He came and he went.....

But he did leave his mark.  Another long summer with my little brother.  Casey went home on Saturday.

When he arrived he had a car full of tools. When he left he had the car and a trailer full of stuff.  A thousand dollar costco run did not help but then he had to buy supplies for Laurens wedding and Joni needed pants to go with her wine and paper goods.  And then there was the Saturday garage sales.  Too many good deals to pass up.  A ladder here, a wheelbarrow there, and the fireplace set.  So sad he left the extra hardwood flooring he planned to use for Joni's house.   And let's not forget the trailer itself.  Obviously the boy has latent hoarder characteristics.  

It was painfully obvious that his mind was on getting out of town.  Had been since before we went to Sonoma.  The giggle with everyone, except Casey, was his insistence that he only had "a day and a half of work to do".  That morphed into "not including the remodel" which he always knew was part of the job.  His day and a half became almost 3 weeks which was far more realistic for the work that had to be completed but not what he wanted.  Our friend Scott would come over and Casey would say "I am leaving tomorrow" and he would look at me and smile.  Even Oma knew he just wanted outta here!  Not sure why, we are very pleasant people and he had his own room with a TV and bath.  May have had something to do with Lauren's wedding and Joni!

As it was, Casey did not do well with Marketing 101.  One should always turn over any project clean bright and shiny.  Let's just say we spent all day Sunday cleaning up the debris field.   The good news is that I got a new finish hammer, a pair of nice pliers, and a few other items which were buried.  

All that said, let's focus on what is important.  We started with this....

And ended with this....  

Five and one half months of construction and we are left with an extremely well built cottage for Oma.  It was altered on the fly to meet everything that Oma wanted.  Had Casey not been here it would never have been built or if it had we would have had significant cost overruns and way too many fights with contractors, designers, and engineers.  Casey did a great job of finding the problems before they were built and developing solutions with the various trades.  

All that is left is for Oma to finish unpacking and Annette and Oma to get the garden under control.    

Still working it!

Sorry for the missing posts.  I HAVE been told by OMA that she is getting complaints because I haven't posted in a while.

The last week or so has been a whirlwind.  We came back from Sonoma and immediately Annette, Margie, and Katie went up and moved Oma out of her house.  They were home about 10 PM that night.  Margie had arranged for a semi truck trailer to haul furniture and stuff coming out of Oma's house back to Wisconsin.  That was dropped in the driveway of my shop.

Elise left on Tuesday early and the moving van arrived @ 7:30 and the move in began.  Oma sat in her chair in the garage and told everyone where each box and piece went in the new house.  We were done with that at about 2.  Margie had arranged for the movers to take several of the items which she was taking to Wisconsin over to my shop for loading into her trailer.  We unloaded her stuff into the shop and headed home to start unpacking.

Casey arrived on Wednesday to find his jobsite a mess with household belongings.  Oh well, stuff happens.  While Martin, Katie, Gu, Leslie, Laurel and Hanna ran around the bay area visiting sites and climbing half dome, work continued.  Oma headed up the unpack team with Margie.  Casey trimmed windows and base.

We also completed the installation of the tub and verified that the jacuzzi part worked as expected.

I had 2 issues to resolve with electrical.  I had been avoiding both.

In the first case, 2 of the four can lights in the bathroom did not work.  I knew there was a problem in the connection in either the last working can or the first non working unit.  Unfortunately, these lights are under the heater unit so there is no access from the attic.  I feared the worst, ripping out sheetrock only to find the problem was in the other light.  I mad a depot run to see how I might access the connections from the inside.  The designers thought of this and there was an access.  I ripped apart the non working lamp and found a factory defect in the wiring unit.  Snip snip and a wire nut had the problem resolved.

I wish I could say the same for the other issue.  The can lights in the front of the living room would not work.  Now these are on a 4 way switch in the bedroom, front door, and living room.  The wire I thought was the power feed to the lights would not light them when power was applied.  I ripped out all the switches put tone on the wires and found the tone on wires in the bedroom AND the living room.  It made no sense.  To add to the mystery, one evening about a week ago Casey and I accidentially had these lights working by connecting to seemingly unrelated wires in the living room.  Long story short, I played with it for FAR too long.  I worked it with Sarah before the party.  Again after.  Got thoughts from Casey and we even removed a piece of sheetrock in search of a nail through a wire.  Zippo.

I threw in the towel and called Frank over at Brilliant Electric.  He worked with me on the shop upgrading the panel, replacing it when it was torn off the wall by the dumpster, and then installing the panel on the new building.  He came out late Friday with his expecting wife and took a look.  I explained what I had done and then let him do his magic.  About 30 minutes later he had the problem identified.  One wire to the light from the Living room and one from the bedroom and only one wire on each was connected to the lamp.  Problem solved.  Casey is loving it because I needed help and had to call someone but he can't call in another carpenter.  I remind him that that is called rework - keep trying and you are bound to get it right ;-)

I think we went to a SF Giants game on Wednesday with the whole extended crew - 12 of us.  They lost but we had fun.

