Landscaping

Landscaping around our house was moderately difficult due to the long, narrow lot layout and the steep slope. To help overcome these challenges, we hired a professional landscape architect. Our builder, Yuval, recommended ANR Landscape Design. Our basic request was something fairly low-maintenance which used native plants when possible. Anri came up with a great design that we are very happy with.

There did end up being a few challenges during the design process. The biggest one was providing access to utilities. Our front yard has a lot of utility boxes and lines running under the ground. The backyard has a drainage line running across it. We ended up rearranging the backyard, and changing a lot of the retaining walls from poured concrete to corten steel or basic stacked blocks so that there would be less cost and work if access was ever needed to the underground lines.

Front Yard

The front yard is what we present to the street, so we want it to look nice. It needs to have a pathway from the sidewalk to the front door that is distinct from the public trail on the side of our property. It also needs to accommodate the slope of the yard. With the great eastern and southern exposure here, the front yard is the prime place for growing vegetables.

The resulting design uses several retaining walls to provide a few terraces, including a level area for a vegetable bed. A simple stone path leads from the sidewalk down to our entry. Around the edges, larger bushes and a tree provide some privacy and shield some of the utility boxes from sight. Different types of ornamental grasses provide color variety in different sections. Strawberry and thyme provide low maintenance ground-cover for the remaining space.

The vegetable area has a raised bed with a separate drip sprinkler system. We decided to use hazelnut shells for a softer ground cover than gravel. We also added extra stepping stones in this area to mark and protect an underground utility that is very near the surface. This area turned out nicely; but with a new baby we aren't actually growing any vegetables this year!

The entry needs to be screened to provide some privacy (especially with package deliveries) without blocking access to the trail next to our house. A simple wood-slat fence with a gate in the middle works well, taking material cues from other parts of our house.

We considered adding a fence and gate at the sidewalk. We later decided those probably weren't necessary, since the landscaping provides a clear division between the walkway to our front door and the public trail down the hill.

Back Yard

The backyard had already been leveled out with a small retaining wall, so it was the perfect place to have some more interactive space. We want a bit of grass for kids to play in and some seating for enjoying the outdoors. Since there is a public trail to the south, we need a screen to provide some privacy.

A seating area in the south-east corner was built in a style matching our decks. This surrounds a small concrete firepit powered by propane. Next to this, in the shade under the main deck is a rock garden with just a few plants. A set of concrete steps connects the backdoor to the seating area. Most of the rest of the yard is grass.The outer edge has some bushes and ornamental grasses to separate the lawn from the retaining wall. A wood-slat fence matching the one in the front provides privacy along the south edge. The north part of the backyard has more ornamental plants and a tree, with a gravel trail leading to the stairs up the north side of the house.

Side Yards

The side yards have the steepest slope to deal with, so their designs were primarily based around terraces with some basic plants.

The south side has a narrow section of wood-supported terraces. There wasn't a lot of space between the public trail and the edge of our house, so this was the most reasonable solution. Some bushes and bamboo are planted here to provide a bit of a screen from the trail.

Shade-loving plants were added to the existing terraces along the north side. The terraces and the stairs they line were added earlier. On the north edge of the driveway, we used the wood-slat fence once more to build a small enclosure for our garbage cans. This leaves them easily accessible, but slightly obscured, and out-of-the-way of anything else.

Patterns

There are a lot of patterns around designing outdoor spaces and gardens. Here are some of the ones we used, and how they shaped our design.

Positive Outdoor Space (106)

• Problem: Outdoor spaces which are merely "left over" between buildings will, in general, not be used.
• Therefore: Make all the outdoor spaces which surround and lie between your buildings positive. Give each one some degree of enclosure; surround each space with wings of buildings, trees, hedges, fences, arcades, and trellised walks, until it becomes an entity with positive quality and does not spill out indefinitely around corners.
• In our yard: We have two main areas for gathering, which is around the vegetable bed in the front yard, and most of the backyard. The vegetable bed area is defined by the retaining walls around it, along with a surface of hazelnut shells instead of dirt. The backyard is defined by a fence on top of a retaining wall, the house, and bushes around the edge of the lawn.

