Last week I posted about our fantastic Aerial crib from Nurseryworks, and someone asked about our wall hangings. I thought they deserved a quick post of their own, so here we go. These wall hangings are really sliding curtains from Ikea that we hung on our wall. I tried to find the same print on Ikea's web site, but they didn't have it. In fact, it seems like they have lots of curtains in the store that I didn't see on their website. The fabric and the hardware cost us about $25, and looks great in our nursery. We are thinking we might even do something similar in our bedroom.

Little Arrington Raymond was born 6/4/07 at 10:28 PM. He weighed in at 7 pounds 10 ounces and was 21 inches long. He was born with a full head of hair, and a deep rooted appreciation for classic modern design . . . or at least a good binky. He is of course perfect for us in every way, and I am perfectly happy staying up at night with him. It's great to be back in our house again, and so far we are all doing great, and loving the new nursery.

I have had a couple questions about some of the detail in our addition, and I though I would take a minute to answer some of them. First off, the wood paneling in the hall.All the panels are made of 3/8" baltic birch plywood. Baltic has a much lighter appearance compared to normal birch, but in my opinion it's worth the extra money. I had a great theory on how to hang it (courtesy of Chris from Gleason Woodworking Studio) and it kind of worked. The idea was to use a keyhole shaped router bit to route out a channel on the back side of all the panels. Then you screw a normal drywall screw into the studs on the wall at the same height. The head of the screw fits just perfect into the fat part of the keyhole and the shaft fits in the skinny part. That allows you to just slip the panels on and they are securely fastened with no exposed nails anywhere.

It probably would have worked flawless if I had bought a slightly thicker panel1/2" or even better 3/4". The problem was with the 3/8" I had to keep it pretty shallow, so they were kind of prone to ripping through. Problem number two is it becomes real hard to slip the panels on unless the wall is dead straight, which of course mine wasn't. I ended up doing a combination of keyhole channels, and nailing them from the front on the edges. For all the joints, I routed out a tiny 1/6" groove half way down on the side. That way when they butt together you get that nice 1/8" deep reveal, which looks a lot nicer than a plain old butt joint. I also held the bottoms of the panes about 3/8" above the finished floor (the concrete) to match all the drywall.

Windows: The casing on the louvers and doorways is 3/4" baltic birch. I left all the raw plywood edges exposed instead of putting edge banding on. It's a lot more honest look, and it makes it a lot easier to do as well. The louvers themselves are made of the same 3/8" baltic birch as the panels. I built the boxes that they go in first, and then just nailed all of them from the outside. That proved a lot more challenging than I thought it would be. Hitting a 3/8" target 500 times in a row just wasn't happening. I had quite a few misses, but in the end they turned out all right.

Drywall: The drywall didn't turn out quite as clean as I had hoped. If we weren't on such a timeline (our due date was yesterday) I would have called them back 3 or 4 more times until it was nice and smooth like I wanted it. The did do a good job on some things though. Instead of baseboard we just floated the finished drywall 3/8" above the finished floor. They used a tear away L bead from trim-tex to finish all the bottoms. See the zoomed in picture above. It ends up leaving a nice clean edge all across the bottom. The look is really nice on the eye, and we'll see if it becomes a cleaning nightmare or not.

Lighting: Besides our fans, and some sconces we still haven't gotten for the hall, most of our lights are 4" eyeballs. We just bought the standard Halo cans, and then some after market eyeball lights to put in them. The good thing about using a very standard can like a 4" Halo, is that you can easily change out the trim anytime in the future. There are some off brand eyeballs that are nice, but they are not standard sized at all, and if they ever died on you for some reason, it would be very hard to replace them.

Since we are planning on only using passive cooling in our house, it was very important for us to have some good ceiling fans. Anyone who has looked for a modern fan knows that The Modern Fan Co. pretty much has the market cornered. We were looking for something clean, simple, and of course affordable. We ended up going with a Cirrus Hugger in white with a light on it. We have had it installed for about a week now, and we absolutely love it. The look matches our room prefect, the light with dimmer offers some nice light, and the fan keeps us snuggling under our down comforter all night long. We purchased it from a local store the Light Spot for $383 each. They are also available from Y-Lighting for about the same price. Available from Y Lighting for $384

I took two days off earlier this week to work on some of the finish carpentry. There is a lot of it in our house, which will be nice in the end, but right now it is very time consuming. I managed to get all the birch paneling done in the hall, as well as all the casing on the bedroom doors. The louvered windows are what took the most time. They really complete the rooms though, and will be great to have when we get the skylights installed. The idea is that when the skylights in the hall are open it will draw air from the courtyard windows, through the room and out the skylights. It should provide for some great passive cooling. So far the temperature in our house has been great as long as we open all the windows at night, and close them in the morning.

