Stucco, Bookcase, Stairs

Progress is chugging along, though the schedule has slipped. We're probably looking at another 2-3 weeks before completion. The big excitement of the last couple days is that the exterior scaffolding has come down! Here are some exterior shots.





The bad news is that the scaffolding will go back up after the driveway and exterior stairs are poured! The exterior stucco has proved more challenging than expected, since we're using an unusual product that looks more like a concrete skim coat than traditional stucco; it will probably be the last task completed in the house!

Two interesting architectural features on the interior are complete; a large bookcase, and interior stucco walls. The two-story bookcase forms one side of the stairs, beginning on the first floor and extending up to the second floor to serve as the guardrail. It's built with painted MDF, and the carpenters did a terrific job; I cannot find a single flaw. On the first floor, the bookcase includes a bench area to sit and put on shoes, and has storage below for boots and shoes.



The bookcase is double-sided, with sections alternately open to one side or the other. Here it is rising up the stairs.




And from the second-floor hallway.



This photo also shows the interior stucco, which was an addition to the original plan. The stairs scissor around this wall, and the wall is sometimes indoors and sometimes indoors, so we we decided to extend the exterior stucco finish to the indoors to make the indoor/outdoor transition more seamless.



You can also see the floating stair treads with windows below leading to the third floor. It was a sunny day so the image really highlights the light. The stair treads have an LVL structural core, and are wrapped in strand-woven cross-laminated bamboo plywood from Bamboo Hardwoods. The pieces are mitered together to give the appearance of one thick, solid piece; the treads are attached to the wall using hidden Simpson hardware.

Concrete Floors and Decks

Our house has concrete floors on both the first and third floors. They're not yet complete, but concrete floors are a complex beast so I thought I would post on the story so far. Our goal is to have smooth, subtly reflective, gray concrete floors. We like natural concrete; we're not going for a highly reflective polish, or a sanded look that reveals pebbles and aggregate in the concrete. The first floor slab already looks pretty good, it just needs construction soiling, tape adhesive, etc., cleaned off before applying a penetrating sealer (probably Consolideck LS).

The third floor is three-inch-thick lightweight concrete. Most parts look great, like this:



There are some black splotches, though:



These could be hand troweling marks, or entrapped moisture from the curing process. We're getting some expert opinions, but solutions can include grinding the areas down, or using vinegar to lighten the areas. Once they're resolved, we'll seal the floors and apply some sort of floor wax to protect the finish.

Another notorious aspect of concrete is cracking; contractors will tell you that cracks cannot be completely avoided. We're fortunate to have only hairline cracks, that you can't even feel when you run your finger over them. Here's the biggest one, though it looks much smaller in person.



Moving on to decks. Our biggest addition is that we extended the rooftop deck out on the cantilever. It looks incredible. There's a whole lot of deck up there, which is important since we have a very small yard.





Next week the metal railings will go in, so it won't look quite as open. But it will be much more safe.

We also have a deck off the kitchen. Between the cedar siding and cedar decking, it feels like a cozy wood lodge up there.



The downside of all this cedar is that it has to be maintained; sanded and stained every 1-2 years. We're using a Sikkens stain. But it looks incredible so far, as did the view today!

Kitchen Cabinets and Countertops

I've given up waiting for pristine conditions to shoot photographs; dust and protective brown paper and plastic are just a fact of construction. Clean and bright photos probably won't happen until after final cleanup, so here's a post on cabinets and countertops.

To me, the kitchen is the central component of the home, so it merits lots of attention. Options for modern cabinetry are plentiful. At the high end there is a multitude of drool-worthy cabinets from Italian companies like Poliform, ArcLinea, and Scavolini, Bulthaup in Germany, and HenryBuilt here in Seattle. Locally-made custom cabinets, such as those by Seattle's Build or Kerf can also be modern and minimal and beautiful. However, all these options will run you $30k-$60k in cabinets alone. At the low end, IKEA makes terrific kitchen cabinets, despite what many contractors will tell you. However, they have a limited range of finishes, and the sizes can't be easily customized. Also, note that IKEA cabinets are only cheap if you pick up the boxes and assemble them yourself; otherwise the labor hours rack up too quickly. We choose this option for our laundry cabinets, and just had Logan's set the already assembled boxes. (There will be another blog post on this little round of sweat equity.)

In between these options are semi-custom cabinets, such as the Amero line from Pacific Crest. They have a huge range of doors/finishes, boxes can be customized to the half-inch, and prices are low; we spent around $8k for our kitchen and two bathrooms. (Though we have a below-average number of kitchen cabinets, since we have a huge walk-in pantry just behind the kitchen.) We choose the Metro door in black-stained Red Oak for the lowers, and the Jazz door in white gloss for the uppers, wrapped in Oak finish panels. All the lowers are soft-close full-extension drawers, which are much easier to use than lower cabinets. Notice that the uppers actually cantilever out; the boxes are attached to a support beam that was then wrapped in finish panels to hide it (try to do that with IKEA!). Behind the uppers is a staircase to the lower floors. The kitchen island counters extend an extra foot to form a bar.



Along the back wall and wrapped in protective plastic is a floor-to-ceiling bank of cabinets and finish panels that will house the oven/microwave and refrigerator. This bank was supposed to be 30" deep so that it can hold a full-depth fridge; however, it was accidentally built 24" deep. This will be fixed in the next couple weeks.



Cabinet hardware is another easy way to get spendy; Omnia and Linnea make great options. We instead went with IKEA hardware; heavy and long Tyda handles for the lowers and minimal Strecket handles for the uppers.