Half-Hidden Garden (111)

• Problem: If a garden is too close to the street, people won't use it because it isn't private enough. But if it is too far from the street, then it won't be used either, because it is too isolated.
• Therefore: Do not place the garden fully in front of the house, nor fully to the back. Instead, place it in some kind of half-way position, side-by-side with the house, in a position which is half-hidden from the street, and half-exposed.
• In our yard: We don't really have a side yard to use in such a way. But with a public trail going down the side of our house, the backyard ended up being a half-hidden garden, with some shelter from the trail, but some exposure, too.

Hierarchy of Open Space (114)

• Problem: Outdoors, people always try to find a spot where they can have their backs protected, looking out toward some larger opening, beyond the space immediately in front of them.
• Therefore: Whatever space you are shaping—whether it is a garden, terrace, street, park, public outdoor room, or courtyard, make sure of two things. First, make at least one smaller space, which looks into it and forms a natural back for it. Second, place it, and its openings, so that it looks into at least one larger space. When you have done this, every outdoor space will have a natural "back"; and every person who takes up the natural position, with his back to this "back", will be looking out toward some larger distant view.
• In our yard: For us this mainly applies in the backyard. The sitting area with bench has a natural back against the retaining wall, and looks out onto the lawn. The lawn then looks out onto the wilderness around our house, and the distant view.

Terraced Slope (169)

• Problem: On sloping land, erosion caused by run off can kill the soil. It also creates uneven distribution of rainwater over the land, which naturally does less for plant life than it could if it were evenly distributed.
• Therefore: On all land which slopes—in fields, in parks, in public gardens, even in the private gardens around a house—make a system of terraces and bunds which follow the contour lines. Make them by building low walls along the contour lines, and then backfilling them with earth to form the terraces. There is no reason why the building itself should fit into the terraces—it can comfortably cross terrace lines.
• In our yard: This was an obvious one for us. Both sides of the house plus the front yard use terraces to provide flatter areas for landscaping and planting.

Garden Growing Wild (172)

• Problem: A garden which grows true to its own laws is not a wilderness, yet not entirely artificial either.
• Therefore: Grow grasses, mosses, bushes, flowers, and trees in a way which comes close to the way they occur in nature: intermingled, without barriers between them, without bare earth, without formal flower beds, and with all the boundaries and edges made in rough stone and brick and wood which becomes part of the natural growth.
• In our yard: We followed this pretty well, with most plants mixed together. We especially used different ground covers with larger plants like ornamental grasses and shrubs. The main boundaries we have are the retaining walls and a bit of hardscape to walk on.

Garden Wall (173)

• Problem: Gardens and small public parks don't give enough relief from noise unless they are well protected
• Therefore: Form some kind of enclosure to protect the interior of a quiet garden from the sights and sounds of passing traffic. If it is a large garden or a park, the enclosure can be soft, can include bushes, trees, slopes, and so on. The smaller the garden, however, the harder and more definite the enclosure must become. In a very small garden, form the enclosure with buildings or walls; even hedges and fences will not be enough to keep out sound.
• In our yard: The backyard is enclosed by the building on the east side, and a retaining wall plus fence on the south side. The north side faces our neighbor, and the west side wilderness down the hill from us, so the busy sides are protected. Even the trail isn't that busy, so just a fence should be enough protection for it.

Vegetable Garden (177)

• Problem: In a healthy town every family can grow vegetables for itself. The time is past to think of this as a hobby for enthusiasts; it is a fundamental part of human life.
• Therefore: Set aside one piece of land either in the private garden or on common land as a vegetable garden. About one-tenth of an acre is needed for each family of four. Make sure the vegetable garden is in a sunny place and central to all the households it serves. Fence it in and build a small storage shed for gardening tools beside it.
• In our yard: We are starting small for this one. We do have a dedicated vegetable bed that is protected and very sunny. In the future, we may convert other areas, especially the south side terraces into vegetable beds, too. We also have a space under the house we can enclose to make a nice shed for tools.

