Tons O' Professional Design Ideas

Or, The One With All The Pictures...
Here is a huge compilation of design ideas that the design professionals at Winnans construction came up with. Starting from their first ideas to what we think we've basically settled on.
First stab at our kitchen from them. Checked floor very 50's.
Ugh white trim...

Top floor, floor plan not so very different than our idea.

Don't like the tub where it is. Tasha's bath is a bit smaller and now we can get to the storage area.

Some renders-the dressers in front of the built-in bench didn't make sense to us. We want as much built-ins as possible.

First stab at the 2nd bed and bath.

Still with the white painted wood...

Another try at the kitchen...and the deck not having stair down.. Didn't like the table here cause its not in the good view area.

Here's a very different idea for the top floor. With only one bathroom..which we expressly said we did not want...

Some renders of the alternate universe plan where we want to share a bathroom with a teenage girl.

First stab at the laundry area.

This is getting better with wood cabinets and paperstone countertops. Not sure about the deck stair thing. Or the beveled counter near the spiral stair.

In this one the booths were flipped so that the back of one will act as a back splash for the new sink location.

Here's a another different idea for the top floor. Irene didn't like how the bathroom was so big and the weird mini-hallway to the closet. I also didn't like how the toilet is damn near the bed...

Another kitchen iteration. We're not sure about the placement of the prep sink. The designer does not want it on the stove wall cause she thinks it will be in the way of the flow...we haven't decided yet.

Slightly different master bath setup with different closets in the laundry area.

Like the great big reading nook with built-in storage on either side. Not sure about the new smaller steam shower not big enough for two to sit and take a steam.

Tasha's room and the laundry area with venting skylights. We're hoping that we can use big enough skylights that we can pop them open at the end of a hot day and whoooosh all the hot air will fly out of the house.

This is the final kitchen idea. The deck is not settled and the placement of the prep sink is not either. Now how different is this than what we started with?...answer...not much...

Final top floor idea with the king and queen closets, the secret door to the storage area. How different is this from what our original idea was??? How many differences can you find kids?

Some renders of the final design for the top floor.

Renders of Tasha's room. Notice the built-in bookcases and dressers.

Final exterior plan. Don't we have a weird shaped house? That's why we like it. I think that with the swoops on the new dormers they're going to look pretty original to the untrained eye.

So we went thru a lot of time and a lot of iterations to end up with final designs that are barely different from what we started with.... I guess that's the way it works. The designer did add a couple of things to each design that we didn't think of and those touches made the design better.

Next up the trade walk thru and the 'presenting of the budget'....

We Have Heat!!!!! Ya-Hoooooooooooo

We Have Heat!!!! We Have Heat!!!!We Have Heat!!!! We Have Heat!!!!We Have Heat!!!! We Have Heat!!!!We Have Heat!!!! We Have Heat!!!!We Have Heat!!!! We Have Heat!!!!We Have Heat!!!! We Have Heat!!!!We Have Heat!!!! We Have Heat!!!!We Have Heat!!!! We Have Heat!!!!

Can you tell that we are a little bit excited? Its only, oh, 6 months late but we got the radiant heating system up and running a couple of days ago and maaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaan is it nice to have heat...We've lived in this drafty, under-insulated, leaky window'd Victorian for two winters now and wow the difference is just amazing. When it's in the mid 30s and all you have is a couple of 1500Watt space heaters to keep warm...wow that's just not very fun. We could really only keep the bathroom, our bedroom and the family room warmish - when it was cold only the tiny bathroom would get actually warm. Gone are the days of it being 45 degrees in the kitchen.

