Cassilhaus: July 2008

PRIME TIME

The drywall is up and the priming is beginning. We are using Philip Hansell Painting and they are doing a fabulous job. The house already had a ton of light and now it is bouncing all over the place with the bright white primer!

In addition to priming, Luis and Crispin (sp?) are working on the second and final coat on the exterior cedar so they can take the scaffolding down. Ellen and I were on the site today doing another marathon interior paint color selection session and they were out there with brushes smaller than toothbrushes doing ultra fine touchup down to the nail heads. It looks stunning.

This weekend is all about part II of the Finish Olympics. We probably will have 15+ hours in on interior paint color selections and we aren't done yet. We are at least having a good time and made fantastic progress today settling in on Driftwood, Dark Celery, Ochre, Sea Froth, Tropical Orange, Rainforest Dew, California Copper, Creme Froth, Cork, and Smoke. We are using low or no VOC paints primarily in the Sherwin Williams Harmony Line. It is difficult to start this process with a blank canvas. It is easier if you have some reference point. We started with some clippings I have pulled over the past few years from Interior Design and that led to some great starting colors. We also referenced the great colors on the steel doors on a dresser we bought from BluDot called Modilicious 3 and that got us the scheme for the guest pod.

In other news they are getting ready to install some of the Ipe decking. They have installed the tapered sleepers on the sun terrace to flatten out the deck surface.

Next week promises to be an amazing one--hardwood floors, kitchen and bathroom cabinets, interior trim, and ceramic tile. The house is coming together so quickly it doesn't feel real. We are supposed to move in in about 3 months. I should have some detailed posts next week. Stay tuned and thanks for reading.

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JOB SIGN

This was a bit of a personal crusade for me. In my 20 years as an AV consultant and contractor, my company has been acknowledged on a construction job sign exactly 1 time and that was after intervention on my part. I wanted to fabricate a job sign for Cassilhaus that would acknowledge all of the consultants and craftspeople that made this project happen and here it is. Many thanks to Anna Wirth and Hannah Peele for helping me with the design, Nik Shah for his rendering of the finished house, and Mark Gordon for a beautiful job fabricating the sign. I should thank God too for perfectly positioning two trees in the right location and right angle to mount the sign at the entrance to the project. (I just noticed this sentence has all three spellings of the word 2 in it!)

In other news, drywall finishing continues at full speed.

Nelson and Luis do the drywall dance.

Don and Kevin attacked electrical central in the gallery object in preparation of installing six low voltage transformers for the low voltage track lighting system in the gallery.

Steve, Dwayne and Joe checked off the cedar siding on the West side of the Master Bedroom and were working on the South side when I left yesterday.

They are supposed to get the AC turned on today in preparation for hardwood floor installation. Stay tuned.

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CAMP CASSILHAUS

On a whim Ellen and I decided we wanted to spend our first night in the house so we packed up the air mattresses and toothbrushes and headed out for camp Cassilhaus.

We invited our friend Scott over for dinner and played a few games of Farkle on the screened porch.

The only work light I could find on the site was broken so I had to hot wire one of the fixtures I just purchased for exterior lighting. Scott and Ellen each won a game. I showed my usual games of chance karma.

Any romantic notions of a special evening were fairly quickly dispelled by both air mattresses losing their air, the fans kicking up enough drywall dust to choke us, and a generally hot and humid evening. We had a great time anyway and it was great to be out there at night. The big dipper hangs right over the house and we were serenaded by a million bugs and a rushing stream. The drywall finishers surprised us by showing up Saturday morning. Who knew it was the day to work on the master bedroom closet?

In the morning the birds were singing in force and after a gala breafast of Raisin Bran on the deck Ellen headed off to the Durham Farmers' Market and I started to work on interior paint color selections. I also noticed that they had finished the cedar on the north upper soffit of the main pod and it looks great.

We are starting to make the house a home.

I have spent the day looking and looking. It is the same in art as in life. The deeper one penetrates, the broader the view.

--Goethe

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4D

These images including our first interior rendering just in from Nik Shah. I hope the construction looks this good!

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I can see CEDAR now.

From the very beginning of the project I knew I wanted Red Cedar on our house and it has been quite a journey working out the sourcing, finishing, profile selection, application techniques, etc. but finally the day has arrived. Our cedar was prefinished in Greensboro and broght to the site last week.

We are using vertical grain clear Western Red Cedar on the entire bridge volume, the soffits for the two stucco pods, on the underside of the bridge on both interior and exterior runs, and to fabricate the dining canopy. We prevailed on Leon to use blind nailing to apply the siding and he even found some nails with colored nail heads. Dwayne, Steve, and Joe started with the high soffits on the west side of the guest pod and it looks absolutely stunning.

For these soffits we are using a "V" joint profile while on the vertical siding we are using a "fineline" profile which has a very fine reveal. On the siding we are also using a home slicker product which allows for drainage behind the siding but makes for a challening installation to keep everything flat.

