For our new bathroom remodel we decided to go with a concrete countertop. Partly because the price is totally right, and partly because we really like the look. We have done a concrete table top in the past, so we figured it wouldn't be too hard. The slab is an 1 1/2" thick with a 4" lip on the front, and is reinforced with wire and rebar. It took three bags of quickcrete 5000 and one sheet of melamine. Well actually two sheet of melamine, because I cut the first one an inch too short, and had to go get a new sheet. Oops. Minus the extra sheet the whole cost came in at about $50. Not bad at all. The fact that we had an above mount sink made the form super easy. Above are the pics of the form before the pour, and after. Next week I'll put up pics of it installed, plus the walnut vanity that it sits on.

Just a quick post today. Last week I told you about the vessel sink I got for a screaming deal. Well we needed a nice deck mount faucet to go with it. Faucets for some reason are insanely expensive, many of the nice ones are upwards of $300+. There was no way I was going to spend that much, so after a long time of hunting around I found this one at overstock.com. It was clean, modern and fit in the kind of asian inspired look we have going on. The price was only $79 so we figured we would go for it. I was pretty scetched out that the quality would not be that great. Luckily when we got it, everything turned out to be up to par. Turns out it is made by Kingston Brass, which would have been nice of overstock to mention. Anyway it looks good installed. I'll get some pics up soon.

Available at overstock.com for $79.

As we started into our bathroom remodel, we started looking for some affordable yet chic new fixtures. One of the first big obstacles was to find a above mount square sink. We wanted above mount (vessel) for a couple of reasons. First it makes the concrete countertop a lot easier, since there is no knockout for the sink, and second, we like the look. Let me rephrase that, we like the look of square vessel sinks. It complements the simple modern design we have for our vanity and the japanese influence that the ofuro will bring to the bathroom. We went to a local plumbing supply called Standard Plumbing to look at their showroom. Nada. We mostly were ignored as we wandered around, but finally someone was nice enough to pay attention to us and answer our questions. They recommended Miro Ceramica for square vessel sinks. We ended up with the one shown above, which I believe was called the box 50. They had it in stock, and even gave us contractor pricing, so we got it for $120, which was a total steal. We couldn't be happier. Now we just need a facet.

There are a couple things that my wife and I had hoped to get done before we start the actual construction for our addition. One of them was to remodel our bathroom. If you looked close at some of the drawings I have posted you can see that we plan on changing the location of the door, and moving a wall over a couple feet. Since de-construction is cheap and things were going slow with the addition, we thought that we would get a start on it. Above you can see a before and after of the process. We have big plans of course. A walnut vanity capped with a concrete countertop and vessel sink are in the works, as well as a stainless steel Ofuro (Japanese soaking tub), Ipe floor mats, a new toilet, shower, and lot and lots of tile work. Keep checking back for all the juicy details.

More pics after the jump.

This is the the view where the long hall will be connection the original house to the addition, you can see where we tore out the old wall. We really only had to move it over about 2 feet. Unfortunately we had to move all the sewer and water too, which was slightly less easy. Same view as above, but you can see where the new wall is starting to go in. This is actually the first wall I have ever framed in before. Looking the opposite direction, but from the bathroom instead of the hall.

Looking towards the back door from the bathroom.

I promised last week that I would post some of the first 3D renderings that we had done. What you see here is almost a combination of the two floor plans that I posted last week. In the 3D renderings the existing structure is left in 2D and the addition is 3D. Having ripped out the wall between the old living room and bedroom further solidified the idea that the addition should have two bedrooms. Instead of trying to minimize the hall space, we decided to maximize its efficiency. Starting about 10 feet into our existing house (next to the bathroom) to the very back of the addition will be built in storage. That should make the smallness of the floorplan a lot more livable. The exterior will be a Hardipanel rainscreen. The windows have changed quite a bit from these renderings, but the rest is basically the same. Lots more pics, and a good floorplan after the jump.

