thesimpleHOUSE

With the roof trusses up and the eaves and fascias and barge boards going up, the houses are really, really feeling good to us.

The overhang framing adds such a dimension to the houses and the curb appeal. The stacked, double 2×8 fascias add a sense of mass to the houses that, I feel, is critical. One pet peeve I have as an architect is wimpy overhangs and fascias that are barely larger than the gutters; you can barely see that they’re even there!

The roofs are going on; the cottage has the felt paper and the main house is getting close.

We are also starting to make some of our selections of materials, even though we’ve had most everything picked for four years. We had a walnut selected for our cabinets that we LOVED. The grain, the hue (a very dark walnut) were perfect. Except. The sample was Peruvian Walnut. As in rain forest walnut.

So we’re rethinking the walnut and looking at a domestic Black Walnut. Aside from the rain forest issue, my concern was the way walnut fades. We had cherry floors in our previous house and cherry darkens with age; no problem. In fact, it looked better and better year after year. But walnut fading doesn’t excite us too much.

So I Googled it. (Google is a verb now). And I found that walnut apparently really only fades in direct sunlight and/or UV. Well, none of our cabinets will see any direct sunlight. They are all internal to the house or under a large porch overhang. So I think we’re good.

If you click on the picture above, you can see both houses. I did a panorama and it doesn’t fit well in my blog format.

 

 

 

The trusses were delivered this week and the houses are really taking shape now. We are getting a feel for how the houses’ room sizes and relationships to the neighborhood will be.

And we love it.

The way the houses sit on the lot and relate to each other is exactly as we pictured in our minds. The porches – the main entry porch at 15th and Lawrence, where we plan on a couple of chairs to sit and drink coffee on Saturday mornings, the BBQ porch at the other side of the main house and the entry porch and patio at the cottage, all feel wonderful.

These next few days will see the rest of the roof going on, the fascias and barge boards (extra-wide for added character) and the roof plywood (so we can FINALLY get things drying out).

So I’ll keep posting. We are taking pictures for a slide show sequence when this is all complete; likely early in the Spring 2015.

 

 

It’s been about a week and a half since I’ve done an update.

Sorry about that, but I’ve been really busy at work and things visually hadn’t changed much.

We have all of the walls now framed and are close to getting trusses delivered. My mason is installing the porch posts and cheek walls for the three porches so we can get the posts in to support the beams to support the trusses. We should be seeing some more visible progress by the end of next week.

You’ll also notice the excavator in the middle of the picture; we’re backfilling around the house and getting some of the gravel down for the patios and garages.

The small pile of wood in the foreground is about half of the waste so far. I took a 300# load to EcoSort about a week ago and about 95% of that was recyclable. If you’re not familiar with EcoSort, I encourage you to look at their website via the link; they are a local service that sorts construction waste and recycles what can be recycled. Our first load was largely small pieces of wood, cardboard and similar material. The next load will be similar.

We’ve also enjoyed meeting a lot of our neighbors. It seems like every time we are on site, we meet a new neighbor. I think we’ve now met every one of the immediate neighbors; they seem very friendly and we think we’re going to really enjoy living in the neighborhood.

The only downside we can see so far (if it is a downside), is Cornucopia is just three blocks away.

And that could prove VERY dangerous…

 

 

 

The Cottage is coming along well. Walls up, plywood on. Trusses are coming soon and the walls on the Main House will be starting tomorrow. We are doing the exterior walls as two, separate 2×4 walls with a 1″ gap between. This gives us an 8″ wall and about an R-37 insulation level.

R-values (“resistance”) are something that measures how well the house retains heat or cool inside. The higher the value, the better. Code is R-21, so we are about 60% better. This will give our tenants much lower utility costs. Our attic will have close to two feet of insulation. The floors will also have a foot of insulation.

And we are doing the same construction on the Main House.

Both houses will have a mini-split heat pump unit that will heat and cool at an incredibly high efficiency level. So combined with the added insulation, electric bills for both houses should be very low.

Well, it’s getting late. More later.

 

I actually thought I’d do one post on the apartment, then move back to the house. But it’s been amazing to my wife and I how many people are raising and eyebrow, asking, questioning, skeptical that we could go from a 2,750 sq ft home to a 950 sq ft apartment with little adjustment. So as I sit on my leather sectional sofa, blogging on my laptop via wi-fi and sip my mocha made with my own espresso machine, let’s take a little perspective-check.

We loved our home. It worked well for us as the kids grew up and served us well. The yard was awesome. But since the kids moved out, we really were only living on the main floor, which was about 1,800 sq ft. So the transition to the apartment was easier.

What seems interesting to me is the underlying, pervasive idea that more or bigger is necessarily better. As Americans, we seem to think that bigger cars are better (look how much larger a 2014 Honda is than a 1985 Honda), bigger houses are better (the AVERAGE new home size in the U.S. is now 2,500 sq ft), etc.

To which I say: “How much is enough?”

That phrase became apparent to us in recent weeks and maybe I’ll blog on that someday. But really, we are so blessed to be living in a 950 sq ft, 2-bedroom apartment that a good share of our furniture fits and is a standard of living that is STILL better than probably 90% of the world (i.e. running/clean/hot water, dishwasher, microwave, heat and electricity).

I can honestly say after this first week, we are enjoying this part of our adventure. The house construction is coming along well (more on that later) and we’re totally stoked about this part of our journey. So don’t think we’re covering anything up when we say we are enjoying our life in our “little” apartment. The average HOME in the U.S. just 60-70 years ago was smaller than this.

We have made the next step in our transition. Our movers were on hyperdrive yesterday and what was going to be a two-day move to the apartment, then put the rest in storage ended up being a one-day event. We had tried to purge as much unnecessary “stuff” ahead of time and with Brenda’s awesome lead (she did most of it), we got it all done in a day.

We have moved into one of our apartments on River Road and will live here until the house is complete. We haven’t lived in an apartment since 1982, but it is quite a blessing that we have this available for us. Living on a very busy street will take some getting used to; but so far, going from 2,750 sq ft to 950 sq ft has been pretty easy.

Floor framing of the cottage started yesterday and floor framing the house probably will start today.

Today we will be organizing the apartment and getting things in their place. More later.

 

 

We stripped the forms on the Cottage today and started setting up forms on the house. House concrete will be poured tomorrow. Coming along nicely.

 

We are using high fly ash concrete. This recycles a waste product (coal ash from coal power pants) and results in stronger concrete.

 

Well, after five years and a couple of months, we have sold our Wintercreek home and have embarked on our new adventure in downtown Eugene. It’s late right now and I’m tired. But I wanted to get this started and hopefully I’ll be consistent with the updates. Time will tell.

As I recently said on my Facebook page:

“It’s a magical world, Hobbes, old buddy… let’s go exploring!” Calvin

Good night.