Down the Pipe and Up The Shaft

The house was finally bestowed with that universally acclaimed harbinger of true civilization: running water.

This came in the absolute nick of time because our "alternate arrangements" for delivering water were getting a bit tough on everyone, not to mention the bicycle:

Now that we have water flowing through the pipes inside the house, we finding all sorts of great ways to use it:




And when you combine water, electricity, and natural gas, you get something very special indeed:

Of course, as with all things in this house, what was a simple appliance delivery got complicated fairly quickly. There are two places in the house plumbed for a washer and dryer. The traditional laundry room in the garage (shown in the picture above) and what appears to be a closet in one of the bedrooms on the third floor:


After taking careful measurements of both locations, we ordered two sets of washers and dryers, a larger one for the laundry room in the garage and a smaller one for the upstairs laundry closet. Sears obligingly delivered both sets in an alarmingly large truck and unloaded them without a hitch:

So far, so good. However, as even occasional readers of this blog can predict, this is the point where things usually go terribly awry, and this was no exception.

Despite our careful, repeated, and absolutely accurate measurements, we discovered that household appliance dimensions are apparently governed by quantum mechanics rather than classic Euclidean geometry, and we had failed to account for the curvature of space around the washers and dryers when trying to figure out what would fit into the designated spaces.

When the tape measures were finally retracted, we found out that we could not fit the larger appliances in the garage laundry room without structural modifications to the house (that Fai, to his credit, was more than willing to do).

For the same reasons the smaller washer/dryer set would not fit in the upstairs laundry closet unless we could make a few nips and tucks to the very fabric of the universe itself. Fai was a bit less enthusiastic about this one, mostly because he was not sure we could get the permits in time. Ultimately when we found out that there is a 6-8 billion year wait for the space wormhole we would need to make it work, we decided to install the smaller appliances in the garage and go with a smaller set in the laundry closet. Frankly, I would have been shocked if it had turned out any other way.

So the bigger washer dryer stayed in their boxes and got right back on the truck and headed back to Sears and the smaller set ended up in the garage; problem solved!



The march towards civilization brought about the next bittersweet moment for the week when one of my favorite parts of the house, the elevator shaft, was taken over by, you guessed it, the elevator. Up to this point, the shaft was an empty abstract piece of negative art, and I don't think Jenn had completely abandoned hope in the possibility of installing a 4-story tall chandelier in the middle of the staircase.

All of that went by the wayside when the elevator contractor showed up this week and started filling the shaft and the adjoining space under the stairs with, well, elevator gear:




Even the elevator cab got assembled inside the shaft, like a ship in a bottle:




All of this is powered by an impressive electric-hydraulic pump:


And operating from a reservoir filled with a significant quantity of hydraulic fluid from those empty buckets in the background:


A few more days, and pressing this button would summon the cab to whisk me away to any of the upper floors I desire -- we hope.



In other parts of the house, the kitchen got a very cool back splash made from glass subway tiles.



Overall, the kitchen is really coming together well. All that fuss with the crane and the obsessively hand crafted cabinets and the ridiculously large faucet seems to have brought about something very close to the intended results.




At the very least, I am heartened that the two vital appliances are installed and operating: the microwave oven and the espresso machine.



The other major item on last week's agenda was the re-application of stucco. Now, your correspondent is no stucco expert, but it seems that after applying all of these coats of stucco, the steel beams and even the framing may be redundant. It seems that the correct number, whatever it is, has finally been reached, and (except for clean up and some patch and trim work) the stucco application has come to an end. The end result, at least at first examination, appears to be smooth and even with a very even tint. Let's hope there is no more scaffolding in our future.






Next week: more plumbing, glass, more elevator work, and some key inspections.

Après le déluge, stucco

Over the last few weeks, Jenn has been spending a fair amount of time at the house and to make her more comfortable, we had to move the very first piece of furniture into the house:



It is a significant, if humble start, and we hope more furnishings would be moved in in the near future.

Before reporting on construction progress, your correspondent needs to respond to some reader feedback. The regular readers of this blog, all three of them, have complained about the lack of new entries in the last couple of weeks. While it is true that the last entry was back in late December, your correspondent's sloth is only one reason for this lack of output. The other convenient excuse was a week-long storm that lashed San Francisco and that brought the exterior work in the house to an abrupt halt and limited the interior work to trim and touch up.

