Picture Time

Things are going well. Mechanical, electrical and plumbing rough-in starts Wednesday.


from the dining room, looking into kitchen:
looking at living room and front door:
from 2nd floor landing, looking into kids bedroom:
Lg bedroom and bathroom, looking out to the backyard:
from roof:

Upstairs Bath Components

I can't bring myself to call it the Master Bath. Anyway, it will have these in it:

Duravit D-Code Tub. Will have white tile on sides rather than apron.



Kohler Stillness Tub/Shower controls. Thermostatic valve w/separate volume control. Will include tub spout, shower head and hand shower.



Toto Aquia II toilet. It's dual-flush and fairly inexpensive. I really wanted one of these just to confuse house-guests.

Ikea Norrviken sink/Godmorgon cabinet. Same reason we got most of the other Ikea stuff, it's practical and cheap and it looks pretty good. Other sinks that looked a little nicer were 5x as expensive.

House is Stripped and Wet

Apparently, the roofer is ready to go. He's just waiting for the weather to turn around i.e. for the rain to stop, and he'll start working.

It looks like today will be nice.

The stairs to the roof should be framed soon. Windows going in next week.

Bath Thingys!

Somehow, I thought these things just materialized fully functional. They don't. Someone (s) actually has to select each valve (pressure balancing, thermostatic, diverting) and control, and tub faucet.

We'll be hitting a showroom or two this weekend to learn more and make some decisions on how we want our bath/shower to operate.

picture courtesy of moen

Kitchen Appliances

We're getting ready to put in our appliance orders. We've chosen the following:

Oven/Microwave: Ikea Nutid in white. It's not the best oven out there, but it was inexpensive and it will fit in perfectly with our white Ikea cabinets. Maybe someday we can swap in a nice convection oven and steam oven.
Refrigerator: Liebherr HC1050. We found this on closeout after a condo builder returned it due to a dent in the door. Since it's a built-in style, we'll have panels over the door and that won't matter. For some reason built-in refrigerators are exorbitantly expensive (seriously, why?), so we were really lucky to find this. It's definitely tiny, only 21" wide and counter-depth. We live down the street from Whole Foods though and never really buy any more groceries than we need to cook one or two meals. That and some good organization should get us through.

Dishwasher: Asko D5233. Another built-in, this will have a panel that will conceal it behind the cabinets. It came down to Bosch, Miele or Asko and the salesperson made a good case for the Asko. The price was slightly better than for a Miele, but this is still more than we had expected to spend. Since we both abhor washing anything, we figured it was worthwhile to get something nice here. Since we have an open floorplan, we really wanted something quiet, which this is. Plus, it's Swedish so it will match my car.

Cooktop: The big splurge is on a Miele 30" induction cooktop. The engineer in both of us left us with no other choice. It looks amazing, is well-made, energy efficient and will have all the benefits of induction. It will be nice to have something that doesn't put out too much heat in the summer and will be easy to clean-up.


Hood: Futuro Futuro Concorde. We just like how this one looked. There are no-doubt other hoods that would be much more effective, but most of the hoods with large capture-areas wouldn't really work aesthetically. What this lacks in efficiency, it will hopefully make up for in raw power with 940cfm.

First Floor Layout

Our Architect

Our architect is Ben Waechter from Atelier Waechter. We originally met Ben when viewing the Z-haus down the street. If we had a bit more money, we'd likely be living there right now. It's beautiful in every way. Ben has been extremely fun to work with and he's come up with some really great ideas. He's worked hard to stay within our budget and come up with really creative ways to do more with less. He's also great at taking our half-baked ideas and turning them into really professional-looking concepts. Also highly recommended.