A House By The Park

The plumbing and HVAC rough-in work is now essentially complete and electrical work has begun. Details of the plumbing and HVAC equipment are available at this previous post, but essentially, the piping, the ducting, and the gas furnace are now all installed. Lots of other stuff, like the heat pump and the fixtures come later.

The crew at Anderson Nesler has done a great job on the HVAC, building an intricate but efficient maze of ducting, and cramming the furnace into a tight crawlspace so as to minimize impact on livable area.

I just got my property tax assessment card in the mail, and wow, what fortunate timing: my house was valued at zero dollars, and will remain so for a couple of years. It turns out King County does its annual reassessments based on the value of your house/land as of July 31st. July 31st also happened to fall in the two week window where the old house was gone and the new house framing hadn’t been erected yet. If I had deconstructed a week or two later, or even a week or two earlier, my tax bill would have been quite a bit higher.

So, the lesson of this blog post is: if you’re building a new house, find out when your taxing authority resets property values and try to plan around it if you can.

Also, I’ve added some pictures of the ongoing HVAC, plumbing, and electrical rough-in to the photo gallery section.

A couple of weeks ago, plumbing and HVAC work began. There’s not a whole lot to see on the livecam (which is good because it’s been busted for a few days… need to reboot) but lots of work is happening very quickly. Below are some of the specifics of what’s going in.

Plumbing

For the pipes, we chose PVC and PEX over copper. It’s cheaper, easier to work with, and has no significant disadvantages other than it isn’t supposed to be exposed to sunlight. I am so glad we took this house down to the foundation and replaced everything because the old galvanized steel pipes were in disgusting shape.

Imagine the sweet, sweet nectar that ran through these puppies.

For shower hardware, we went with the Purist line from Kohler with a few bodysprays as well. We opted against a steam shower for both cost and moisture reasons.

For the bath, we went with the Origami from Bain. You aren’t supposed to use oils or salts in normal jetted tubs so we went with an airbath. It’s a nice simple design and supposedly Bain is the best brand to trust. For the tub filler, we went with the Cascade Bi-Tech 14200, which roughly matches the faucets.

For the faucets, we are either going with Dornbracht 33 500 625 or a knockoff built in China called the Taron. Apparently there was a huge lightning-induced fire at the Dornbracht factory in Germany this summer and it has caused dramatic delays in getting product from them. I wasn’t crazy about spending $500 a faucet anyway, so we may just see how the $225 knockoffs do instead. I’ll have a separate post on this shortly.

For the master bathroom sinks, we’re going with the Ronbow CB3028 and for the powder room sink, it’ll be the hard-to-find Laufen Palomba.

For the commodes, we’re going with the Toto Pacifica line. Notably, we are avoiding dual-flush models because I’ve heard that the “half flush” option ends up never getting used. I wanted to use wall-mounted commodes, but the cost and extra complexity in fixing any “problems” kept me away.

The only thing up in the air is whether or not we will be running a hot water recirculation line. The system was spec’d without it, but as soon as I found out the delay in getting a hot shower in the morning could be a minute or more, we’re looking into how much it would cost. I’ve lived in apartments and condos for most of my life so I’m used to only waiting 10 seconds or so for hot water, so the thought of building a house like this and downgrading significantly in that area is not appealing.

HVAC

Most significantly, we’re going with a forced air heating and air conditioning system powered by a Rheem 5 ton 16 SEER 2 stage heat pump, with a Rheem 100,000 BTU variable speed 80% efficient gas furnace as a backup. I would have loved to do radiant heat but since we wanted air conditioning as well, that would have required buying, installing, and operating two completely different systems. Instead, we’re just doing electric radiant pads in the master bathroom and underneath the concrete hallway on the main floor.

A friend of mine who built a house told me the biggest mistake he made was not having a system which could service multiple zones independently. In other words, the ability to turn off basement heat, send a bunch of heat to the main floor to get it to 70 degrees, and send maybe not quite as much heat to the upper level to get it to 70. Or, to leave all A/C off on a summer night except for on the upper level where the master bedroom is. We had originally looked at doing separate systems for each floor but eventually settled on one system that can service three zones independently. There was some initial confusion between Build and I about what a multi-zone system really is. By multi-zone, I mean “the ability to control multiple zones with multiple thermostats, all electronically, and without having to physically open and close vents”. If you’re spec’ing your own system, make sure you make this clear.

