Kyle sent this image of his completed basement floor. The bathroom and kitchen cabinetry and tile work are remaining to be complete as well as the interior doors and trim. At some point, I hope to show some before and after photos. The transformation has been very dramatic.
Working with Tess, we have settled on a design theme for the siding on the River House. We will use a slate-colored vertical board and baton for the principal siding component with horizontal tongue and groove accents in warm red-toned wood material. Not fully illustrated is the masonry foundation at the base of the entire structure which will also cover the entire walkout basement wall. This rendering is missing the east wing roof but conveys the basic color/design scheme. It has been fun experimenting with the various possibilities for blocking and color combinations.
Visiting us from Seattle for the next few days is Tess, one of Jeanine’s dearest friends. We have hired her to help us with the interior design of the River House. She flew in on the red-eye this morning and we spent a good portion of the day selecting materials and reviewing design elements. We feel very fortunate to have someone with her expertise and artistic flair assisting us with the myriad choices to be made at this stage of the project.
Last night temperatures dipped to 10 below zero with high winds driving wind chill down below minus 30. I stopped by the River House this morning to make sure we did not have any downed trees or other damage. Fortunately, there was none but I will have to wait until temps rise above 32 to determine if our temporary water service survived. The Sudbury River was frozen solid except in front of our house where a natural spring enters the river from below. Future grandchildren, should we ever have any, will have to be warned about thin ice in this part of the river. I spent the afternoon with Kyle using a very heavy concrete grinder that we rented. It was necessary to flatten the floor in his basement after the subcontractors he hired to do the flooring installation made a totally unacceptable attempt to level the concrete. It will not be perfect but we were able to address the most egregious problems.
Work on the River House today was canceled because it was too cold. Plummeting temperatures did not stop Maya from her routine of walking to work, however. I am pleased to see that she seems to be dressed for the conditions. There is something about this photo that makes it very clear that it was insanely cold outside.
Ten of twenty-six windows were installed today. The crew doing this work does nothing but European-style window installation. Their experience and expertise were apparent at every turn. I spent half the day installing most of the ceiling boxes for the ventilation system covering both the first and second floors with only the basement remaining to be done. Each box will connect the tubes that carry air to and from the ERV (Energy Recovery Ventilator) with the supply and exhaust diffusers that spread air into or remove air from the rooms in which they are installed. During the remainder of the day, I worked on an idea for one of my consulting gigs which is beginning to show great promise. Regrettably, I am not at liberty to disclose any of the details.
Our German-made Schuco windows arrived on site today. Fitted with triple pane glass, even the small ones are extremely heavy. The large ones take four very strong people to move. The largest will probably require at least a dozen workers to install. It took the entire day just to move the windows into the house and to begin positioning them in the rooms to which they belong.
On the way to the construction site this morning, I was shocked to see an old friend lying dead on the side of Sudbury Road. Bruce, an extremely large male beaver, was a frequent visitor at the River House. When our site supervisor first saw him lounging on the ice he mistook him for a small black bear, which was an easy mistake to make given his massive size. His tail slap was loud enough to make you jump out of your shoes if you were close by and I think he enjoyed the reaction. Even though he did fell a favorite dead tree that was a popular and very photographic bird perch, I was very fond of Bruce and will miss him. When I returned from the site on the way to my annual physical, Bruce was gone. Perhaps animal control had picked him up but I am left to wonder if someone saw the potential for a magnificent beaver fur and seized the opportunity.
With our two geothermal bore holes completed and a 300-foot U-shaped pipe grouted into each, the next step is to connect the vertical loops to each other and then to the house. The crew excavated around the bore holes to a depth of 4 feet and cut off the steel casings at that depth. A similarly deep trench was made between boreholes and to the foundation of the house where the supply and return lines enter through two holes drilled through the foundation wall. The pipes from each bore hole are connected in parallel and then to the house from the midpoint of the parallel connection (to promote balance flow to each loop). A strip of metal tape was placed over the pipes so they could be located in the future and the trenches were backfilled concluding all the outside work for our geothermal heating and cooling system.
Nico spent the weekend in Denver putting on an amputee soccer clinic. Essential to building the US program are outreach programs such as this which bring young players into the sport. While in Colorado, he connected with his high school buddies Greg and Cray.
Maya ventured to the North country where she enjoyed skiing with friends despite her injured shoulder. MRI scans have since confirmed that she has a SLAP tear and torn rotator cuff. Her doctor has suggested an ultrasound-guided steroid injection at the tear to help her manage the discomfort. Unfortunately, such injuries do not heel with time and she will likely require surgery at some point in the future.
On the home front, Kyle and I completed the wiring for his basement renovation. All the lighting and all but 3 outlets worked as expected. It took a while to figure out that the drywallers had covered an outlet box leaving the following section of that circuit disconnected. We excavated the wall, found the box, and completed the installation of an outlet at that location. Presto, all remaining outlets became energized. On a less positive note, we discovered that the flooring installers had done a very poor job of leveling the concrete leaving behind several dips and high spots. With half the flooring already placed, it will be quite a lot more work to now remove it and address the hills and valleys.