Sitting Wall (243)

• Problem: In many places walls and fences between outdoor spaces are too high; but no boundary at all does injustice to the subtlety of the divisions between the spaces.
• Therefore: Surround any natural outdoor area, and make minor boundaries between outdoor areas with low walls, about 16 inches high, and wide enough to sit on, at least 12 inches wide.
• In our yard: We didn't make every division a sitting wall, but we do have a couple good ones. The retaining wall above the vegetable bed uses some interesting natural stone blocks, and is just about the right size for sitting on. The standard garden blocks for the lower retaining wall between our backyard and the wilderness also form a nice sitting wall if you want your back to the cultured yard, and to look out on the wild plants nearby.

Overall, we're quite happy with how things turned out. It ended up being a long project, with a lot of stages to it. But we are excited to see the plants spread out and mature into a more established landscape.

Decks and Green Roof

Decks and patios can be just as important to a house as the main rooms. If properly designed, they too act as rooms of the house. Like interior rooms, they should connect logically to the rest of the house, and to attract people to them, they must be spacious and laid out properly.

The obvious place for a deck is outside the living room to the west. It is easily accessible from the main floor and looks out towards the view. We made it about the same size as the living room, nestled into the corner of the stair tower.

The second natural deck location is the roof of the garage. This temptingly large surface is roughly level with the second floor. Following the Roof Garden pattern, the space is divided into a green roof and a deck. A built in bench provides a nice sitting space. The deck portion was designed lower than the green roof, giving a sense of sitting in the greenery.

Several patterns helped guide our design:

Outdoor Room (163)

• Problem: A garden is the place for lying in the grass, swinging, croquet, growing flowers, throwing a ball for the dog. But there is another way of being outdoors: and its needs are not met by the garden at all.
• Therefore: Build a place outdoors which has so much enclosure round it, that it takes on the feeling of a room, even though it is open to the sky. To do this, define it at the corners with columns, perhaps roof it partially with a trellis or a sliding canvas roof, and create "walls" around it, with fences, sitting walls, screens, hedges, or the exterior walls of the building itself.
• In our home: Both of our decks are designed as outdoor rooms. The main deck mirrors the living room in position and size. It has a railing that feels comfortably enclosing, but still leaves a connection to the wider outdoors. Its placement gives it some of the best views in the house, while directly connecting it to the main social spaces. It will be easy and attractive to move from the living room to the deck when the weather allows. It has a natural gas outlet available so we can use a grill out there in the future.
  
  The upper deck is a private room. It is enclosed by the building wall on one side and the back of the bench on the other. It has a bit of roof overhang to enclose it, too. The location off of the master bathroom and laundry room makes it easily accessible for the family. The bench and green roof make it an attractive place to spend time.

Six-Foot Balcony (167)

• Problem: Balconies and porches which are less than six feet deep are hardly every used.
• Therefore: Whenever you build a balcony, a porch, a gallery, or a terrace always make it at least six feet deep. It possible, recess at least a part of it into the building so that it is not cantilevered out and separated from the building by a simple line, and enclose it partially.
• In our home: The main deck off the living room is about the same size of our living room. It sits in two corners of the house to achieve a recessed feel.
  
  The upper deck is wider but not as deep as the lower deck. It is about 10' deep, including the bench. Being above the garage, it feels tightly attached to the rest of the building.
  