I promised earlier in the week I would show you some of the first house plans our architect designed for us. Things have changed quite a bit since these first set of plans, but it is interesting to see how things evolved. The idea was to add two bedrooms to the existing structure, but have them separated by a courtyard. In both of the plans shown above the wall between our existing bedroom and the living room remains intact. If you have been following the story, you already know I ripped that out last fall. What we actually ended up with is more of a hybrid of these two designs. The real tricky part has been cutting down on hallway space to maximize livable space. Next week I will post one of our first 3D renderings which is much closer to our current design.

I have hinted before about the fact that since buying our home, we have always planned on adding some square footage. Since the day we moved in we started brainstorming about how we would like to enlarge and improve the existing space. Originally we had ideas of building up, which would increase our livable space, without sacrificing any space from our small lot. Unfortunately, chopping off the top of our house and going up a level was not too feasible when it comes to affordability and livability during construction. That left us one option, an addition in the back yard. Before I go any farther, let me paint for you a mental picture of our lot.

It is 31 feet wide, and about 145 feet deep. Thats about 4,791 square feet, or .11 acres. We have one of the smallest lots on the block, but luckily we have alley access in the back, which makes it a pretty usable size. Our house is around 24 feet wide, which leaves about 4 feet on one side and 3 feet on the other. That means we are pretty close to our neighbors. Our neighbors to the north have a six foot wood fence, so visually they are not much of a problem. The south side is a different story. On that side there is a 4 foot chain link fence between us and two junk cars, half dismantled and sitting on blocks. Just behind the cars is a mammoth two car garage, which is full of everything but running cars. In other words, not the best view.

About the same time we were beginning to plan our house, I came across a great thread over at fabprefab which was originally named "less than 1,000 square feet". Sixteen pages later, that thread became the courtHOUSE thread, which became the inspiration for Mark Meyer's (aka eamesdaedelus) courtHOUSE. Make sure you check out Marks Livemodern page for some great renderings of this beautiful project that never came into realization. What I took away from those 16 pages was a notion that not only was it very possible to have a smaller home (something I already believed) but one of the best ways to maximize the space is by creating an outdoor room by making a courtyard. I have lived in Brasil where couryards are much more common than they are here in the states, and I loved the intimate outdoor spaces they create. The idea of a courtyard also solved the problem of our rather close neighbors on both sides. We would be able to have our privacy out doors and expand our floor plan.

I was also reading a book called Mini house style. In the book it had the architect of each project list the top five things that were important to making a small home work. Several things that I took away from that were #1 built in storage, #2 open, flexible floor plan, #3 long line of sight to increase the feeling of space.

One other thing that was on our laundry list of wants, was a japanese style bathroom. We had recently visited a local spa called The Kura Door, which had some beautiful Ofuro tubs. After that we became semi obsessed with the whole japanese bath experience. If you have know idea what I am talking about, don't worry, I'll get into it more later. If you are looking to do some reading, "The Japanese Bath", is a great book, as well as the more light hearted "How to take a Japanese bath".

I am lucky to have a friend Seth Striefel, who is an interior designer turned architect. At the time we were looking for our house, he was trying to find the same thing, either a lot to build on, or a cheap house to remodel. He has a great eye for design, and was kind enough to agree to help us design our house. We got together with him one day, and told him all our ideas that we had for our house. He had some great ideas, and drew up some floor plans, which I will post about later this week. Stay tuned.

