Monday, December 28, 2009

Geometry revisited



In an earlier post, I'd mentioned the fact that lines and planes are, in fact, infinite. A trick of the eye that Wright used to great advantage with the trellises on the end of his flat roofs to lengthen visually the horizontal.

Another trick that we have used is to bevil the ends of the hardie board siding where they meet at the corners of the house so that each board seems to go off to the end of the world. If you look at other houses, there can be a cap piece of molding at every corner. This "stops" the line visually.

This requires great skill in the cutting of each board and fitting them together. And Brian is doing a wonderful job with this.

Sunday, December 27, 2009

Painting starts



The weather has been fine here for the last couple of days, so we scurried over to do what painting we could during this first weekend of Christmas.

Saturday, December 26, 2009

And now the painting begins




This is where we were at the end of work on 12/23. It is really soggy here, since the rains washed away the remnants of our slushy grey Christmas. We're feeling a bit better, although we think the Dog has the flu now. After Pat does some calking, we're going to get going on painting some windows and get started on painting the pre-primed hardie board siding.

Tuesday, December 22, 2009

Oink Oink


Down for a bit with a bug..
Have a Merry Christmas and we'll be back after the Birthday Party.

Now, here's the funny thing, I've been looking for and posting free pictures from all over the web, but couldn't find anything on the web about Jesus for free to post up here. There are more scam artists out there working Jesus than there are working the walk-in-tub con.

So I had to go to Wikipedia, once again. After the money all shakes out, I'm going to give them a donation I think.

Saturday, December 19, 2009

Thursday, December 17, 2009

Solomon would be proud


We are going with the blown in cellulose for the ceiling and the Pink Panther batting on the walls. That's the decision as of 6:20 this morning.. Could all change by the third cup of coffee

Wednesday, December 16, 2009

Night Shift



Pat and I went to the house last night to paint the long vertical window so that the guys can start the siding. Here's a night time view of the house. You can see the Anderson windows with the blank squares, that's where the handmade windows will go. We have about 35 of them in our truck waiting to be transferred the the basement so we can paint them and another 15 at the house waiting to come here... Thank Goodness the weather was warm last night.

And of course, the two oldest grandsons had a grand time running around the dark house with Pappy's flashlight. The highlight of their evening was the port-a-potty. It is always fun to use an outhouse in the bleak midwinter....

The problem with Genius


In Rebecca West's novel, The Fountain Overflows, a child is taking piano lessons from her mother, a concert pianist. They are working on Beethoven's Sonata in D Major (opus 10). The mother is frustrated with her daughter because she insists on playing the piece as it is written and the mother tells her, "Rose, you are a musical halfwit...you must supply the high F sharp there though it is not written. Beethoven didn't write it because it was not in the compass of the piano as he knew it, but he heard it, he heard it inside his head."

Jane Austen, born five years later than Beethoven on this day in 1775 wrote the orginal "chick lit.". Her books were so far ahead of their time that Pride and Prejudice reads more like a screen play than a novel. And even today, some people will lump them as silly books to read and toss, whereas they are poison pen satires as pertinent today as when they were written during the Napoleonic Wars.

I've written quite a bit about the fact that Frank Lloyd Wright's houses were leaky sieves. I don't know why that was. Maybe like Beethoven, he was working in his head with a material that was not in the "compass" of building materials currently invented. Another puzzling thing is that although many of his roofs leaked and cantilevers failed, the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo survived the great earthquake of 1923, one of the few buildings to do so. So, I'm thinking he knew engineering, he knew structure and he knew that materials were going to be designed that would help his roofs not leak.

Happy Birthday Mistress Austen and Maestro

Sunday, December 13, 2009

A small saving with interest.


We are doing a combination handmade/Anderson Windows deal on this house. It is cheaper, if the windows aren't going to open, to have Tom S. and his crew make the framing and Matkins glass supply the fillings. But, this means we will have to paint the frames... you can see the handmade next window next to the casement one. This saves us alot, not individually, but collectively as we're talking around 50 windows..

Friday, December 11, 2009

Sweat Equity

That horrible sound title means just what it says. We have to start working now, painting the foundation tomorrow, painting the hand built clerestory windows and once the siding goes up, painting that...

BUT, on the plus side, it means things are CRACKING!

Here's a cynic's view of sweat equity...


Pat has a clear understanding of we can and cannot do. Painting is entirely within our realm of workability. The wiring is not..