  

Roof Garden (118)

• Problem: A vast part of the earth's surface, in a town, consists of roofs. Couple this with the fact that the total area of a town which can be exposed to the sun is finite, and you will realize that it is natural, and indeed essential, to make roofs which take advantage of the sun and air.
• Therefore: Make parts of almost every roof system usable as roof gardens. Make these parts flat, perhaps terraced for planting, with places to sit and sleep, private places. Place the roof gardens at various stories, and always make it possible to walk directly out onto the roof garden from some lived-in part of the building.
• In our home: The biggest accessible roof space in our house is above the garage. We split that into a roof garden and a deck. The roof garden is a green roof system from GreenFeathers. Plants are grown in modules at the company's nursery for several months. Once the plants are established, they are transported to our house. The modules are placed on the roof, and the liners are removed to connect the sections together. It is designed for our climate and should need almost no maintenance. During the hottest days of summer it will need a bit of hand-watering; but otherwise will take care of itself. We have the largest green roof in the development so far, and we went with some deeper modules. The deeper modules allow larger plants to grow, including some that will turn in to small bushes. There are a variety of plants to provide variation in height, color, and bloom time. The layout includes some terra cotta stones to provide access to all parts of the garden.
  
  The deck next to the green roof provides a sitting (and even sleeping) space. It feels tightly integrated with the plants, placing a garden at your back as you sit on the bench.
  
  The other major part of our roof is the butterfly top. It is not so easily accessible, so we did not add a deck or garden up there. To make it potentially usable space in the future, we ran a conduit from the electrical box to the roof. This will allow us to easily add solar panels on the roof when we desire.

From layout, we moved to materials. Ipe is a popular wood for decks. It is weather resistant, and turns a silvery color over time. Yuval prefers batu. It is also weather resistant, cheaper than ipe, and has a rich red color. The warm color provides a contrast to the cool colors of our house, and Seattle's typical cool, cloudy weather.


No deck is complete without a railing — no safe deck, at least. Like the other houses, we chose a slatted design using the batu. The vertical posts are powder-coated steel. Originally we considered stainless steel. Eventually, we decided to use a darker color to match the interior window trim. That helps to make the posts disappear and lets attention be drawn to the view. For similar reasons, we went with a horizontal strip of batu on the top of the railing instead of a cylindrical steel tube.


We're happy with how the decks and green roof turned out. They are warm, comfortable, and inviting places. We should make good use of both decks (when the weather allows).

Front Door

The front door doesn't need to be particularly special for an entry to be successful. It needs to be of good quality; it needs to be visually set apart; but it doesn't need to be elaborate.

That said, we wanted our front door to be something special. We wanted it to set the tone for the rest of the house: refined, simple, elegant, well designed, natural. Like the other houses in our development, we had our door designed by Christopher Lindsley, a local craftsman (who, with the commission of several dining room tables and a number of other pieces, is quickly becoming the woodworker for our development).

Designing a door is an odd process. Because of the time it takes to create the piece, and because it is nice to have a door on the house by the time you start leaving valuables inside, door design starts before a lot of the other decisions have been made. The door should set the tone of the house, but when we started designing the door, we only had a high level idea of what that tone would be.

Our first concept played upon the L-shape motif that we used on our stair tower. We envisioned something with two L's in smoky glass in a field of dark and driftwood grey wood. This initial concept had some problems. In addition to not leaving a good spot for a door handle, it felt more geometric than we wanted.

Chris talked us out of this basic concept, but we did like some of the basic ideas: light and dark contrast and a sense of flow and motion. Chris and Yuval worked with us to shape this into a couple of different designs. One, shown below, used a shifting stair step to give a sense of dynamic flow. Another option really built on the "tetris piece" theme of our initial concept and involved a lot of different sized pieces covering the door. Both of these could have been quite striking, but we eventually went a different direction. These ideas were neat, but they didn't seem quite right. Plus, when it came down to it, finding the right combination of wood to balance the sense of dynamism and simplicity was difficult. Even a single variety of wood has such variety in color and grain that combining that variation with a lot of small pieces became noisy.

We were somewhat stuck at this point. Our second design meeting ended at something of an impasse. Everyone liked different parts of different ideas, but nothing really captured our imagination. Fortunately, before our third meeting, Chris had an inspiration which took our door in a completely different dimension.

Our final design combines a simple but weighty door with a substantial surround and deep casing to evoke (but not slavishly copy) a Japanese temple gateway. The strong horizontal line of the fascia enhances that effect. The crisp but natural design evokes the aesthetic we use throughout the house with the woods providing a preview of the materials that will be encountered inside.

