Painting outside and inside

The outside of the house is all painted. Luckily the weather was warm enough last week to finish up! The stone work around the garage is all finished as well. What do you think of the final color choice? We changed at the last minute to Dry Dock, which was a less pink of the two choices...glad we did. The house looks plenty pinkish in the late afternoon sun.

The interior doors were delivered...soon to be installed. 

Now on to the tougher decisions of inside paint colors.

 

We first chose three colors that were off-white/tan. The lightest color on the wall is one of those three...the others looked nearly identical! Next we went much darker and tried the darkest two colors on the wall. We were afraid that colors this dark would make the smaller rooms feel too small. So we finally compromised on the second lightest tan color. We think it will be lighter than the cherry cabinets and the maple floor, but darker than the white ceilings. If we don't like it, we can always paint over it in a couple of years! Apparently 6 different test samples isn't that bad...some people go through many more according to the painter.

We have heat!

The gypcrete is in and the heat is on. Time to pay for two gas bills now! An inch and a half of gypcrete covers the PEX tubing and the wooden sleepers. The house was quite humid for a few days after the gypcrete was poured. We opened the windows and turned on the heat to help dry the gypcrete. The house sure feels much warmer now!

Here's the utility room downstairs in the garage. You can see the wall-mount boiler and the hot water heater. You'll have to ask Andy for more details than that! 

 

All of the kitchen and bathroom cabinets have been delivered and are ready to install. Just need the gypcrete to cure and the walls to be painted!

One project we attempted this weekend was to install the fireplace panels. The unit comes with 4 pre-grouted fire brick panels. Andy was hard at work reading the directions. Unfortunately one of the panels had a crack in it, so we have to have it replaced before we can finish the installation. We did pick out a large piece of juniper wood for the mantle...will look neat when it's all sanded!

Front yard taking shape

Landscaping looks great! We are always impressed with how hard those guys work. Looks like they are probably wrapping up for the winter and will finish the rest of the details in the spring when we start to think about plants and such. Just rocks for the winter! The irrigation system is roughed in and we have hills and rivers to help control the drainage. We've lucked out with a pretty mild November so they were able to get a bunch of work done.

 

 

The big coil of plastic tube is the water line coming from the house. The plumber needs to get this hooked up to our water meter (in the little concrete box by the sidewalk) soon so that we can have water before the snow covers everything! 

 

We absolutely love the flagstone stairs. They used some of the flat malapai rock for the risers and then big pieces of Flagstone from Ash Fork for the treads. Our neighbor said that stairs are nice so that people don't have to walk up the steep driveway slope...plus they add some interest to the massive slab of concrete!

They nicely graded the left side of the driveway. We'll see how the drainage is this winter and add some crushed rock in the spring to help contain the dirt. 

The driveway is all clean and ready to be sealed!

Hydronic Radiant Heating

Well one of our big desires for the house was to have hydronic radiant floor heat instead of forced air. Flagstaff gets pretty cold in the winter; where we live now has forced air, which we've learned is an expensive way to heat a big house with 2 stories and the floors are always freezing cold because it's on a slab. So we decided to make sure we could have the in-floor heat in the house we're building. Andy says the future dog will love it! Plus we didn't leave any room for ducts when we designed the floor plan! Since Flagstaff doesn't get overly hot during the summer, we are not putting in air conditioning. Folks from Phoenix seem to feel they need to have air conditioning in their Flagstaff houses, but I'd say the majority of people don't have it. So that's another reason that we don't need ducts.

In the garage we have a small utility room that houses the boiler and domestic hot water tank. The future controls and equipment for the driveway snow melt system will eventually be housed here as well. The hot water from the boiler is pumped to several manifolds throughout the house which control the loops of water going to the different heating zones. The guest bedroom, office and jack and jill bathroom are on one loop. The great room, kitchen, laundry room and powder room are on a second loop. The master suite is one the third loop. The game room/shop downstairs is on the fourth loop (these tubes were put in when the garage slab was poured).

Ted nicely arranged and installed all of the equipment in the boiler room and the manifolds in the ceiling locations. Next Alan the plumber and his sons installed the 1/2" PEX tubing that takes the water to and from the manifolds to heat the rooms. The tubes are placed at ~12" on center. Near windows and doors, the tubes are run closer together to allow for extra heating in the drafty areas.The tubes are stapled to the sub-floor. Ted did a pressure test to make sure we didn't have any leaks.

 

Gypcrete, which is a lightweight concrete product, will be poured on top of the tubes to provide the large thermal mass to carry the heat throughout the room. The gypcrete and tubes add a total of 1.5" height above the subfloor (which the builder planned for with double sill plates so that our ceilings don't feel lower!) Apparently gypcrete is used often in commercial and multifamily construction as a sound barrier between floors. So maybe Andy's woodworking equipment downstairs won't be that loud upstairs!

Tile can be put down on top of the gypcrete, but hardwood is a little more challenging since you can't easily nail into the gypcrete. So for the great room and the bedrooms we had to put down strips of wood (called sleepers) in between the rows of tubing to have a place to nail the hardwood. We cut all of these boards to length and glued and screwed them down to the sub-floor. When the gypcrete is poured, it will be leveled to the top of these 2x2s so everything is flush. Hopefully we can still see the tops of the sleepers so that we know where to nail! We also plan to glue the hardwood floor so that we don't have problems with imperfect sleeper placement.

 

 

The gypcrete should go in on Monday!