Cassilhaus

CATCH ALL/CATCH UP

I had to give myself amnesty from staying current on posts.  I got officially overwhelmed with the pace of things on the site. I feel bad about not getting progress shots up but dealing with the real thing takes priority.  I decided to just summarize all the progress and just redouble efforts to stay current after that.

1) Main Stair.  The main stair is almost complete so we have full circulation in the house. This shows construction just underway of the landing between the main entry and the kitchen. After a few treads it makes a right angle up to the gallery/master suite.

We are going to be working with an artist named Marc Maiorana to design and fabricate custom stair rails.  We discovered his incredible work at Penland School of Crafts in Penland, NC.  He’s coming down tomorrow to brainstorm ideas and take measurements.  Here is a sample of his work at Penland.

2) Living/Dining.  The double high space in the main pod comprising the Living and Dining areas is now framed and roofed.  Things are a lot darker in the house but it is wonderful to see the full house shell now complete.

3) Windows.  The window installation starts next week and Ellen and I took a great deal of time this past weekend going through the entire house and looking at framed views and angles to verify correct window placement.  We decided to move a few windows up a foot of so and swap the two NW corner windows in the master bedroom.  We also added a window over the large millwork cabinet on the East wall of the Living Room.  I think we did incredibly well on siteing and sizing windows but there is nothing like looking at your actual views to do final tweaks.  We went all Pella on our window and door package and they have been great to work with.  One of Ellen’s favorite views inside is the view looking south from the living room where you can see up over the glass railing (not in place yet), through the clerestory at the low roof and to the trees south of the carport.

4) Rough in.  Electrical rough in is done in the guest pod and ramping up to full speed in the main house. We hit a snag on cable distance for the low voltage track runs. The transformers live in the ¾ height "gallery object" in the bridge and we would have had to run wiring down into the floor, across the gallery, up the walls and into the ceiling but there was no space between the gallery clerestory to get such a large amount of cable through. After many design proposals we settled on extending a small section of the gallery object wall up to the ceiling to enclose the wiring.

HVAC ducts have been marked and they are working on the main arteries of that system.  Plumbing rough in is complete on all items they can get to at the moment.

5) The stucco on the upper soffits is about 70 percent done and looks great.  They should finish next week. 

 I am not sure when they will start the stucco on the main pods but if you are looking for a job it is a wonderful view.

6) Millwork.  Ellen and I continue to refine the millwork designs.  We spent most of the night on Friday working on the main millwork piece for the living room.  Here is what we came up with--

7) The bracing in the gallery came down and we can finally experience the full space.

Thanks to all for your patience and for going along on this wonderful ride.

       

To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.  To know the dark, go dark.  Go without sight, and find the dark, too blooms and sings, and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings. 

Wendell Berry

                                                                                                      

           

 

Let the Rough-In Begin

The rough in phase has begun with a vengeance. It feels like a very significant shift.  We have gone from a three man framing crew with a singular focus to a much larger team including HVAC, Electrical, Plumbing, and Stucco all working in different areas. I think Ellen cringes when the almost finished beautiful framing comes under the hammer, the drill, and the dreaded Sawzall and saw dust is flying everywhere as plastic pipes penetrate the floor, ducts go through the walls, and electrical boxes get nailed in place. It's a mental shift too as we have put all of our energy into making sure the structure works as designed and the larger elements of the house come together as planned--a more macro thinking--to focus on the inner workings and pathways at a more micro level that we spent so much time trying to work out in advance.

So far it is all working like a champ.

We can't be accused of having an inexperienced crew.  Leon has assembled an amazing team of seasoned pros.  Robert, one of our plumbers, has been working for Hillsborough Plumbing continuously

for 56 years!!!!  He started when he was 14 and said he started before there was plastic OR copper piping.  He also started before I was BORN!  What a great guy.  Rafael from EQC is an artist with a pair of tin snips. I heard this clicking noise coming from the guest pod and I

discovered him meticulously cutting out the lip of a piece of custom duct work that looked like a factory machined edge. These guys are all the best of the best.

 

 

Don, the electrician from P&L Electric, has been very thoughtful about all things electrical and made some really good suggestions about fine tuning our electical design.  I have been in high gear trying to get all of our light fixtures in on time to stay on track.

Even more scaffolding is being set up on the site as the stucco guys from Reynolds Construction set up to do the soffits under the upper overhangs of the bridge.  They are just beginning to grok how high up those soffits are.

The last phase of the framing has finally started as the tall walls of the living/dining area go up.  It is also very sad to see the beautiful views of the forest and house slowly go away. We are reconsidering

one of those deleted windows on the east side of the living room.

To achieve the marvelous it’s precisely the unthinkable that must be thought.

