BRICK BEGINS

This is just a start, but I can tell already that it's going to be a long, slow process, so I won't wait for completion. We fell in love with a brick when we were living in Asheville, and after literally years of asking around, finally found the company that makes it, almost by accident.  Unfortunately, we also found out that they're in Nebraska, and shipping brick is not cheap.  It's a lustrous dark gray, with a little bit of brown and even purple and blue, depending on the light.  It's a little bit shiny, as if it were glazed, but it's certainly not.  It's just a special clay from that region that takes on a slight sheen when it's fired.  In the end, we couldn't find anything locally that came close, so we ordered two truckloads of Endicott brick and it arrived right around Christmas.  This is absolutely the most beautiful brick I've ever seen, so Endicott - if you're listening - send me a kickback.

We began with the vertical brick, on the exterior foundation walls.  We used three different sizes: utility, norman and modular, and a number of different shapes within each size.  Most of the exterior work was done in utility size brick, which is 4x4x12 nominal.

This is the stair down to the spillway terrace, outside the library.  The landing negotiates the changing angle of the retaining wall on the left.

 

Jerry Bradshaw, our master mason, laying out the radiant heating lines in our exterior bench - more about this later...

A finished wall.  It's hard to appreciate the iridescent sheen of the Endicott brick in a photo, especially when it still has mortar residue all over, but this brick is incredible.  I'm jealous of any architect who lives in Nebraska - I would be using this product on every job I drew.

Another bench wall.

And another view of our first really finished brick wall.

Maybe here you can see a little of the reflective sheen of the brick.  Okay, maybe I'm a detail geek, but I love this brick.

LONG LOST LUMBER MILL FOOTAGE

I really thought we had lost these images, but they turned up this morning in the far reaches of my hard drive, so now's the time to post.  The Grandin Lumber Company was built around 1900, about 8 miles east of us in then-thriving Grandin, North Carolina.  It was damaged by flooding in the '30's and used as a barn until Hurricane Hugo knocked it to the ground in 1989.  When Edgar Howell took me to see it in 2009, it looked like a bonfire pile of slowly decaying lumber.  I bought all the yellow pine and oak timbers for $5000, hoping it would be enough for the house, which we still hadn't completely designed.  My friend Tony Moretz painstakingly denailed the timbers and cut them into slabs with a portable bandsaw mill, set up on-site.  

Still a lot of good lumber in that pile...

Our pile of usable timbers.  You can see some of the massive bolts still embedded in the timbers.

That's the grain that I was looking for - tight, even growth without too many knots.  This was a smaller timber and probably yielded very little finished lumber.  Maybe 3 or 4  5-inch wide decking boards.

Luckily, many of the other timbers were much larger, and we wound up with a nice stack of slabs like this:  1 3/4" thick by a full 12" wide.  It will finish out about 1 1/2" x 11.  But the grain and the color of that piece are incredible.

Drywall

The heading is lower case, because I know it's not that exciting.  But what is exciting is the feeling that we're moving on to the finishing stages!  Still, that will probably drag on for another three or four months.

The first coat of mud!  It took us almost a week to finish the first coat, but second and third will go much faster.  We're using a bullnose corner bead, shown loose on the left and installed on that corner.  It just softens the corner a bit and makes drywall look more like plaster

Downstairs, with drywall.  The green, for the uninitiated, is moisture-resistant drywall.  It's going behind our kitchen counters and laundry / utility area.

Rodney, finishing up the first coat

Johnny, starting the second coat

This is the peak where everything comes together.  The ridges and valleys will be covered by wood trim once the sheetrock is finished and painted.

Clearly not drywall, but it's so pretty I couldn't resist.  Locally harvested (and milled by us) eastern red cedar, for the closets.  This is a highly aromatic cedar that keeps moths out of my wool sweaters.  We'll use it for the interior walls of our closets.

Besides being aromatic, it's also beautiful, with swirls of red, pink and purple.  This all came from a local apple orchard where the cedar trees had been planted for insect control.  They were expanding the fruit trees and cutting the cedar.  We had it sawn into planks, then air-dried and surfaced it into finished boards.

BACK OUTSIDE

I realize it's been quite a long time since I took any exterior update photos, and I've actually made some progress out there.  Here in the front facade you can see that the slate siding is complete, we've just hung the steel balcony, and we've almost finished the porch ceiling.  

Oh, nice -- I just learned how to do captions!  Always had trouble with my text running wild all over the page and seemingly no way to format it.  Maybe I'll go back and fix all my other posts.

We ran out of wood for our porch ceiling - 8 boards short.  Now we have to wait 2 weeks for the new material to come in.  