I’m not sure what thermostats are going in (I think HAIs maybe), but they will all have the ability to tie into my home automation system for remote administration.

Our HVAC contractor is Anderson Nesler, Inc..

I’ll have everything broken down by price once this stage of construction is complete.

After only five weeks, Scott and the three man crew at Alexander’s Custom Homes have successfully completed framing of the house. They will be back to install the windows and several other things later, but the bulk of their work is done… and done extremely well.

Here is the timelapse of framing phase:

I mentioned in my last post that we encountered a few sizing “issues” during framing, two of which were solved by minor shifts in interior walls, and one of which was unsolved.

The unsolved issue centered around the feeling that, at less than 12 feet, the master bedroom was too shallow. While 12 feet is a perfectly livable depth for a bedroom, it just seemed too cramped, especially for a house designed from scratch for its owner. The girlfriend and I both felt the entire master suite was just too small so we asked Build for options, priced out. The options were:

1. Move the entire exterior west wall of the master bedroom two feet west, enlarging the bedroom depth by two feet and shrinking the deck depth by two feet. This seemed like the most attractive option, but it was also by far the most difficult because it posed far-reaching structural problems. Turns out we would have had to re-beam a good portion of the house all the way from the north to the south. Approximate cost: $14,000.
2. Same thing as above but move the wall six feet west instead, to the edge of the deck, eliminating the deck. This was a lot easier structurally, but losing the master bedroom deck did not seem good. Approximate cost: $10,000.
3. Move only the section of the west wall that is glass two feet west, leaving the structural part of the wall in place. This poses no structural issues, shrinks part of the deck to a 4 foot depth and leaves the other part at a full 6 feet. Approximate cost: $1,500.
4. Steal a foot from the already small master bathroom and walk-in closet. Approximate cost: $500.
5. Do nothing. Cost: only disappointment.

After some heavy thinking, option 3 arose as the clear winner. It accomplished the objective of enlarging the master bedroom, didn’t cost too much, and it even improves the deck in a way, since the six-foot-depth area is a bit more private now.

So, sizing crisis averted!

There are a few very important things I learned from this process:

1. I can’t stress how relieving it is to have a design/build firm whose interests are completely aligned with mine and who isn’t interested in nickel-and-diming me for every little change order that comes along. With many traditional architects and G.C.s, even meeting about such a change would “start the meter” so to speak. Build has been great through all modification requests and I feel very lucky to have a team that cares as much as they do.
2. Not withstanding the above, I am a bit mad at myself for not doing more during design stage to ensure the house was sized appropriately. In looking at plans, I tended to concentrate on the more obvious questions like “where is the kitchen in relation to the living room and dining room” and “how many bedrooms are on the same floor at the master”. I really never scrutinized actual dimensions of rooms because I just figured there was a standard size for everything that would be either met or exceeded. What I should have done is physically laid out string in an open space somewhere to match the dimensions of each room in the house. Just a quick “reality check”. This lesson gave me a great idea for an invention/business that I may pursue at some point. The bottom line, however, is that it doesn’t matter who your architect is… they are going to design what they think works and if you don’t have the data to know otherwise and say something, you’ll end up with questions and change orders.
3. In this phase of the project, I will freely admit that I have gone from a “low to medium maintenance” client to a “high maintenance” client, and I think I know why: I am a web designer. My world is not a world in which I spend months planning things with the intent of building them out to the meticulous specs of the plan. My world is a world in which you have an idea, mock something up, prototype a little, iterate, launch, and then keep iterating after that. The foundation is never set, the walls are never nailed, and the paint is never dry. Working on the web is an infinitely iterative process and designing a house is the opposite of that.

Framing began on July 23rd (only 28 business days ago) and it is amazing how quickly it’s going. Scott and the three man crew at Alexander’s Custom Homes, Inc. have been doing a spectacular job in all aspects thus far. They are diligent, detail-oriented, efficient, courteous to neighbors, and reasonably priced.

From what everyone tells me, this is the most interesting phase of construction to watch. Each day, the house looks much different, and it’s a joy to drive to the site after work and see what’s new.