Let's talk for a minute about radiant heating and its super awesomeness. There are no floor registers to take up space. There are no ugly duct lines running everywhere. There are no drafts. The floor is 'warm'. Now, this is a low temp water system where the water never gets above 110 deg F so the floors aren't 'hot' but they are warm. It's hard to explain but I'll try. In the past when we've walked on the floors in our socks they were COLD. The cold would just emanate from them and chill you through your feet. Now, the floors are warm and they warm you through your feet. It's an even warm which is also super amazing. Every room is evenly warm - there are no hot spots, no cold spots its just evenly warm and soooooooooooooo nice. We have to admit we are fricken in love with this heating system.

Have to give props to the guys at North East Radiant Technology - it appears that they've designed a system that is working at advertised.

Now, as to the question of whether or not it was worth the amazing amounts of hassle and the extra expense compared to a forced air furnace......the jury's still out on that one. But it is super nice to be able to take your preemie baby into any part of the house and not have to worry if it's too cold for her. That right there might be priceless.

So, I tried filling the system after the pressure test without following any sort of directions...It did not go super well. I plumbed the fill valve into the hot water line from our tankless heater instead of the cold water supply line...I got a ton of air trapped in the system and it didn't work...after a looooong call to my radiant designer it was determined that I had everything hooked up right but that all that trapped air was tripping the pressure head bypass (that black cylinder next to my right hand). I was going to have to bleed the thing the right way to get it to work.

Here's me going at it the right way using the hose and bleeding each individual loop separately.. Ya there was a ton of air still in the lines and I went through like geez a couple hundred gallons of water.

Notice all the water on the floor and my wet shoes...one of those almost full 55 gallon trash cans tipped over part way and got a lot of water everywhere.

After I got the system bled I found out I had to set a couple of secret parameters on the boiler and Tekmar control systems so that they would talk to each other...wasted a cold wet tired evening of banging my head against the wall on that one...but I got it figured out and now the boiler and fancy-pants controls are talking like old friends.

These little dealys are the flow meters and flow control valves for each loop. This is before I adjusted them all so some have no flow. You adjust them by putting that red cap on top and twisting them to either decrease or increase flow. The amazing thing about this is that the flow thru the loops is mostly set at .2-.6 GPM? Man that's nothing it seems like?

Here is the control panel for the boiler. This is where I had to set the secret parameter. Right now its showing that the boiler is in stand-by mode and the water circulating thru it is at 98 deg F. The hard to read dial on the right is the pressure in the system which is reading slightly more than 10psi. It should probably be at 12psi so I might have to add some more water to the system. What's amazing is how quiet this thing is..at full blast you hardly hear anything from it.

Here is the super-fabulous TekMar 420 boiler control thingy. The control panel says that the boiler is firing, the circulator pump is running, that the boiler is modulated down to 18% and that only one zone is requesting heat.

Here is what the valves look like when they are open. The top pops and you see the thick blue line. This shows that loops 5&6 are circulating which corresponds to the zone shown on the controller above. This is the kitchen-sun room zone.

These two temperature dials show the outgoing water temp (to the loops) and the incoming water temp (from all the loops). It shows that there is a temp difference of ~20 deg which is right.

Here's the cool co-axial exhaust of the boiler. Even at full blast it's way quieter than the tankless water heater. It makes a low-quiet moaning sound that I hope my neighbors can't hear. Though it does sorta make the area sound haunted.

Don't worry that wood above is just temporary. We threw that up to block the breeze from whipping through there and up through the floorboards.

One thing that's a little wacky is that we can not insulate the thin-fins yet. Since this is radiant heat the heat radiates evenly in all directions. The AL plates help the heat to radiate upward more but still there is a lot of heat coming down. Last night with no heat on on the bottom floor it was a toasty 67 deg down there. Not ideal but hey it was 71 deg upstairs!

And for a final picture here is a wonderful shot of what the temp is in the front part of the house. Yep 70 deg!!!

These thermostats are great cause at the press of a button they also tell you what the outside temp is. Well at least I think thats great. So you can go, look its 45 deg outside and a nice even toasty 70 deg inside.