One of the reasons that we decided to switch to radiant last year was because we didn't want to blow all the old dust and grim out of our heat ducting. Ironic that by trying to avoid that we ended up with a mess three times the size, and no heat starting into Dec. in Utah. When our house finally dropped to 50 at night with our little radiant oil heater on high, I finally sold out and hooked up the old furnace. By this time we had managed to install our boiler panel, and boiler, and get it all hooked up to our indirect water heater. All we needed was to run our pex tubing. For the front room where I had put in a new subfloor, it was actually quite easy and enjoyable. We cut sections of 3/4" plywood 9" wide, and arranged them around the room so that the tubing could lay under the finished floor without getting squished. (If that doesn't make sense, look at the pics) On top of that we will install our finished floor. We planned on changing the layout of our home with a new addition, so we didn't want to install a bamboo floor until we were done moving walls. That and the fact that we had spent all our money on the radiant heat led us to look for a more affordable temporary solution. A local hardwood dealer MacBeths Hardwood has a damaged pile where all their imperfect and damaged sheets go. We managed to buy 20 or so sheets of 3/4" plywood for $8 a sheet. It was a mix of oak, red oak, birch, etc. We cut the sheets into 4 x 4 squares and arranged them alternating grain. It turned out costing about $0.50 a square foot. Very inexpensive and it looked great too. We didn't end up sealing it, sense we plan to switch them out eventually, but the end result was very effective. With the front room done, all that was left was the crawl space. It turned out to be a complete horror. Around 75% of the space was only accessible by crawling army style and stapling pipe up while laying on my back in the dirt. There were sections where the spaces were so tight my chest was literally wedged between the floor joist and the dirt as I tried to staple as far as I could reach. I am not generally a closterphobic person, but I admit I got freaked out a little several times. Two weeks before Christmas all our hard work paid off. Our house was finally fully heated. We cranked it up to the low 70's for a day, just because we could. The floors truly were wonderful. I walked around barefoot all the time. Along with heating our house, the boiler also heated a 50 gallon indirect hot water heater, so our showers never get cold. All in all it took us just over two months from the first day I ripped up the floor on a whim. The radiant heat and domestic hot water cost came in somewhere around $4,000 when it was all said and done, plus the cost of the new subfloor and leveling plus all the other little bits I forgot about the grand total was probably under $5,000. While it was a way bigger hassle than I had anticipated, in hindsight it was all worth it. Radiant heat was something we both really wanted, and it felt good to know that if we were tenacious enough we could achieve our goals.

Our scarce furniture in a pile. Heat reflecting shields help make the radiant heating more efficient with wood floors. Notice the 9" sleepers that the heat shields sit in, then the tubing sits on the heat shields.

A shot of part of the floor all finished.

This is the small hole that leads to the crawl space. It was real fun pulling hot water heaters in and out of this, not to mention the 200 pound panel.

50 gallon indirect hot water heater.

Tubing below subfloor. These still need heat shields and then insulation to be efficient.

A tangled intersection. It's obvious I'm no professional.

The most spacious part of the crawl space. I can almost be on my hands and knees.

Pex stapled up. Notice how little space there really is.

Now that we had the floor all ripped out and put back in, we could finally start working on the radiant heat. We decided before we went to all that trouble we would go ahead and rip out the dropped ceiling that was over the bedroom. Of course the demo only took a good day, but dust would last for weeks. We were hanging new 2 x 10's on Halloween night. At one point I literally left my wife holding one end of a beam while I went to answer the door. Hanging the insulation took another couple of days, and unfortunately the drywall is still pending. Getting the radiant up and going quickly became the main focus as the temperatures started dropping. I had read many, many articles online about DIY radiant heat installation. Most of them made it sound like it was a pretty easy thing to do. Get a boiler, add a couple of pumps, some pex and a thermostat and you're in business. I had read approximate square foot costs and figured I could do my 750 square foot home for around 3 thousand dollars. One of the single biggest costs was going to be the boiler. Thats where we totally lucked out. We found a monitor boiler, the "MZ25C" used in the classifieds for $500. It is a 95% efficient, gas boiler that puts out over 94,000 BTU, which is almost twice as big as we need. Normal retail for this boiler is over $2,500, so we were getting a screaming good deal. I asked for a quote online from radiantdirect, and it came back significantly higher than I thought it would. I don't remember the exact number but it was something like $4,500 without the heat source. Besides being significantly higher than I thought, I was less than confident about the support I would be able to get for installation. I decided to get a quote from a local plumbing supply place Standard Plumbing. They would take care of the system design and main board, and I would do the rest of the install. For some reason I was confident that they would come in cheaper. The initial quote I got from the was around $6,000. I was obviously shocked, but the fact that our house was getting down to 55 degrees inside at night convinced me that it was the best thing to do. Besides, their lead time was a lot less than the online places, plus they would do most of the hard part, the panel. The guy that was helping was obviously surprised to see that I told him to go ahead and do the drawings. He was used to plumbing contractors, not punk kids who had almost no idea what they were doing. I was pleasantly surprised when he called back a week later and told me that the plans were ready, and he had simplified it to save me a significant amount of money. Turns out he was just trying to scare me off with the original quote, and when he saw I was serious, he reworked things. It was now starting into December, it was very cold, and we still didn't have any heat. They were several weeks out on any panel assembly, which was way too long for me. I decided that I would go ahead and build it myself, even though I had no idea how to sweat copper. They were even nice enough to take me back to the back and give me a crash test on how to do it. Luckily for me, the day I went to pick up all the parts to build it myself I got another call. Apparently one of the guys that did the assembly had offered to do the job over the weekend for me. Instead of paying $1000 for the job, he would take $400 under the table for Christmas money, plus another $250 for part to the company. I gleefully agreed. Now all I had to do was run all the tubing, and hook up the panel and boiler before I froze.

