I appreciate all the effort you put into the whole process and I’m glad we get to see the pictures of views (especially), framing, concrete, etc along the way., but I LOVE it when we get to see the project start to take final shape:) I’m just imagination challenged before we get to this stage sometimes.
Amazing! Love the pictures! The excitement is increasing!
When will you start keeping an eye out for your next project?
Yes, I live in MA, it was not a pleasant summer.
I have a digital humidity monitor in the room where I store my musical instruments, and I’ve never seen the humidity get over 80% in this room. We have only room air conditioners, so they don’t come on automatically, but even running it for a short period wrings a lot of moisture out of the air.
Our master bath doesn’t have any air conditioning and even though we run the fans we still occasionally get some mold on the ceiling, even in the winter.
This doesn’t speak to the motivation for this rule.
It also says “All new residential buildings that are three stories or less in height that are submitted
for building plan check must comply with the mandatory requirements of the 2013 California Green Building Standards Code”, does that include renovations? I guess according to this inspector it does.
I have brass trim on my fireplace glass doors. I have heard about spraying the brass black with heat resistent paint rather than paying $500+ for new glass.
@coralbrook Where can I buy the 2000 degree proof black spray paint you mentioned in the fireplace photos?
Can you take some new view photos for us from the fireplace room?
You can get it in the spray paint area of Home Depot. I think it’s actually for car engines and it’s dull black. It’s on bottom right shelf in my home depot
It was not clear to me whether humidity controls were required in all the powder rooms but he pointed it out specifically while we were standing in a powder room.
Cannot take any view photos in living room right now because all windows are taped up for spraying on trim this weekend
Regarding next project…I have already declined a couple of fantastic deals because I don’t have one dollar to buy anything right now. At this point I think I’m going to collapse in a heap when this ever gets done. I cannot even imagine how we are possibly going to get all the details done in the next 8 weeks.
At this price range I think it will take about 2 months to sell, although 21 days on market seems to be the average.
And speaking of budget…just got estimates on the stucco and it’s going to be $11,000. I budgeted $5,000. How could I be off by so much:) What a freaking learning curve I am traveling on!!
I just loaded photos of all the little details we are working on. We are double / triple checking everything in the walls to make sure we don’t forget anything when we start installing drywall next week.
Do you have a gas line to the deck(s) for grilling out? I saw your picture caption about adding electrical outlets to the deck.
Yes, we ran a gas line to outside of the house just below the deck and it is stubbed out. Buyers can run an extension or a flex gas line from the stub to wherever they want to have an outdoor BBQ.
We also ran a gas line to the fireplace and stubbed it out in case buyers want to have a gas fireplace.
We did not run gas to the laundry room or the ovens. We have 220 outlets.
I think I have explained before that SDGE warned me that our gas meter might be undersized for the new house and we need to be careful not to install appliances that have a huge draw. That is the reason I bought a fancy water heater that uses less gas than normal to heat 90 gallons in one hour. Also it is the reason I could not install tankless water heaters for the house because they specifically said to avoid anything that has a huge ‘instant’ draw. So, I will disclose very carefully to the buyers that they need to be careful not to have water heater going full blast, heaters going full blast and then start using fireplace and outdoor BBQ all at once.
Right now there are only three things drawing on gas meter… stovetop, water heater and the furnaces.It would be an absolute nightmare to upgrade the gas meter because it is currently located underneath the small deck off the back bedroom. I have no idea how they got permitted to put a deck over the gas meter, but they did back in 1990. To upgrade they would require the gas meter to be moved to a completely different location, tear up the back yard and run new lines, etc. All in their own good time at a tremendous cost.
I think it is interesting that I had to go through a large worksheet and detailed review of water usage against our current water meter (remember losing the sinks?) but they didn’t do any calculations for the gas usage against the meter size. Probably because I technically did not ADD any additional gas usage to the house except a small new furnace for the top floor.