It truly is a great thing having lived without heat for so long to have this. Used to be we would know exactly how cold it was outside just by standing in our hallway. Now we open the front door and are shocked, shocked I tell you, at how cold it is. In fact I think that after the loooooong cold wet evening of getting the system up and running I might of shed a small tear as I opened the front door for the first time and it was WARM!

YAY WARM!!!!!!!!!!!!

Anyone who wants is welcome to come over and walk around in their socks to experience the super-wonderfulness of radiant heat. Just make sure it's a day that's actually cold outside and that we'll you know, be home...

We Got Inspected!

Okay so its been awhile since we've done any work or posted anything to the blog...you see we have this other project that got started a little bit earlier than expected and well....that ones a gonna take precedence from here on out....

And though nothing got finaled (except for the lame-o earthquake valve) it was a good experience with the building inspector.

The Radiant System passed its Pressure Test! First off I want to talk about this fricken radiant heating system and chasing down leaks... Its only supposed to leak where you connect the red tubing to the manifolds and yes we did have some leaks there but those were found and fixed in short order. The leaks that really blew me away...click on the pic for a bigger version. Everywhere where there is a red asterisk there was a leak in the valve body or from the packing nut in the valve! These are supposed to be quality made in the USA webstone valves and a bunch of them were leaking from their casting marks!!! Once I realized this I had to go thru every single inch of the control panel piping with soapy water and check every single blasted thing....this took a loooooooooong time and I had to do it several times. When I would find a leak at a casting mark I would mix up some clear epoxy and paint it on. I'm sure its not an official cure but I'm not going to fricken take this crazy-ass control board apart to replace the valves...Yes I'm a lot annoyed about it...

In the pic the entire thing is hooked up and ready to go. It finally holds air 80psi and the inspector gave us the go-ahead to fire it up!! Course I have no idea how to do that as its complicated as heck and all computer controlled and what not...going to have to do some serious RTFM'ing. At least the weather has turned cold again so now we're motivated to get it done. It was in the 90's here a couple of days last week and wow hard to work up the energy to finish a heating system in that kind of weather...

The Tankless Heater Passed its inspection!! The inspector saw our old jury rigged heater and was like, 'Geez you gotta get that outta here..' You've heard of spaghetti programing? Well here's spaghetti plumbing! Actually those white lines are temporary PEX lines to tie the new tankless WH into the house lines. Its soooo nice not to have to worry about running out of hot water when we shower...we both realized that showering had become stressful because we were always worried about running out or the next person running out of hot water. How silly showers should be the opposite of stressful.
I was worried that the tankless was going to be loud when it fires but standing outside near the vent it just sounds like a dryer venting really. Or neighbor has a Noritz model externally mounted and you can hear that thing from the sidewalk its loooooud.

The Gas Lines Passed their Pressure Test!! I don't have any clever pictures of non leaking gas lines to show you so I thought I'd show you version uh, 3.0 of the fire pit. Now its plumbed with nat gas from our main line!!! I built a new burner out of 5/8 flex copper tubing and think it came out pretty well. The flame is nice and even. One thing though, house pressure is 1/2psi and we were running the thing at 9psi earlier...not sure if its going to put out enough heat...but hey, no tanks to ice up so it'll be a constant all night long heat. We'll just have to build more heat producing art pieces to keep us warm in the backyard when the sun goes down.

One ominous thing the inspector said was.... 'Doing the framing inspection on this house is going to be interesting.....' Yikes I'm worried... We kinda F'd up the schedule you get the framing passed before you go putting in plumbing and whatnot in the joists...its possible that they could make us fix some chewed up joists and that would mean pulling out the rad tubing that goes thru every single joist in the house.....I think I better get a framing inspection before I do anymore plumbing....yikes..

odds n ends as we get closer to heat

We really are getting down to the last little bit of work for the heat.. just finishing up running gas line to all reaches of the house.