Yep, as awful as it sounds, my wife's birthday is actually the day after our anniversary. To those guys out there, you're thinking, wow, hooked up. One gift, and you're covered. No such luck. My wife is smarter than that. Before we got married she made me sign in ink, a statement saying I would never ever combine the two.This year I splurged a little. My wife has always wanted an arco lamp. I obviously couldn't afford the original made by Flos (ylighting has it for a mere $2,300). I had seen several knock offs around town (discussed here in the forums) but really didn't like how far most of them strayed from the original design. I called a local store, By Design, to check prices and they told me they had a new model in that was almost exactly the same as the original. It sported a large square marble base and the square arch tubing. I went to look at it, and it was spot on. It is made in China, but the craftsmanship seems very quality. The original manufacture is italstudio mfg ltd. (no sign of them on the web) and it was apparently imported through Chair Tech out of Canada. The price was $400. While not exactly affordable for a floor lamp, compared to $2,300 it was a total steal.

Available from By Design for $400.

Today is my 3 year Anniversary. If you have read some of our remodeling stories, you already know that my wife is the most patient in the whole world. It just so happens that she is the most beautiful as well. I count myself the luckiest man in the wold.

Card designed by Mingo Design, for Artichokes and Company.

If you have been following the story of our house, you know what a mess I got myself into. Yesterday I explained how I started the demo for our radiant heat. Before I continue, I wanted to explain a little just how I planned on doing the radiant so you don't think I was totally crazy. Where access from beneath is possible the most efficient way to add radiant heat to a wood subfloor is to run the tubing between the floor joists and staple it up with metal heat transfer plates. This is a fairly painless experience for those with full basements. My house had a 10' by 10' basement with 6 foot ceilings, about another 50% was crawl space ranging between 1' and 3' of clearance from floor joist to dirt. The remaining 40% above which I was currently doing the demo work mentioned previously had almost no clearance from below, making a staple up install impossible. There are plenty of above subfloor systems out there for the application I was planning on doing in the front of the house, most of which were quite costly. I opted for the DIY approach. It consists of ripping 9" wide strips of plywood and attaching those to the subfloor 1" apart from eachother. This creates a groove which you can safely lay your tubing and heat transfer plates before putting your finished floor in. The obvious downside to this is the extra thickness of the floor. Because I didn't want to have 3" thick floors and 5' door ways I decided I had to demo all the way down to the floor joists and level them out, install a new subfloor, the layer of radiant, and then the finished floor.

