Day Fourteen

I don’t know if Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh or even Michel de Montaigne ever renovated a building – well, Mr. Montaigne did pay a local craftsman to carve his favourite aphorisms into the beams of his study sometime around 1570, they are still there today – but if one of them did I like to think it would have been a chaotic mess. Because at the moment I need to think that even the people I admire for perfectly arranging simple words into simple sentences would get it wrong when it comes to choosing the windows, the floor, the decking, the HVAC, the trim, the insulation, and just how white the whiteness of the white paint is.

 

The person at the local builders merchants I’ve been talking to this week about windows and doors told me today, after I pointed out a discrepancy in his sizes and costs, that actually they were all wrong and he would have to recalculate – upwards of course. I was trying to be decent by using a small local company rather than one of the faceless conglomerates, but it’s difficult to shake the feeling that if the windows arrive with just one small detail wrong I’d be kicking myself until I ended up in Montana.

I’ll be thinking about that this weekend.

Day Thirteen

The ceiling was ripped out this morning and the following curiosities fluttered down; a letter sent from Coatesville to a town whose name I can't make out date marked 1955. This is a wonderful find, but I do need someone to decipher it for me. I wonder how much of the correspondence we send by email will flutter down from an attic in 60 years time?; and three coffee tin lids - interesting - why does anyone keep three coffee tin lids?

Day Twelve

The diagram in this picture looks strangely like the kind of thing I would have drawn to illustrate an utterly worthless point during a presentation to a room full of people half asleep when I worked in advertising – this one actually tells you something.

This is insulation from Idaho Blue, made from recycled denim, borate ( second photo - a chemically inactive, naturally found salt that inhibits the growth of mold, fungi, bacteria and mildew) and a binder.

It’s from natural recycled materials, has none of those nasty man-made fibers that irritate us and are appalling to the environment, and it has the LEED qualification – even though a programme about LEED that was on NPR this evening when I was driving home included some scientists who disputed how rigorous LEED are in awarding their symbol to manufacturers. Nothing but nothing is undisputed in the new world.

Day Eleven

This is a relaxing way to spend your birthday - get woken up at 5am by an insurance company in London calling to remind you that some policy or other runs out shortly, try to get back to sleep, fail - because your eyelids are now firmly attached to your forehead just thinking about the silly amount of stuff that needs to be done - get up, call Emily and open presents from Mrs. A. via Skype, and then shuttle for the rest of the day between building wholesalers to talk windows and doors.

Company number one was in West Chester, number two in Downingtown, three in Christiana, stop at office for 30 minutes, four in Exton, five in Frazer.

I did think that being armed with the correct dimensions would make this a relatively smooth process. Not so. I'm pretty dumb for every other day of the year, but I shot out of the apartment this morning believing the stars would be correctly aligned today and we could choose the windows and doors and order. Hah and bah.

In England you can walk into your corner shop, pick up a loaf of bread, a pint of milk, a copy of the Guardian, chat about the weather and politely request some new windows - not quite, but almost. America offers everything; windows of every shape, material and colour in any combination a window-fetishist could desire. Leather with steel attachments? You got it, Sir!

The result is mind numbing. I keep reminding myself that at least we do not have to order custom-dimension windows; when Tom and I met at the property the other day he worked out that even though each window was slightly different (really) he could build around a standard size - the difference this makes in cost and delivery time is significant enough for me to whoop.

Perhaps the stars will realign themselves tonight and the stack of options in front of me that need to be compared will be a breeze tomorrow. Uh huh.

Thanks for the birthday presents Mrs. A!

Day Ten

Here's a photo of the bamboo flooring that will be installed in the office. We have chosen the wide plank (6-1/4 inches) version. It''s vertical grain, organic and is free of halogenated hydrocarbons, heavy metals, herbicides, pesticides, urea formaldehyde and any harmful emissions.  Remarkable - I think all visitors should be issued with shoe covers before being allowed to walk on it.

Day Nine

We need to make a couple of decisions on this project.

What size wood for the flooring - double wide or classic bamboo? 

Should we delay the installation of the the decking until next year or go with the non-organic alternative? 

What’s the best place for the restroom? 

Where will the filing cabinets go? 

Have I completed the PECO form to request the electrical system is moved from the front of the office to the back? No. I’ll do that tonight. I'll put the form in the post tomorrow. Promise.

Day Eight

Day Seven

Day Six - Letter from London

Whilst James has all the hard work to do of overseeing this project on the ground, I have the fun job reading the blog from over here in the UK, and making design suggestions, picking materials and daydreaming. Marriage is all about finding the perfect division of labor, and I'd say we've got it just right on this project, though I'm not sure James would agree...

I'll be going to as many exhibitions as possible while I'm here (autumn is the best season in London for art and design events), and will posting the things that are great sources of inspiration. First off: today I went to see the amazing gem that is the Serpentine Summer Pavilion by French Architect Jean Nouvelle. Our little white house is not going to look quite like this, but his comments in this video about the time frame for the build are something we can relate to:

Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2010 by Jean Nouvel from O Production Ltd. on Vimeo.

I also got to check out the Ernesto Neto exhibition at the Hayward Gallery - here are a few photos of his otherworldly maze-like environments, created with a thin net membrane stretched over skeletal frames made from plywood. The netting is secured by stitching, and - the best part - weighted down where needed with pockets of spices and herbs like camomile and rosemary. This is construction for all of the senses. The whole installation spans two big indoor rooms and two outdoor terraces. Fantastic.

Day Five

You have to love America. A country 40 times larger than the UK, over twice the size of the entire European Union but there is only one company that sells vertical grain bamboo decking and they have sold out until 2011. Oak, hickory, ash, cedar, mahogany, maple; I can have any of them in a matter of minutes – but not bamboo. Nope, nada, nein.

The decking design has it run across the front of the building, about 4 feet wide, and then open out to around 9 feet wide across the right side.

The bamboo flooring samples are being shipped over-night, so we should know tomorrow if the colour (stupendously important) is the one we are look for. Here’s a thing – the samples cost $4 but there’s no charge for the FedEx bit, which must be in the $10-$20 range – why not give free samples but charge for the shipping? I’m missing something in this calculation.

Anyway, we may have flooring, but we won’t have decking.

To my eye the picture below is a thing of beauty (I’d love it even more if I knew what CFM’s are), it has such a stark rational quality that it’s going to be framed and hung in the office on opening day.

It’s the plan for the HVAC system from the HVAC man and it arrived this morning as part of an incredibly long and detailed document that outlines what goes where and what it does – the document looks like a PHD thesis, but that’s my take on it.

The HVAC man tells me that the system will be “balanced”, meaning that each outlet will measure the temperature in it’s own little area and adjust the heat accordingly so that every inch of the building will be at the precisely the same level – get that; in England you get an open coal fire and everyone huddles around, pushing and shoving until we all pass out from the fumes.