The Wood Stove

We have heated exclusively with wood for the entire time we have lived in the North Carolina (almost 15 years). I love the radiant heat from a wood stove and really like cutting, splitting, and hauling wood. The fact that it seems to be one of the few ways of sticking it to the man by avoiding payment for heat every month serves to make it all the sweeter. (Warning, dealing with the cutting and splitting and hauling and the dirt and inconvenience of wood heat is not for everyone; many people hate it.) So it was a given that we would install a wood stove in the new house. Being a cheapskate, I saw no reason not to move our old Squire woodstove with us when we moved; it had served us well for all these years, held big logs and put out a lot of heat in return, and best of all, it was paid for.

I guess I should not have been surprised when the county building inspectors started giving me trouble over the idea; that's their job right? Maybe it is different in other places, but here, in Orange County NC, if you are going to install a woodstove it has to either be certified by some organization or else have an installation book that shows the manufacturer's requirements for setbacks, stove-piping, surrounding surface requirements, etc. Since I had bought my old woodstove on Craig'slist 15 years earlier and had no documentation (and the manufacturer was apparently no longer in business) I was informed that "sure, no problem" and then they read me a list of things I had to do, including building a 16" thick layer of stone covered by a 1/2" steel plate underneath the stove and extending 4' in every direction. I would also have to build a brick wall behind the stove and leave a 4" wide opening between the brick wall and the existing wall behind it. In other words, they would allow it to be installed but only if I tore the house down and rebuilt it since the layer of stone I had to place in the middle of my living room would weigh more than 10,000 pounds, which the framing would not hold. The funny thing about all that stuff that had to go under the stove to keep it from burning through the floor is that I currently have the stove installed on top of a tile floor and have placed my hand underneath it, after burning the stove for several hours, and the tile it still ice cold, not even slightly warm. That it because in this universe heat always goes up, which is apparently not the case in the universe the Orange County building department works in (or maybe they thought I was going to burn plutonium fuel in the thing.


At any rate, a new woodstove was in our future. I had paid $300 for my last stove and $500 for the one before that, so when I saw prices running $3000 to $10,000 I suffered a bit of sticker shock. I had put $5000 in the budget for a new stove when we applied for the construction loan and so that was about our limit.












Ultimately, we found a nice stove that fit the budget and I had a crew install it. The weather had been unseasonably warm and it seemed that we might not get to even fire it up until next winter, but we finally had a few cool nights that would allow a fire and it performed better than I even expected. The 25' tall stovepipe makes the stove draw exceedingly well and getting a fire going is very easy.


We are starting a new 8' x 24' woodshed this week and by next winter all of our wood should be dry and ready to burn. I think that between the house's solar features and this new stove we should rarely have to use the heat pumps, so once more I will be laughing while I stick it to the man (Duke Energy).

Update: December 2012

Loving this stove! Easy to light, draws well, and pumps out the heat. Glad we made the upgrade. Not sure though why all stove fans have to be so loud! This thing puts out so much heat that the ceiling fan you see above it turns pretty fast just from the rising heat. Coldest temps we have seen so far are about 25 degrees, so the proof will be one of those 8 degree nights, but so far it looks like this stove will come pretty close to being able to heat the house. If there is a single downside, it would be the much-smaller firebox than what I was used to. Can't really stuff in any wood longer than about 16" and have to split it much small than for my previous stove, but am still happy with the performance.

Finishing Up

There came a time in the project when I decided that my trim carpenter was actually doing more harm than good while every week I was still having to pay him. I assessed what work remained and decided that there was really nothing left that I could not complete myself. It had become apparent earlier that he really was no craftsman at all and while he certainly had much more carpentry experience than I have, his lack of attention to detail and his refusal to listen to my direction more than made up for any difference in our relative levels of experience. On the other hand, while I have much more limited experience when working with wood than with metal (long ago I completed and 4-year machinist apprenticeship and was employed for several years as a journeyman machinist), I will take the time to do things right. I might not be as productive, but in the end I will definitely have the final product quality that I want.