The unrabbitted lintels, or no Pink Panther for us


The insulation discussion is complete. After talking with the inspector, if we go with the fiberglass batting, we need vents in the soffits.. but, Tom says that the won't work with a flat roof because then we need corresponding vents in the roof.
So we're going with the blown in cellulose at nearly 2.5 times the cost. Somewhere, somehow, we're going to save money...

Thursday, December 10, 2009

Insulation


If you tour the Pope-Leighey home in Alexandria, you will see on the floor by the window a cutaway sample of the orginal wall. This is to let the tourists see the insulation used at the time. It consists of the outer wall of cypress, the inner wall of cypress and sheet of paper between...that's it.

My my, all of our talk recently has been of insulation..vented, non-vented, blown in cellulose, blown in fiberlass, fiberglass batting. All with "R" ratings in the high numbers. In fact, more men know their insulation numbers than their children's birthdays.

We haven't yet decided; the quotes are coming in. That's the ubiquitious Tyvek wrapping around the exterior walls. I think the next thing is the Hardie Board siding and then we start our onerous, sweat equity job of painting..uggh..

Wednesday, December 9, 2009

Capistrano



Like a flock of swallows, roofers descended yesterday.. It was either then or never as rains are predicted off and on, seemingly for the rest of the century.

Monday, December 7, 2009

Well?????

okay, we have 20% chance of rain for the next two days.... are our roofers going to be the brave fellows we know they CAN be and attempt to finish the roof so that we can get our windows and doors in and therefore take delivery of our appliances from Sears and our cabinetry from Ikea???
Inquiring minds want to know

Devilish Details






The blue boards are the insulation that will keep our radiant heat from seeping out into the ground and costing us many, many bucks.The silly white dog has her Christmas bow on her neck, which we had to remove because she has such sensitive skin, we don't want to spend many many bucks on her steroid creams.

The devil is in the details because the big conversation this afternoon with Tom's assistant (Tom is on his anniversary cruise) was how to do the blue board under the sliding glass doors....these are issues that could make a huge difference in our heating bills when we're 95 and freezing...

Our first insulation quote is nearly TWICE what we thought it would be.... scotch and water time.

Friday, December 4, 2009

nope

no roof and it is supposed to rain tomorrow turning into snow.....

mebbe, mebbe not

A roof covering today????

Thursday, December 3, 2009

Robert Lewis Stevenson, sortakinda



The rain is raining all around
It falls on field and trees.

It rains on the umbrellas here,
and on the ships at sea..

AND MY ROOF DAMMIT....

Rain has probably delayed our house building by 3 1/2 weeks. We, by rights, should have been dried in for over a week. We have had to put off the Sears delivery of our appliances three times and the roofers may or may not be able to put the membrane on today so that we can proceed with our windows which have been waiting silently in the Home Depot warehouse...

AND, RONNA IS GONNA WIN!!! ARRGGGGGHHHHHH!

Thanks to Amazon.com for the image...

Wednesday, December 2, 2009

Obsessions

My sib, after viewing the house, reported to the others it looked Japanese, which led to emails talking about the influence of the Japanese on FLW.

The other day, we watched Magnificent Obsession, Frank Lloyd Wright's Buildings and Legacy in Japan..
These video's thesis isn't that Wright was influenced so much by the Japanese as they just had absolutely identical ideas as far as organic architecture and were well suited, like a good arranged marriage. It was an interesting video with animation that reminds me of Terry Gilliam of Monty Python fame. The music got on Pat's nerves toward the end though. Magnificent Obsession: Frank Lloyd Wright's Buildings and Legacy in Japan

Tuesday, December 1, 2009

Trinity

One of the things that I want to remember is that it has been a privilege to watch this house get built. It is interesting that although we had visited the Pope-Leighey house and taken pictures and paced out the dimensions, we and our builder, really just have been flying by the seats of our pants. And it has been fun to see that with further reading, it has adhered to alot of the tenets of Wright's philosophy.

In The Natural House Wright talks about all the possibilities when one uses concrete, steel and glass. Although this house is structurally different from the original, it looks the similar. Much like two computers look alike at first, but then you see one is an Apple and one a PC.

We sat in beach chairs in the great room yesterday on our concrete floor, gazing at the steel beams that support the cantilever carport, windows and trellises while a gentle breeze lifted our hair through the windows where the glass will let nature come inside the house.

It's different, and yet it is concrete, steel and glass...


Pat putting in some sweat equity...cleaning sawdust.