Eventually, the surround will be stained dark to increase the contrast with the door (the sides of the surround already are).

The downside of this design is that we gave up a bit of functionality for aesthetics (in that sense, the door isn't representative; usually we drop aesthetics before functionality). Notice the complete lack of windows by the entry. Entry windows are great for letting you take a peak out when someone comes by (is it an unwelcome solicitor?). They are also something of a security feature. In the end, we decided it was something we could live without to get the look we desired.

From the inside, the door looks more standard. The white oak door is surrounded by unstained white oak casing and adorned with a simple dark bronze handle. To add more interest, we choose to use a piece of white oak with some personality.


Overall, we are really happy with the way our door turned out. Later, we'll look at how it fits into the rest of the entry sequence.

Exterior Design and Colors

The exterior is finally painted, and other than a few touch-ups, the exterior design and color is fully finished. Let's compare what we ended up with to our original plan and inspirations.



This picture gives the best evidence of the look we were trying to achieve. The garage has larger panels, and the dark grey stands in contrast to the light grey lap siding on the rest of the house. Details such as the windows, roof fascia, and deck edging, are in a dark color to provide an accent.

The charcoal frame of the windows was the first piece in place. Those were ordered when construction started, and installed back in February.


The fascia around the edge of the roof was installed in April and May. We were limited by the colors available in the metal, so we decided on a dark bronze. It was just shy of black to avoid too stark of an accent, with just a touch of warmth from the bronze.

Unfortunately, this didn't quite work out. The dark color of the metal highlighted the flex and imperfections in the metal due to the height of the fascia. After some trials of different installation techniques and different materials, the roofing contractor decided to use a thicker metal. This cut down on the warp and flex of the metal, giving a smoother look. However, the colors in this metal were different than our original colors! The fascia ended up with more brown in it, as an espresso color.

At the time, we decided this would be acceptable, as the color was not directly next to the charcoal of the window frames.

The paint colors are the largest applications of color and really define the look of the house. 'Dark grey' and 'light grey' and not specific — there are thousands of varieties of grey in all different shades. Colors look different under different light and against different colors. Not only do we have the window trim and the fascia to compare against, but we have the reddish wood on the deck, and the neighboring houses. The house directly next to ours has a blue theme, while the first house has a bit more of a bluish-grey style; but the house across from ours (which is not painted yet) is aiming for more of a brown/cream palette.

In our original design meetings, well before construction had started, we had picked out a couple of candidate pairs of colors. One was a bit cooler, and the other was a bit warmer, but they were fairly close together. These were not chosen under realistic conditions; the samples were small and the light artificial. Once we painted these on some pieces of siding to compare against the window trim, deck wood, and neighboring houses, it was clear neither pair were right for us. The cooler pair was noticeably blue against the window and decking. The warmer pair was noticeably brown against the other houses (in fact, one of the shades matched the dry dirt around the house rather well).

We took another look, and came up with two more palettes. The first was Dovetail and Dorian Gray. The second pair was Attitude Gray and Unusual Gray. The Dovetail/Dorian pair was a touch warmer, and was a good match for the existing colors. However, it matched a bit too closely, and ended up looking bland.

The Attitude/Unusual pair has a bit of a green undertone. It works with the rest of the colors, but gives a more interesting look. The green pairs well with the trees and foliage around the house, but the colors are still grey enough to appear as such to the casual observer.



The surprise came once the paint was applied. The colors look good, and we're pleased with them. However, there is large variability in how the color is perceived. In bright sun, the light color is a nice light shade of grey, almost a bit cream-colored; while the darker color has a noticeable green tint.



In shadow, the lighter color darkens up noticeably, but gains a bit more green.



Right next to each other with some sun, the lighter color gains a touch of blue.



Overall, a bit more contrast between the colors in the shade would've been nice (as shown by our initial inspiration picture), since Seattle isn't known for its abundance of sun.