On the downside, some dry rot was discovered in some of the existing basement framing we were going to re-use, so the crew had to tear that out and replace it. Not a huge deal, but not expected either. On the bright side, it makes me all the happier we didn’t decide to just remodel the house. Between the dry rot, the pipes, and the wiring, it was in pretty bad shape.

As the house takes shape, almost every area is looking really great. However, we’ve identified some areas of concern as well. Some have been dealt with gracefully by the shifting of non load-bearing walls, but one big item remains.

Problem #1 was that both of the additional bedrooms looked extremely small once the walls went up. We successfully remedied this by chopping the linen area out of the additional bathroom upstairs and giving the extra room to the bedroom. You can now comfortably fit a queen sized bed in there. We are now left with one small additional bedroom and one large additional bedroom, which sounds perfect.

Problem #2 was that at only 80 square feet, the master bathroom was small, and, in our minds, well below average by modern standards for a house like this. By shifting a couple of walls and reducing the size of the walk-in closet a bit, this was increased to a more comfortable 96 square feet. It’s not a giant master bathroom by any stretch, but it’s big enough for a shower, two sinks, a toilet, and a large jetted tub. We’re not looking to throw dance parties in there or anything.

Problem #3 is more serious in scope and deals with the size of the master bedroom. We’ll be looking at ways to resolve this tomorrow and I’ll have a separate post on it shortly.

In the meantime, please feel free to check out the latest photo gallery of the framing stage.

Just getting caught up on the last few blog posts worth of progress… sorry for the backdating on the last couple of entries.

Framing began a few weeks ago and it’s going QUICK. I’ll have a full post on the framing process next, but for now, feel free to check out the proper photo gallery of the entire project I posted last night. The gallery provides much better imagery and angles than the webcam, obviously, and I’ll update it as often as I can. It’s available via the left-hand navigation of this site as well.

I’m thinking about adding the photo galleries to the main RSS feed. Anybody have any thoughts on that? Good? Bad? Alternatively, I could just add the RSS feed of the gallery to the sidebar.

During deconstruction, it became apparent (via cracking) that the existing concrete carport was sitting on a few inches of air. Not good. Build decided, therefore, that it would be best to repour the garage foundation and footings at the same time we did some minor touch-up pouring around other parts of the foundation.

This phase was unexpected and added several thousand dollars to the cost of the project, but the folks at Blackhawk Concrete Construction, R. Leonard & Sons, Island Concrete Cutting, and Cascade Concrete Sawing ended up getting it done in only a few days, as framing began in other areas of the house.

There wasn’t a lot to see on the webcam for this phase of the process because the garage area is blocked by a big metal container, so it will be combined with the framing stage, for timelapse purposes.

A shot of the garage right before the new concrete was poured

On July 23rd, deconstruction of the old house was officially completed. The process began on July 9th and took 8 business days (2 Monday-Thursday workweeks) to finish. I am completely satisfied and amazed at how this phase went, and I credit the great work of Noel Stout and his team at The RE Store as well as Paul Jensen Excavating for removing a 50 year old mass of brick, metal, wood, and sandstone with the delicacy of a surgical team.

A timelapse is worth a thousand words, so before explaining this phase any further, take a look at the whole process compressed down to about a minute:

Probably the most amazing part about this deconstruction is how much material we saved from going into a landfill. I don’t have the final weight numbers yet, but essentially 40% of the house was resold to other home builders, 50% of it was recycled, and only 10% of it went to the dump. Amazing. For all the talk about building green using expensive solar panels and other technologies, this step has a much greater immediate positive environmental impact, in my opinion. I talked to Paul — the gentleman operating the excavator — and he told me he could have technically knocked the entire house down in five hours if it was all going to the dump. I ended up paying more in labor fees to deconstruct the house instead of demolishing it, but I would have paid more in dumping fees the other way. In the end, it’s better to spend your money on good, honest, environmentally-conscious labor than on dumping fees.

As an extra-added bonus, I had the re-sold elements appraised at Foss Appraisal and they came out to a whopping $18,000… about triple what I expected. This means I can write off $18,000 in donations from my taxes (note: any claim over $5000 requires this third-party appraisal).