Here's Dan with his favorite harbor fright toy - the right angle drill - drilling holes in the studs to run the gas out to backyard. That's right, natural gas bbq here we come! That bbq has been our oven for the last couple years, so I'll be very happy to not need to get propane.. well, we'll still need it for our stove, but one thing at a time..

Ok, two things at a time :D
There were a couple repairs to make to the fire pit, like plumbing it into the gas line! More on this later..

This is where the laundry room will be, and then the line splits off to the backyard on the left.
No leaks here!

Pressurizing the system indicated that it was still leaking from somewhere though..

.. and lo and behold, the last place I would've thought to look, the line PG&E installed between the gas meter and the emergency shutoff valve! Look at that leak!!

We disassembled that whole section and taped and gooped it up, and the pressure holds! Unfortunately, there's still a slow leak somewhere at the manifold, so there's a bit more sleuthing to do before we can have the system inspected

A couple small leaks have been eliminated, but it still loses about a quarter pound of pressure an hour.. every connection has been checked and rechecked, and Dan even found and fixed a leak in one of the cast valves! Still a slow leak though..

There's a bit of wiring to do too. The control panel needs to be connected to the sensors and the boiler..

The boiler seems so small, it's extra crazy how much open space there is inside. Lots of coils up inside those cylinders though, which explains why it could look this empty and still be so heavy!

Couple circuits had to be run too. This one is for the tankless hot water heater.

Here's the other end of that circuit, approaching the heater.

A very exciting prospect of the brand-spanking new subpanels in the house is that as a line gets run, we can note it. Which means that we have an excellent chance of having all the circuit breakers accurately marked with the actual location the circuit is run!! Isn't that exciting?! (that sounds sort of sarcastic, which is completely unintended.. it's really an exciting prospect!)

The fun with gas never ends

Each Saturday morning we wake from our dreams of the cavalry riding in and doing a large amount of work for a reasonable price and head downstairs, turn off the gas, and get back to the pipes..

I've been lagging on posting pictures and details because it all looks a bit monotonous: a run of pipe, a piece of pipe being threaded, pipe wrenches tightening the new piece in, cutting the next obstacle out of the way. Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

The fun and exciting part is how every 5 feet there's an old unused gas line, or something unimportant like the main water line coming into the house, that's completely in the way of the gas run and has to be moved before we can continue.

Here's a selection of pix of threading gas lines

Here's a little slice of one section of the room.. It's a bit busy, but a decent representation of how much is involved in running not all that much pipe.

This is getting close to the end of the run to the new tankless water heater.

It may seem like hooking up a new water heater is a distraction from the work to get the heat up and running, but a) we need to complete the entire gas run for this floor so we can pressurize/test it and have it inspected, and b) our current water heater I bought on craigslist goes out at random with increasing regularity. Like last night right before shower time.

Moving on to to some of the cutting of unfortunately placed pipes.. This is a hot water line running to the lone bathroom in the house

We need to replumb the water lines in the house and Dan has been trying to get the permits approved to use Pex tubing instead of copper (it's better in 100 different ways.. Dan should do a post on that at some point.), but has been turned down several times. Pex is legal and approved, but until August is at the discretion of the local building official.

This is what that pipe looks like on the inside. It was so gross I absolutely couldn't convince the camera to focus on it!

This is one good reason for redoing the water lines, which we would do right now if we could just get that permit..

This is one of the more interesting action shots of cutting random pipes out of the way. My dear husband takes the most flattering pix of me working

Here we had not only pipes, but also walls in the way of the gas runs.

There were notches already in the joists, but they were for a smaller diameter pipe that was apparently bent here and there because they were only sort of aligned.

I widened the notches a bit and made them just a smidge taller - they can't be any more than 1.5" into the joist, which is just barely more than what they need to be for the 1" gas line to fit, so I had to be pretty careful not to cut outside the lines.

The pipe made it all the way through the field of joists only to knock right up against the top plate of a wall, so I took a notch out of that too..

