Greenhouse Blog

We have windows!

2008-11-08T15:25:00Z

Every day at the site seems to bring lots of progress, there are tons of guys there working on all sorts of stuff. The framers have been moving along and the tinners and plumbers are both about halfway through. The building is mostly wrapped and about 3/4 of the windows have been installed. The masons are supposed to get started this week, so at least the outside will start to look finished.

Click on the picture below to load the movie. You’ll need QuickTime Player to see this movie, visit The Apple Website to get it.

Caution, this is 6.9 MB!

Framing Movie to Date

2008-10-09T20:21:01Z

Framing has been slowly progressing over the last two months and I was hoping to be able to wait until it was all done to post this movie, but I just couldn’t wait any longer. There’s still quite a bit left and it’ll be a couple of weeks before they are all done. While it has taken some time, I cannot praise the framing contractor and his crew enough for the wonderful job they are doing. They are very meticulous with everything they do, trying to make sure it gets done right the first time, a quality that I find highly admirable. Everything looks fantastic, we are just eager to see what our new house is going to look like.

Click on the picture below to load the movie. You’ll need QuickTime Player to see this movie, visit The Apple Website to get it.

Engineered Lumber

2008-09-15T20:13:00Z

We decided that we should use engineered lumber for all of the framing in the house. The main reason is because it is more environmentally friendly, but also the engineered lumber is straighter than standard lumber so it just makes a better house. Made from small-diameter or lower-quality trees or from waste from wood-processing operations, engineered lumber is a combination of wood that is peeled, chipped, or flaked and then glued to produce a durable panel, stud, beam, or joist. That’s the good news. However, most structural engineered wood is glued together with binders that contain phenol formaldehyde, a product with minimal off-gassing, but it does off gas. That’s the bad news. Also, it is somewhat more expensive than standard lumber, but we decided that given all the positives of the product that we would use it.

Geothermal Wells Drilled

2008-09-02T20:03:00Z

The contractor was out today to start drilling the geothermal wells and install all the piping. It turns out there will be 5 wells total, each drilled to a depth of approximately 210 feet. The piping runs out from the furnace room to two manifolds near the wells, one for the inflow, one for the outflow. Each well has a pipe loop in it and one end is connected to the inflow and one to the outflow. As you can see, the framing has just barely started, so it seems a little early to be installing the wells. The heating contractors are the first ones in the house once the framing is completed, so I guess it makes sense that they want the wells in.

Click on picture to get a larger version.

Foundation - The Movie

2008-06-22T17:43:00Z

This movie took almost three weeks to make and in fifteen seconds it shows a sequence of the various elements of the foundation being installed. First there is some final excavation, then the pier footers are drilled and the cement is pumped into them, the forms are then installed with tons of rebar, the concrete is pumped into them, the forms are removed and the foundation is then damp-proofed.

Click on the picture below to load the movie. You’ll need QuickTime Player to see this movie, visit The Apple Website to get it.

Foundation Poured Today

2008-06-14T00:14:00Z

The foundation for the house was poured this afternoon and it finally feels like we are making some positive progress. Up to this point they have just been taking stuff away from the lot, some house and a lot of dirt, which feels negative to me. The foundation crew has been working hard the last few days to get the forms in and I think they had 3 crews there today, roughly 12 guys scrambling around the forms making sure all of the rebar and stuff was ready. The structural engineer came by and inspected everything and told me that it all looked great. The foundation is a critical part of the house and I didn’t realize just how much engineering goes into it, but it is important that it is prepared to carry the different point loads of the house that is on top of it. The pour took 3 to 4 hours in all with 10 concrete trucks coming and going. They would back up to the concrete pump, an amazing piece of equipment that pumps the concrete up the tube along the boom, probably 25 feet in the air and then it gushes out the other end about 60 feet away and into the forms. The guy controlling the pump walks around with a remote control so he can see and make sure to keep the end of the boom just where it needs to be. All of the other workers were constantly checking to make sure the forms were true and level, bracing them with 2x4’s. It is quite a choreographed event to watch.

The forms give away the shape of the foundation and it it fun to think about where all of the different elements of the house are going in relation to the rest of the neighborhood around us. It is exciting that after 10 months of planning the house is starting to take shape.

Click on picture to get a larger version.

Big Hole

2008-06-01T00:26:00Z

We have a very big hole on the lot, luckily no real surprises once we dug up the dirt, I was worried about the potential groundwater situation. This view is to the northeast, luckily our neighbors to the east seem to be very understanding about the whole situation, as you can see it might be interpreted as a major imposition to them. We are “keeping” the current garage, which means that we want it to stay where it is, so we’ll demolish it later and then rebuild it in the same spot on the current foundation.

Click on picture to get a larger version.

