Twenty years ago, I enjoyed watching a television series called Boston Legal. The show was about the fictional law firm Crane, Poole & Schmidt whose Boston office was located at 500 Boylston St. Today, I had a meeting there with the founder of a venture capital firm and made the connection as I approached the building.
I found this little fellow lifeless on a window sill in the River House. All of the operable windows there are in their venting position to allow the house to dry out. The plaster, paint, concrete, and many other construction materials have a great deal of latent moisture that needs to be shed. We cannot begin laying the floor until the indoor humidity has stabilized at a reasonable level. The vented windows let in a lot of insects but they do not seem to be able to find their way out again. Fortunately, we should have our AC up and running in the next week or two which will allow us to close all the windows. As I am typing this, I just realized that we have screens for all the windows and there is no reason not to install them now.
The front door assembly was the final missing element of our new home’s exterior. It was installed today but not without challenges. Due to the way it must be tipped into position because of its extreme weight the opening height has to be larger than the published rough opening. Mathematically speaking, the space needs to be sized to equal the hypotenuse of a triangle with a base equal to the width of the door assembly and a height equal to the height of the door assembly. When the foreman of the five-man installation crew found me in my shop to inform me that the door would not fit, I simply grabbed one of my battery-operated saws and followed him upstairs. I have learned to roll with the punches through the course of our build. In less than 20 minutes, I was able to increase the size of the rough opening and the door assembly was placed into postion. Even though it is fully functional as-is, the crew will return on Friday to remove and reinstall the assembly so that it can be anchored more securely and raised up higher so that the door will have more clearance above the finished interior floor (to accommodate a rug).
When we sold our home on Mattison Drive, I left my old table saw with an attached router table for the new owner. I was not interested in trying to move that 20-year-old behemoth out of the basement. I replaced the table saw shortly after moving into the original River House, but the router table has been a low priority until I decided I would be fabricating our stair treads using a lock miter joint for which it is essential. Router tables are invariably a DIY construction project as I have yet to find a decent one fully configured. Mine uses a cast iron table top and mobility stand from Harvey. The router is a Bosch 2-1/4 horsepower unit and the router plate and lift are made by Jessum and sold under the Kreg brand. The Harvey fence I ordered will not arrive for another several weeks so I will be using my old Incra fence until them. My 40 year old Craftsman machinists tool chest proved the perfect solution for organizing and storing all my router bits and tools. Assembling and aligning all of the components took the better part of 4 hours after which I returned to cabinet making.
Having completed most of the base cabinets for the kitchen, pantry, and laundry last week, I decided to treat my shop to some cabinets as well. They will do double duty as a miter saw station. Consistent with other choices in the design of the basement, I decided on a floating design so that there would be no damage in the event of flooding. Our foundation waterproofing has lived up to expectations for a bone-dry basement but the risk of flooding from the river is one we cannot ignore. The cabinets did not budge with me sitting on the edge but I will probably add some feet to ensure they do not deflect when I load them up. Each cavity will get a set of full extension drawers which is a project I will defer until after we have moved in. I still need to apply a finish and add some trim to the edges but I was quite happy with the amount of progress I made in one day.
We are enjoying a visit from Kris Earle, Jeanine’s childhood friend and bestie. We all gathered at Kyle’s house for lunch where Maya and her boyfriend joined us. Later the pair went out for appetizers and wine at Woods Hill Table. I helped Kyle with the last bit of his basement renovation project, adding a door to the top of the stairs so that his new tenants have a more significant measure of privacy.
On either side of my project with Kyle, I completed the last of the base cabinet carcasses for the kitchen, pantry, and laundry. Rarely does work go substantially faster than I would have expected. The combination of a very easy-to-execute design and having a fully functional shop has made this phase of the work go remarkably fast. Next, I plan to begin work on the custom cabinetry for the walk-in closets.
With cabinet bases nearing completion, I turned my attention to the River House countertops which will be fabricated from Quartz. The man-made product is available in panels that are 120″x55″. The shapes on the left-hand side of the drawing above represent the shapes and sizes we need. The rectangles on the right show how the needed shapes can be most efficiently cut from the raw blanks.