We specified 10-foot wide garage doors on the new house so we could be more relaxed while parking than is the case with the 8-foot wide doors at the Road House. In addition to the fun of making the first ingress, I wanted to confirm that doors could be swung open to their full extent without hitting the walls. My car was very happy for the elbow room.
Kyle’s basement renovation project is in the home stretch. Drywalling and floor leveling have been completed. Kyle used contractors for these jobs as neither one of us was too keen on doing it ourselves. Both require specialized tools and benefit from considerable experience. This weekend we will work on installing the recessed ceiling lights, outlets, and switches. We will also get his garage door working again after the drywaller managed to disconnect the electrical circuit which feeds it.
The patterns one can find in ice never cease to amaze me. Talk about the ultimate Rorschach test. If you have a few minutes, click on the image and look around. I think you will be amazed at how many interesting images and shapes you will discover. So far, this winter has been quite mild with daytime temperatures occasionally hitting the mid-forties and often remaining above freezing. Given the amount of mud surrounding the construction site, it is generally advantageous when working on the outside of the house for the ground to be frozen. Naturally, now that work is moving to the inside, when warmer temperatures would be appreciated, the forecast is showing us heading into a cold spell.
One area of the River House that has been very difficult for me to visualize has been the stairs and railings. As of today, our construction foreman single-handedly completed temporary ones to facilitate interior work on the house. Seeing and using them has helped us to finalize design decisions for the final versions. I think they may be one of my most favorite design elements of the house. The photo perspective makes them appear cramped and steep. In reality, they are quite spacious and have a 7-inch rise over 11-inch run, which is widely regarded as the optimal ratio for climbing and descending.
Occasionally, a photo and title tell the whole story. I found my brother like this on our couch this morning talking to Jeanine. I could not resist running for my camera. Marie, his better half, requested a headshot for work. Although I do not have a proper photo studio set up at the moment, I did manage to make an acceptable image, which was not much of a challenge with such a lovely subject.
My brother Mark and his wife Marie arrived late yesterday as did Jeanine returning from her yoga retreat in Mexico. This morning, the kids joined us for brunch before we set out for tours of Kyle’s new house, Formlabs (where Maya works), and finally Maya’s apartment. We returned to Concord for a lovely dinner at Papa Razzi, our go-to restaurant for really good food. It has been quite a while since we spent an entire day with family and it felt really wonderful.
My brother Mark and his wife Marie flew in from Minneapolis this evening to visit for the weekend. I had hoped to do some grocery shopping before their arrival but lost several hours of the day having to deal with a flat tire. I picked up a nail from the River House construction site and finding someone with availability to repair it took much longer than I would have thought. On the positive side, I was able to do my grocery shopping with Mark and Marie which resulted in a far healthier and yummy set of options for dinner. Mark prepared steaks which included searing them on their sides, something I have not witnessed before.
I am happy that our first proper snow of the season did not arrive until all the sheathing work on the River House was completed. Just two more steps before the shell is weather tight. First, we need to install the water and ice shield on the roof and then we need to install the windows and doors. Hopefully, we can complete both of these activities before the end of the month. At that point, we can introduce some provisional heating to improve working conditions for the electrical, plumbing, and HVAC work.
Last night the drilling rig was repositioned for the second bore hole location. The casing for the first bore hole can be seen to the left of the mini-excavator’s left tread. Bedrock was encountered at 141 feet with minimal water. The next steps are to install the geothermal loop tubing into the holes and then fill the holes from the bottom up with grout to ensure proper thermal coupling of the pipes to the ground.
Our geothermal heating and cooling system will require two 300 feet deep boreholes to accept the vertical closed-loop pipes through which water and anti-freeze will circulate to pump heat from the Earth into the house (in winter) or from the house into the Earth (during summer). The first well was completed today. We had 142 feet of clay before hitting bedrock and managed to avoid any aquifers. This is a great result since dense clay and bedrock are both great thermal conductors. With any luck, our second bore hole will be completed tomorrow.
Throughout the design process for the River House, I have been very thoughtful about sight lines both internal and external. Now that the first and second-floor framing is complete, I have been able to walk through the house and visually verify that my calculations were correct. Everything is as it should be and as a bonus, I discovered a sight line that I had not considered. It is possible to look through four different second-story windows to see “through” the house into the patio area and “through” the house again to the other side of the river. You would need a ladder or drone to appreciate this view but I thought it cool nonetheless. So cool in fact, that I decided to fly through the four window openings with my drone while shooting a video. It should be noted that I use my drone almost exclusively for photography and flying through obstacles is not something I have had much experience doing. As I made my approach, I was so focused on setting up the sight line that I managed to run into the house for my first crash in several years. The propellors got trashed but fortunately that was the only damage to the drone. Just before the fateful moment, I did manage to capture the view I was looking for.
