Progress report -- Week 17.5

Jonathan and I were out of town all last week at a coin show, so I have been swamped and not able to post as much. When we got back, the tile had just been laid and I wasn't able to get into the addition to scope it out. So I'm sure that more was done that I just don't know about yet.

Progress accomplished this week:

--painting in garage and garage study finished
--painting begun in addition
--door frames, window frames, and crown molding installed in addition
--handrail installed in garage stairway
--most interior doors hung in addition, except for fancy special order door for bedroom
--tile put down and grouted in garage bathroom
--tile put down and grouted in addition laundry room/foyer area; status of tile in bathroom unclear because I couldn't get in there to see how much has been done
--fence posts for new fence put in
--telephone line rerouted to or through garage
--replacement whirlpool tub has arrived
--design for built-in bookcases in bedroom settled on
--new bed purchased. Jonathan and I decided to leave our current bed in the upstairs bedroom and let Athena use it when she moves in; this way Isaac can inherit her bunk bed, which he is greatly anticipating, and we'll leave his twin bed in our soon to be new dedicated guestroom. Our current bed is a beautiful antique that belonged to Jon's grandmother, quite huge and ornate, but it is also--to put it delicately--a pain in the butt to make and a bit on the shaky side. So we decided to buy a new bedroom set. I had been visiting the local furniture stores to see what they had, when I spied a nice queen-size sleigh bed with leather padding at one store. (Jon also decided he wanted a bed with a padded headboard given his penchant for sitting in bed early in the morning sipping his coffee.) It was priced at $1849, but the floor sample was a clearance item marked down to $875. The only snag is that it had a "SOLD" sign on it, but I am not easily deterred. Looking at the "sold" sign I noticed that it was dated November 1, so I asked the saleslady if it was possible that the customer was never going to consummate the deal and volunteered that we'd be willing to buy it outright in cash right away. She disappeared and after a few minutes came back and told us that she could sell us the bed, and they were also willing to store it in their warehouse until the addition was completed and ready for move-in. So now all we need to do is find a dresser/bedside table set that's a reasonably close match.

Obstacles encountered this week:

--I wasn't crazy about the paint color on the vaulted ceiling of the addition. We had originally asked to have it match the ceiling color of the rest of our house, but for some reason (the greater amount of windows and thus natural light coming in?) it looked much darker/tanner in the addition. So we're going to have the poor painter repaint the ceiling.
--weather has been too cold/snowy/icy (what else is new?), so we are unable to pour the concrete
--my absence and consequent inability to show exactly where I want the fancy trim to go in the shower has slowed tile work in shower

Progress report --- Week 16

Progress accomplished this week:

--Carpentry details on garage study installed (baseboard, windowsills and window frames, doorway frames, doors installed)
--Carpentry details in addition begun
--Several doors in addition installed
--Tile for bathroom delivered; tile work starts Monday. This photo shows samples of the 3" decorative border and the trim piece.



--Painting begun in garage
--Weather cooperated and the masonry work on exterior of garage and addition is finally finished! WOOT!
--Continued working on perplexing leak in chimney that has plagued us since we moved into the house 5 years ago. We've tried everything to fix it, including rebuilding it from ground up. Until now, nothing's done the trick. But Wagner had his men seal it again and check/redo the flashing. He discovered a small crack in one part of the flashing, and fixed it, so maybe, just maybe, the problem is resolved. It didn't appear to leak any with the rain we had last night, so keep your fingers crossed.
--Meeting with concrete man to plan/start paving of ground outside new garage and rework our front walk to be accessible
--Back yard graded
--Sod for back yard put down

These last two steps sound simple, but they probably represent the most visible dramatic progress on the site, and I'm sure it's the step most appreciated by our neighbors. We no longer have the huge dumpster in the back yard and the mountain of dirt excavated for the garage. Wagner had to scramble around to find anybody with viable sod at this time of year, but he got a truckload of it in. He worked feverishly to get it all down yesterday before the heavy rains that were predicted started falling. But now our back yard looks like a back yard (albeit with a monstrous garage plopped down in the middle of it) rather than a construction site. It makes me think that, yes, this renovation *will* eventually be finished! Here's a shot of our new, flat, green back yard, with fence (temporarily) removed, showing the neighbor's shed now located firmly on his--and not our--property. ;-)



Obstacles encountered this week:

--Representative of the whirlpool tub company came out and looked at the tub and deemed it too damaged to repair. We are returning it under warranty and awaiting the replacement.
--During the grading process, the backhoe/bulldozer machine uprooted a tree stump, which pulled the telephone wire off the pole. No phone service. Phone repairman was out here for 3 hours yesterday, during which they discovered all sorts of other problems with the line. It was finally repaired and stayed repaired for, oh, about 12 hours. Noticed this morning the phone service was down once again. They'll send somebody out again tomorrow. *sigh*

Floored once again with indecision

In a previous post I announced that we had finally decided what to put on the garage study floor, namely a very cheap oak laminate that I had found at Lumber Liquidators for something like 78 cents a square foot.