The other huge choice to be made in kitchens is the countertops; we wanted solid counters as white and textureless as possible, but without the plastic-y feeling of acrylics like Corian. The natural choice is Quartz composite, made using the Breton process. Here in Seattle Caesarstone and Pental Chroma are the most common; however, their whitest options still have a fair amount of texture when viewed closely, and we were afraid our extremely white uppers would make this texture even more obvious by reference. We got a tip that Quantra counters, a new product from India sold locally by Meta Marble, had the whitest Quartz available, and indeed you can see that they're very white! Surprisingly, it wasn't any cheaper than more established brands, probably because it comes in a 3cm thickness rather than the standard 2cm. We're thrilled with how it turned out, though, especially the waterfall pieces extending to the floor!



As an aside, getting these huge 8' slabs up to our third floor was quite a challenge. They ended up renting a lift, and it took six guys to wrestle the pieces.



Our cooktop is a 36" drop-in from BlueStar (well-known in foodie circles as providing the highest BTUs available in a consumer product), and the sink is a double-bowl zero-radius stainless steel model by Vigo (remarkably inexpensive compared to the more common Franke version, which can run in the $1000s).



The rest of the appliances, kitchen faucet, and island pendant lighting still need to be installed to complete the look and function, but overall I think we managed to create a totally hot and modern kitchen on a pretty constrained budget! I will return to the kitchen once it is complete with another post.

Moving along, but nothing to see!

Dear readers: much to my chagrin, it's been almost a month since I've posted. There has been great progress, but this is a challenging period in construction to blog about. Unfortunately, I can never get photos of completed work because it gets covered up almost as soon as I see it, for protection! The stranded bamboo floors are in, and look beautiful, but were covered up within hours of install. The concrete floor on the 3rd level is poured, but they kept it initially covered by wet curing blankets, and now by brown paper because the walls are being painted (I'm very curious to see what, if any, cracking we have). The floating stairs were being installed today, but there is sawdust everywhere so I didn't take pictures. The kids bathroom is tiled, and the master bathroom is partially tiled. The kitchen and bathroom cabinets are in, but there are some issues with the kitchen cabinets that will get fixed before I shoot the pics.

They're painting this week and next, so the house is sheathed in plastic. But be ready for a fast burst of posts on interior finishes right after that!

Exterior almost complete

Progress has been fast and furious. On the exterior, nearly all the siding except for the final stucco coat and some panels between the windows are on. The underside of the cantilever soffit is now wrapped in white metal, which I think gives it a really luminous and lighter look than before.






All the cedar strip siding is on, as well. Between the black aluminum windows we'll be adding black-painted MDO panels, and between the wood windows we'll add panels of fir.



There has also been lots of progress on the inside, but pictures will have to wait since most of the finishes are covered up. A coat of primer has been sprayed on all the drywall, and the second floor stranded bamboo flooring and staircase is installed, but covered by protective cardboard. The third floor concrete floors are poured, and are looking great, but they're still covered by wet curing blankets as they continue to cure. Finally, the kitchen cabinets are being installed! So, lots of action, but pictures won't come until after the holidays. Happy holidays!

Drywall & Sliders

Our sliding doors have finally arrived and been installed, so we are officially "dried-in." The doors' arrival unblocked a logjam, and progress is now fast. Today was sunny in Seattle, so we managed to get some great pictures.



As you can see, the cedar rainscreen siding is now partially installed. We expected the factory-applied stain that we choose ("teak") to be darker, but we are none the less happy with how it looks.



You can see one of the sliding doors in the lower left. The biggest slider is 14 ft long and 8 ft high, and was carried perilously up this ramp.



A view from the inside of the long sliding door.



Drywall installation has started, and will finish next week.





The sun was out so we could get a peak of the Olympic mountains from the living room.



While the house is certainly looking great, a few small things have gone wrong. The Lindal windows are good quality but their hardware is quite outdated.





Brass? Seriously? While the brass door lock is easy to replace, the black plastic handles are looking more challenging to change. We're waiting to hear more after our superintendent looks at them more closely, and calls Lindal.

The garage door also arrived, but the pattern of glass mullions was incorrect; it was supposed to match the pattern in the window wall above. The garage door company went ahead and installed it temporarily, and will swap it out once new ones are made.



The house is really starting to feel real. Once drywall is finished, they'll start on flooring and trim. Since almost none of our interior finishes are custom, it's all going to come together really fast!

Wood windows, Stucco, Insulation

I'm long overdue for an update. The white aluminum siding is almost entirely on, except for the area under the cantilever.





The first two coats of the labor-intensive, three coat stucco process is applied. The final coat must wait thirty days for the second coat to dry and set. What you see now is called the "brown" coat, but the color isn't that far from what we want.



Finally, the wood windows from Lindal are installed.



Unfortunately, the wood sliding doors have yet to arrive, which explains the bubbled and boarded-over areas on the west side of the house.



Lindal makes great windows, but they've consistently over-promised and under-delivered when it comes to scheduling; they've yet to actually deliver their product on the day that they promised. Oh well. The newest schedule is that we'll receive the sliding doors Monday.

Finally, insulation is installed. We ended up going with standard fiberglass batts, though I had my superintendent walk through the house with the sub-contractors and foam anywhere he saw daylight. So, hopefully we're a little more air-tight than usual.





Drywall has been delivered. We've passed framing and insulation inspections. Once the sliders are installed and drywall is finished, the fun of interior finishes begin! I'm also looking forward to the wood siding, which should warm up the exterior.