Kyle and I spent ten hours today, our longest work session to date, completing the installation of strapping on the ceiling in his basement. Normally, this is a simple matter of cutting the 1×3 straps to length and nailing them perpendicular to the floor joists at each intersection, and then repeating the pattern every 16 inches. We used my cordless nailer to drive the roughly 700 nails required for the 350 or so intersections. In our case, however, we had to shim over 100 of them to compensate for the large variations in joist size/position. This was by far the most labor-intensive and time-consuming part of the job but should result in a nice and flat ceiling.
My cousin Heather sent this photo of Chacala Beach with the following message.
Hi Chowbee, Buppy and Carlos —We are having an excellent first day on our retreat, starting with yoga at 7a, breakfast, and a walk along the beach to explore Chacala beach and harbor. Then lunch, yacking, inability to decide what to do next….nap, pool, hot tub, hammock, reading, painting, more yacking…..before yoga at 5 and then dinner. I am trying to lure Jeanine and Carol away from attending a rather fruity sounding program tonight—“self care sanctuary”—to drinking cocktails and playing gin instead. Let’s see if I can prevail over the better angels of their natures, etc. Please send news!
Jeanine shared this photo she took of what she calls her Happy Stairs. I am left to wonder where they lead.
On the home front, Kyle and I continued working diligently preparing his basement renovation project for the drywall crew coming later this week. We had hoped to avoid strapping the ceiling to preserve another 3/4 inch of headroom but upon further investigation, it became apparent that this addition would be necessary to compensate for imperfections in the floor joists. This has added another day and a half to our work and we hope to complete the remainder tomorrow.
Jeanine traveled to Chacala, Mexico today where she will be spending the next week at a yoga retreat with my cousin Heather and cousin-in-law Carol. Located about 90 minutes north of Puerto Vallarta within a small and remote fishing village on the Pacific Ocean, Mar de Jade was founded by Dr. Laura del Valle and two of her siblings.
Back at home, Kyle and I worked hard to put the final touches on framing, plumbing, and HVAC vents in his basement prior to the start of drywalling which will be done by a contractor starting next week.
Starting on Monday drilling begins for two 300-foot deep geothermal boreholes that will support our ground source heat pump. The crew arrived today to set up the rig and excavate a slurry pit. I am glad I was onsite because they were going to locate the boreholes using Massachusetts state setback regulations rather than the more stringent ones mandated by the town of Concord. It would have been a very expensive mistake had I not intervened. Ideally, we would like to hit bedrock quickly and not find any water but Murphy’s Law suggests just the opposite will be true. Drilling is expected to take three days so we should know the answers by mid-next week.
For some time now, Nicolai has been working to promote the development of regional amputee soccer teams in the US. Next month will kick off with a match between his New England Revolution squad and the New York Metros. Hopefully, the weather will cooperate and the teams will not have to contend with frigid or snowy conditions.
Maya shared this rather funny photo taken last December. Masked out of the picture is the couch and pillow on which I was taking a nap.
Napping, in fact, was how I spent much of the afternoon today after my second colonoscopy in as many months, this time in a more advance hospital setting, to remove a large polyp that was identified during the first procedure. The resection was successful and I was back at work before the end of the day.
It will not be long now before we are ready for siding on the River House. This evening I spent several hours working out some of the final trim details for the windows. Our house has nine pairs of windows that are vertically aligned. Five of them will be “connected” visually by a flat panel located between them. The remainder of the siding will use a vertically oriented 6-1/4″ wide shiplap profile. The 2D view above is from a 3D model that includes the 26 framing and trim components required for each window pair.
Jeanine and I met our nephew Johnny at the Weston Reservoir for a lovely 2 mile walk this morning. It has been some time since we have seen him and it was nice to catch up.
Located adjacent to the reservoir is the 27,000-square-foot, 22-room home of Jim and Kim Pallotta located on 28 acres. A billionaire hedge fund manager, Pallotta is a co-owner of the Boston Celtics and by many accounts a nice guy and generous philanthropist. Born in the same year I was to a father from Calabria he grew up in the North End.
We learned today that a good friend of the family died suddenly on Thursday. Sarah Doherty co-founded SideStix, the company that makes the carbon fiber crutches that Nico uses. She reached out to us in 2007 to congratulate Nico for becoming the first person ever to climb Mount Kilimanjaro on crutches. She would become the second and was hoping to learn from his experience. She lost a leg at age 13 while biking when struck by a drunk driver but never let that stand in the way of leading a very athletic life. She worked with her husband, Kerith, an engineer and inventor, to create the world’s most comfortable, light-weight, high performance forearm crutch. Nicolai would become an early beta tester and brand ambassador for the fledgling company which we later became seed investors in. Nicolai spent a portion of his high school gap year living with the couple on the Sunshine Coast in British Columbia and working at the company. Sarah showed us how passion can overcome adversity and was a beacon of hope for all that were lucky enough to know her.