Mind you, we are not talking about a little sprinkle here, this was a major torrential downpour. In fact, this was the only way I could get to the house during the storm:



Eventually, the storm subsided a bit and it was possible to get to the house using more conventional means:




Of course, since underwater stucco technology is still in its infancy,



the work on the outside of the house had to be stopped while the storm lashed the area. The good news is that despite the déluge, the house proved waterproof, except for one small leak in one of the sliding doors, and that turned out to the window manufacturer's fault, not the construction crew's.



Eventually, even the most persistent storm abates and this one was no exception. The rain stopped, the sun came out, and as the waters went down, the scaffolding went up for Stucco, part deux.



This may seem like deja stucco to the regular readers of this blog, but there is a good reason to re-apply stucco. In order to get uniform color, the tinted stucco layer for both sides of the house has to be applied at the same time, or at least in very rapid sequence. The previous attempt at applying tinted stucco was interrupted by the storm and if we simply finish the application at this point, we will end up with two different colors. The solution is to reapply tinted stucco to the entire house. The stucco being reapplied also includes an acrylic additive that repels moisture and provides better watertight integrity.

Once the waters parted outside, the work inside resumed as well.

The most dramatic change inside the house is the installation of the counter tops. The Quartz counter tops in the kitchen provide the perfect working surface for prepping and serving gourmet meals. Here is the kitchen before counter tops:




And here is the kitchen after:




In addition to its functional purpose, the quartz slab also serves an aesthetic function by reflecting the light of the under counter LED lights:



The under cabinet lighting in this kitchen comes not from lamps or tubes, but from panels of 28 LEDs that consume about the same amount of power as a very small night light, but produce the equivalent of a big fluorescent tube worth of light and produce absolutely no heat in the process.




The second full bath also received its marble counter top, but alas, no LED lighting:



The other bit of indoor work involved putting handles on doors. Normally, this is not particularly taxing, however, this being our house, even simple things tend to get complicated fairly quickly.

Many of the doors in the house are pocket doors and require fairly complex locks to operate. Installing these locks requires fairly precision cutting of the doors to accommodate the recessed handle and mortise. There are two ways to do this, the traditional, or Flintstones way which basically involves drilling a lot of holes with a hand drill, hoping that the end result is the right size and shape:



This is a bit like trying to build a Fabergé egg with stone tools. Here is an illustration of the process in action:



The second way, the right way, is to hire someone who has the right skills and equipment to rout a perfect lock-shaped hole in the pocket doors.

The process starts with a jig:



An absurdly complicated tool that looks like the love child of an oversized cordless drill and a hydraulic car jack is attached to the door:



The operator then cranks the crank and the router bit follows a complex three dimensional path that would put the Blue Angels in G-LOC to create the perfectly shaped cavity in the solid wood doors to receive the complex shape of the lock.



Here's a very short video of the rig in action (Warning: it's a bit loud). The beeping you hear at the end of the video is the smoke alarms going off from the wood and paint turned vaporized by the router bit.



After a few turns of the handle exactly the right amount of door material ends up as sawdust on the floor to allow the lock to be snugly nestled in the ensuing cavity.



While this was going on, the plumbers were busy -- plumbing. This includes the installation of the stainless steel kitchen sink:



and the approximately oil derrick sized kitchen faucet:



Another humble, yet important, bit of plumbing being installed is the toilets:





Speaking of toilets, the master throne is waiting for its turn to be installed:



And for the throne's wireless remote control to be powered up:



Looks like the Port-O-Potty's days are numbered.

Another development involves one of my favorite structural features of the house, you guessed it, the elevator shaft. With the date for the installation of the elevator fast approaching, the shaft gets an air vent and a smoke detector at the top. I have to give the shaft up on Monday and here are a few final shots of the empty shaft with its new features:





The grotto got some attention as well and the fresh air ducts were installed and enclosed in a very attractive, yet unobtrusive soffit.







and I finally got to see what was inside the data junction box:



Cannot say that seeing this makes me feel any better. At least, now that AT&T has connected the phone lines,



we can connect all of this to the outside world.

Next week: Appliances, back splash, elevator, glass, and marble.