The second-most amazing thing about this process was how little collateral damage was caused by it. One of my Japanese maples lost a branch due to a window frame falling and one of the neighbor’s garden rocks got cracked when a dumpster truck bumped into it, but that’s about it. To remove that much house off the side of a cliff with that little damage is astounding to me. The crews were all very nice too and entertained the neighbors with explanations the process.

Finally, the last amazing thing to me about this deconstruction was how freely everyone moved around in the presence of such dangerous machinery. In watching the livecam all day (I have an actual video feed on my desktop… not just the stills), I frequently saw people crossing in front of, behind, and on each side of the moving excavator arm without ever getting hit. The almost unconscious coordination these people have is unbelievable.

On to framing!

Time-lapse photography is a great way to document a construction project. Setting up a proper time-lapse requires you to answer a few questions before you can get started:

1. What are your available locations to mount a camera?
2. What are you connectivity options?
3. What are your power options?
4. What are your image quality requirements?
5. Do you want video monitoring as well?
6. What are you willing to spend?

Locations

There are really only two choices when it comes to location: either mount a pole somewhere on your property or find a kind neighbor willing to let you put your camera on their property. Mounting a pole would have been a difficult option for me because it would have taken time/effort/expense and it didn’t solve my internet connectivity problem. I could have probably run power to the pole but then I’d have to either rely on a flaky wireless internet connection or build some sort of temporary enclosure for a modem. Not impossible, but not ideal for my purposes.

Luckily, my across-the-street neighbors were nice enough to let me mount a small camera underneath their carport roof, which provided a great viewing angle for the construction and potentially a direct connection to the internet. My neighbors have cable internet, so in order to get me on a completely separate network from them, they ordered a DSL line, which I pre-paid them a year’s service for. The DSL modem has wireless access, but since I needed to power my camera anyway, I planned on buying one that had PoE (power-over-ethernet) built in; that way, one ethernet cord was all that would need to tether the camera.

Connectivity

As mentioned, I went the DSL-from-neighbor’s-house route, but there are many other options to consider. If you have many open wireless networks with strong signals around your property, you can try to mooch off one of those. Or you can offer to pay a portion of a neighbor’s internet bill during construction in exchange for getting access to their network (this is what I originally proposed to my neighbor). Another option is to purchase your own cable or DSL connection and build a waterproof shelter for it somewhere on site.

Other less-than-stellar options include procuring a computer that can accept a Clearwire (WiMax) card and using that for your connection, or using an SD card in your camera and manually transferring images every week or so. There is an SD card called the EyeFi which has built-in wireless transmission but as of the date of this blog entry, it’s missing one critical feature: the ability to delete images after they have been uploaded. Without this feature, the card can fill up even as you are successfully posting your images online.

Power

Power-over-ethernet is really the ideal way to give your device the juice it needs to operate because it kills two birds with one stone: the power and the connectivity. Note that in order for PoE to work, you’ll need a $30 device called a PoE injector which sits between your router and your camera, plugs right into an AC wall outlet, and runs a trickle of power down the ethernet line.

If you can’t do PoE (or if you’re doing it on your property), you can hook up power through the temporary power strike that will be set up on your site.

I looked briefly at battery-based options for powering video cameras and none looked too promising. All were large, expensive, and still obviously required recharging. The only way I’d consider running battery power for a project like this is if I was using a still camera and was cool with swapping a new battery in manually every couple of weeks.

Image quality

There are a few levels of image quality you can achieve in a time-lapse project: 640×480 “security cam quality”, megapixel “web cam quality”, hi-res point-and-shoot quality, or high-res DSLR quality.

The first thing to decide is whether or not you require video streaming capabilities. I didn’t think I did at first and only wanted high quality stills, but after watching my demolition streamed live last week, I am extremely happy I went for the video option. It’s a great way to keep a close eye on the construction site as well.

If you require video streaming, both the point-and-shoot and DSLR options are unfortunately out. To stream video, you need a device with a streaming server embedded in it (or at least the ability to stream it out to a computer over USB), and I’m not aware of any still cameras with this capability.

If you don’t require video streaming, go with a point-and-shoot with a built-in intervalometer or a DSLR that can be attached to an intervalometer. For a great overview of this type of time-lapse project, check out Photojojo’s guide. I also found a site a couple of months ago that listed a ton of cameras with built-in intervalometers but now I can’t find it. If you happen to find it, please post a link in the comments.

