leangreen.org recycled renovation on a low-budget ration

we posed the question as to whether or not we should wrap the redwood around the north side of the house. Nevermind this entailed removing the very same redwood from the north and south side of the house after removing a layer of fiber cement as well as reconditioning all of the wood, the answer was obviously yes.

On Saturday, in beautiful 80 degree weather, we hung the final row in what proved to be the most challenging siding installation to date. The less than 2 foot gap between our house and the dreaded rose trellis meant that any ladder was going to be nearly upright. What that in turn meant was that I was the only one with the stomach to climb said ladder. This led to a three man install team, and of course a new tool was created. One person would brace the ladder from below, pulling it towards the house and dodging various things that I may be dropping from up above (this was mainly Rob). Then another person working from the upstairs windows shuttled the redwood planks out to me on the ladder (this was mainly Jim, Jen carried the torch this weekend). We would get the plank out the window and, with a grip on one side, I would climb the ladder while Jim placed the tool under his side and guided it upward. Once the board was hoisted into place it sat on the tool, which was a long lower case t made out of 2x2 with a plywood spacer screwed onto the horizontal piece, which locked the tool in place allowing Jim to shift into ladder bracing mode from the window when he could reach. From there I would screw the board in, come down and move the ladder to the other side and repeat. All of this translates to something around 1 row/1.5 hr, not part of the original calculations when the thumbs up was given.

We are still happy with our decision to go for it and elated to check another item off the list. Now it's back to the electrical work and various other distractions.

Yesterday with the help of Jim, Tom, Elton and Rob we got the barn doors hung. Things went very smoothly and in total it took no more than 20 minutes of effort. Now we need to trim out the openings and install the additional hardware (stops, guides and locks) so that we can get a tight and secure seal.

I also spent a good deal of the day yesterday with an electrician that will help us knock out the electrical work. We will contract with him to have the main service panel built and wired up to the electric company's wires. He is also acting as a consultant to help fill the gaps in our wiring plan and execution.

Recently we have been trying to figure out a way to deal with the funky plane changes in the bedroom ceiling directly over where our bed will be. The roof lines forced some strange framing and trying to visualize how to sheath the space made me feel like I was looking at an M.C. Escher drawing.

We decided to use large beams to drop the ceiling at an angle and create a single plane. The beams will be exposed and the finished ceiling will be attached to the top of them. We bought the beams used from the ReUse People in Oakland, about 36' of 4"x6" doug fir for $40. In this picture Jen is finishing the sanding before applying the tung oil finish.

Things are finally starting to pick back up so we hope to have a good push of progress in the very near future.

After a trip to IKEA to check out the PAX sliding doors and some cabinetry, we've drawn up a detailed plan and interior wall elevations for the bedroom. Amazingly, Brian completed the entire IKEA marathon on crutches and did not indulge in swedish meatballs at the end of the race.

Big sliding doors should help keep the cats (and their fur) off our sweaters without taking up any room and allowing us to open up the wall for doing laundry. We're maximizing the sliding door idea, they just save space. We've also decided to replace our old chimney with a totally tubular skylight for bringing daylight into the closet while reusing the hole in the roof with minimal patch work. Glowing, semi-transparent acrylic doors on the closet might be an interesting day-lighting strategy for the entire room. Saving on electricity might help us rationalize the cost of the doors.

We still need to detail our interior walls. We contacted Serious Materials about their Eco Rock product which will not become available until July or later. We're not sure about using such a new and untested product, but compared to regular old gypsum drywall it claims to use 80% less energy to produce, use more post-industrial recycled material (no gypsum), be re-usable if removed, inhibit mold better and off-gass less. According to the site, "EcoRock generates 60% less dust, and presents no negative effects of airborne mercury often generated during wallboard production using FGD (recycled) gypsum from coal plants." Sounds pretty good, we'll see about the timing and price point. We also want to visit Earth Source Forest Products in Oakland to check out their extensive inventory of formaldehyde-free plywood and fiber board for cabinetry. We've seen some interesting use of plywood as interior finishing surface which would save us from the dust and time of drywall plastering.