Geothermal Heating and Cooling System

2008-05-21T00:33:00Z

I have been meaning to post this for a while, but we have a final proposal from Blue Valley Energy to provide our geothermal heating and cooling system. Click here to see the proposal from them which details the system used and how it works. Geothermal is actually a misnomer here, we are not located on a hot spring, rather the system should be called a ground-source heat pump. Basically they will drill 5 holes 250 feet deep and will circulate water from those through a special furnace that will provide heating and cooling for the whole house. The furnace works a lot like and air conditioner, using a compressor to concentrate the heat or cold, so the system uses more electricity than a typical forced-air furnace (we’re hoping to put some photo-voltaic cells on the roof to offset the electricity use). On a net basis it uses less energy than a typical furnace and should pay for itself in 8-10 years, depending on the price of natural gas. The system is mostly forced air and has a variable-speed fan and a smart controller that will move air around the house to regulate the temperature before it turns on the water circulation system. It will also provide some radiant heat in the basement and living room of the house. I have a friend who has installed such a system in a very large house and it seems to be working well. We are very excited that the system seems to be cost effective and that we can afford to install it.

Demolition in 30 seconds

2008-05-13T17:37:01Z

Yesterday was the big day when they took the house down, and being the geek that I am I made a time-lapse movie of it. Luckily Chris from Old Greenwich was there to help me mount the camera box on the pole that we had set in the ground at the far southeastern corner of the lot. I got the camera going right at 7:00 am and the demolition crew pulled up, just in time! Most of the house came down in an hour or so and it took them the rest of the day to crunch it up and load it on their trucks. They probably would have moved faster but things are slow for them now and they’re trying to stretch this out. I didn’t take pictures of the second day when they pulled the slab foundation up because of the snow storm - I decided to paint the box and make it more weatherproof. I will mount it again and take pictures during the rest of the construction, so watch for periodic updates.

Click on the picture below to load the movie. You’ll need QuickTime Player to see this movie, visit The Apple Website to get it.

The Plans Were Approved!

2008-05-03T00:20:00Z

Yippee, we got an email today that the plans were approved and we can start construction!!!!!

Apparently Ginny had a restless night when she got a phone call that our front setback should have been 27 feet to match the neighboring houses to the east, rather than the 20 feet we’d been working with. Luckily the 20 feet had been committed to back in October and so they approved that, phew.

We are lucky to have such a good architect who has a solid reputation with the City, it really made things go faster than expected.

Now we just have to build the thing!

The plans are submitted

2008-04-04T00:08:00Z

Wow, I haven’t posted anything for quite some time, but we have been busy and the plans were submitted to the City of Denver today for their review.

A-00 view from corner

A-07 North & West Elevations

A-07 South & East Elevations

A-08 Sections

A-09 Sections

We chose a roofline!

2008-01-10T19:24:00Z

We had a marathon 3 1/2 hour session with Ginny and made quite a few decisions on the house.

First, we refined the kitchen layout and think that we are close to done on that. I’ll post plans once I get them from Ginny.

More importantly, we looked at several alternatives for the roof and decided that to make the house look as contemporary as possible we are going to have a flat roof on part of the house and curved sections on three of the rectangular elements that stick up. See the elevations and perspectives below.

While we were thinking about the outside of the house, we talked about what we think the exterior materials should be. We decided that cement block will make up most of the outside of the house with metal on the sections of the house that have a curved roof. We haven’t really decided on the exact colors yet, but we’re thinking of fairly light colors.

Finally, we spent a couple of hours looking at kitchen cabinets and appliances and advanced our thinking considerably. More on that later.

Also, we got a proposal for the geothermal heating/cooling system that is very interesting, but more on that in another post.

Here are the perspectives and elevations, enjoy!

Plans, Version 0.00003

2007-11-28T17:39:00Z

Okay, I have been busy and didn’t get time to post the intermediate version, there weren’t that many changes anyway, but this is a big leap forward. The spaces are definitely getting refined, there’s a basement plan, and there’s furniture too. There’s still work to be done (i.e. windows and elevations), but were actually taking these to the builder to start that conversation with.

Click on the image below to see a pdf file of the plans.

Plans, Version 0.00001

2007-10-30T20:35:00Z

I’m not sure if I put enough zeroes in the title, this is a very, very preliminary idea of the flow of the house. We have had a couple of very intense and entertaining meetings with Ginny and after looking at a number of alternatives we have settled on this one. Of course, things will develop from here, but this plan has the basic elements where we want them and it seems to work on both levels of the house.

Click on the image below to see a pdf file of the plans.

We picked Ginny DuBrucq as the architect

2007-08-23T20:19:00Z

What a struggle it has been to select an architect. We talked to 3 very talented groups and had a very hard time picking one.

First we talked with Michael Hassig and Olivia Emery with A4 Architects in Carbondale. We really like the work that they have done creating a very contemporary Colorado look at various places in the mountains. Also, they seems to have lots of experience with alternative energy options such as solar and geothermal. The trouble is that they are in Carbondale and it would be hard to meet with them or have them oversee the construction.

Next we talked with Larry Cohen, an old school mate of mine who has recently set up his own shop in Denver and works with a couple of builders. We toured a couple of his houses and really like the work that he has done, really listening to the client to create what they wanted. He has a nice clean look and we really like his work.

Finally, we spoke with Virginia (Ginny) DuBrucq who has worked with my family for as long as I can remember. We love her style and spend all of our time in the kitchen that she created for us. We know that she understands our aesthetic and will do what we want with her style imprinted on it. Plus, she only lives about 5 blocks from us.

So, in the end, we went for what has already worked for us, and decided to use Ginny as our architect.