A neighbor just put their house up for sale, actually still listed as coming soon, but they posted aerial photos in the open house announcement. This property is unusual for the area and has green space on two sides. The aerial photos did a great job highlighting this and the size of the lot. Is this something you might consider for this listing, given it’s unique street access?
Yes, we are going to do drone photos to highlight the unique canyon location and views
We started our insulation of the main floor today and are ready for an inspection on Monday. Technically, we are supposed to wrap the exterior of the house with the black paper and chicken wire for the stucco first. This keeps any moisture or debris off the fiberglass insulation. But, my stucco guy is not going to come start wrapping the house until the top floor is finished and passes inspection. We cannot call for an inspection of the top floor until our roof trusses are delivered and installed. The usual chicken and egg kind of thing
So tomorrow I get to waste some time and money having one of the guys staple on some black paper over the exterior portions of the house that do not have shear panel protection. All because of code issues even though there is not one drop of moisture in the air right now and nothing is going to happen to that insulation 
I loaded some more photos of all the details underway. One of the key things we did today, that drove the guys crazy, was double wrap any drain line in the ceiling or wall. One thing I cannot stand is when you can hear toilets flushing and water running through the ceiling and walls from above. So, we wrapped everything with two layers of insulation, even though it is not required by code. And, all of the hot water pipes have been covered with foam insulation to keep the hot water lines insulated.
I wish someone would do that to my house, cb. I can hear when someone flushes a toilet upstairs. It’s an early warning system that DH is about to come downstairs.
It’s really hard to see any progress but we are really busy on a lot of details. First, I want to make sure that we review every single thing inside the walls on the main floor because the drywall is going to get started on Tuesday morning. I have always had so much trouble having to open up a wall later because we needed to move something. I have literally done 3 separate walk throughs with the guys to think through eveyrthing before we button up. One of the key things I noticed is that electrician had put the cable/Cat5 box in the wrong location in the back bedroom. He had it on the wall where a bed would go. Had to move it across the room
This weekend we are attacking four things… roofing crew is on roof tearing off all the old tiles because we need to cancel the giant Whirlygig that was above the front door (it was hideous) and cancel some vents and install new vents through roof. He is trying hard to have everything tied from old to new with metal flashing/paper, etc. this weekend.
Painting crew is sanding and prepping some old windows and doors and finishing all the trim painting in the living/dining area
Another guy is going around the house stapling black weather paper over all the areas where the insulation is open to elements.
Carpenter is making custom window sills on top floor and installing our vinyl windows up there. We don’t want to install the wood windows yet because the interior wood would be exposed to the elements before we get our roof on.
Then another guy is going through the main floor installing a bunch of blocking and drywall shims to make sure the drywall installation flushes out perfect. We have an area under the master bedroom balcony where the joists and beams did not come out evenly on ceiling below so we have to shim it all up to make it even for ceiling drywall.
Pictures loaded
Thanks for the new photos, cb. I can’t wait to see the living room with the trim once you’ve removed the masking! It’s going to be gorgeous.
Next week is going to be the unveiling of the living room! We have to move everything out of living, dining and kitchen. The oak flooring is coming on Monday to get’acclimated’ and we are tearing off the paper that is covering the floor. I will finally get to see if everything is coming together as I envisioned. They are going to start the patching and lay down kitchen floor a week from Monday.
Then I have to put several stains down to choose final coloring of oak floors throughout main floor.
On Friday I placed the order for the gorgeous flooring for stairs and top floor. I have to stay with oak for main floor to tie in with the existing floors. But top floor is going to have solid 3/4" walnut long planks that I got at a great price and I’m very excited about. 600 sq ft and cost with tax was $3,000.
We passed our insulation inspection today and we have installed all the interior doors in the addition. Drywall will start tomorrow and we will be painting everything next week.
I was able to have a discussion with the building inspector about our dumbwaiter doors and he gave me some suggestions how I can have a nice looking cabinet door and put 5/8 drywall with some trim on the inside of the cabinet door to pass inspection.