fun with foam

I finally spent some time putting foam backer rod in every gap I could find in the double-hung windows throughout the house. Turns out there was surprisingly little air coming through! I don't think the weatherstripping made much difference at all..
<-- ..Especially compared with the gusts coming up through the floor over this bumpout.. this was definitely a candidate for some sort of insulation.

The particle board cover of the crate the heating system manifold came in was perfect for temporarily sealing in under the bumpout. Eventually, we'll have all the heating bits and insulation and wires and whatnot in place and can close it up for good, but for now a little something between us and the 30-odd degree outside would be helpful.
A little measuring, a little geometry, and a little time with a skilsaw and I could practically feel the warmth.

Turns out I have too few hands to screw a piece of plywood in overhead and take pictures, so we jump right to a finished view. All the gaps are foamed in and this definitely cut down on the drafts!

The rest of the foam went into sealing up the vents from the old heaters, and a couple other holes we found.

We'll have awhile before the insulation under the radiant can go in, so we want to have as much sealed up as possible when we're able to fire that system up.. any day now, I'm sure..

manifold destiny

I mean, manifest density.. I mean, oh never mind

Because we changed the model of the boiler we're using, there was some retrofitting to do. We stepped down from the 110,000 btu model to the 60,000 btu model which does not have its own circulator pump, so here's Dan soldering in the new pump.

Once each of the valves was soldered on, Dan connected the stainless steel flex lines for the boiler inlet and outlet.

And then the boiler magically appeared on the wall, with no heavy lifting involved from the man with the bad back or the pregnant woman. Dan still had to hook it up though.. it's not all magic wands and whatnot.

<-- Notice here there are no pex lines connected to any of this

Next up was mounting the manifolds back to the wall, on top of the nice new fire-resistant drywall. We had to cut the pex to the correct length and remake all the connections. They've been pressurized up to 80psi for a week and no leaks!

Finally, we need to hook the control board up to the manifolds and pressurize the entire system.

For the boiler, we still need to install the vent, the condensate drip line, and the pressure-relief line. And we need to run the gas lines.

And then someday soon, there will be heat.

Slacking on the posts.. slacking marginally less on the work

Today's project was installing electrical boxes for the outlets and lights downstairs

The other side of this wall is where the sawhorses with piles of siding live, so Dan did the measuring/marking/drilling/cutting from the backside

Everyone knows the trick to drill holes in the corners of an area you need to cut, right?

If you drill the four corners with a good size bit, you can go back with a skilsaw and easily start at one hole and cut straight to the other

This is the next outlet box over, which was much easier to get to, and the box for the lightswitch by the door. You can also see the thermostat at the upper left, so we'll have power, lights, AND heat in this room!!

The boxes are shimmed out with scraps of the 5/8" drywall that we'll be skinning the whole downstairs with. This way the boxes are already sitting at the correct final depth (Dan's good at thinking ahead like that..)

This is the back wall of the downstairs bedroom. I think we're covered on boxes back here!

The two round white circles are covers for the light boxes for sconces we're going to put over the bed in there, and 2 of the outlet boxes are for switches for those

The dangly white square on the left is currently the only outlet for that side of the house. It used to be outside, but wound up walled in on the inside after the foundation work. I was annoyed at the time, but it's turned out to be very convenient.

And then it was my turn to put up a few boxes..

Look, plastic outlet boxes attached to studs. Exciting stuff, wouldn't you say?

Everything went well until I got to this spot where we need to fit a 4-switch box between a forest of studs spaced just a little too closely together..

..my chiseling skills are very rusty (as was the chisel when I finally found it.. but I sharpened it before I started so I can't really blame the mess on the tool)

The box finally fit though, so all's well that ends well

the end

out with the old - heaters

New year's is a good time to finally take care of those nagging chores, so we decided were going to get rid of the nasty scary old heaters in the front room and the bedroom.

Dan got the cover off this one in the front room and started disconnecting it while collected all the cleaning supplies for what we knew was going to be underneath.