My poor wife has been wanting to nest for the past couple of months, but it has been virtually impossible. Now that the nursery is basically done, she can finally start nesting. She has been washing, folding, and organizing all the baby clothes, and getting everything ready for the new kid-o. We didn't realize just how much clothes we had until we started organizing it. People have been so generous with their gifts, and loaning that we have plenty of goodies to keep the little bean covered. There will be lots more update about our nursery coming up. Stay tuned!

Saturday we called on family and friends to help us out a little with some painting. We had a great turnout, and got an amazing amount of work done. We managed to prime all the walls, and get at least two coats of Glidden Evermore Semi-Gloss on the walls. The bedroom and nursery got three coats, and late Saturday night we were able to set up our bed, and sleep in our new room. We used pure white base 1 paint everywhere, and I love the way it looks. The Glidden Evermore is a low VOC paint, and it was great to work with. It's available at home depot for $20 a gallon. We bought it in the 5 Gallon buckets, and between primer and finish paint went through almost 18 gallons of paint in one day. A big thanks to everyone who showed up and made it possible, you are all amazing!

I have always loved the look of the commercial style kitchen faucets. Up until now there weren't a whole lot of affordable choices. We were pretty set on getting the Ikea HJUVIK for $249 even though we weren't absolutely in love with the look of it. That was before I came across this Pegasus Faucet at Home Depot. The K300 Series faucet is the same price, and looks a lot better. I installed ours last week, and so far we are absolutely in love with it.

Available at Home Depot for $247.

For the past several days the drywallers have been taping and mudding our entire house. It is unbelievable what a mess those guys can make. The first day my wife and I came home at the same time, and we were both in a state of complete shock. It looked like a bunch of monkeys had just finished a mud throwing fight in our house. We had covered some things prior to them coming, but there was still drywall mud on our bed, all over the floors, on our new countertop in the kitchen. Pretty much everywhere. Despite the mess, and the fact that we have basically been homeless for the last three days, things are going well. They should finish today or tomorrow with the whole house, and then we can start putting it back together and painting. This should be the last time there are strangers in our house.

There is this funny point in a remodel where everything goes from being unfinished to almost ready to paint. Saturday our little two man crew of drywallers finished up the rest of the hanging. It's crazy because it almost looks like a house now. They will be mudding and taping this week, and hopefully next weekend we can start painting. There will be no base boards in the addition, so there won't be much else to do inside besides some of the finish carpentry, and cabinetry. This week will be a white dusty nightmare, but at least there is a light at the end of the tunnel.

Warning: Long rant ahead. I ordered all my windows at the very beginning of Feb. this year from Alumaline. Since most of them were custom, they were about 4-5 weeks out, which was perfectly fine. As you know I received all my awning windows and sliding doors a long time ago, and they have been installed for a while. What I may not have mentioned is the fact that I still don't have my skylights. They sent the wrong size with the first shipment, which was a simple mistake. Since then Alumaline has had all sorts of difficulty with their local Milgard rep Mel Short. He was so difficult to work with that they refused to talk to him anymore, and passed the buck to me. I spoke with him several weeks ago, and after a lengthy conversation, he agreed to reorder the skylights at the proper size, at no additional charge to me. Yesterday I received a call from Mel. He said he had lost my number and had been meaning to call me to say he hadn't ordered my skylights yet, and I need to pay for them in full before he could order. I told him I had already paid Alumaline, and he needed to work that out with them, to which he replied "Alumaline won't even work with me anymore". I let him know that neither would I. Needless to say, I will be ordering Velux skylights today, which will actually save me some money.

We finally passed our rough electrical inspection last week, so this week we were ready for insulation. Since we are doing radiant we wanted everything to be super insulated. Having a flat roof also posed some unique problems as well. The ceiling bays either have to be individually vented to the exterior (both a pain and very ugly) or we had to use an icynene type spray in insulation. Even though the latter was the more expensive, it was really our only choice. We went with Superior Insulation for all the work. The connector ceiling got 6 inches of spray on plus the inch that is above the joists on top, which puts it at about R44. All the walls got R19, and the rest of the ceiling got 2 inches of spray, and R30 batting, which puts it around R42 plus the built up foam on top.Unfortunately they forgot to do one wall, our window box, and our sky lights. We have been trying since tuesday to get them back, and they should be here this morning. Hopefully drywalling will start this morning too.

Three weeks ago we started ripping our kitchen apart in preparation for putting in our sliding glass door. Two weeks ago we had a huge hole cut in the wall, and our last door installed. Last week we received a big shipment from Ikea, and this weekend I finally had time to put some of it in the kitchen. We didn't want to order too much from Ikea, since they will be opening soon here in Utah, but we also were going crazy with our kitchen half ripped apart. I had thought about building some cabinets, but in lieu of time we just ordered them from Ikea. We ended up getting the SORBO doors, and I really like the look of them.