Video monitoring

If you’ve decided you want video monitoring capabilities, you’re pretty much limited to 640×480 security camera quality (low) or megapixel webcam quality (better, but not great). Although the megapixel cameras are more expensive, I highly recommend going with one. 640×480 is just too low of a resolution to get a clear picture from.

Axis cams are generally regarded as the gold standard, but the really good megapixel models run upwards of $1000. I went with the Panasonic BB-HCM515A which is about half that price and have been reasonably happy with the results so far. It’s officially an indoor camera, so I’m rolling the dice a bit, but it’s sheltered from the rain so I’m thinking it should be fine.

Price

You can spend anywhere from $50 to about $4000 on your setup, so what you buy depends on your budget. My goal was to keep the project under $1000, including internet connectivity charges.

My particular setup

One of the nice things about the Panasonic is that it has a full web server built into it, with the ability to stream live video to both my computer and my iPhone as well as the ability to automatically FTP still images to my server at any interval I choose. I can also pan and tilt the camera remotely from any web browser as well as give guest access to the stream to friends.

Here’s a nice shot of a crew member dancing for a spectator. Tiffehr happened to catch this while watching the stream.

Via the built-in software, I have the camera set to FTP one image every 60 seconds to my server and overwrite the previous one. That image is displayed on the Live Cam page. Additionally, the camera snaps another shot every 5 minutes and uploads it with a unique timestamp as part of the name. The result is a folder full of images taken every five minutes, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

At the end of the project, I’ll do some serious editing and probably eliminate the nighttime hours and weekends when there is nothing to see, but for now, I’m just posting daily time-lapses of the previous day’s activity. To accomplish this, I installed mencoder on my server and created a PHP to hit it like so:


date_default_timezone_set('Pacific/Honolulu');
$yesterday = date('Ymd');

I run the script at 12:05am every night, and the first line is a hack to make sure it encodes the previous day’s files instead of the current day’s (it’s yesterday in Hawaii at that time). The script outputs an .flv file for playback in the Flash player. You’ll need to export a .swf with the standard .flv playback component to get it playing in a browser. Otherwise, feel free to tweak the script so that it outputs to .mov, .mp4, .avi, or any other format. Fair warning though: the mencoder manual is a gigantic clusterfuck of settings that it can take a Unix rocket scientist to figure out. Hopefully I’ve done most of the work for you with the settings above.

Problems with my setup

The biggest problem with my setup is that I’ve had to drive to the site and manually reboot the camera twice now. It’s now set up to reboot itself at 6am every morning (via the internal software) so hopefully that solves the manual reboot problem, but it’s a little disheartening that a “network security cam” doesn’t have the power to self-heal itself automatically no matter what the circumstance. I’ve heard Axis cams are better at this.

The other problem is that my DSL provider has me on a dynamic IP. The camera uses DDNS so recovers from an IP change within 10 minutes, but even though the FTPing goes on uninterrupted, the streams can be interrupted multiple times a day if Qwest keeps changing my IP. Kind of a bummer. I might buck up for a static IP eventually… we’ll see.

The only other problem with my setup is that I obviously don’t have the multi-megapixel clarity that a still camera would provide. Since the daily entertainment of watching the live stream outweighs the lack of crystal clarity, however, I’m cool with the tradeoff.

So there you have it: how to set up a reasonably good quality, highly entertaining time-lapse of your construction project. If anyone has any more tips, please post them in the comments!

Although I can’t put the entire house on a credit card, I can pay for a lot of its elements with one… like deconstruction, printing fees, legal fees, and plenty of other items. Because of this, it made sense to use the most lucrative credit card possible. My friend Calvin alerted me a couple of weeks ago to a new card by Schwab that gives you 2% cashback on every single purchase. Not bad at all, and much better than the tons of 1% cards and airline mile cards out there.

Furthermore, Schwab just deposits the 2% into your brokerage or bank account automatically at the end of each month. No more messing with rewards, redemptions, and other roadblocks designed to get between you and your refunds.

2% may not seem like a lot, but it adds up. I’d rather spend that 2% on upgrades than just have it disappear into the ether.