We had a bit of drama around the house in Sebastopol.  It was closing on Friday and we got a call from the real estate agent that it was not clean enough.  No clue why she waited a week to let us in on that little fact.  Casey and I jumped in Chester and headed north right in the middle of rush hour.  The house was fine but we did a quick scrub and got home about 10.  Will also arrived late Thursday night with a friend from school.  They were headed for the outside lands concert.  He spent the night.

On Friday Laurel left for home and Will headed to SF.  Margie and I went to the storage unit and got out more stuff bound for Wisconsin.  Annette was off so she helped unpack and built the new landing off the front steps as well as what will become a garden sitting area for Oma.  Margie spent a day packing her trailer and waiting for the pick up.  Friday is my movie night so we went to a movie (remember, I am retired).

Saturday morning Katie headed back to Zurich at zero dark thirty.  We were OK with that because she left Martin with us.  We put him to work on the house.  He is a natural.  He put the turn in ends on the banisters and prepared the half wall in the bath for tile.  We worked around the house on Saturday and Sunday.  We headed to the lake on Sunday afternoon for a swim.  Sunday night Will came back very late on his way to LA.  We also picked up Martin's cousin and 3 of his friends.  They are vacationing in the US and stopped in SF.  Great fun.  Full house once again.

Monday morning Margie left.  Martin did SF with his cousin and friends.  They rented bikes and rode across the GGB and back.  I tidied up the electrical now that it all worked.  Casey called for the inspection and kept working away.  Annette and OMA unpacked and marked the first Monday in years that Annette did not drive to Sebastopol.  Nice for everyone.

Yesterday Martin headed to the airport.  We also had our final  inspection.  We were very lucky to get an inspector who is simply a nice guy.  He liked the fact that we were building this as a family for Oma.  He was helpful and friendly.  When I came in from a depot run Oma, Casey, and Mike (the inspector) were sitting on the couch talking away.  We had just completed the final - YAY!!!!

There is still a bit of trim to complete but the big effort now goes into the closet and doorway to the bedroom.  That should be done by the end of the week.

Here are a few shots of the house with furniture and plants.  No particular order.

.

Moving day

So sorry it has been a long time since the last post.  We have been a little busy.  

So here is the status.  

The house is about 98% complete.  It still needs "case and base" as Casey says.  

We had our inspection on 7/26.  Essentially we passed and it was approved for Oma to move in.  That said some of the finish was and is still a bit rough for move in. 

There were 2 areas that the inspector noted.  The first which is a California thing and easily fixed was handrails cannot end they have to wrap around.  Not the same in Colorado.  Such is life.  

The second was associated with our sewer.  Did I tell you about the sewer?  Early on in the permit process we had to get the sewer video'd.  They found a 9' piece of WW2 cardboard orangebergh pipe at the edge of the street running up our front under the walls by the stairs.  To get the permit we had to replace that piece of pipe.  

Well I got a few guys out here and they all said the way to do it was using a pipe bursting method.  They would replace the entire pipe from the house edge to the street.  Everyone said it was a piece of cake.  So we dug a big hole, removing the sidewalk in front of the house.  6 foot square and 8' deep.  Then we dug a hole at the clean out in front of the house.  That required deck removal and some serious damage to Annette's plants.  That turned out to be the easy part.  

We had the digging done by our cement contractor and that went perfectly.  It did require that we get an "encroachment" permit.  Then I hired and idiot named Gary (Gary's plumbing) to do the pull.  It took him several hours to get his cable down the old pipe (yep we had no sewer during this process).  The port potty came in handy.  He finally got that with help from Casey and I.  Then he pulled in a steel cable that looked like it was off the golden gate bridge and attached his cone thing to that at the house end.  

All we needed now was some pipe.  This pipe is special and needs to be fused to the final length before the pull.  Well dumb butt Gary doesn't know how to read the clearly marked distances on the video report, or read them off the vide file or use a tape measure so the puts an extra 40 feet of pipe on this beast.  We had 4" sewer pipe running from the front yard up the deck outside our room past the hot tub and all the way to the pond in the back.  

Then the fun began.  They inserted a vertical 2' by 2' steel plate in the hole.  Attached to this were 2 hydraulic rams that grabbed the cable and pulled it about 8" then released and repeated the process.  They got that all hooked up to the engine that drove the rams and we were off and running.  NOT!  The machine started pulling and instead of the cone up top going into the pipe the entire maching just started pulling itself into the hill heaving the dirt up in the process.  This took out the old cable TV conduit that ran along the sidewalk.  Calls were made, things were tried but it was not happening.  Now Gary and his crew were blaming it on the soil and they had never had this issue and the moon and the cats and....  