Here they are working on the North side of the master bedroom above the screened porch. Myron helps Steve rip a piece of siding to make the NW corner.

I don't know the time table on the installation of the decorative cedar ceiling under the bridge but there has been some serious head scratching going on trying to figure out what is parallel to what and how they are going to get the vertical ribs on the cedar in the kitchen to line up perfectly to form the canopy over the dining table while navigating the light fixture trim rings in the kitchen ceiling. Leon really has been sweating the details on the light fixture integration into the canopy as well. He had Dwayne carve out a hole in the studs adjacent to where the canopy emerges so the the electical box for the low voltage lighting track that is on the side of the canopy could be installed with no visible wiring. Kevin with P&L installed the box yesterday.

As of yesterday we have had 2250 visitors to the blog. There certainly seems to be loyal readership on the jobsite as everyone asks me about it. Thanks to everyone for going along for the ride.

Frank

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Half Way Home

My first post about construction was 6 1/2 months ago and I still pinch myself every time I go to the job site--it hasn't really set in that we are more than half way done and that it is actually me who will be moving in in less than 4 months! The project is going fantastically well--we have bumps and frustrations like everyone--but our dream really is being realized. We have a great builder in Leon Meyers and a fantastic crew of really talented and dedicated craftsmen. Our little cul de sac is so jammed with trucks that I can barely find a place to park when I visit.

I don't know where to start with the progress report. Drywall is going full steam ahead. I try to keep one step ahead of them covering up my wires.

I came up with an interesting base trim detail involving a decorative reglet mated with a trapezoidal (of course) shaped piece of trim wood. In the gallery the aluminum will be exposed and elsewhere in the house it will be painted the same color as the base wood. They have just started to install it.

Charles and his team from Pickard Roofing got started on the mop down roof on the roof terrace.

This roof will be covered by an ipe deck material. Steve and Joe fabricated sleepers (Steve LOVED doing this) to counter the slope of the roof.

Rain water will go through the decking, run down the roof, out the scuppers, and be captured by a cistern under the screened porch and be used for landscape watering.

The interior and exterior HVAC units have been set.

Don and Jesus wired them up yesterday and are hopeful of doing an initial system test this week.

Larry with P&L electric came up with a very flexible scheme for emergency generator power. We didn't want to invest in a large permanent generator system so they have placed a jack under the screened porch where we can roll in a portable generator. The main electrical panels have been fitted with a change over interlock switch which allows change over from mains power to generator jack. We can then decide (within the limits of the portable generator rating) on a case by case basis which breakers we want to energize during a power outage.

Some luck lies in not getting what you thought you wanted but getting what you have, which once you have it you may be smart enough to see is what you would have wanted had you known.

Garrison Keillor

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STICKMAN

Ellen and I had our friends Linda and Patrick Dougherty out to the site for Sunday brunch and a look around the site.

We fired up the toaster oven and tea kettle for the first time on the soon to be screened porch.

Linda is the chief curator at the NC Museum of Art in Raleigh and chairs the Friends of Photography group that Ellen and I are involved in. Patrick is a world reknowned sculptor who makes these amazing organic nest-like sculptures. Check out his website. We hope to have Patrick make a piece at Cassilhaus in 2009 or 2010. Stay tuned! Ellen and I volunteered for a day a few years ago as stick wranglers when Patrick did a commission at the Nasher museum in Durham.

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STUCK-OHHHHH!

These are the guys from Reynolds Construction that are doing our beautiful stucco work.

Rusty and Richard the two principals are on the left talking to Myron and Sean, on the right, is running the crew. Wikipedia does a vastly better job than I could of explaining the 3 coat Stucco process. At first it seemed an odd and very traditional choice for exterior cladding on our very contemporary house but we came to it when looking for a natural material that was very monolithic looking. All of the panel materials being used now all give seams and I was trying to get away from that. I had seen some beautiful cedar and stucco houses by architect Robert Swatt who had a very strong influence on me when we were designing our house. I think stucco and cedar are a great combination. Here are the metal lath on the main pod and then the scratch coat on the guest pod.

There is a lot of singing going on on this installation team!

The left panel here is our first look at the final finish coat for color approval (Mortar is the color name). The section to the right is the second coat. I love the color. Ellen, who was lobbying for something close to the color of winter beech leaves was less sanguine.

We do have some strategically placed expansion joints to avoid cracking but I don't think they detract too much from the uniform look of the surface.

We are waiting for the final round of windows to be installed on the north of the main pod and the east of the guest pod to complete the stucco work. All of the stucco soffits are already done.

It is counterintuitive to welcome insecurity as a sign that something good is beginning. I have never greeted it as a friend. But I know that that is where the work is done, and that premature comfort is a pretty good sign that nothing much is happening.

Sean Kernan