2008_06_24 Kitchen appliances, shower, intercom system, fireplaces, bridge

These pictures were taken 2 days before we were to move the furniture into the house. You heard that right - two days! So, as you view what was going on imagine how stressed out we were at this point. It was too late to postpone it any longer. We had movers committed to us for 6/26/08 and we were not going to try to extend the apartment stay into July anyway.

Oh, yeah, we had to leave on Saturday 6/28 (2 days after the furniture move) to go to Navarre Beach, FL for the week with Kathy's family that we always try to attend.

Below you can see the wall oven and the microwave with the plastic stuff on them still. In case you wonder about such things they are GE Profile brand as will be the cook top and cook top downdraft vent that you saw in an earlier posting. The refrigerator is different (LG) and the dishwasher will be a Bosch.



Here is the refrigerator. It has ice (cubes in 3 sizes and crushed ice) and water in the door.

Below you can see Roberto's sense of humor in the base for the rock that is to go on the fireplace in the great room. If you were to have a very good picture of this you could also see the sort of honeycomb shaped wire that was stapled (with probably a thousand staples) to the fireplace wall and that the mud type of base was put on and allowed to harden before the rocks were then put on it.

The mantel is sitting on the floor. It is 4 inches by 16 inches and about 6 and a half feet long.

Kedrick Hammond is the guy who put in the security system and also the intercom system. He is getting ready to put in the main intercom panel.

Roberto is putting rock on the fireplace in the bedroom.

The shower tile is now getting close to being finished. That's still just a work light in there and you can see the cord hanging down.

Here's a closer look at the shower. The floor and the strip around the wall are real rocks. The blue drain cover is blue because it still has the protective plastic cover on it.

Below is a view of one of the intercom speakers. There are speakers in every bedroom, the great room, the screened porch, the workshop, and the front porch. You can play radio or CDs through them. Each room has individual volume control and you can select the privacy button if you don't want anyone else to be able to listen to what's going on where you are. I guess I should say that you can "call" someone from any of them and then if you want to be able to listen to their response without them having to get up and go to their speaker to respond you can press both buttons at once (I think that's right) and you can listen to someone from wherever they are in their room.

This feature is also used to be able to listen to see who is at the front door.

This is just a view of the great room fireplace from about halfway up the stairs.

Scott is helping put together the front porch "bridge" to the driveway out front. The notch at the bottom of the boards will be filled with a 2 x 2 to give added support to the floor. There's also the same notch at the end that meets the porch.

Here's the other end.

Now the flooring is on it. The hand rails will come later.

2008_06_17 Shower, Medeco locks, digging trench for utilities, and starting the front pull through driveway

The picture below is the master shower before it was grouted. You can see the spacers still in between the tiles on the wall. There is rock around the wall and it matches the rock that will make up all of the floor of the shower.


The guys below are from Alabama Lock & Key in Birmingham (Brandon with his head up) and they are installing the Medeco brand locks. They are high security locks that are drill proof, bump proof, and just overall very, very good locks that are used in places requiring the best security. They're also pretty nice looking too we think.

They spent 2 days putting them on the exterior doors. Since they cost as much as a small car we didn't even consider putting any of these on any interior doors, but we found Schlage door hardware that is a pretty good match for the color and style so we got those for interior doors.

Here is the finished product on the inside of one of the French doors in the great room.

Scott is operating the backhoe and is digging the trench for the underground phone, power, and Internet cable. It has to come from the back of the house around the corner, up the hill, and to the telephone power pole up on the road. They have to be more than 2 feet deep and buried inside 4 inch conduit.

Here you can see the trench being dug. It goes from the back of the house around the corner and to the telephone pole that's up on the hill where the white van is parked in this picture.

Joe's still working on the tile! He was a hard worker and didn't even want to stop long enough for any chit chat.

Below Scott is trying to get the curved conduit positioned correctly to go from the box on the wall to meet the conduit that is going to be underground. The bend can have no smaller than a 4 foot radius because they don't want any sharp bends in any of the cables.

You can see below that the conduit with the utilities in it actually goes underneath the sewer pipe at the back of the house. Getting the trench dug with the backhoe was a little bit scary since they wanted to use it to dig as much as possible, but didn't want to accidentally hit the sewer pipe either. Scott dug it close with the machinery (probably within 8 or 10 inches on either side) and then they finished the process with shovels.

Right here they are using a shop vacuum set to blow in order to blow some string through the pipe that will run in it from here all the way to the telephone pole about 120 feet or more away. Then once the conduit is buried with the string in it and the power company comes to put in everything they will use the string to tie it to the cables and pull them through the conduit.

Scott is now working on the driveway in front. He's trying to make it split off from the main driveway (which goes down to the garage) and curve from there in front of the house up to the telephone pole is.

Here are some lighting fixtures in the kitchen.

The doors are NOT blue. I don't know what causes this, but almost every time I try to take a picture of the doors outside on the south side of the house the light makes them look blue. They are what you would consider forest green. Also, there is sawdust on the doors from some other work being done out there, but the Medeco locks are what I was shooting for here.

This shows the first piece of conduit (on the right) that has been attached to the house and it has the string through it. Scott is getting ready to put the string through the next piece of conduit and then they will glue the two pieces together. After gluing them they will then bend them around that corner to get ready to start going up the hill.

I was afraid that the conduit would break trying to make the turn, but it made it with no problem.

See? I told you.

Below you can see the progress and where they need to go.