Tom Robbins

1000 STRONG

We had our 1000th blog visit yesterday! The Sitemeter software that tracks our visits is incredibly fascinating.  We can see where are visitors are from, how they got to our site, what their Google search was if they used one and a whole host of other info. Raise a glass to Cassilhaus for reaching this milestone. Thanks to everyone for checking in on our little project.  It is really getting exciting so please stay tuned. They finished the upper roof framing and sheathing yesterday and I got up there to take some photos.

This was taken from the highest point on the house above the master bedroom.  It is WAY up there--about 35'. This area with the chairs is the living/dining room and the only part of the house that has not been framed yet.  Ellen and I invited everyone in our offices (Ellen Cassilly Architect and KONTEK Systems) for a pizza, beer, and Locopops party after work and there were quite a few wide eyes!  Everyone seemed to love the house very much and a good time was had by all.  The most important piece of intelligence gleaned from this outing was that Papa John's Pizza delivers to our new house!

I spent the day ordering light fixtures, window blinds, and in-wall loudspeakers.  I have a serious weakness for Italian light fixtures.  I found an amazingly cool one today by a company called Flaver. Take a look at LOOP. It is alternating/undulating plates of white and red glass. I also fell in love with a fixture called HOLE from Itre. I am very grateful to Teresa Teachey for all of her help today with these fixtures.

The 14 page quote from Lutron on window blinds was less stimulating but needs to move to the top of my list so I need to wind this up.

Be wary of any enterprise that requires new clothes. 

    --Henry David Thoreau

You can BANK on that

I won't bore you with the long ugly saga of our construction loan but suffice it to say we got a big dose of "Big Corporate Bank".  35 years of banking relationship and 6 months of regular loan meetings at CCB/SunTrust ended up being worth less than a cup of coffee when 2 days before our closing (and with construction already started), having outsourced loan decisions to folks in Georgia, we were informed that we couldn't have a loan because our house design "had features that lacked broad appeal to the wider market". They were adamant that there were no financial or credit issues--only DESIGN issues.  They'd had the plans for 6 months and they wait for 48 hours before closing to decide our house is too weird?!?!?! Our local SunTrust friends were fantastic through the whole thing but when the people in the best position to make decisions about loans are no longer allowed to make those decisions it is time for a new bank.  Thanks to a referral from our builder Leon, we met Larry Loeser, the president of Harrington Bank in Chapel Hill.  WOW.  Talk about night and day.  We had our approval in a day and who do you think comes out to the job site every month to approve draw requests?  Larry.  He showed up to meet Ellen and I out there on Monday sporting blue jeans and a Michael Jordan T shirt and brought us lunch from Subway.  We gave him the 10$ tour and walked down to the stream to get the lay of the land. I can't tell you what a breath of fresh air it is to find a banker that really walks the local service talk and invests in your dreams because they think you are doing an interesting and worthy project rather than only loaning money for the lowest common denominator thing that checks all the right safe boxes.  Thank you Larry!!  I forgot to bring my camera to lunch so you get only words today.

Stairway to Heaven

There’s a feeling I get
In the pod for the guest
After the week of the leaving
In my thoughts I have seen
Risers, Treads through the trees
And the echoes of previous ladders
Ooh, it makes me wonder,
Ooh, it really makes me wonder.

If there’s a bustle in your job site
Don’t be alarmed now,
It’s just the ringing of the nail gun
Yes there are two paths you can go by
To level two now
There’s still time to change the floor you’re on.
And it makes me wonder

Your head is humming and it won’t go
In case you don’t know
The 2-bys are calling you to join them.
Dear lady, can you hear the steps though
And did you know
Your stairway goes to the sleeping loft.

And we’re buuuuying a stairway to heaven.

With apologies to Mssrs. Page and Plant we are very excited that we finally have a stair to the second floor.  We were out of town and much was

accomplished in our absence. I think I will go away more often--much more fun to see huge changes. The guest pod stair and landing, sleeping loft knee wall, and closet framing all took form.  No more climbing ladders to get upstairs.

This is the artist's studio space with the sleeping loft above.  We can't wait for our first visitor!

The lower part of the upper roof was also framed and it is an unbelievable set of complex angles.  Kudos to Dwayne, Steve, and Myron for figuring this out!

This is the view down the gallery and you can see where the drop down roof forms a soffit for the library.  To the right we will have this amazing hall to the master suite with clerestory on both sides and a glass rail overlooking the living room below.  There is a built in bench at this spot at the top of the stairs (the ones that aren't there yet)

In other news they put the septic field in.  I was really pissed off at the amount of tree damage caused

and vented some to Leon and Myron.  It is difficult to stay mad too long in this place. The house seems to get more complicated and intricate every day yet it seems so settled here and feels very much like home.