The other problem at this point is the fascia. It is noticeably browner, especially when compared to the various accents painted to match the window trim.



Ultimately we think it will be OK, but we're tweaking the colors near the entry to prevent too harsh a comparison between the various shades.

At this point, the exterior of the building is largely done. There are still some details left — deck rails, stain around the door, a little more trim paint — but after that, it will be more or less in its final shape!

Dirt-moving and Inspections

Not a lot of interior work was done last week. Rough-in is nearly finished, so time on site was filled by inspections and corrections. Outside, more siding was added, the decks are closer to being finished, and dirt moving for landscaping was started.

More electrical work was done — in theory, but not in practice, the last of it. The electrical panel was labeled, and the connection to the main service is nearly ready to go. We asked for a small correction in the media room, and a larger circuit put in for the kitchen for an electric-powered stove. Temporary circuits need to be added for space heaters to dry out the interior before drywall. This will all happen this week. However, the electrical inspection was approved, along with most other rough-in inspections. Mechanical required a small correction around the fireplace, but everything else that was ready has been approved. The only remaining inspection is for framing, which requires some work from the insulation installer this week.



More siding was installed on last week, including the lower south side, the north side of the garage, paneling around the stair tower door, and some paneling around the living room windows.



Nicer weather provided an opportunity for more progress on the deck. The living room deck was evened out, sanded, and is now ready for the finishing stain. The upper deck was completely finished, including staining. The wood has darkened and is a richer color now. The finish looks uneven in the picture because it was still drying.



The most important work last week was dirt-moving. The entry-way was filled in with dirt and can now serve it's stated purpose of letting people enter. The driveway was smoothed out, so it can now support a concrete truck pouring the slab for the garage floor. The front yard in general has been leveled, and prepped for hardscape and landscape. The area between our house and the neighbor's is being prepped for landscaping (which has been designed). Finally, our backyard has been smoothed.



The camera wasn't pointed quite low enough to capture the dirt being moved, but you can see the movement of the excavator. The end of the week shows the finishing work being done on the rooftop deck.



Poplar has been delivered for the windowsills, which will go in soon (before the drywall). Fire breaks (to keep fire from spreading in the walls) need to be put in this week, then the framing inspection can happen. Now that the entry has been filled in with dirt, the entrance through the garage can be sealed up, and a blower can be put on the front door to find and seal any leaks in the envelope of the house.

Siding and Wiring Conduits

Last week mostly saw work on the exterior siding for the house. The electrician came by for just a bit to work on some of the last details. However, a few more questions came up, so the electrical work wasn't quite finished last week.

Quite a bit of the lap siding was installed, including the north side, upper level on the east side, the north-west side, the upper south-west side, and the upper south side.



We acquired the exterior wall washer light we're going to use on the west side of the house at night. We tested it out one evening after dark, and it should do a good job highlighting our house.



The last major piece of wiring (I believe) was getting conduit for future cabling run. The endpoints are in the living room, kitchen, office, master dressing, and second bedrooms. These run down into the crawlspace, except for the office, which runs directly into the server closet. The server closet then has a single conduit that runs into the crawlspace. The media room has a conduit that runs from the closet up to the projector mount to send video up there.



I spent some time exploring the crawlspaces under our house. The crawlspace is quite generous, and there are plenty of pipes, ducts, and wires running under there. The space is large enough that we added some stub points for lights. Under the garage you can follow the electrical wiring back to the central electrical panel.



The timelapse shows the siding installation (the work later in the week was covered by a blue tarp to protect from the rain). You can catch a brief glimpse of snow falling Tuesday morning.



Next should see more work on the siding. We are hoping to have the inspections finished up soon; maybe this week if we are lucky.

Electrical Wiring, Exterior Finishing

This week saw more good progress on both the interior and exterior. The electrical wiring is nearly complete. Some exterior finishes, including siding, exterior soffits, and the rear deck all saw work done on them.