One major oversight I had made was to grossly underestimate the amount of finish carpentry work that is required in a house of this size. When I took over the carpentry task the deck, door and window trim, kitchen cabinetry, flooring, and some of the decorative trim were complete, leaving baseboards, pantry, closets, built-ins, and a lot of little odds and ends to finish up. This house has 13 closets and most of them required 4-5 shelves each, at a minimum.

Early on in the project we had looked at shelving options and had agreed that neither of us much cared for the ever-so-popular wire shelving, which is about all you can find in the big box stores. We opted instead for some form of solid wooden shelving and I decided that in most cases I would use poplar lumber and laminate a one inch thick oak strip on the front edge of each shelf for a more finished look.

When I had initially cleared the lot 5 years earlier I had milled several of the large trees that had stood on the site into lumber and those boards had been drying ever since in my pole barn. Using that rough-sawn lumber to make shelving was by far the most labor-intensive way to make shelving, but for me it would also be the most satisfying; and after all, I really had taken on this project for the joy of doing it as much as for the final product.

So the process would be to cut the boards to length, plane them to thickness, joint the edges, laminate several of them togther to obtain the desired overall width, trim them to finish size, prime them for paint, and apply the final coats of paint. Then I would take rough oak lumber, cut, plane, and joint them, round over the edges, and stain and finish the pieces. These finished trim pieces would then be laminated to the front edge of each shelf. I could then prepare the shelf supports (requiring basically the same set of steps), fit them and nail them in place, and then install the shelving. While this was a long and involved set of steps, I was no stranger to assembly line work and kind of looked forward to the whole thing. The big issue was that I was building the shelving at the same time as we were moving and we needed to have the shelving in place before we could unpack. This was also spring, which meant that I had fields to prepare and crops to plant and tend, so prioritizing the work was essential.

We had planned on installing mirrored closet doors on the his and hers master bedroom closets and had ordered them in plenty of time to have them onsite while my finish carpenter was still with me. I had special ordered them through Lowes and even with the 4-6 week lead time we should have been fine. But when they arrived they were mirrored doors with no mirrored surfaces. Yep, the Lowes guy had apparently ordered them that way. We already had the frames installed by the time we noticed so I figured we could reorder them and then when they arrived, return the new frames and not have to remove the old ones. The Lowes guy agreed. Apparently though the Lowes accounting department did not agree and two weeks later cancelled our order. So I tore the frames out and returned them and reordered a third time. By time they finally arrived my carpenter was long gone so Mario and I installed them and they looked good.

Appliances

When we applied for our construction loan we were required to put together a budget with detailed cost breakdowns. One of the required categories was appliances. We took a  trip to a couple of big box stores and I felt pretty capable of equipping our kitchen with appliances for around $5000. I figured about $1400 for a nice side-by-side, a 36" range for about $1200, $500 for a dishwasher, and $500 for a hood. This would give us a contingency of over $1000; what could possibly go wrong?

Unfortunately, at that point we had not yet completed our kitchen design. We often share the cooking duties  when we have the time. When we prepare a meal together I generally do the cooking and Flora does the prep work and handles the oven. One of the things we discovered was that most of our conflicts while cooking occur when Flora needs to open the oven while I am working on top of the stove. The logical solution is to separate the cooktop from the oven. I also really wanted the stove to be located in the center island. Unfortunately, separating the cooktop from the oven pushes the cost from $1200 for a range to several thousand dollars for separate appliances. Also, I did not realize that the cost of an island hood adds another thousand plus dollars. Then, when we decided that a double oven might be worth investigating, the budget was a total shambles.

Ultimately, we decided that a gourmet kitchen really deserves a high-end range-top. I was able to procure a display model of a Wolf 36" range-top with four gas burners and an infrared charbroiler, exactly what I had been wanting for decades. Above this is mounted a 42" island hood. Along with the double electric oven, cooking in this kitchen will be epic!

Floor and Wall Tile

During the building process I have been the general contractor, in charge of supervising all of the work, have completed some of the tasks myself, and have done bits and pieces of other tasks, but the biggest job I took on was installation of floor and wall tile. All of that kneeling and getting up and down might mean that tiling is a young man's game, but I figured that if I took my time I could do it all.