Nico stopped by the house yesterday and assisted me with the construction of kitchen base cabinets. Having an extra set of hands was especially helpful for the assembly process and offered Nico a good learning opportunity. In the hours we spent together, he did not think to mention that he would be traveling to Poland with the US National Amputee Soccer Team to compete in the Amp Futbol Cup. I have curtailed all travel until the River House is completed but may have to make an exception for this trip.
The last bit of work needed to complete our underground utility installation was getting the conduits into the house. This necessitated drilling 5 holes through the concrete foundation, two large ones for electricity, two medium ones for fiber optic and cable, and one small one for an emergency-off circuit required to take the battery storage system offline in the event firefighters ever have to kill the power when battling a blaze.
The conduit for our buried utility services was laid today. The two larger ones are for electricity. Each one can support wires for a 200 amp service. We only require one but decided to install a spare should we ever need to increase power to the house or run some future service from the street. The incremental cost of the extra conduit is small compared to the rest of the project. One of the smaller conduits is for fiber optic and the other is for cable. Jeanine has been coordinating with Concord Municipal Light and Power, Comcast, and Verizon to have all the wires on our old utility pole transferred to the new one that was placed a few weeks ago. Talk about an exercise in herding cats.
One of the key design features of my shop is the oversized exterior door which will allow me to bring in or remove large items like sheet goods and machines as well as to remove completed cabinetry and furniture. The base cabinet carcass for our laundry room pictured above is a perfect example of the need for this capability. I was able to complete it in half a day including the separate base (not pictured). As I drove back to the Road House feeling quite pleased with my progress, I started mentally envisioning how I would move it into the laundry room. No problem getting it out of the shop, no problem getting it back into the house on the first floor. Then it hit me. There is no way this base cabinet will fit through the laundry room door. Not even close. Fortunately, in the five minutes it took to complete my commute, I had developed a plan to cut it into two sections and am confident this will address the challenge.
When we decided to build our forever house, there were four things that I wanted to be bulletproof. The roof, the windows, the doors, and the cabinetry hardware. By bulletproof, I mean of such high quality that they would never become a maintenance issue or the source of aggravation. I have had to repair or replace drawer slides in every house we have ever lived in or worse yet, resigned myself to living with a sub standard user experience. This will not be the case at the River House. The drawer slides I have selected are manufactured by Blum and I put a sample set through my torture testing and have determined they will stand the test of time. They also support a push-to-open capability that will be used on all the drawers throughout the house. At $60 a set, they are not cheap but I much prefer this solution to a lower quality $40 slide and a $20 handle. Another important benefit is the ease of and degrees of freedom when adjusting for proper alignment. Not a big deal when you are installing a couple of drawers and can spend time tweaking each one. When you will be installing more than 100, every bit of time saving pays big dividends.
I met Tony Bennet at the funeral of my uncle Ernie, pictured above with his wife, Barbara. Instead of speaking about his long-time friend and occasional guitar accompanist, Tony delivered an acapella tribute that reverberated through the small church. I do not remember the story of how they met, but both had parents who were born in the Calabria region of Italy and immigrated to the United States. I think I remember reading in my father’s autobiography that Tony would often join the family for dinner at my grandparent’s house in Brooklyn. Unfortunately, that book is packed in a box somewhere and will not go back on a shelf until we move into the new house. Also in storage is a painting that Tony made as a gift to my uncle who left it for my father. I found it when cleaning out my childhood home before we sold it. At the time, I did not realize that Tony was the painter because it was signed Benedetto. Only later did I learn that was the way he signed all of his art work. I am looking forward to rediscovering it when we get settled.
Tony Bennet started life with next to nothing and worked his way to stardom. As is often the story, his success led him to excesses that nearly cost him his life and career. When he hit rock bottom, he reached out to his sons who helped him to reinvent himself and went on to recapture and even extend his former glory.
The trench that will carry power, fiber optic, and cable to our new house was completed today and the bottom was filled with sand. We are hoping to lay the conduits starting on Monday when our electrician returns from vacation. The backhoe operator managed to very neatly pile the excavated material in such a way that a car can still navigate the driveway. I was expecting the work to block all traffic so this is very helpful. Once this trench is backfilled, work moves to the other side of the driveway where a much deeper trench will be made for the water main.