As it was getting dark we sent them home to regroup and try again the next day.  Casey had become their master carpenter (like he had nothing better to do) and had a plan laid out.  Essentially move surface area.  2 4'x4' sheets of 1.5" plywood against the hill.  then some big timber between that and the plate.  

They arrived in the morning and put the plan into action.  Good news - it worked.  Bad news it ripped out my water main in the process.  A temporary water main - using a hose was fashioned and we limped through the weekend.  On Monday we replaced the main and got rid of Gary - the essence of incompetence.  The next day the new sidewalk was poured and we were back in business.  the reason this whole thing became an issue for the final inspection is because the city wanted the asphalt replaced at the edge of the whole.  Until that is done they won't close the encroachment permit and we cannot get our final if the encroachment permit is not finales.  I just checked and the asphalt is done and the city inspector was leaving the site.  

We had other things going on as well.  The final push for the housewarming party on Friday.

The final repair to the driveway....

 We flipped on the water in the house only to find a leak that was not there before.  I removed some sheetrock and made the fix.  

Then there was setting the toilet and tub.  To do that plumbing had to be moved since the walls had been moved during the final framing.  The toilet was easy but the tub was a pain in the ass because someone (Annette) had to do it from under the house.  Suited up down she went and soon after we heard a cheer of victory.    

Tub plumbing ready for re-work

Toilet goes in

 About this time people began arriving.  Hans and Susan from Hawaii, Katie and then Martin from Switzerland, Elise from NY, Margie from Wisconsin, Sarah from Davis, , Laurel, Patrick, and Will from LA.  They were all put to work.  Trucks were filled and dump runs made.  It was amazing how much crap we hauled out.  Pretty soon the yard was looking far less cluttered and there was light at the end of the tunnel.  

Meanwhile we had a kitchen to outfit.  Casey worked with Katie on cutting in the microwave vent and installing the unit while Sarah worked with me on the kitchen sink/disposal/diswasher.  What a pain in the butt!  Thanks to Sarah we got it done.  

Tools were thrown into Casey's trailer and at 3 we got dressed for Oma's party at 5.  The party was outstanding with lots of friends, neighbors, and family.  Oma was thrilled which was what it is all about anyway.  She got a cake and presents and then Casey presented her with the keys to her new home.  Special night.  

Today Annette is headed up to Oma's with Katie, Elise, Laurel, and Martin.  They will meet Margie and the movers at the house.  The goal is that she will be 100% out by the end of the day.  I am guessing it will be emotional even though Oma is ready to go.  

Tuesday the movers deliver Oma's stuff.  We will put them into the house but not set her up just yet.  

Casey is back on Wednesday.  He needs to finish his stuff so Oma can finish her move in.  I have a couple of electrical items to diagnose that were driving me nuts.  I think I know the issue so it should be done pretty quick.   

And now it is Oma's house

Among lots of other things, Oma's stained glass was installed today.  Instantly it became her home.  

 Here is the family crest in her bedroom over her desk.  It is a Klaver (Clover) and Boldrik with a tulip in the center.  

Inside looking out

Looking in at night with the lights on.

The first egret gets installed

 The egret windows installed:

At night backlit

The bench seat windows looking out into the garden 

Looking up the walkway.  First thing you see are the seat windows.

 Porch lighting 

 Even the front door got in the mood

Getting tight...

Work continues.  Hope to have our Certificate of occupancy before the 27th!!!!

Top cap is going up on the wall.  Beams are being wrapped.  Kitchen cabinets are getting finished.

Bathroom is starting to take shape.

Here we have Annette and Casey calculating grab rails - or so they said.....

 Here the boys are after putting up the upper cabinets.  It is Casey's birthday so we got him a shirt with his birth year on it.  He does get around OK for a guy his age.

Did I mention Oma has a secret padded room for those occasional "moments"...

Front door - check, Floors - check

Oma can now greet people at her front door.  It is installed.

The pantry went into the kitchen along with all the soft close hardware.

 Did I mention the stairs leading into the front yard garden.  We think these will get quite a workout.  

Moving right along

The 4th is behind us and we are back at work.  Casey came back from Pagosa although I am not sure he is refreshed.

Over the weekend Annette and I were able to actually do a little bit of normal work around the house.  On Friday I was able to sweep, vacuum, wash, and power wash the new deck.  It really looks nice.  I took down the pond screen, made two dump runs, and we actually have our back yard back again.

On Monday the facing was installed on the front planter.  Oma is going to like her "stand up" garden.

Casey and Andrew finished the ceiling in the studio.  Looks nice.

This week the floor will finished, the front stairs, and the granite walkway.  Oma's stained glass windows go in next week along with the high windows in the LR and Studio.