EXTERIOR UPDATES

Yes, I know, we should be living in there by now, but the least I can do is add some new photos.  It's been a while since we've taken any exterior shots, so here goes...  Most of the site is cleaned up and the yard seeded, just in time.  Pretty soon the leaves will be falling and I'll be able to get a better view of the house.  But really this is the look we were after - we wanted the house to recede into the site.  Please stay with us for the finish.  I just ordered the track for our sliding exterior doors, heart pine floors upstairs are finished, ceilings are complete, cabinets are due next week, counter material is coming next week.  There's still a lot happening, just maybe a little less visible.

GLACIAL PROGRESS

Looking over the images from my last post, It's hard for me to believe that it's been over two months.  I wish I could point to something that justifies such a huge lapse of time, but it's just been slow.  We're sanding, painting, patching drywall, cleaning...  I do have a few additions to show for my time:

Front entry, once again.  Maybe it doesn't look like much has happened.  Maybe it hasn't.  I can't tell anymore.

Now this is certainly new.  This is my son's bathroom, way cooler than the master bath.  This is all traditional, hard-coat plaster, on metal lathe.  Most of what you can see has received the second coat (the brown coat), over the first coat (the scratch coat).  The exception is the tub basin, which has only the scratch coat, and the low wall in the foreground, where you can still see the lathe.

This is how the sink ties in.  The idea is that the three fixtures would flow together, from the sink to the tub to the shower.  Not that we'll literally fill the tub from the sink and drain them all in the shower, it's a visual thing.  Eventually, this will all be finished with a top coat of pool plaster (I think).

Ooooh, and the masonry heater is finished!  This has been a real ordeal.  Our original specialty mason, brought in from the Asheville area, turned out to just not be a very good mason.  His work was all over the place, out of plumb (vertical), out of square, off layout and uneven.  So we just let him complete the firebrick core, which is the heater itself, and then had our 100% reliable local mason assemble the veneer in black brick.  We had to take down quite a bit  of the original mason's work, but the difference was night and day.  This might partially explain the time lag.  Tom, the heater guy, would turn up for a few days, then disappear for a week or three (seriously) without word.

Here's the other side.  The principle is that the fire burns in the main firebox, the exhaust gases rise into a secondary combustion chamber above, then fall on either side to beneath the firebox, travel horizontally through the heated bench and finally exit up the chimney.  Sounds complicated, but it works.  Well, at least it drafts properly.  Above the masonry section of chimney will be a metal chimney pipe out through the roof.  I've been somewhat reticent to cut a hole in my brand new roof, so that work is not yet complete, but it will happen soon.  The concrete block work below the heater will become a bench, and the stair to the main level will be in the background.  This, and the brick floor in the lower level, is all that remains for the mason.  

This is the brick wall that will surround our stove.  We bought an old Vulcan restaurant stove and I've been refurbishing it as I find time, but it's way more work than I expected.  I've got it broken down into a couple hundred pieces in the basement, cleaned and waiting to be reassembled.

Here it is again, with some doors in the foreground.  We'll cover the opening with a hood that we'll build one of these days...

This is a dark view of my custom light fixtures.  They're pretty simple, really, just folded out of sheet copper.

Same light, further back.  I've made about 7 of these lights, and now my wife wants 5 more.  I'll take it as a compliment.

Balcony decking is down!  I rushed the guys to do one balcony before a party a couple weeks ago, but it will have to come back up to be stained.

And the balcony from below.  It's cedar decking, so it smells great.  I wanted to use locust, but couldn't find a good source.  Cedar is beautiful, just a bit soft.

This is the lower terrace, with an outdoor fireplace and our other new dog, Louise.

A better view of the outdoor fireplace.  More great masonry by our local genius, Jerry.

And my wild-eyed dog.  She's a daddy's girl and I love it.

MASONRY HEATER

This post will most certainly require a later update, but I wanted to get things started.  The masonry heater will be our primary heat source.  I mentioned before that it's like a wood stove built out of masonry, but that's a simplistic explanation.  It's based on a centuries-old European technology, like the Scandinavian tulikivi, the German kachelofen, or Russian wood stoves (I don't know what they're called, much less how to spell it).  The principal is that a small fire is lit and burned quickly at very high heat, approaching 1600 degrees.  The exhaust gases exit the firebox into a secondary combustion chamber, then drop to the base of the heater before finally leaving through the chimney.  The result is a very complete and efficient combustion, which delivers 85-90% of the wood fuel's heating potential to the huge mass of masonry that encapsulates the heater.  The chimney is then sealed off, allowing the heated mass to radiate into the surrounding spaces.  Theoretically, we'll fire the heater once a day and otherwise benefit from the residual heat.  It's an old technology, but clearly a bit complicated, so we brought in the expert.