And we weren't disappointed.. look, rat poop! hurray! It's been (thankfully) so long since we've seen any that it was just like the first time.

This heater was so low to the ground an attached to the wall, so there was no way to clean back there during the big decon effort. Which is one of the reasons we never wanted to turn it on. The smell of cooking rat droppings just isn't the same as fresh-baked cookies, or anything else you'd want to smell in your house.

The heater in bedroom was further from the wall, so there was much vacuuming and cleaning way back when -Dan got started before I got a pic, so it's a few inches further out than it started.. but it was more than a foot from the wall

The other reason we never wanted to turn these on was evident here.. to pull this out Dan literally just pulled a little. Nothing was attached or sealed to the vent pipe so one night of this big guy heating our bedroom probably would have been our last.

This is a very flattering picture of me cleaning out the nastiness-filled wall cavity around the vent pipe.

And this is what it looked like before. It actually doesn't look so bad in the picture.. seemed much worse at the time

Underneath, on the other hand, was a different story. Just as gross at you'd expect

Don't worry, Henrietta didn't have time to get a paw in there before I fired up the vacuum and she went running off in terror.

The gas pipe sticking up out of the floor was dead, so while I was cleaning the grime Dan was downstairs sawing it off and now that's history.

A couple of days on a craigslist free posting and the heaters disappeared like magic from in front of the house. Now that we're free from those old things hopefully things'll move quickly to get the new system up!

everybody's favorite hobby, drywall

Now that the manifolds and control panel are all mounted to the wall, we decided it would be fun to take them all down and put up some drywall behind them! hurrray!

The entire garage area needs to be drywalled for fire resistance, and although technically this will all be in a utility closet that is not part of the garage, it's better to be safe than sorry. We're actually planning on using 5/8" drywall everywhere on the first floor, although the only place it's actually required is in the garage.

So, we put the control panel on jacks and pulled the manifolds back from the wall and slid drywall in behind. Of course, all we could find was the standard 4'x8' sheets of plywood, which made drywalling our 9' walls extra fun.

Drywall isn't the worst task, it's just the one I've been saying from the start that I would LOVE to hire someone to do for us, if we can swing it. This was just one wall though, and it would've been way more trouble than it was worth to find and arrange someone to do it for us.

Plus, we still have the fancy drywall screw gun from work on our old house. I will say, this screwgun may have an understanding with Dan, but it clearly hates me.. I ultimately switched to a regular drill which saved the bit on the drywall gun, the drywall, time, and some of my sanity.

This little bit where the hoses come up out of the slab was fun..

I cut scraps to go fit in all the odd spaces, then smoothed it in with tape and mud

I couldn't use premixed mud, because it takes 24 hours to dry and we wanted to get this done and get the panel and manifolds back on the wall before 2009. The mix it yourself kind cures in as little as 20 minutes, depending on the kind you get. I got 45 minute curing, which has a 20 minute working time, which was perfect.

One thing I learned from mixing cement is that it's much easier if you start with water and add the dry mix to that, then add more water as needed.

Here's a lovely shot of me mudding around tubing...

.. which didn't turn out half bad, if I do say so myself.

The large joints between sheets look like a blind 10 year old did them, but this little bit that no one will ever notice looks lovely!

And then on to the other side of the doorway.

The plumbing straps had to be loosened to slide the drywall in behind, but that was the worst of the obstructions on this side, so it wasn't so bad

And viola!

I took another pic after I taped and mudded the seams, but I'd also just vacuumed, so all you can see is the playa reflection of the flash on all the dust

Now it's time to put everything back on the wall and start hooking things up

Nother Top Floor Idea

Okay Here we go again....
Guess what? All those groovey diagrams our architect did? He mis-read the dang scale, so in his drawings the space is much bigger than it really is!!! Sooooooooooo....none of his ideas are going to work!!!! Hurray!!!!
We gave him correctly scaled papercopies of the floor for him to sketch his ideas on. He's supposed to come back to us on Tues with all new super-fab ideas.... we'll see how that goes...