Taking out all the old floor meant reducing our 750 square foot home to less than 300 square feet of usable space. We managed to put most of the furniture in the kitchen, including our bed. While ripping out the floor I found old newspapers from the 30's and 60's. I kept some of them, but the majority went to the trash. After taking all the flooring out, I noticed that the wall between our bedroom and the living room was just floating in mid air. We had rough plans for our addition, and knew that we wanted to open up the front of our house as much as possible. After convincing myself that the house would indeed remain standing without the wall, I went to work on ripping it out. The results were dramatic. Our cramped little living room and bedroom were now one big open room. If only it had a floor.

If you actually made it this far into the story congratulations. I'll save you the boring details about the sub floor. The short story is that I very carefully cut joists to sit on top of the old ones, bringing all the floor to the same level. Everything was carefully braced, and eventually a real live subfloor was installed. The whole process from exposed floor joists to subfloor probably took just under two weeks. All praises at this point should go to my extremely patient and beautiful wife, who somehow made sleeping in the kitchen among piles of furniture and boxes seem like a sane thing to do.

The pictures speak for themselves Looking from our living room through the door to our bedroom. Our bedroom floor. Another shot of our bedroom floor, showing the old ducting below. The huge pile of wood in front of our house. It got bigger. The scary bridge from our front door to our kitchen and bathroom. Did I mention how beautiful and patient my wife is? The floating wall between our living room and bedroom. Demo of the wall. One big room. Cross bracing floor joist before leveling. Finally a subfloor in the bedroom half. This is well over a week into the project. Looking from the bedroom to the living room. Floor leveled and partially insulated prior to subfloor install. Living room. We officially have a floor in all of our house! Studio living never felt so nice. Next I have to learn to wire.

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We had always planned on tearing out our carpet in our house. The short neutral grey/brown pile just wasn't doing it for us. We found our excuse to finally get rid of it last fall. After our first colder fall day I started thinking about getting our furnace ready for the winter. I pulled up a grate to see how clean our ducts were, they were a complete terror! Each one had at least a couple inches of dust, dirt and grime. Just the thought of all that filth blowing around was enough to make me shudder. Since moving in we had wanted to do an addition, and heat it all with radiant heat. I figured this was the perfect time to switch out systems, and save us from having to turn on our old heater. Half of our house had decent access to the floor from underneath, which presumably would make installing radiant easy on that section. Unfortunately we couldn't access the front half of our house from underneath, so we would have to lay the tubing on top of the floor. More details on that later.The first step...

We knew we had to rip out all the carpet. It was a quick job that went easy enough, but uncovered some peculiar findings. Under the carpet we could tell that there were several layers of subfloor. I wasn't quite sure why, but I hoped to be able to take it down to the original subfloor, and save myself a couple inches of floor height. It seemed like for each layer of subfloor I ripped out, I found another . . . at least in some places. As I peeled the layers back it quickly became apparent why there were so many. The original subfloor, which was a very abused tongue and groove pine, was extremely uneven. The two farthest corners in the room were almost a full 3 inches lower than the high spot in the middle. After all that destruction, I now had to figure out a better solution than the built up layers of patchwork plywood. My simple carpet removal prior to the radiant install had suddenly turned into a big project.

As a quick note,I realize that this is about projects in the past. Things are starting to happen quickly in my house now, so I plan on getting caught up, and then giving weekly in depth updates as to what we are up too.

If you've been following the story of our house, I've related up until we actually took ownership. In may of 2005 we started moving our stuff in. As first time home owners were were quite ecstatic to finally have a place of our own. When we bought the house it had a 4 foot chain link fence in the front yard. The first thing we did was rip it out to open up our yard a little. We recycled it by using it in our back yard so that our dog would have a place to run around while we were at work. The previous owner had been parking in the back yard for years and there was even old asphalt that went through most of our back yard. It took me months to rip it out with a pick axe and a shovel. Needless to say, the back yard was a mess, and still is. Inside was a different story... Our home was built in 1917. To be truthful, judging from the original structure I think it started out as more of a shed than a house. Since then it has gone through a multitude of remodels and additions, and it still has at least one more big one until it is done. The previous owner had gone through everything about four years before we bought it. They increased the square footage a little, (by extending out the back another 8 feet) getting it up to its current 700 sq/ft. The front of the house was divided into a living room and a bedroom. The living room had a nice vaulted ceiling, but the bedroom had a dropped boxed ceiling. The whole house was done in neutral colors, although none of it very tasteful. One of the very first things we did to the interior to celebrate the fact that we were home owners was paint our bedroom wall a bright grass green. It felt good to be able to do whatever we wanted, and it was nice to get a little color into our cramped little bedroom

