I'd heard about from several different places including several recommendations from the Berkeley Parents Network I kept giving up on, but then kept trying again because I'd hear another great thing about them.. they didn't respond at all to my first email, so after a month of not making very much progress finding a designer I called and spoke someone who suggested I come in for a consultation. They preferred to have the appts M-F, but I have to work if I expect to be able to pay for cabinets, and they were able to arrange an appointment for me to come in on a Saturday. The quality of the cabinets seemed good, it was a line we hadn't heard of before, but the person helping us informed us after about an hour that he was the "B team," and that the "real designer" only worked M-F. OK, fine.. a copy of our drawings and the details we discussed would be left with the designer, who would get back to us with an estimate.
After a week I called and left a message wondering when we could expect the estimate. After another week of no response at all I called 4 times in 3 days and, except for the last time, was told my call would be returned in an hour or so, or when so-and-so got back from lunch, or from the job site. The last time I called I said I was getting the impression they didn't want to work with me and was told so-and-so had been at a job site all week and would call when he returned to the office. That was more than a week ago.
It's things like that that have been eating up the time and sucking the life out this project.
All told I think I talked with about 20 designers, and met with about 9

After everyone we've talked with, we've decided to go, ironically, with the very first person who called me back after my original query. Took awhile for us to actually get a chance to talk, and then to meet, but I think she'll have some good ideas for us. We've also had some blog readers submit really helpful ideas so I'm feeling pretty confident that the plan we come up with will be one that will be one we can live with for the rest of our lives.

I'm also talking to local cabinetmakers about pricing, and most of them also offer at least as much design services as are needed to get from the floorplan to cabinets on the walls.

So things are inching along.. I could start on the "we've been really busy at work" sob story, but I don't think that's going to change, so we're trying to figure out how to keep up a reasonable rate of progress.. hopefully there will be more interesting news to report soon

Greenday (building, that is)

This weekend after we finished our chores (ie the 8th coat of varnish on our doors!), we headed out to the Build it Green Home Tour in Alameda county. None of the houses were actually in Alameda, but several were in Berkeley and Oakland and we made it to 6 of the 8 in the area. One telling similarity among all the homes on the tour was that they were owned by someone who had a green service to sell to homeowners. It made it a little like a commercial that we had the privilege of paying to see.

Our first stop was an amazing place in the Oakland hills.. I took pictures of the green roof and the impressive solar array, but I found out as we were leaving that the builder/homeowner is launching his own website this week, so didn't want anyone taking pictures, or certainly posting them online. This place was a showroom of every green product/practice you can get when money is no object.

Every house we went to had hydronic radiant heat (it's apparently THE green thing), so it was helpful to talk to people about how difficult it was to install and how happy they were with it. The universal opinion was that it's the best way you could possibly heat your house, and no one we talked to would go back to a forced air system.

In fact, the only negative we heard (and it's related, but not even about the radiant heat) was about using the same solar hot water panels for heat and household hot water (for showers, laundry, etc.) I'd always thought that would be an efficient use of space and resources, but it makes sense that the uses/needs are so different, that to optimize the system for both would not be possible.

We got to check out LOTS of manifolds, and more than a couple boilers, hot water heaters, and storage tanks. One person was using a pretty fancy hot water heater as a storage tank because it was so well insulated.
This house was using an on demand (tankless) water heater to heat water for both the radiant heat and the household hot water. That was another thing I was interested to hear about, and unlike the issues with the solar water doing dual duty, this seemed to be going very well. Thanks, I'm sure, in no small part to the super-insulated storage tank.

So I didn't take any pictures of the fancy recycled countertops, or cork floors, or plyboo cabinets.. but look at all the pretty (and clearly labeled in this case!)

I did manage to tear myself away from the boiler room of this house long enough to get pictures of the radiators we're planning on for our master bedroom. I didn't even notice them in this room, Dan had to point them out to me! Of course, that has a lot to do with the fact that the walls are white, which is not something that will happen in our house (once the top-to-bottom, end-to-end coat of gloss white oil-based paint is eliminated, that is..). We might just need to pick an acceptable color from the radiator line, and paint the walls to match. I was a little less excited when they were taller and a different color than the walls.

I somehow managed not to get any pictures of my favorite house on the tour - a bungalow that actually looked and felt like a family could live there. But I did get a shot of the toy they had out back!

<-- How's this for a supergreen incentive to exercise?! Apparently you can rent these from a guy in Berkeley!

It was an interesting day, even if some of the products and practices seemed well beyond our monetary means.. The website for the Build It Green organization does have tons of resources on their site that look really helpful, and hopefully the education they and their members can provide to builders, homeowners and others in the housing industry will make a dent, and start bringing these ideas into the reach of the average joe.

to Spiral, or not to Spiral

We've been planning on putting a spiral staircase in between the 1st and 2nd floors of our house, and having been getting lots of opinions for against the idea.

We've stared at the floorplans and doodled in stairs in a few different places, but in every arrangement we can fit a full staircase (even with switchbacks), we still lose some or all of a room.