However, the more I looked into it, the more misgivings I had. The customer reviews on the Lumber Liquidators site were all uniformly positive, but I wasn't sure I could trust the site to post any negative reviews. The people on the do-it-yourself forum, on the other hand, were largely disapproving. On top of that, other sources I looked at said that you really need laminate to be at least 8 mm thick to avoid denting and other problems. The inexpensive laminate I was looking at was only 6 mm thick. And more than one source argued that laminate was not a good choice for kitchen areas or anywhere you're likely to have water spills. Hmmm.

So then one day I was walking by the flooring display at Home Depot and saw an ad for a product called Allure by Traffic Master. This was vinyl, but instead of being in big squares that you glue down, it's in the shape of planks like laminate flooring that have little strips that you stick together... no gluing down involved. It looked more realistic than the square vinyl fake wood floor. Best yet, it was unlike any other flooring option I had encountered so far in that it didn't require any special sublayer or floor preparation. You could just plop it right down on our wooden subfloor. That made it the least expensive option we had discovered so far.

So I went home and researched it on the internet. The Home Depot website listed nothing but rave reviews, with the flooring getting very high ratings from all customers. Again, you gotta wonder about the possibility of bias, though. But the other forums also rated it positively, with several landlords saying that they had installed tens of thousands of square feet of the product and had been very pleased with how it held up.

So I told Wagner that I had (*ahem*) changed my mind once again and wanted to get the Allure viny planking for the garage. He picked up a couple of samples pieces and laid it down in the garage. There was a bit of a roadblock when I showed it to Jonathan and the kids, and the color choice I favored (hickory) got overruled by the rest of the family. So I dragged them all to Home Depot where we decided on a light oak color instead.

At this point I thought we were all set to place the order, especially after Wagner told me that he had been able to negotiate a very attractive price on it, when Wagner came to me and said that he had been researching the product and was a bit worried about how it would hold up under changes of temperature and humidity. Apparently there have been reports of the planks separating and curling up off their little glue strips under temperature changes. Hmmm. He said he wanted to ask around a little more, as he's never used that product before and is more used to traditional vinyl stuff that you glue down solidly.



In the mean time, we're having a little debate regarding the stairs to the garage study. The carpenter has finished installing them, and they look great to us as is. But Wagner wanted us to either paint them and put down rubber treads (as the paint will wear off), or put carpet down. Jon and I don't want carpet (too hard to clean), but we also were worried that treads would be hard to clean. And to us the stairs look lovely. But when we proposed that plan to Wagner, instead of him being pleased that we were (finally) cutting expenses by not requiring the stairs to be finished, he objected "But there's different kinds of wood on the stairs! The wood doesn't all match!" We tried to assure him that the lack of feng shui truly didn't offend us, but he got that look on his face again, the look that says "these folks are making a big mistake."

So at this point, we're very much unsettled regarding the garage. Yikes.

Progress report --- Week 15

Progress accomplished this week:

--New high-efficiency gas furnace installed in addition
--Drywall work completed in addition
--Trims and casings for garage and addition selected; trim work begun in garage
--Kitchen repainted
--Protective paper and plastic shielding removed from kitchen; kitchen is now officially COMPLETED, just in time for Christmas dinner, hallelujah!
--Exterior masonry work continued
--Concrete board installed in addition, as prep for laying tile
--Access panels for various electrical and mechanical units installed in addition
--Tile for bathroom ordered. Wagner is a master negotiator and got them to come down on their prices quite a bit.
--Sliding doors for (soon to be former) laundry closet area purchased. We were looking at interior doors for the bedroom when Wagner spotted a section full of clearance items. There stood a set of sliding doors that would fit our laundry area perfectly, and which we needed as we wanted to get rid of the bifold doors that had caused us so much grief by constantly bumping into the door to the addition. The doors were priced at $110, marked down from the original price of $277, which I thought was a spectacular deal. But by the time Wagner was through negotiating with the department manager, he got the whole set, including track work, for $50. I told you he was a master negotiator. ;-)
--Door for bedroom selected and ordered. We're getting a fancy door with a beveled/frosted glass inset. Very attractive, and will help let in natural light from the bedroom to the foyer area.

Obstacles encountered this week:

--Bitter cold temperatures, snowstorm halted all work one day; masonry work has been much delayed
--A light test of some sort revealed that the whirlpool tub did not arrive with an adequate seal or lining or something in two spots. I didn't quite understand what the problem was, but Wagner assured me that it would be taken care of adequately, or we would need to get a replacement tub under warranty.