..only to get the pipe to the other side of the wall where it knocked up against a water pipe!

Take that little story and repeat it over and over, and that's what the last month or so has been like

This is the far side of that water pipe after it was removed.. it's extra special because from this point on it's a single pipe that goes all the way to the kitchen sink. With no joints, our two options were taking the whole thing down and replacing it, or threading a cut end in place to attach a fitting and connect to a temporary line. Since our goal here is to get the gas done in order to have heat sometime before midsummer, we went the thread-in-place route

And it worked great! Here Dan has it all threaded and hooked up to a shutoff valve, which was then hooked up to the previously mentioned on-its-last-legs soon-to-be-retired water heater.

We've been agonizingly close to done with the pipes for awhile, but now we're actually close enough to start thinking about pressurizing the lines and testing! So I made a little test fixture that has a pressure gauge with a quick-connect to hook up to our air compressor, on one half of the same size union that connects the main gas line into the house up to the gas meter.

<-- action shot of me disconnecting the gas meter

And here's the little gauge sitting at 10 psi

briefly

until it went to 9

then 8..

I should've taken a picture of the giant air bubble that appeared the second we got soapy water on the fitting at the end of the main run right where it splits in 3 directions.. but it was a little too depressing. Basically, one of the pipes I threaded, conveniently located in the dead center of everything so that a good half the piping needs to be disconnected in order to repair it, was leaking like crazy.

This being the end of the day Sunday, we disconnected everything past that point, and attached the temporary flexible line to the current water heater to that point and called it a week.

What Things Cost in the SF Bay Area

As a follow-up to our previous post I thought it would be a good idea to discuss some of the costs we've had with this place. What we thought we paid for, and what we got for our money.

First off, 'The Kitchen Designer'

Irene did all the right stuff. She checked Angie's List and a couple local lists and got three names for us to talk to. We interviewed them all and settled on one that seemed to be what we needed. She said she did all her work in Chief Architect, her prices seemed reasonable and we liked her initial ideas.

I sent her .dwg files of the house and scaled pdfs for her to start her designing process. She couldn't figure out how to get the .dwg files into Chief which really annoyed me. When I got my copy it took me like 5 min to do it without reading the manual. This makes me think she only had the light version of the program which does not allow you to import files.

After waaaay too long and a lot of back and forth we met with her to view her initial designs. All she had done was printed out a copy of our floorplan and put a couple pieces of tracing paper over it so she could doodle out some ideas. About 20 min into this meeting I realized that she had maybe spent the hour before this meeting whipping out these 'designs'. Designs that ignored the things we told her were important to us and designs that were impossible to do in reality. She had things like the stove in a spot where you couldn't open the oven door while someone was seated at the dinner table? I was mostly annoyed because we told her specifically that we wanted to see things in 3-d done in Chief. Come to think of it I never saw any proof that she had the program or knew how to use it. It literally takes 10 min to whip out a basic kitchen in Chief if you know what you are doing...

So, for her three designs she did, we got one useful thing - switch the fridge to a new place to make the prep sink easier to use.

Price tag for one good idea $600

Kitchen Cabinets

We shopped around all the local quality cabinet shops, and for the cabinets in our initial kitchen design the prices ranged from $17-$37,000 for just the cabinets, installation and counter tops would be extra.

Next, we turn our attention to the idea of an architect to help us design out our master plan for the house.

Architect Costs

We went through the same drill and came up with three names. We interviewed them and were again shocked at what it costs. The arch. who showed up in the brand new $100,000 Por-shaaaaa wanted $24,000 to do the design and permit ready drawings. The two other guys were not much different. They all want a % of the building costs or budget...which I think is an inherent conflict of interest as the more expensive the house is the bigger their fee.