This is Tom Trout, an enigmatic masonry heater builder from the mountains of western North Carolina.  He's built heaters all over the region and even trained masons in Japan.  He was a real hit on the job site when he showed up with his wood-fired hot tub.

This is the lower wall of the masonry heater, with the ash-dump door in place.  The quarter radius bricks at the top center are the sill of the firebox opening.  Needless to say, we've got an intricate pattern worked out for the masonry veneer on this masonry heater.  Our masons love our patterns.

Tom made me cut my own corners for the firebox opening, and I'm pretty proud of my work.  These are all cut from the quarter radius brick, and the mis-alignment is due to the lack of the mortar joints.  Obviously the finished opening will be  quite a bit larger, these are just the four corners.

Meanwhile, back inside

Work has not ceased indoors, although most of the excitement is outside.  We've been working on the second floor closets.  The interior walls are all aromatic cedar, which was harvested and milled within 20 miles of our job site.  The exterior walls are white oak, again locally harvested and milled.

This is the closet wall, seen from the outside, with the interior cedar surface complete.

This is the same wall, from the inside.  You can see the incredible color and grain of the aromatic cedar

This is the exterior, white oak surface of another closet.

We used an alternating lap at the corner, which creates an interesting pattern in the wall.

 

This is an interior corner, at a wider angle, exaggerating the alternating pattern.

RADIANT FLOOR

It's probably time to discuss HVAC, or heating, ventilation and air-conditioning, to the uninitiated.  My wife and design partner, Amy, hates air conditioning, and I'm ambivalent.  It does make me feel clammy indoors and then overwhelmed when I go back outside.  Our climate is a gray area.  It does get hot in the summer - up to 100 degrees in the extreme - but we're at the foot of the mountains, so each night a cool wash of air comes straight down the valley and drops the nighttime lows into the 60's.  Our cooling system, therefore, is fairly simple:  a whole house fan for nighttime ventilation and circulating cool creek water through the slab, just down to the dew point.  Amy does like heat, however, so this system is a bit more complicated.  Our primary heat source will be a wood-fired masonry heater.  It's essentially a wood stove made of brick, and I'll share more about this decision later.  Our second system is the radiant floor, powered primarily by a wood-fired, exterior boiler.  This will serve the first floor topping slab only, and will be supplemented by radiators on the second floor. 

The radiant floor piping layout, with plywood walk-boards to keep from squashing the radiant pipe.  All pipes originate from and return to the mechanical area to the left.

The beginning of the topping slab.  We're pouring a 3" 'topping slab' over the original 4" rough slab.  We wanted a finished concrete floor and were concerned - in hindsight, justifiably - with building over the finished floor, so we framed over the rough slab and then poured the finished floor on top.

The topping slab begins to spread...

 

The first area is leveled with a vibratory screed and allowed to begin to set.

The topping slab is complete, and finishing has begun.

And this is the completed, troweled slab.  Next is a final buffing the next day and a coat of sealer.

MORE BRICK

I mentioned in the last post that I expected the masonry work to be a long process, but I don't think I fully understood just how long.  We're about 8 weeks in now, and still going.  But you'll see from the photos below that this is not your average straightforward brick job.  This first image is one of the compound cuts they had to create to work around our column bases...

Steven's masterpiece.  Each pair of columns had about 4 similarly mutilated bricks around the base.  This was particularly tedious work.

Here's how it fit's against the column base

exterior stairs, now complete

Work on the pavers begins.  This is a herringbone pattern, with a 'norman' size brick, which makes the pattern a little more pronounced.

Pavers again, with the stair in the background.  The wood-fired boiler will go in the niche to the left of the stairs.  We needed a heat dump, for excess heat from the boiler, if it's not called for inside, so we ran radiant pipes in the bench against the stairs.  This should be a cozy seating area in the late fall / early spring.

Looking back toward the entry

And down toward the spillway terrace

Another stair, with our new dog, Thelma, in the foreground.

This is the spillway terrace.  It doesn't make sense yet, but eventually we'll have a dam across the creek and the spillway will flow right past this terrace.

Okay, so I liked this stair.  Sorry for the redundancy.

That's John, grouting the joints.  The pavers were first laid in a mortar bed, allowed to set and then grouted, much like tile.  This is because the brick we used is very dense and has a low initial rate of absorption (IRA), compared to the typical southern red brick that our masons were accustomed to.