Can you tell that I'm a little cheesed off?



Here's our latest idea for the top floor.





We're pretty settled on the kids room and the kids closet being the way it is. The kids bath size is pretty settled but not the exact lay-out of the bath.

Opened up some space in the master-bed by getting rid of the couch and table and putting in a big window seat with big pull-out drawers underneath. We both really like the idea of having somewhere comfy to read that's not in bed. The closets on either side of the window seat are kinda optional but we like how they frame in the window seat.

We got rid of the door at the top of the stairs and turned the queens closet #2 into a shallower linen closet. Hopefully this will make this area less cramped feeling? We also are trying to make more use of pocket doors.

Still have the closets in the dormer. There is 4' between the bed and the wall on the tight side that gives me 2' for a nightstand and 2' for a pocket door. This does not sound ridiculous to us?

Didn't really screw anymore with the master bath.

Now that the 'pro' has the real dimensions of the space we'll see what he can come up with...

If anyone else wants to take a stab at designing out our top floor please use the diagram in this post it is correctly scaled-with dimensions.-thanks

New Top Floor Design Ideas

Check out our most recent ideas for what the heck we are going to do with our top floor and see what one experts thoughts are.

Here's the original floor plan for the top floor of the house. This floor has been totally gutted remember. Shoot I just realized that this diagram has incorrectly scaled dimensions, so don't pay attention to those...

Here's what the top floor looks like now-its gutted to the studs.

We've decided that we want to do the entire top floor as private family space. On this floor we are going to need to find space for;the master bed-bath, enough closet space for two adults, a kids bedroom-bath and a laundry room...plus as much random storage as we can pack in. We've added a dormer opposite the existing dormer and put our closets in it. We kinda like the idea of having windows in the closets. Not sure about the sizes though. Putting the bath were we did in the 'kids room' squeezes the size down but it still seems like a pretty good sized room.

We are giving a local arch. a try. He's a retired prof of arch from some university in OR which I can't remember right now.
Here's his two first shots at designing out the space. We don't know if we like the way he's turned the Master Bedroom into a turny-twisty path. We still are not convinced that we need two sinks. Why put the kids closet where it is when we have the closet in the hallway that can be used? Seems like we are squeezing down the size of the kids room doing it this way.

This idea is different. The closet in the middle of the room with the TV isnt something that would of occured to us.
The separate shower is interesting also. The toilet kinda recessed might be good too?




So what do y'all think? Got any great ideas for this space? If so we'd love to hear them.



Our pal and neighbor Ayse came up with this mix of ideas. Ayse had this to say
I was looking at your architect's plans and realized that a nice combination is this mix of the two: you get a nice long sight line through the upstairs. I'm attaching my cut-n-paste of the plan. You could also forgo the closet in the kid's room and just put in a wardrobe, or steal some of the space from that storage area right there (the low ceiling part would be a place for shelves and shoe
cubbies) to make a closet.

I like this configuration of the master bath better than the one with a separate entrance for the shower, but I would break the sink counter and add a wall with a frosted glass pocket door between the two "rooms" (shower/sink area and toilet/tub area), so you could have two people using both spaces to their fullest. And I'm not sure I see the purpose of two doors into the shower, but maybe that is an artifact from cutting and pasting; you could use that corner area as a closet or just widen the bedroom.

One thing I don't like is the shelf beyond the tub. My experience with such things is that they end up being dirty and hard to get to for any useful purpose (since you have to climb into the tub to get to the space). If the ceiling is too low there for the tub to move further west, I'd suggest you just box it in (a flush lightbox can make a nice way of making the wall more interesting). If it's tall enough, a small window there next to the tub would be cute. Actually, if you did a little dormer over the tub and scooched it west, you'd get extra headspace and more light and no dust shelf (that's what I heard a real estate agent call them!).

The toilet in a recess is not optimal -- you end up having to work in a tight space when you need to do repairs. On the other hand, it's a shallow recess and does pull the toilet out of the middle of the room.