Drainage

Aside from pouring concrete along the badly saturated area, the drainage system along the other side of the house is done. Now the long tubes that were siting in the trench are connected to the down spouts. Looking tucked and cleaned.

There are some more drainage work to be done on the other side in addition to the concrete slab. The kitchen exhaust is also installed all in preparation for the upcoming rain next week.

Actually this whole week I've been struggling with colors for the exterior, but I now have to concentrate on the interior color choice first as no painting outside until the rainy days are over.

Primed, tiled and grouted!

PRIMED

Just a couple of days ago I was still contemplating what to do with the front entry, and what do I get today? It's primed. So from contemplation on Friday:

to installing siding by Sunday:

to primed by Monday:

It basically only took 3 working days! Now the pressure is on to finalize on the color.

TILED

Master bedroom is tiled and shower pan is made. What's missing is the grout. Tiles are limestone, off white and rustic grey.

GROUTED

Guest bathroom is grouted. All done. Moon stone ceramic tiles and porcelain floor tiles. Just noticed that after grouting, it's hard to see the pattern from this picture.

Out with the old, in with the new

Within 48 hours of identifying the rotten sidings, and even before I have a chance to contemplate whether to go with another material, new wood siding has been installed. The carpenter crew works in lightning speed. Now I have new wood siding in practically 2/3 of the house and with new insulation and water proofing sheets.

The most shocking part when I arrived at the house has to be the new siding in the entry way. I just made a page of how the old entry way looks like and was just talking about it to Peter, the next thing I know, it's done. I really need to be extra careful with my contemplations. I guess this time it's fine, it's what I want...

And there is more. Remember the tree that was taken out to deal with water drainage? Now there is a sloped concrete slab directing water away from the house. This is to avoid further cracking on the floor, further sloping of the wall and chimney.

Entry Way

This is an informational page for Jessica. Apparently she has forgotten the exact look of the entry.

What to do with siding here?

I want to cover the very dated glass blocks with the same siding as the rest of the house and remove the frame around them.

Replace the left side of the frame and glass blocks with siding. 

the lower frame is this awkward looking H shaped frame.

However there's no way to use one continuous piece of siding for 2 reasons: not long enough and too expensive to extend from an existing plank that originates from the upper window.

So the other choice is to have the connecting region "taped."

Look at the horizontal bar across.

And the siding is rotten.

The house was power washed as part of the painting preparation. And of course more problems surfaced. Practically the whole west facing side of the house has downright rotten sidings. Part of it is due to the strong afternoon sun. Part of it is due to the broken downspouts spilling water onto the wood planks. On top of that the soil around the house is also over saturated and needs to be redirected.

The other area where the tree was (see previous post) suffers a similar fate and on top of it contributes to the chimney being crooked.

So painting the exterior turns into a siding removal, re-insulate, re-waterproof, plank replacement nightmare. I can just see extra $$$$. And what about the landscaping? Peter wants to pour concrete on the bad area to remove water from the house, but you can't just pour concrete here and there. Now the yard is a concrete jungle mixing with not too appealing plantation. The right thing to do is a complete re-landscape. But seriously, this is getting out of hand.

A side fact, do you know that a wood siding house needs to be painted every five years for good maintenance?
I surely didn't know that...

Onto the exterior

Now that Fall has descended upon us, there is a hurry to finish painting the house before the rainy season begins. Due to decades have passed after the last paint job, the sidings are chipped, splintery, cracked, aged and if you are nice you can call it rustic. But let's not kid ourselves, sidings are in dire need of repair. The most time consuming and tedious part of painting is the amount of prep work. In this case, I would say a good 80% would be spent on prepping and priming the exterior. So on Saturday I drove by the house and it was shocking. I knew that prep work has started, but I didn't know that sanding down the wood makes the exterior looks so run down.

There is also another big shock which is outside the dining room window. Peter ordered a very nice looking tree there chopped. It was such a nice "moment" from the house. I understand that the growth is too close and is obstructing the down spout, but still seeing it chopped is disconcerting.

