Happy Halloween

The scariest 12 pounds in Alamance county. More about the house tomorrow.

mOMENts

There is a moment in any endeavor, whether it's raising a child or a house, where you just get a feel for how it's going to turn out. Hopefully that moment is not going to be like the one when Gregory Peck figures out that his son Damien has some interesting genealogy to go along with that odd tattoo on his head.

Hopefully, the moment will be more like "AHHHH, yes, this is just the way I hoped it would be."

We hit that moment yesterday when the roof of the bedroom wing was framed in. The house looks a lot less like a plywood mobile home, and more like a Frank Lloyd Wright Usonian. The bones and flesh are there, the rest is just cosmetics so to speak.

Fear

This is where the end of the carport steel locks into the steel post.

Pat, the 57 year old boy, horsing around on our carport's skeleton.Carport skeleton on the left, Tom, Elspeth and Pat in the middle.

Trellis skeleton on the right.

At what point does a handwritten note from the bank cease to scare?

It was just an invitation to a real estate investment seminar, whereas we're gambling big time that this house is going to all work out.

The steel was delivered yesterday; because we're terrified of what COULD happen. This steel is the stuff that will hopefully keep our cantilevered carport from crashing down into the ground, our picture windows in place and the trellises on the ends of the wings fly without fail.

The original Rosenbaum house in Florence, Alabama didn't have steel structural support and it leaked like a sieve. The 800K renovation corrected that problem. I hope this house doesn't cost that amount. I'm pretty sure then a handwritten note from the bank WOULD be bad news.

Happy Birthday PV

Come again another day

Rain all week according to the N&O. We shall see what gets accomplished. The only deadline we're sort of dealing with is we have to be dried in sufficiently to receive our Sears appliances as well as the Ikea cabinets the second week of December. And this week is Halloween so time is flying by.

We had dinner with a young fellow who had never heard of Frank Lloyd Wright so we mentioned the Ken Burns documentary, which is an excellent introduction.

Here's a taste of it. Apparently PBS has such tight reins on their shows, you can't access them on the web unless it is on their site.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2G8k3qTpk7g

Here are a couple of negative responses to the show.

http://www.franklloydwrightinfo.com/burns.html

Fibber McGee

We are attacking our hall closet today. It could be scary.

There are things under the stairway, where the closet is located, that I don't want in the new house, because obviously, I wouldn't have stuck them back behind Mom's blue winter coat I still wear. But, I don't want to get rid of them yet. So, I guess we'll put them in the basement of the biz building and let the girls make decisions about pictures of people they never knew.

On another note, there was an article in the Raleigh N&O about a house with the same "poliwog" design (as Mr. Frank called it.) Only to mind my, they had no privacy. The whole point of the L shape is that the inside of the L faces the woods so you have a semi-courtyard. If the L is open to the road, no matter how far back it is from the street, you have no privacy.

The bedroom wing's clerestory windows have been framed. We're thinking we may eliminate ONE window which would enable us to put some Ikea closets in there, AND, the big concern, is that my IKEA bathroom cabinet will not fit in the place we have designated for it. We even measured twice. (You know the rule, measure twice, cut once.)

Time and Tide, Time and Tide

This has been a week of waiting AND activity. Our contractor had to take advantage of the clear skies to finish drying in another job and so instead of framing our house completely, he chose to do the steps instead. This is a job that also required dry weather, and so we now have steps to go from the lower level great room to the bedroom wing, which has just about finished with the framing. And, the framing is a bit more beefy due to the stress that will be imposed by the steel girders which will support the cantilevered carport as well as the fact of all those windows.

The steps look very retro, It is supposed to start raining again this afternoon, we we'll see what we can get accomplished this morning.

Patience, I must remind myself constantly, is a virtue.

Just as, "It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in a possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife," so to it is a truth universally acknowledged that Frank Lloyd Wright was a jackass.

Okay, that was a very awkward way to get Jane Austen in this blog. But I had to do it.

But, it is true, and you don't have to take my word for it, just read his book THE NATURAL HOUSE. His arrogance shines through in sentences like "if there were no casement windows, I would have invented them." His judgemental attitude is writ clear when he calls the very common, double hung windows "guilliotine" windows.