2008_02_28 Plumbing, tubs, showers, floor joist supports

On February 28th the tub for the upstairs bath arrived. Scott brought it up in his truck. Below Scott (left) and his brother, Steve (right), look at the jets on it.

Scott, Steve, and Steve's crew then picked it up and carried it to the house. I carried the heavy camera!

They managed to get it up the temporary stairs without either dropping it or having anyone fall off so it was a complete success. The tub is only about 5 feet long and 42 inches wide so it's not as big as some jetted tubs are, but it should be all Kathy might need or grand kids might need, etc so it should be sufficient.

Below you can see that this tub and the shower are designed to fit together so that they become a unit. You may be able to tell that the shower unit has to be picked up and then set down over the end of the tub. The shower does not yet have the glass door or the portion that completes the side of it that forms the "wall" at the end of the tub. They are glass and will be added later.

The area where Steve is standing could be left open, but we may put a linen cabinet of some type in there to fill that "hole". However, whatever we do we have to leave a way to access the machinery part of the tub in case it needs maintenance.

We could put a very shallow linen cabinet that only comes out to about half the width of the tub so that there would still be room available to get to the motor, etc of the tub. However, we could also put in one that is deeper than normal so that it comes all the way out so that it goes out as far as the tub and then just put in a removable panel in its side so it could be removed to gain access to the tub's working parts. I prefer that method I think, but it will make it very tight to get in the light switches that will be on the wall right by that door. The distance between the door frame and the cabinet would be barely enough for them to fit.

In the basement you can see all the metal straps that hold up the pipes that come from the sinks, shower, and toilet.

What you're looking at below is the shower in the master bathroom. It is an irregular shape as you can see. Why? Well, mostly because we wanted to have it as large as the space would allow and that made the log wall sides 4' 6" on the side to the right of the corner and 5' 0" on the side to the left of the corner. Also, it had to have inside wall sides that were a little bit different in length for a couple of reasons. We wanted to keep it as large inside as possible which meant having unequal lengths along the log walls and the shape of the master closet which is adjacent to the bathroom also affected the angle of the shower door.

If you have seen pictures before of the closet you may remember that the corner of it that would stick out toward the bathroom was chopped off to prevent it from extending into the bathroom area. Doing that allows there to be more wheelchair room in the bathroom if that's needed some day.

Now, back to how that affects the angle of the shower door! In order to keep it from looking "off" I wanted to keep the shower door to be parallel to the wall of the cut off closet. With them being parallel it will look OK to me, but if those two angles had not been parallel it would have (in my opinion anyway) made everything look too jumbled up.

There will be a fixed shower head on the "inside" wall that is on the right below. There will also be a separate hand held shower head mounted on a bar on the "inside" wall that is on the left that will allow it to be fixed at any height along the length of the bar or removed to be used by hand.

We also plan to put a corner shower seat and the best corner would seem to be the one in the corner of the two log walls. We'll need to make sure that that doesn't adversely affect the ability to put a wheelchair in there though. If it does then we could just continue to let Kathy use the shower seat we have now that she uses in our shower now.

The shower drain is just put in temporarily for now. It has nails that are nailed part way in and bent over holding it in, but the guy who puts in the pan and then builds the curved bottom with the mud (that's apparently what they call it) to give the tiles a curved base can unbend the nails so he can do his thing and then permanently install the shower drain when he's ready. At least that's how I understand it.

The tub/shower below is the one that is going into the bathroom in the basement. There will also be a toilet and a pedestal sink. We're not planning to spend a lot of money on the basement bathroom.

We had planned to just put in the plumbing for it should we (or someone else some day) want to put in the bathroom fixtures. However, the builder thought that we'd not save a lot of money doing that and it would be easier to do it now than later. In the grand scheme of things the cost of the tub, toilet, sink, and faucets, etc won't be all that bad. At least this way if I want to make a quick trip to the bathroom or want to wash my hands if I'm working in the workshop they won't be too far away!

They had to remove 2 inches of the top of the floor joists underneath the shower in order to allow for the entrance to it to be virtually at the same level as the floor so that a wheelchair can roll into it without having to be faced with a raised barrier and still allow for about a 2 inch slope down to the drain.

What they did to accomplish this was to cut out the OSB board and cut out 2 inches from the top of the floor joists that had been supporting the floor (the OSB board). Once they removed 2 inches from the 2x10s they then became 2x8s. Since Scott wasn't happy reducing the strength of the floor joists he decided to buy some long pieces of angle iron that are about a quarter of an inch thick and about 4 inches along each side and use them to add support to the floor joists.

He had them drill holes every couple of feet through the angle iron and the floor joists and then they bolted the angle iron to the bottom of the floor joists to give them additional strength. I think that even if I gain a lot of weight the floor in the shower will still hold me!

Below you can see the plumbing to the tub/shower in the basement.

Below Scott is using a nail gun to frame up the shower walls in the master bath shower.

Scott is standing in the doorway. The area under the window is where Kathy would like to put a short cabinet or vanity that will allow her to put on her makeup, etc there.

I guess we have to get shutters for all the windows in the bathrooms, kitchens, etc on the first floor. We went to the large home and garden show in Birmingham on Friday and got lots of good info on businesses that do everything from shutters, to garage storage solutions, to gutters that keep leaves out, people who make mantels, create water features (which Kathy would like some day), and lots of other things. We already have asked one gutter company to come out and give us an estimate on Monday.