For electrical wiring, the interior line voltage work (lights, switches, electrical outlets, and a big, beefy cable for an electric car charger in the garage) is nearly completed. There might still be a few details left, but not much at all. The majority of the data wiring was completed, with Ethernet, cable, phone, and low-voltage for security or home automation run throughout the house, and speaker wire plus a bit of subwoofer coax cable run in the media room. There is still some wire that needs to be run for exterior lighting and electrical outlets, and then a few conduits for future data wiring and media room wiring need to be run. Those should be complete within a few days, and then the electrical inspection can be done.



The fireplace and gas connection on the back deck were installed this last week. The fireplace has been mostly covered up to protect it, but since part of the cardboard was detached, we took the opportunity to get a picture of it.



Some ductwork for the HRV unit was added.

Some of the exterior finish work was started last week, too. The HardiePlank and HardiePanel siding was delivered Monday morning. The panels were put up on the stair tower during the week.



It is not painted, and there may be some other details in the channels between the boards to do, but it is starting to give a feel for what the finished house will look like. The HardiePanel is being used for the lower exterior soffit, and the bit of that was installed. The upper exterior soffit was installed using a knotty cedar.



The flooring of the back deck was laid down on Friday. It isn't fully finished, but looks quite nice already, especially when it gets wet.



We finally moved the camera to a position right in front of the house. It should be able to capture all the upcoming work on the entryway, siding installation, along with all the general activity of people moving around during the day.



Next week should see electrical finished, and some inspections done. Once all the rough-in inspections are done, insulation can go in; but we don't expect that to happen this coming week. Siding and/or deck work will probably continue on the exterior. The next big piece outside will be getting the entry foundation backfilled and the driveway filled in for better support. Once you can actually walk in through the front door, the missing panel in the garage will be filled in, and the house can be sealed up and tested for leaks. Then the garage can be cleared out, and the cement slab poured in there, which will allow installation of the hot water heater. We're not quite sure on the timing of all that, though, because a bit of landscape design needs to be done on the north side of our house (south side of the neighbor's), so that all the dirt-moving can be done at once.

Lights and a Deck

This was another exciting week of work on the house. Electrical was started, including a lot of the lighting layout; and the rooftop deck was framed and finished.

Electrical wiring was started on Monday, and a lot of progress was made. One of the first steps was placing all the can lights so we could approve the positions before they were wired. We're using 6" cans in most of the house, and 4" cans upstairs (they have better sealing than the larger ones, so they won't lose as much heat through the roof) and in a few places downstairs that we want to highlight. The electrician started placing mount points for lights such as pendants and sconces, electrical outlet boxes, light switch boxes, and tying it all to the central electrical panel.



On the exterior, the deck part of our rooftop deck was built this week. The frame for the bench and under-floor was put together earlier in the week, and then the batu planks were put in place at the end of the week. There's probably still some finishing (sanding, weatherproofing/oil/sealant of some manner), but it already looks really good!



The timelapse video has a few interesting points: first the bench frame above the garage goes up, then the garage window followed by the master dressing windows are installed (the final windows in the house), and then the batu planks on the deck wrap around the bench.



The monthly summary shows the vapor shield and foam being installed, along with the windows and upstairs doors.



More wiring will be happening next week, maybe including data wiring. The fireplace was delivered, and the space has been prepped for it, so that install should happen soon (it has to be installed before the gas inspection can happen). The knotty cedar for the exterior roof soffit was delivered. The rest of the siding should be delivered soon.

Windows and HVAC

Lots of work on the windows and HVAC system this week. The windows are almost fully installed, as was a majority of the HVAC system.

The windows were only delivered at the end of last week, but by this weekend, they were nearly all installed. The two windows in the dressing room were left out, but that seemed to be because they are using the openings to deliver decking lumber upstairs. The rest of the windows were installed, including the skylight over the stairs and the various glass doors. Along with the windows, the rest of the house was wrapped in foam.