Progress report --- Week 14

All I can say is: Wow!! Just wow! Wagner warned me that "things will start happening fast now," but I can't get over the transformation. The addition now looks like part of the house (albeit an unpainted, unfurnished part of the house). I'll post a bunch of photos, but I really need a wide-angle lens to show everything off in its glory.

Here's a shot looking into the new shower. You can see the two arched doorways, the first leading into the drying off area, and the second to the shower area. No more squeegee, WOOT!

This is a shot taken from the bedroom looking into the new master bath. The first opening to the left will be the vanity area; the second is where the toilet will be. Shower and whirlpool will be on the right. At the far end is my closet. Note there is a window there... that was the pre-existing window from when this space was our garage, and we decided just to leave it there, in spite of my aversion to windows in closets. ;-) (FYI, the space-age looking yellow thing is a nifty work light Wagner uses... puts off something like 1000 watts of light.)

This is the interior of the bedroom, with the door to Jon's closet at the left and the main door to the bedroom on the right.

Here's a higher shot, attempting to show the vaulted ceilings, but not very effectively. I need that wide-angle lens:

A shot standing from the door to the bedroom looking toward the opposite corner:

Progress accomplished this week:

--Drywall installed in addition
--Brickwork just about finished
--Glass brick windows in master bath installed
--Gutters installed on addition area. Several months before starting the renovation we had put up, at considerable expense, new EverClean gutters that allegedly never, ever need cleaning out. (It probably goes with out saying that Jonathan's and my gutter-cleaning habits are every bit as unreliable as our granite-sealing efforts.) Wagner was able to carefully remove them from the garage and re-use them for the addition.
--First skylight in kitchen removed; new skylight installed. It does a MUCH better job of letting in the light, so I'm glad we went to the effort and expense of swapping it out. We ended up locating it slightly off center so as to necessitate cutting only one room beam instead of four. It looks fine, though:


--Approaching closure/final decisions on tile. Wagner found a new tile store that had a huge number of sample displays up and great selection of trim. I found a new trim piece there that is considerably cheaper than the border I had picked out at Louisville Tile ($8.99 per linear foot compared to $30-something) and looks nearly as nice, so I think I will go with that, and then get the rest of the tile as originally selected.

Obstacles encountered this week:

--Massive indecision on my part regarding humidifier selection. At this point, we're going with the True STEAM, but we're waiting for a callback from the HVAC guys to make sure it will fit okay in the furnace room.

Moisture on the brain

So I have spent WAY too much time the past two days researching humidifiers. The HVAC guys Wagner got estimates from recommended two possible units: a Honeywell True STEAM humidifier, or a Trane evaporative unit. Thanks to my time on the Piano Forum, I knew a little about basic types of humidifiers (pianos need very precise humidity control for a number of reasons), and I had a dim memory of some brands receiving greater praise than others. So I told Wagner I wanted to study the choices before making a decision.

Talk about a headache. While there are plenty of reviews of small portable humdifiers, there are very few objective reviews comparing different whole-house humidifiers. There are plenty of websites discussing individual brands, but they're all biased (published by the company selling the brand), and they all make their own particular brand sound like the be-all and end-all of humidifiers. Rather more troubling was the fact that I could find next to nothing about Trane humidifiers.

On the other hand, the True STEAM was getting rave reviews from a number of corners, including various HVAC and do-it-yourself forums. Apparently it is very effective because it heats water directly into steam, and thus converts essentially 100% of the water that flows through into humidity, as opposed to the evaporative type of humidifiers, which run water through a pad and thus as much as 2/3 of the water just goes straight down the drain. (This type in turn is infinitely better than the old-fashioned drum type of humidifier, which rotates a spinning pad on a drum through a standing pool of water and is thus prone to all sorts of bacteria and mold problems. Whatever you do, don't buy one of those types.)

The snag is that the True STEAM is a fairly new unit, introduced only in the past year or so, and thus with not much of a track record for longevity or reliability, and it also cost twice as much as the Trane. I also could find only one post talking about the cost of running the unit, and it mentioned that it raised their electricity bill by about $40 a month. That adds up to a lot over time.

But with the internet remaining scarily mute on the Trane, I didn't know if I wanted to spring for it. On the other hand, the Piano Forum (and other places which presumably knew more about humidifiers) also raved about the Aprilaire or Desert Spring units (both evaporative types). Of course neither of those were offered by the HVAC people we were having doing the furnace.

Then I noticed buried in some forum a post which asserted that Trane was the same as Aprilaire. Huh. I called the Aprilaire people and spoke to a VERY nice and helpful young man who was reluctant to confirm that they were identical but did confirm that Aprilaire's parent company also manufactures the Trane unit. I pressed him a bit on the issue, and he said that the main units were probably the same and that the main difference would be in how they were packaged (e.g., the humidistat supplied with it, etc.)