However, as we were discussing at church yesterday, Mozart and Beethoven probably weren't all that easygoing either. Along with the singlemindeness of genius comes a certain tunnel vision that disregards other people's feelings and ideas.

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Again thanks to Wikipedia for these images.

Rain

That's Elspeth, Speedo's replacement, and I in Pat's Sanctuary. I'm standing right in front of where the washer/dryer combo will be.

Elspeth isn't nearly as cool as Speedo was, but she's a lot more portable and her hair color matches ours.

As you can see, the framing is going slowly due to the rains. It should clear up next week.

That wormy looking things sticking up out of the floor are the radiant heat tubes. They'll be hidden in a wall.

O, Pat just got in from getting the paper, he thinks we may actually see the sun today.

The dogs of war

"It is desperately cold...a damp clammy cold that almost never amounts to freezing or frost, but it is harder to keep warm than anywhere else I have been, unless Italy."

So writes Frank Lloyd Wright in his book, The Natural House. He was actually writing about Tokyo, Japan, but that description just suits our weather today and what is forecast for the rest of the week. A damp, clammy cold... Welcome to the south.

And we have started our annual bickering. Pat turns up the thermostat because it is cold as hell when the rains and wind blow (and I always think of Hell as cold-absence of God and all that) and almost immediately, I race over to turn it down because I get so "stuffy."

Wright's answer to this conundrum is what he calls "gravity heat," or what is more commonly referred to as radiant heat. He became a believer during his stint in Japan whilst building The Imperial Hotel. Froze to death until he was introduced into what his hosts referred to as "Korean Room," which had heated floors.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_Hotel,_Tokyo#The_Imperial_Hotel

Heat- that physics bound commodity- MUST rise. Therefore, if the floors are warm you've won the major part of the battle in making your house comfortable. Right now, we don't have radiant heat. The house was freezing, Pat kicked in the furnace and now I'm stuffy.

The dogs of war have been let loose.

A tentative Beginning

The framing has begun, o so quietly. There has been a 24 hour break between rainy days today, and so TOM SOUTHERN, our builder who has allowed us to finally name him, has been up at the site most of the day building.

I guess TOM SOUTHERN has decided this radical old fashioned plan just might work!

On the plus side, I managed to get my pansies in between showers.

Jane Russell and cantilevers

When Howard Hughes hired Jane Russell to star in his pictures, he also hired a structural engineer from Hughes Aircraft to design a new bra to "maximize" and support the assets he had purchased.

Perhaps Mr. Wright should have used the same engineer when he built Fallingwater. Frank Lloyd Wright used cantilevers to infinitely extend the lines of his buildings.

If you remember your high school geometry, you will remember that lines and planes are infinite. Hence a cantilever projection out of a house, makes the house appear to go on forever. This is especially true of our little usonian with its cantilevered carport and trellis projections at the end of each wing. The planes of the house are extended forever and simultaneously they seem to hug the earth. However, these cantilevers need to be anchored firmly to maintain their structural integrity.

Unlike Ms. Russells' foundation garments though, Fallingwater's cantilevers began to fail almost as soon as they were built and they underwent a massive reconstruction just before we toured the home a couple of years ago.

Our carport has steel structures to help anchor it in place. AND the steel was fabricated right here in good ole Burlington NC at Piedmont Metals of Burlington... just about spittin' distance from our lot.

Thanks to Wikepedia for the picture of Fallingwater.

Morticia would like these

http://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/S79829370

Our floor color ended up being more of an orangeish/brownish with a hint of red, which I actually like better than the Santa Fe Red Mr Wright used.

I had been worried that our greenish/teal oriental rug in the living room would mean we'd be living in a perpetual "Christmas mode" but this will be fine. It also means that we had to rethink the kitchen cabinets and we opted for the brown/black cabinet drawers and doors, which also means we saved nearly half of what we planned to spend down there because our first choice was, of course, the most expensive. And at IKEA, you can opt for drawers rather than shelves inside the cabinet. One of my sisters, BB, has drawers rather than shelves and I have coveted them for years...