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I mentioned last week how hard it was to find an affordable home to buy. We feel very lucky to have found ours. I was practically addicted to the MLS for a couple months, looking for anything that had some potential. We had narrowed it down to two general areas that we wanted to live, downtown, or Sugarhouse. Sugarhouse is a neighborhood about 10 minutes from downtown that has a hip and unique little shopping district and lots of trendy little tutor homes. Its not exactly the place to find a good deal on a home, but it is a great place to live. We ended up getting a home in what I call Sugarhood, which is just west a couple blocks of the nice Sugarhouse area. Its a transitional area that has a lot of potential. Our home was a total steal at $106,000. It was on the market for some time in the $120 range but not selling, so the owner changed it to for sale by owner and dropped the price. Of course there is a reason it was not selling (there always is). Our house is just under 700 square feet, small even by Sugarhouse standards, and situated on a 30' wide lot that leaves both neighbors houses less than about 5' from our side windows. The lot is a decent size however, around .11 acres with alley access to the back yard. Now that we knew we wanted it, we had to face our first obstacle, financing. I work as a nurse, and make OK money, but have zero credit history. The logical thing to do in this situation is get a FHA loan. Unfortunately our house had an area where the wood siding came in direct contact with the soil, so FHA wouldn't even touch us. My wife some good credit history from some school loans she had, but we found that if we were to use her credit score, we had to use her income, which was about half mine at the time. We had to claim me as the unemployed spouse in order to get the loan, and ended up with not the most favorable rates. Eventually after jumping through enough hoops we got approved and closed on the house almost a year ago from today. We knew we had a lot of work ahead of us to make the house what we wanted it to be, but it felt good to finally be homeowners. Now we just had to figure out how we could make it into something modern and affordable.

This is the first in a long series of posts that I will be doing over the next couple of months. One of the biggest obstacles to us aspiring modernists is finding an affordable modern home. In fact, it has become a huge niche market with tons of people trying to cash in on. Prefab housing was one of the first genuine attempts to make affordable modern homes available to the masses, but unfortunately it has come up short in filling the needs of the common man. I hope to show that with a little creative thinking, and a lot of hard work, anyone can have an affordable modern home. For those that are interested in a somewhat lengthy, but thorough discussion of how we are making it happen, read on...

Ok, let me set the stage for you, tell me if it sounds familiar to you. My wife and I had been married for about two years, and had been living in various apartments around the city, some better than others. We were really tired of feeling like we were just throwing our money away, and wanted to live in a modern contemporary home. We spent quite some time researching building costs, figuring that the best way to have a modern home was just to build one. We live in Salt Lake City, Ut, and building costs for the frugal can usually be had around $100 a square foot. We thought that would be perfect, 1200 square foot home on a thirty thousand dollar lot, and we would hit our budget of $150 thousand. Sounds good on paper, unfortunately it totally doesn't work. Problem #1, there are no lots for sale anywhere we would want to live, and certainly not for $30 thousand. We really didn't want to compromise on location, so after almost 3 months of looking for a lot, we gave up on the plan of building in the downtown area. That left two options, either buy a house that already fits our style and budget, or find something really cheap that we could put a lot of money into. Of course finding something that fits our style and budget was never going to happen. All the cool houses go for 1/2 million or more, very frustrating. So we set out trying to find a house that was cheap and in a good location. Not an easy task, but one that at least proved possible.

Stay tuned for the next update in this series on making the modern home affordable. If there are any details you want to know, just ask.