Dan mentioned this conundrum to someone that lives very near us, with exactly the staircase we're planning on putting in! It's the same kit from the same company, in the exact 6' size we can fit! And he was nice enough to invite us over to walk up and down (and up and down and up and down..)

And if that wasn't enough, he even lent me a basket so I could walk up and down pretending I was carrying laundry!

I have to say, my concerns are totally erased. This staircase is perfect. Going up is no problem at all, and there's a handrail all the way down that if you hold onto it, also keeps you on the wide part of the treads.

Thanks very much Mike for making us jealous of all your beautiful walls, and also letting us play on your stairs!

In the meantime, we're 2 coats into side 2 of the doors and looking forward to another 2 days of fun.

the Doors

Our doors are here!!!

The 6-8 week lead time turned into about 4 months.. first, it was impossible to get anyone to actually order them for us because we wanted 7" doors and that was apparently a difficult part number to find.

So Dan found the part number himself, and then it only took another couple weeks to get someone to actually place the order because apparently pricing was equally difficult to get. (The Simpson rep Dan talked to was interested to hear how challenging it was for us to buy his product.. )

Then, once the doors were ordered, it took another 10 weeks for them to show up. I called the day after they were due in and was told they'd be in the following week. ("great news! your doors will be here Wednesday!")



Thursday of the following week I called to find out if they were in and was told they'd be in next Tuesday in a similar happy, "great news!" tone of voice. (noticing a trend here??) We had one more go-around, but finally got the call that the doors had arrived!

<-- Apparently it was this guy right here causing the problem. It had arrived to the distributor all busted up, so the distributor held all the doors until Simpson was able to ship another one out. This is the only door we bought pre-hung, because we had to. It's the interior door between the garage/workshop, so it had to be 1 hour fire-rated, with self-closing hinges. Fancy, right? Heavy, too..

.. and really pretty!

<-- These are the 2 exterior doors for downstairs. We'll probably put some opaque film on the glass for the one at the front of the house, but we wanted to let more light into what is essentially a basement. We'll be staining these this weekend, and putting on a couple coats of marine spar varnish. Everyone seems to be surprised that we're not going to paint them.. but what's the point of having this beautiful wood if we're just going to slap a coat of paint on?! As it is, I've got a lot of work ahead to get all the years of white paint off the gorgeous molding in the rest of the house, I'm certainly not going to paint the one thing we have that's not already covered in it.

And we'll finally get to use the beautiful hinges!!
I got these from House of Antique Hardware in February! They're super-beefy, and so pretty!!

They don't match the hinges in the rest of the house exactly.. but the hinges in the rest of the house don't match each other anyway! I figure if the hinges and knobs on each floor match, no one will ever notice they're not the same as the ones on a different floor.

No one but me may notice the hinges at all anyway.. but I just have a thing for pretty hinges. Just look at how cool these are! And the feel super-solid!

Right. So.. it's not just hinges.. I've been plotting to get rid of the shiny brass knobs on the doors every since we had to install them to keep the evil grandkids out

These are from Nostalgic Warehouse, which makes some really nice reproduction hardware. Since we were getting new doors, I decided it would be much easier to deal with modern latches instead of mortising the doors.
I bought them from Shop4Classics online, because they had backplates with a fake keyhole cutout (I just LOVE that!!!)


And while I was at it, I picked up a matching handle for the front door. A "grand entry set," if you will.. this way I was able to get all the locks keyed alike.

I've been staring at this stuff for months, so it's very exciting to think that they'll finally be on doors! Plus, our super-classy plywood exterior will be replaced by actual doors that fill the entire doorway, and have actual doorknobs on them.

Kitchen Design Ideas part 6 million

Okay so our post asking for design help ideas went over like a lead balloon
We wanted to share with y'all where we are with the kitchen remodel ideas.
We've talked to several designers, a design-builder and we've got several more in the chamber ready to be interviewed.


Here's the exact existing layout of the room which will be our kitchen.
Now with dimensions!!! The big giant windows are great for morning light but they are a pain to plan around! That and the window on the south wall is to dang close to the corner.

Here's our best attempt so far at a realistic remodel. The whole bump-out idea from earlier was kinda quashed by reality....We managed to get a little bit more space in the kitchen by squeezing down the chimney chase by 6" and removing half of it. Now its an AV cabinet and a small chase to run wires to the top floor. This also freed up enough space for us to put a corner china cabinet in the spot. Now we have somewhere to put our fancy wedding china and glasses...if we can find them Notice also that the wall between the bedroom and kitchen has been pushed into the bedroom 21". By moving the walls we gained 30 sq ft not fabulous but not horrible either. It makes the bedroom smaller but we think still quite livable with the 10' ceilings. We still plan on recessing the fridge into the wall so that its flush with the counters. Along the back wall we also moved the existing window away from the wall to allow for a corner wall cabinet. We did a mirror image window and cabinet on this same wall. Now the stove is flanked by windows with a view to the backyard.









Here's a shot looking into the room from standing in front of the stove. You can see the china hutch in the newly made corner. That weird pattern on the ceiling is my attempt to make it look like a tin ceiling with my cheap-o home design program. Lots of counter and cabinet space here.