I don't know what Frank would think of black cabinets in the kitchen, which he refused to label kitchen in his blueprints, preferring the term workspace.

I find that whenever we talk about doing anything, we spend an inordinate amount of time wondering if Wright would approve of it, and even though he's not here to give his opinion one way or another, we are just like his paying clients. We want to respect his work.

On our tour of the Rosenbaum house in Florence, Alabama, we were all marveling on how tiny the furniture was. It turns out that Wright designed all the furniture for what he considered an "average" person-5'8 1/2"-exactly his height. This would have been fine, except that the Rosenbaums, both mother and father and their sons were all tall... Julia Child tall. But, they used his tiny chairs, squeezed their basketball player thighs under the low dining table and never thought twice about it. When asked why on earth they just didn't get furniture more suitable for their frames, Mrs. Rosenbaum replied, "Mr. Wright wouldn't like it."

I don't think I'd be uncomfortable for 50 years to please the man, but I would like to think he didn't hate the choices we're making.

What the Swedes do best

We're headed to IKEA! To get our kitchen cabinets and bathroom sinks and furnishings.

Why IKEA you ask? Because IKEA understands small, compact and lean. The Raleigh News & Observer just had an article about the latest parade of homes. And, per usual, all the homes in the article seem to be massive, overdone Grandomania styles as Mr. Wright would say. We have walked through Lowes and Home Depot looking for very plain, yet nice kitchen cabinetry and it's just not there.-not in Alamance county anyway, so we have to go to Charlotte.

Also, with our concrete floor and radiant heat tubing, we're not keen on pounding nails into it to secure cabinets. Ikea's come with little feet. I like that. Also, they are good quality, easy to assemble and have nice features like drawers with an anti-slamming feature, which is quite nice.

I think that Mr. Wright would like IKEA. Although he was the quintessential AMERICAN architect, He believed in using new things and was influenced by other cultures such as Japan's.

In fact, when he was building his Usonians, plywood was the newest thing going and he made the cabinetry and furniture out of this new material. Now, of course, it's been around long enough, like dandelions, that we're not all that impressed with it.

And why now? Because IKEA is having a 10% off sale on kitchens right now. We could get more than that if we also bought the appliances from them, but I prefer Sears for that sort of thing.

I am NOT getting lunch there however, Tiddley made better Swedish meatballs.

http://www.ikea.com/us/en/

"It's been a fun day,"...

...standing around spending alot of money," Pat said after our evening race to see who gets into PJs first.

Well, technically, at this point we're spending Vantage South's money.

The weather worked, we got a floor!

That sort of inverted fan on a stick is a "trowel machine." I liked my name better, concrete smoother outer. The men took turns running this noisesome tool and troweling by hand to get the optimum surface smoothness.

Once it was all smooth and dry enough they added the sealer, which sort of gives it a gloss which may or may not be there when Pat and I return tomorrow morning to get it in our heads just what we need to purchase at Ikea.

very very quietly now...

i think we're getting our floor tomorrow

Pride goeth before a fall

NUTS! I shouldn't have blogged about the new floor until I check with the weather gods...

We STILL don't have a floor. What we have is lovely exposed radiant heating tubes resting on those cute little "chairs" and plumbing intakes and outgoes just sitting there waiting to become encased...If it rains, JUST SIX DROPS within any 48 hour window they can't pour the concrete because it "would be very bad," to quote from Ghostbusters. It would still be a viable floor, but since we're using dyed concrete, the extra water from God could discolor it in spots and we don't want that.. So my young friend is getting her roof and we're still sitting here waiting for the 12 drops of rain to end..

A correction

I have been reading THE NATURAL HOUSE by Frank Lloyd Wright. In it, he attributes the word USONIA to Samuel Butler. Mr. Butler, a pithy soul, to say the least has many interesting quotes. For your reading enjoyment and as a literate interlude until we get our concrete floor poured which was delayed due to rains, I am inserting this link to some of them.

http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/s/samuel_butler_4.html

My favorite one is "Death is only a larger kind of going abroad."

Mr. Butler also wrote THE WAY OF ALL FLESH, which is on my bookshelf awaiting my reading enjoyment.