At that point I was leaning toward the Trane/Aprilaire, when I mentioned we were getting a high efficiency gas furnace for the addition. In that case, he said, we strongly recommend that you connect the humidifier to a hot water line. Because the furnace is so efficient, it doesn't run as much, and therefore the humidifier isn't operating enough. Using the hot water line would help it humidify better during the shorter time it was running. This, I knew, could be a big snag, because Wagner had only (thus far) run a cold water line over to the furnace room.

Uh-oh.

So then I called the HVAC people and asked them about it. I spoke with the technician who is installing our furnace, and I spoke with the owner of the company himself. They both said that while both humidifiers were nice, they preferred the True STEAM. I mentioned the operating cost issue, and the owner said that he had installed three of the units in his own house and did not notice a big change in his electric bill. I didn't know what to make of that. He wouldn't lie to me (would he?), but he definitely had a vested interest in selling me the more expensive unit.

Grapple grapple. So then I decided to go to the horse's mouth and call Honeywell directly and ask them how much their units cost to run. And here is where I get all irritated. Any Honeywell execs reading this, you should know this: Your customer service sucks. First, your website is hard to navigate, with some pages slow to load or resulting in the dreaded Error 404 (page not found) message. Worse, there is no customer service phone number posted under your contact information. There's just an email form where you can submit a question, but when I tried to do that and clicked "send," nothing happened.

Finally, I found a pdf brochure for the True STEAM linked through the site, and way at the bottom of the brochure in tiny 4 pt. font was a customer phone number. Heh heh. I dialed it, rubbing my hands and cackling evilly. But first I had to navigate three separate menus before I even got to the recorded voice that told me that my wait time "might exceed ten minutes." Then I was treated to a scratchy, poor quality audio recording of an instrumental version of "You Light Up My Life." I'm sorry, but the Honeywell person who designed that hold tape should be the first casualty of the economic downturn.

Finally, finally, I talk to a real person... who, judging by his accent, was sitting in a large call center in India. Before I can even start my question, he asks me for my telephone number, name, zip code, and shoe size. Just joking about that last one, but I finally got all snitty and asked "Why do you need to know all that?" "We want to ensure our call quality," was his reply.

Finally I got to ask my question: What is the typical operating cost of the True STEAM system? "Oh, I'm sorry, ma'am," he replied, "I can't discuss that. I can only talk about the various features of our products." This stumped me momentarily until I came up with a clever rejoinder: "Hmmm.... well, it occurs to me that the typical operating cost of your unit IS in fact a feature of your product."

"I'm sorry, ma'am, but it is impossible to predict how much it will cost to run. Say that I am in Texas. ['fat chance of that,' I think to myself] The cost of electricity and the weather conditions will make the operating cost of the True STEAM unit very different than what you might pay."

I begged him to just give me a ballpark range... was it a dollar or two a month? Forty dollars like the sole mention of it that I found? Or 100 dollars a month? He stubbornly refused to budge, and I ended the call much disgruntled.

So, at this point I'm leaning toward the True STEAM unit, simply because I do find the literature compelling and believe the people who say that it is more effective. I was finally swayed by something the HVAC company guy said, which is that moist air will migrate toward dry air, so the new humidifier unit should also help out with the rest of the house... and our current humidifiers do not do a great job of keeping the humidity high enough in the winter. The final straw was when he casually asked, "Say, didn't Mr. Wagner say you have a piano you were concerned about? This True STEAM would be better protection for it."

I am fiercely protective about my piano, so even if it costs more to install and run, I guess I'll go for the better unit. Perhaps growing weary of my changing my mind every couple of hours, Wagner told me to "think it over tonight" and let him know for sure tomorrow morning.

Progress report -- Week 13

Progress accomplished this week:

--Most of the interior framing/carpentry work for addition finished
--Insulation installed in garage
--Installation of insulation in addition started
--Electrical panel relocated
--HVAC inspection passed
--Brick work continues (slowly)
--Tile layout for bathroom finalized
--Drywall in furnace room put up
--Whirlpool tub installed

Obstacles encountered this week:

--Bitter cold weather has made it impossible most days to lay brick
--Frame for whirlpool tub initially made too wide. We had decided not to have steps leading up to the tub, because it was only 21" off the ground and we thought we could just step into it easily. But the first frame built for it was too wide, and Wagner feared the building inspector wouldn't approve it without a step. So we got the carpenter back in today and he will cut it back.

This should be an exciting week, as most if not all of the drywall in the addition will be put up and then it will start looking like part of a house rather than a construction site. We're supposed to get an inch of rain today, though, so Wagner wants to wait until the rain is done, just to make sure there are no leaks in the addition before putting up drywall.