Day to Day

The Cocoon excavation of the basement has had to be postponed, contributing to a cascading  of other delays.  Sigh.  But I resolve not to contribute to the delay!  I decide to stay away from the office, turning instead to sanding the newly stripped baseboard.  This is satisfyingly concrete work—got all the baseboard done, first with #80, then with #120.  Of course, there is only 130 feet of it, which is at best a quarter of what will be needed for the whole house.  I wasn’t able to recover all the baseboard from the original core of the house, so we are woefully short.

My anxiety is back in full force—need to get all this woodwork (window and door casings, cornices, taenia, friezes and plinths) stained and topcoated before the weather gets too cold.

It dawns on me that we would be better off with Ethernet rather than WiFi in the restored house.  I’d like to minimize the electronic waves bouncing around, and beside, Ethernet is faster. So I email Marc about having the conduit put in place before the walls are rebuilt.

Good news on another front—Sherwin Williams is able to produce a stain that offers a ‘cherry’ color on new birch that matches the richness of their standard ‘classic cherry’ on the 100-year-old wood.  This is a definite improvement upon my experimentation; I got a purplish tint when applying the off-the-shelf cherry stain to new birch. The custom mix somehow produces an ‘old’ effect on the new lumber.

A second bolt of good news from the blue—the building permit has been approved (we thought approval would be delayed a week due to vacations).  Hooray—let the construction begin—as it will next week, since the Cocoon excavation had to be put off until the 14^th.

Today is a milestone of another sort—the stripping of the old woodwork is finished.  Glad to see the end of that gooey mess in the garage.  Now let the sanding and staining and topcoating begin….

Major progress today: Linda and I meet with our Gate City Bank mortgage lender, and sign off on the construction loan. I text everyone instantly thereafter. So, now our committee (architect, builder, construction supervisor, homeowner) really needs to meet.  Aside from conferring about ‘project updates,’ we need to review the entire long list of Green Star requirements so that contractors can shape their work accordingly. I suggest that we vote up, down or question—mark on each item individually, then have a conference call—it is awkward for me to get down before or during the Cocoon foundation work on the 7^th.  I’ve already missed the mandated meeting with neighbors, which was held today.  All neighbors within 350 feet radius were invited.  As it turns out, only two showed up. But one has a substantive concern about property lines which I need to address.

Separately, Marc responds to my painstaking effort to reallocate doors with a plan that makes frankly better sense.  I had wanted to take the old kitchen door, repair the damaged veneer and make it our bedroom door.  He points out that for the sake of uniform appearance among the doors in the master bedroom, it would make more sense to put the restored kitchen door on the guestroom.  Among his considerations is the fact that at some point we may need wheelchair access, and so we can’t simply put doors back where they were.  For critical access points, he has designed in wider doors.  Fortunately the kitchen door is wide enough to serve.

Marc alerts us to a growing controversy about PEXc piping, which until recently was considered an environmentally improvement over the white PVC which has replaced copper and cast iron piping.

Met daughter Katharine and we cruised three large yards of sliced stone (mostly muddy limestone), concrete pavers and other landscaping materials. Nothing inspired us. Katharine is on her way back to New York. I haul the incredibly heavy old front door, stuffed in the back of the Corolla, back to Fargo. The outside was badly weathered, and the inside has the wrong finish, even if the finish is in pretty good shape.

So I had it stripped by “Strippers on Selby”. I have had only two doors done there, for the stripping costs $200+ per door—it’s considerably cheaper to have students strip by hand.

After a night of disoriented non-sleeping, I meet for most of the day (8:30-3)with Marc and Caleb. Endless issues to cover. Caleb presents a (first) bundle of ‘change orders’, those dreaded tabs for any changes from the contracted architectural plan. He takes no more pleasure from it than I. Sean reassures me that they soon taper off.

The 15th trip to Minneapolis: Drive down via Audubon, where I confer with Jeff Dugger of Country Wood Products—which made me eager to get our large lumber order in. I love the smell of lumber in the morning…

For days I have been sweating the doors (14 of them). Marc has provided a ‘schedule’ that both reallocates the existing doors and indicates where new ones will be needed. Three existing doors are left over, including the one which underwent a $200 stripping in St Paul. So I have been trying to reallocate the doors in such a way as to use them all. This I find to be mind-bending work.  

So, just for a sense of concrete progress, I recruit daughter Katharine, home from New York for a visit, to help me sand one of the doors, which we then seal and apply “Classic Cherry” stain to. The result is a deep, rich cherry color. Ahhhhhhhh.

But this tint is considerably darker than that on the trim, leading me wonder if veneer (on the door) absorbs more stain than plain wood? If so, can the stain color be standardized across doors, windows, baseboard—and what about the new birch that we will have to use?