Here's the view from the sink looking to the left. Not sure about the glass door into the sunporch its just a thought. It is a 'sunporch' and we might want to let light in from that direction. This also shows the new window we added to match the existing window on this wall.











Here's the view from the table looking at the fridge side of the room. In this version the fridge and pantry cabs run all the way to the ceiling while the rest are just standard cabinets. One odd thing about this layout is the door to the bedroom is more in the kitchen than it was before.









Here's the view looking towards the sink and stove. Notice we brought the window away from the wall 2' and lowered it so that we can see out of it more easily.






Well that's it for now. We hope to be able to find a capable designer to see if they can come up with a better solution. Some questions we still have are;

1. How much cabinet and counter space do we really need? Should all the wall cabinets go all the way to the ceiling to maximize storage?
2. What the best place for the main sink and can we fit a prep sink in there somewhere? Do we even need a prep sink?

Help! We need design help!

We are realizing that he have to step up our time table for remodeling-restoring our house. We can't afford to have it go on for-ever. The first step in having a project not go on forever is of course to have a well thought out overall plan......we don't have one of those yet really...so we could use a lot of help. Please see the illustrations and notes below.

If we use one of your ideas you will receive a super-fabulous Chez Neumansky themed prize!

Here's the first floor of our house. We have to call it 'unit A' cause the city considers the house a tri-plex with each level being a separate unit. So, the bottom floor is Unit A the middle floor is Unit B and the top floor is Unit C.

<- Here's the bottom floor. This is the floor we just reconfigured when we re-did the foundation. This floor is pretty set in stone at this point but we are open for ideas on how to get an interior stair up to the 2nd level. This pic shows a spiral stair in the laundry area but we are not married to that idea, that's just the best idea we could come up with...

<-Here's the middle floor of the house. Here we need major help in the kitchen area. We need to figure out how to fit everything in there. We need it to be an eat-in kitchen also and fit a 5'by3' table. We are not against moving-changing windows-walls-doors to make the kitchen work.

We also need to figure out how to get a stair down to the bottom level with out totally screwing up the flow and original character of the house. The kitchen and sun porch have already been stripped of any original details, those rooms can be changed the most. The Front two rooms and bedroom are original and we are loath to mess with them too much.

<- Here's the top floor of the house. Remember we gutted this floor in the de-stankification of the house. This shows our proposed idea for a bathroom but we are open to new ideas.

Basically, we want the top floor to function as our 'master bedroom retreat' (man I sound like I am trying to sell a house in Danville). To us that means a bedroom, an office-den, a bathroom and lots of storage.

Irene does not like the set-up shown above because when one person gets up way earlier than the other they have to walk over to the closet area, then walk back over across the bedroom to get to the bathroom. She thinks that it will be impossible to not piss off the person still trying to sleep....since that person is usually me she might be right....

So that's it we would appreciate any useful suggestions that y'all have. If you are really interested I have pdfs of the floors above also but I can't figure out how to put them on the blog for downloading? If you would like the pdf versions please send me an email and I'll mail 'em right out to ya.

Up goes the Heat

All the parts for our 2nd floor heat came.. I'm bummed I didn't think about taking a picture when I got home from work to see 10 boxes busted open along the side of the house. Every single box was broken open, and several had their contents spilling out into the dirt. Yup, that would've been a good picture..

Basically, we need to staple these thin plates of aluminum, called thin fins up onto the underside of the floor. They have tracks that the tubing fits into, which hold it up and radiates the heat.


Sounds simple enough.. but here's a shot of the underside of the floor. See all those little pointy bits sticking down?? Those are nails. Lots and lots of nails. Which would hold the thin fin out from the floor and keep it from working nearly as well as it needs to. The aluminum needs to fit tightly against the floor to transfer the heat efficiently.
So all the nails need to be cut flush with the wood.

Wire nippers cut the nails, but they left little bits hanging out.


So Dan got to spend the entire day grinding nails.

Lots and lots of nails.

little nails

everywhere


The nails are coming down through the thin strip oak floors we have in the front two "formal" rooms of the house.


Meanwhile, on the other side of the house..

I was able to start stapling up the thin fins under the entryway and in the hallway. I drew out the outline in chalk (no need to heat under the walls or stairs) and fired up the air compressor.

We're supposed to use 16 gauge staples, but our staple gun can only handle 18 gauge.. so it was pretty hit or miss getting the staples to go in cleanly. I kept trying to find the one way to hold the gun so it would work every time.. but no luck. Much as I fought with that thing today, it was still waaay better than a hand powered staple gun






The tubing needs to be 8" on center, and we get 2 in each joist bay which will carry a loop of tubing.

I got through the entryway and most of the hallway today before I was ready to drop. Apparently it's been so long since we've done actual physical work on the house that we're total wimps again! (In our defense, I'm getting over a cold and Dan's coming down with it.. so we're not at our best.. but still, we've got to ramp back up the housework action!)




And Dan's still grinding away at those nails.. there are still a lot of nails. After 8 hours of grinding there's still a lot of evenings after work to go.