The sad looking tree stump ;-(

As I mentioned before, there are too many cracks and crooked wall in the house, apparently the main culprit is the amount of retained ground water under and close to the perimeter of the house. This is part of the process of remedying future problem with the foundation.

No inspector but found a hood!

City inspector didn't show up at all. Another round of plumbing inspection was going to happen today but he didn't show up!!! Now the tiles cannot go in yet, at least on the side where the fixtures are. Instead I noticed that the kitchen hood is installed, well, at least partially. Probably it's being left open to wait for inspection.

Such a short "neck." The ceiling is just so low...

3rd Mensiversary

Three months have passed, the project should be at it's 3/5 point, provided there are no further delays due to any unforeseen circumstances... Another inspection is scheduled for tomorrow. In the mean time here is the current status.

Bathrooms:

In-line drain, shower-pan, cement boarded. All ready for inspection.

Started tiling in the guest bathroom.

Floor, floor boards and door casings:

Replace casings on all doors.

Floor boards and casings are from the same flat wood (to be painted as the wall).

Kitchen cabinets:

Mostly installed. Haha. And I thought it would take 5 days back in early September...

Front door:

New casing and glass blocks covered. More wall!!!! yay.

And this is the situation at the 3rd mensiversary.

Bathroom Revisited

Wall hung toilet stayed. Guest bathroom has been redesigned. Blah.
A shelf is going to be mounted under the mirror unit instead of extending from the sink.
Tiles are going to flush with an additional built out gypped board to avoid round ends.
This translate to having extra gyp board on the mirror side and the door side, which means the door frame has to be changed too. I swear, this bathroom is the most troublesome.

The walls that are going to be tiled have been prepped to have one layer of water proofing sheet and one layer of cement board. The hole on the ground is also filled with concrete. And of course the tub is in.

As for the master bath, the shower pan is built, in-line drain, water proofed and should be ready to add the cement board next. The old toilet is finally out.

Next Monday is the beginning of tile work.

Handles Handling

Most of the cabinets are installed except for the sliding doors, toe kicks and handles!

From the very beginning I planned to use "edge pull" handles, but Noor said that there will be an additional cost due to the necessity of routing down the surface in order to embed the edge pull seamlessly on top of the cabinet. I didn't want to incur additional cost so I decided to go with surface mount handles.

As it's time to make the selection, I basically picked out two stainless steel style and trying to accept them:

But putting them next to the finished cabinets just made me really want to have the edge pull/tab pull again. However, since the cabinets are done, now Noor wants to charge $30 extra per drawer to install them. I understand that routing is a lot of work, but an extra $30 seems excessive. Besides I have over 40 drawers and doors... Don't forget, this is in addition to the cost of the handles. So I am trying to find edge pull handles that are very thin so as to avoid the routing cost.

I looked at so many sites, and they are all just a little bit off.
In order for the tab to look nice, I want them to flush with the overhang of the counter.
The counter is 3/4" projected from the side of the cabinet. The thickness of the plywood is 3/4 " , so the ideal is to have 1.5" depth, 1/16 inch of thickness, 3" to 6" length.

This is the closest I could find:
For a tab pull:

For an edge pull:

Both of these fit the requirements of thickness. The edge pull fits the requirement of depth but not the tab pull. However, there is another issue with edge pull that may make using them impossible. The problem is the drawers are built with a base box and then a face is added to the front. The top drawers are all fine as their inner boxes are lower than the front face. But the rest of the drawers the inner boxes are too high with less than 1/2" difference with the outer face, so only tab pull can be used in those cases...

Top drawer with a good inch gap between the inner and front face.

The rest of the drawers have less than 1/2 inch gap.

The major reason I objected to the surface mount handles are because of the massiveness of the handles. I want to have a minimal surface look instead of a lot of hardware. So Noor suggested to use the same wooden handle to blend in. Here is how it will look:

Not sure about that either. Of course none of these choices are "bad," just that I really want the edge pull look. So the search must go on.