Flora and I both really like tiled floors, as much for their ability to take a beating as for their appearance (and our Rottweilers can be rough on a floor). So we made the decision to tile every room except for the master bedroom and the upstairs loft, which would both be done in hardwood. I knew that my slow pace would hold up the job so I was anxious to get started as soon as I could but I wanted to wait until as much of the finish carpentry and paint as possible were complete before I started putting down tile.

Before any tile could be installed, all floors that were to be tiled had to be covered with cement backer board. This material is essentially 1/2" thick sheets of concrete, which are very heavy. They have to be cut to size and cemented to the subfloor with thinset and then secured with screws or nails every few inches. The material is difficult and messy to cut and did I mention that it is very heavy. Fortunately Mario helped me with this part of the job, which ended up taking parts of several weeks to accomplish.

The Master Bath

I was finally able to start tiling the master bathroom floor in December. We had to match floor tile color with the already-installed custom-poured shower pan and with the granite vanity top that had been selected but had yet to arrive. With all of the angles and doorways to trim around, cutting and laying tile required several days. I laid the 12 inch tiles on a 45 degree diagonal, which proved to be a lot of work but ended up looking great.

This is also one of the floors that has hot water tubes running underneath, so the tiles and shower pan will be warm under our feet when we use this room on cool days.

A bigger job yet was tiling the shower. I had never done wall tiles or tiled a ceiling before. Working overhead is pretty tough on these old inflexible joints, especially my neck, so I could not work too many hours a day. I decided to tile the ceiling, the toughest job of all but I wanted the shower to have the cave-like appearance. Creating shampoo and soap cubbyholes also involved a lot more work than I had anticipated. One big problem was that the little slate pieces that create the dark bands around the room tended to delaminate when they got wet on the saw so many of them had to be re-cut and replaced.

I installed Ditra over the cement backboard on all of the surfaces inside the shower and then sealed all joints with Kerdi-band to ensure that everything was waterproof. It was probably overkill, but by the time I was ready to tile, it ensured everything was rigid and waterproof.

In the end, all of the colors and textures blended well and the warm solar water-heated tile floors are luxurious.

The Upstairs Bath

Next, it was on to the upstairs bathroom. I had both 12-inch and 6-inch tiles so I was able to create a little more interesting pattern.

This room went really fast and looked great until the carpenter who was doing the adjoining hardwood floor left too big a gap between my already-installed tile and the hardwood. This meant that I had to go back and add a tiny strip of tile to reach the transition strip, a situation I really wanted to avoid. This turned out to not be the  last bad decision the guy would make and I might have been better off had I fired him then and there. All in all though the room turned out well and the floor blended well with the rest of the room.



The Guest Bedroom

I had selected a wonderful tile for this room that had all of the positive attributes of natural stone (travertine) with none of travertine's issues. I decided to inset 6-inch tile diagonally between the 12-inch tiles. This meant that before I could begin I had to precisely cut a corner off of every tile that would be installed in the room. This added about 8-hours of sawing, but the affect was dramatic and well worth the effort.

This room receives abundant afternoon sun and the color of the flooring enhances the yellow paint we used on the walls. This would turn out to be my favorite room.

The Office

In contrast to the previously-completed guest bedroom, the floor in this room turned out to be my least favorite in the house. The tile is mostly off-white with some small specks and streaks of color. A standard checkerboard pattern adds to the boredom. Suffice it to say that the fllor is done, should hold up well, and will be fine for an office floor.

The Powder Room

By this point in the project, with four rooms completed,  my knees were killing me (it really is a young man's game) and I was looking forward to doing something other than tile for a while. Since this bathroom was located right next to the master bathroom, with its diagonal pattern, Flora thought it best to use a simple checkerboard in this room. These were gorgeous tiles, brown with little streaks of blue, and we matched them with robin's-egg blue wall paint. The tile work went quickly and the effect is nice. Here, I also got to install my first marble transition strip between this room and the tile in the hallway.