So we completely gave up on that idea....until Irene found this guy. He's a local architect. Lives in Alameda on a boat and is a retired professor of archetecture. He works in auto cad and knows the people at the Alameda building dept. He could read our .dwg files and was able to do a couple of designs...He made a couple of stabs at the top floor and the kitchen. I think he made one good suggestion in the kitchen...uh it was the tall pantry cabinet in the sunroom I think.

After weeks and weeks of weird lame excuses from him, he could never come through with any kind of finished design. He finally came over one Sunday afternoon and.....he was drunk....yep, we picked ourselves a drunkard for an architect.... We asked him to not come back after that.

Total cost for one good kitchen idea? $200

What really burns us is that we lost like six months to this process.

Quotes from Design-Build Firms

We covered this in an earlier post but to refresh: We've heard from 3 design-build firms so far and the prices they are all quoting are around $300-400 /sq ft. Heck, two of them said that doing a simple bathroom would cost $40,000.

Not to defend these numbers but we are talking about quality contractors, the kind that get their work in magazines like Fine Homebuilding.

So, thats what some of those things cost...I could do a run-down of all the costs for all the major projects we've done but that feels like TMI.

It Costs How Much!!?!?!?!

I mean really its going to cost that much!!!

As all our loyal readers know (both of you) we've been kicking around ideas to redo our kitchen area and the top floor of the house.

To refresh, we've got a design for the kitchen area we love.
And a decent working idea for the top floor of the house.

We've recently decided that with a baby on the way that there is no way in heck that we will be able to do much (as in none) work on the house ourselves while attempting to work full time and raise a baby. To this end, we've been interviewing quality (usually meaning high-end) design-build firms to do the work for us.

In our dream we find a quality firm that we can just write a check to and everything is magically done while we maybe rent an apartment somewhere else....

And Then Reality Hit

Interviewing Design-Build firms was interesting...things like if they paid enough attention to take their shoes off when entering our house and if they paid attention to our portfolio from the last Victorian we redid ourselves were telling.

The costs these people are coming up with have totally caught my wife and I off guard. A semi-consensus view from the firms that made the short list is....


wait for it...









$500,000!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

That's for the top floor and the kitchen. Half a million dollars.....wow it just really blew us away...

Thing I can't understand is how in the heck are these people going to stay in business with prices like these? I don't begrudge anyone making a nice profit but wow....with the market in free fall you can buy a really decent house in Oakland for that kind of money. They are talking construction costs of like $400 /sq ft... A bathroom costs $40-60,000 dollars they say...and the $40,000 number is for a 'simple' bath..... wow...

Couldn't we get a new house built for those kinds of per sq ft numbers?

This is forcing a major rethink on our part.
All our budgets were based on two things...

1. We'd be doing the lion-share of the work ourselves.
2. The housing market wasn't going to completely fall on its face.

Our new situation is now causing us to rethink our future path with this house...

Yep, we're considering selling the place as-is and getting out while we still have most of our sanity. We figure we'd take a ~$200,000 bath on the house (what we could sell it for vs. what we've put into it). Heck we even hired a pro appraiser to give us 'real' numbers to help us make this decision with and THAT was more expensive than we were expecting...

One working plan is to do just that and rent a 3 bedroom place in Alameda and bide our time while the market falls and we attempt to save as much money as possible. One issue with this is that we've now decided that we REALLY only want to live in one neighborhood in Alameda-The Gold Coast- of course, and houses in that 'hood hardly ever come up for sale. Plus, finding a house that meets our needs-size, garage, shop, storage makes for even slimmer pickens.

Another idea is to just say screw it and put more money into the house than we'll ever get out of it-don't think our current 'hood will ever be a $1,000,000 house neighborhood and just stay here forever as planned and enjoy our perfect for us house in not the perfect neighborhood (but the best school district and still a great hood) on not the perfect size lot.

Yet another idea we are mulling around is still fixing the place up and keep it as a duplex, live in it for like 5 years while saving up a downpayment on the 'perfect' place and then renting the current place out...

Any thoughts loyal readers?