A lot of work was done on the HVAC system, and the mini-split system looks close to done. All the interior head units were mounted to the wall and hooked up to refrigerant lines, electrical, and some kind of piping (maybe to handle condensation?). The exterior units are not installed yet, but some kind of testing of the system seems to be in-progress. They are installing other ducting, such as the fan connections to the HRV system and the exhaust for the kitchen vent hood.



The timelapse is not terribly enlightening; you can see the powder room window going in, and later the master bath door.



Next week should see the start of the electrical wiring.

Garage Entry Design

The flow of people between the garage and the front door calls for careful design. We wanted a single entry sequence for everyone, whether they arrived from the street, the driveway, or the garage. To support this, we chose to forego an opening from the garage to the house. Instead, the garage will exit into the main exterior entry space.

A happy side effect of this design is that it is more green. A garage opening into heated living space tends to cause heat loss and has a small detrimental affect on indoor air quality.

However, the original design for this sequence had a fatal flaw, at least in Seattle — it was not fully covered! As shown in the diagram above, the sequence of stairs required that you join the main path, and follow the main entry steps down to the front door. The roof (indicated by the grey dotted line in the above image) does not cover the entire entry sequence, leaving you vulnerable to the elements as you go down the steps.

We considered two solutions:

1. Extend the entry roof to cover the steps all the way to the top, covering the existing path from the garage to the entry.
2. Create a shortcut path heading west, directly from the garage landing to the main entry, and put a short roof along the side of the garage to cover this new path.

Adding a larger roof has the disadvantage that it would require a post on the south-east corner, and it would make the entry darker. The second option adds more complexity to an otherwise clean design — a second set of stairs, a possible railing, a different run/rise ratio of the treads. However, our architect avoided those problems and made choosing the second option an easy choice:

Instead of just using the flat eyebrow used over the entry, we wanted to make this new section of roof a feature. A few metal supports extruding from the garage will be sandwiched with wood and support a semi-translucent polycarbonate sheet. This will allow light to filter through, while keeping off the rain. It also allows us to avoid the awkward visual that would result from the difference in height between these two surfaces. We'll use the same design of roof over the lower door to the backyard to provide some more consistency.

Here's a similar roof design from another YS Development home:

This satisfied the design problem nicely, and was finished just in time for the garage framing changes that were required to support the newly-added roof.

Mechanical and Windows

This was an exciting week for work on the house, and a couple new stages are starting.

Plumbing wrapped up this week, but the inspection was delayed due to scheduling and payment issues. There's plenty of time, though, so a delay on that is not a big deal. The natural gas pipe in the kitchen was installed. The upstairs bathtub was filled with water to test for any leaks.

Various framing modifications were done this week: the fireplace was lowered to bench height, framing for a soffit was put in over the kitchen (this ended up being just for aesthetics; there is no functional need for it), the door to the dressing room was moved, the closets in the second bedrooms were shortened to provide desk nooks, the entry closet was taken out to prepare for built-ins, and interior framing against the foundation in the lower part of the house was done. Here's the interior of the dressing room, showing the corner we have for closet space now:



The exciting rough-in work this week was the mechanical system. We're getting a mini-split system, a.k.a. a heat pump, a.k.a. a ductless system, which, as one of the names describes, does not use ducts for pushing heated or cooled air around. Instead, it uses a series of tubes. We want to explain this system in detail sometime soon, but the short version is that these tubes carry heat via refrigerant and move it between the interior and exterior of the house — one direction gives you heating inside, the opposite direction gives you cooling. On the inside, we'll have units in the living room, the office, the media room, the master dressing room, and each of the second bedrooms. These all aggregate to two units outside the house:



On Friday morning, our windows were delivered! A few have already been installed, and the rest should go in fairly quickly. We can finally see what the exterior charcoal frame looks like at full scale. We were surprised at how large the windows are. The framed glass panels certainly provide a sense of scale that the rough openings don't. Also, we have a lot of windows in the living room:



The timelapse is fairly boring this week; the end shows a couple of the master bath windows popping into place.



Most or all of the windows should be installed next week, and the mechanical rough-in should continue. It looks like the next step is to wrap all the tubes with insulation.