This is the big wall, the money wall, as Mike calls it.  We've run about as much slate as we can until we place the two lower windows (more about that later).  Those are copper vents about mid-way up the wall (range hood, bathroom exhaust and gas water heater).  This is the service side of the house.  All the bathrooms, utility area, mechanicals, etc. are on this side, because it's the most hidden from view.

Another view of the front, but I chopped off the columns in formatting.

These are the steps down to the lower terrace, just below the spill-way.  They'll all get clad with brick shortly.  We ordered 100 bags of black mortar (really it's not black, but charcoal) and received 100 bags of buff mortar.  But what's another delay, really?  It just gives us time to work out a few more details.

Details such as this, my copper capped exterior outlet.  It will get worked into the slate.

And our copper corner.

The back porch is nearly complete, but again the slate is held up by the window and door details.  We've finished the ceiling and the gable wall, but need to start on the windows.  The balconies were challenging.  They weigh about 250 pounds, so we lifted them close with the tractor, then finessed them into place.

So here's our son's bedroom, looking north toward the meadow.  In the foreground, we'll have a n outdoor shower, and to the left will be the pond.

SPRAY FOAM INSULATION

We gave a lot of thought to the insulation we should use in this house and in the end, decided on a hybrid system.  The roof has 1 1/2" of rigid foam above the plywood roof deck, then about 1 1/2" of spray foam just below deck and finally R30 fiberglass batts.  Each component has it's own role to play.  The rigid foam keeps the plywood somewhat warm, to prevent condensation, the spray foam air-seals the house and the fiberglass batts are still the most cost-effective way to build up R-value.  All together, along with the roof system, it should give us about R50.

The walls are arund R20-25, with 1 1/2" of spray foam and R15 fiberglass.  Except for where they're clear, of course!  Each layer of polycarbonate is about R1.6, so even with two layers and a dead air space in between, we'll be lucky to get R5.  Still, that's better than any window I've ever specified.  

Here, the spray foam guys look like they're being very neat, and they were for the first two days.

Then, the end of the week crept up on them and suddenly they had a lot to accomplish on Friday.  No one likes to stay late on Friday.  I'm not sure exactly what they did - maybe opened the sprayer up a little more - but they sprayed more foam on Friday afternoon than they had in two previous days combined.

Until the gun blew up.  It's hard to really hear a scream through a respirator, over the job-site radio and the other power tools.  Luckily, no one was injured, and the mess was surprisingly contained.  Most of it wound up on that sheet of plastic.  

All in all, I'm glad we did the foam.  I believe it adds rigidity to the structure, provides a fantastic air seal and a lot of R-value per inch.  The sales pitch was grossly exaggerated, but they always are.  You're basically paying for material on the wall, so get a bid and a good measuring stick to check their work.

And, right after the spray foam, we did fiberglass batts, a much more tidy process, I might add.

The Knauf Ecobat, formaldehyde-free, yadayadayada

See how neat these guys are?  They even cleaned up after themselves.  Not like some other spray-foam contractors I know.

PLUMBING & ELECTRICAL

I know it's been pretty silent from me lately, and it's mostly because the stuff we've been working on just hasn't been very interesting.  BUT, that's largely complete, so now I can show you the pictures and move on to more exciting accomplishments!  We did our own electrical work, but hired out the plumbing, mostly because the estimate was so reasonable.  Unfortunately, I later found out that our house is considered 'custom' which more or less doubles the price.  Still the same number of plumbing fixtures, etc. but there's an up-charge for thought.  So without further ado, here is plumbing and electrical...

This is my wife's tub.  It's 5 1/2' long, about 32" high, solid cast iron, and I swear to God it weighs a thousand pounds.  I bought it for $50 at a hospital auction and it's in immaculate condition.  I was pretty proud of myself for that one.

And this is my son's tub, maybe one day.  This will all be tiled, or plastered, or finished in some way.  The sink is to the right and flows into the tub, which flows into the shower.  Not literally but visually - wouldn't want to brush my teeth and have it flow into the tub.

SLATE SIDING

I know, most people put it on the roof, but you can't see it on the roof, so we've put it on the walls.  I was buying gutters from a local roofing company, and their yard was filled with pallets of slate that they had removed from the roof of a bank.  This was several years ago, and our plans were not fully developed, but it planted a seed in my mind.  Luckily, the slates were still there when we began construction (not many new slate roofs going up), so I bought 1800 square feet for roughly the cost of vinyl siding.  The tiles are about 12" x 20", and are hung with an 8" exposure.  This means that 12" is covered by the tiles above and the wall is essentially three tiles thick.

We're using raw copper as a trim detail at corners, around doors, etc.  It's bright and shiny now, but within a few months, it will dull to a subtle bronze, which I think will work well with the slate.