Many Decisions to be Made

Good progress has been made in the past two weeks. The roof was installed; it may have taken one extra day due to cold weather, but it's in. We learned the downside of the clean line designed for the roof. On the north side, the overhang is only ~3" - just enough to drive rainwater into the house. This photo gives a pretty good sense of how tight it is. So, while it was to be a gutterless house, we're now putting gutters on the lower roof area, so that runoff really runs off, rather than in. Copper gutters will look fine, but I think if we had paused a few extra minutes before that edge of the roofline was trimmed, we would have grabbed an extra inch or two of overhang. It'll be interesting to see how this is handled in other NextHouse builds.


The interior framing is almost done. We had a few things to review this weekend, and decided to have a half wall that follows the line of the staircase, rather than having it run parallel to the floor line. We've also scoped out how the fireplace will fit in. The fireplace itself is woodburning and a thing of beauty - and highly efficient. Check out www.rais.com for the Rais 60 Insert. If the house were laid out a little differently, we would also have considered a woodburning stove - and Rais has some really nice clean lines for those as well.




In looking at the kitchen layout - especially in our 2-hour marathon session with the electrician, we found that the window placement in the kitchen was terrible for a bunch of reasons: (1) if you're standing in the kitchen and over 5' tall, you would have to stoop down to see out it; (2) in order to meet code for electrical outlet placement, we would have had to put the outlets right in the windowsill, which would look atrocious at best; (3) there would have been no room for any backsplash at the sink, so within a year the windowsill would have been all water-spotted. So, the window will be yanked out and moved up about 4" before the siding goes on in the next week or so. In this shot from outside, the culprit window in the kitchen shows - but it's hard to tell how low it really is. We've looked at 2 rounds of cabinet design, and think we're close to set on that. We will especially like the "pro sports lockers" that we're putting in the mudroom - truly places to stash coats, briefcases, gym bags, etc. We'll also have a good place to put the cable modem and wireless router, and plug in our phones etc.


The pictures tell much of the rest of the story - wires are being hung throughout the house, the deck is going in out back, landscaping is making a terracing effect to manage runoff, and we even have a water tank installed in the utility room. Things that don't show in the pictures but are still big steps: the well is connected to the new house; a call to NStar seems to indicate that they'll be faster about reconnecting the power than they were about disconnecting it; plumbing fixtures have been picked out and we didn't break the bank doing it (but we did downscale the showerhead/faucet for the second bath - our guests will never know, right?) We're going with Kohler for the toilets, tub, and sinks - Grohe and Moen for the faucets, etc. In looking at everything, we decided to use the cleaner lines of pedestal sinks in the guest and half-baths, rather than vanities in those rooms.