After putting them together, I decided Ikea has the affordable modern kitchen cabinet market pegged. The quality is good, the price is great, and so is the look. We also installed some TUNDRA laminate flooring. The counter top is a NUMERAR birch butcher block. We cut a whole in it and put in a stainless steel undermount sink to go with it. It ended up turning our really nice.

I mentioned yesterday that I have been working on the electrical for the past couple of weeks. I worked until almost midnight last night to be ready for our rough electrical inspection today. Hopefully it passes, I can't wait to get some insulation and drywall going on this project. Along with the electrical, I have been wiring the addition for all the modern luxuries. I ran two coaxial cables, and two cat 5 wires to each bedroom, and to the hall where the computer will be. It is a small cost up front (about $100) and will be a lifesaver in the future. We will probably never fully utilize them since we don't have a phone land line, and don't even own a TV. We will use the Cat 5 for internet though. Also, it feels good to know any future owners won't be cursing me for not doing it right.

I have been slowly chipping away at the electrical for the past several weeks. It has been slow progress and has included many phone calls to my friend Ryan who is way more savy about electricity than I am. Last week we had the guys from Dibble Electric stop by to work on our main service change. As a home owner, that is one of the few things I can't do myself. This weekend I finished up most of the loose ends to be ready for our rough electrical inspection. Just for fun I threw a bulb in on of our can lights and hardwired it to the breaker so we could have some light. It was fun to see a more concrete reinforcement of all the wire pulling I have been doing. Our rough inspection will be tomorrow, and hopefully we will get the go ahead so we can start insulating this week.Click on continue reading for another pic.

OK, I think I found a winner for some outdoor LED lighting. It's called the NSL LED MiniDisc Light and is available from Brandlighting. They are small, simple, and best of all affordable. They even come in an aluminum finish so they will match all of our windows. Pricing is $40 per light, and $100 for the driver. One driver can power up to 100 lights.

MIDNATT from Ikea shown to the right. It's not anything to special, but it's only $25. When you need to buy 6 of something, the price difference between $25 and $100 is a big deal. These will mount near the tops of all the birch cabinetry, and will basically run the whole length of the hall. Does anyone else have any good suggestions?

LED Available from Brandlighting from $40 - $100. Sconce Available from Ikea for $25.

Up until this point, the kitchen has been the only room that we have not started tearing down walls in. Thats about to change. Our original design for our house showed a sliding door from the kitchen to the courtyard as well as one from the master bedroom to the courtyard. Knowing that putting a 8' wide door in our kitchen right where our sink was would cost some money, we initially decided to wait until later to tackle that project. Luckily, on a last minute whim, I decided to order the kitchen slider when I ordered the rest of the windows. This essentially forces us to do a complete kitchen remodel. Saturday I ripped out the sink and about 8' of cabinetry that was where the slider would be. I even managed to get our sink and dishwasher plumbed in its new location. The wall you see in the picture above will basically become one huge window, and all our cabinetry will flip to the opposite walls. Now all we have to do is put in new flooring, all new cabinets and appliances, move light switches and outlets, patch drywall and paint. Sounds easy enough. The old cabinetry plumbed temporarily until we can get new flooring, cabinetry etc.

I am looking for some good outdoor wall mounted LED lighting, something similar to what is shown in this picture. They will be placed every 8 feet or so along the outside of the house to light the courtyard. The one shown here is from a UK store, and I would really prefer something stateside. I know that there must be some good ones out there. Do you guys have any good ideas? As usual, affordable would be nice!

While I had my Dad's help over the weekend, we went ahead and installed the sliding glass door in our bedroom as well. It took us a couple of tries to get it in the right way, but once we figured it out, it was really pretty easy to put in. It looks absolutely amazing. It's great to see all those windows in our room and all the great natural light that it lets in. Next on the list of things to do is install a slider opposite of this one in our kitchen of our existing house. That should really help to tie everything together well. In lieu of time, I will be having Benchmark Renovation do that install, since it will involve demoing a wall and installing a new header for the slider. That should all be done this week, as well as most of the rough electrical, which I have been slowly doing over the last week or two.

Our back door came in last Friday. We picked it up from Quality Door 15 minutes before they closed. Just before they started to load it onto our car, I noticed that the sticking (the part right next to the window) was not square like I ordered, it was an ogee edge. Not quite what I had in mind, but they said the only thing they could do is build a new door, and I don't have another 5 weeks. All in all I am very happy with it though, it has a nice look, and was barely over $600 pre hung. The hard maple is beautiful and will match the baltic birch in the hallway perfect. My dad came up on Saturday, and we had it hung in about an hour. I had been looking everywhere for affordable modern door handles. I was starting to think I wouldn't be able to find a simple stainless steel locking lever. Saturday morning I was picking up a few things from Home Depot, and I found a Schlage medium duty commercial entry door lever. It was simple, and only $60. Installation was a breeze, and I think it looks great. Nothing fancy, but nice.

Pics after the jump.