Entryway

One of the things we that quickly became routine every time we went to Lowes (which was about 4x a week there for a few months) was to stroll through the flooring department and see what was stacked on or under the closeout table. One of the things we picked up months ago was the a stack a 12" x 24" granite tiles for the entryway and coat closet. They were not particularly inexpensive at $7 each, but they were very nice and I thought that a large format natural stone made a statement as a visitor enters the door and walks into the greatroom. With such large stones I also used wider (3/8") grout lines (the bedrooms and bathrooms all had 1/4" grout lines). The wider grout lines also carried over into the great room. The entryway is separated from the great room by another of those black marble transition strips that is embedded between them.

The Kitchen

The beige kitchen tiles were again placed in a checkerboard pattern, square with the house. The tiles had rippled uneven edges, which made it impossible to use spacers like I had relied on in previous rooms. I still question the wisdom of using such a  light grout in a kitchen, but Flora sealed it twice so only time will tell.











Kitchen Backsplash

The little marble subway tiles I used in this application were problematic from the outset. They arrived glued to a mesh substrate, which made me think it would be an easy installation, but once I put them through the wetsaw the glue began to dissolve and the tiles on the wall that had gotten wet would begin to slide down the wall, forcing me to stick little 1/16" to 1/8" thick spacers  between each tile to locate them correctly. Also, many of the tiles were misaligned on the sheets or broken or chipped. All in all it was kind of a mess and took a lot of extra time, but after everything was grouted it did not look too bad.

The Greatroom

Finally, knees protesting more than ever, I got to the greatroom. I think we paid more for these tiles than for all of the tiles in the rest of the house and oh how I looked forward to seeing them in place.  So even with the aches and pains that came from all of the previous work, I looked forward to doing this room more than any other.

The format of the tile cried out for using a herringbone pattern and I jumped at the chance, even though figuring out the layout was a little intimidating to begin with. I worked for almost a full week to lay and grout the 600 square feet of tile (with a little help with the grouting) but the result was more than worth the trouble. The first thing I noticed was how warm the tiles got when the sun was shining on them, just as predicted. I have to admit that I had been disappointed that the more lightly-shaded subflooring in our passive solar room did not heat up much on sunny days. But now, with the much darker tiles in place, it was a different story. In a passive-solar room such as this, the sun heats the floor during the day and then radiates that heat in the evening.

Now that all of the tiling in the house is complete and grouted, I can install the baseboard and call back the painters to finish up, which is one of the last things to do before it is time to move in.

Granite

We were dying to get the cabinets finished up so that the countertops could be installed. We had picked selected our granite slabs several weeks earlier after many trips to multiple slab yards. We were surprised by the way our tastes in stone changed as we saw more and more of it. I think it is important to select a stone that you won't get tired of over time, something that we observed had happened to us with some of our earlier selections. Granite prices vary depending on the material. There are generally three or more pricing levels. A level 1 granite should be available for $30-40 per square foot (installed price). The difference between price levels can be $10-20 per square foot or more. The granite we selected was a level 2 material.

The first step in the process was to have the templating guy come out and glue wood strips together to create a template for each of our counter tops. The photo below shows a stack of completed templates ready to haul back down to the fabrication shop where we would join them the next morning.








At the fabrication shop we lifted each template into its correct placement on the slabs that had been delivered and taped them in place. During this process we discovered that we could not fit all of our templates onto the two slabs that had been delivered and that we would need a third slab. This meant another trip to Raleigh but it would be necessary to get what we wanted. In all we had six pieces fabricated for the kitchen and two additional vanity tops fabricated from remnants.

When the installation crew showed up later in the week I was surprised that there were only two guys since some of these pieces must have weighed well over 200 pounds but the two guys got them all in place quickly. The main island has a prep sink on one end and on the other end there are two six inch wide arms that extend along the sides of the range top. In this photo the installed trims out the piece that connected the two arms during delivery.




Some things to remember about natural stone that the salesman will not tell you:

• The more homogeneous the granite the stronger it generally is.
• Larger crystalline structures are generally more prone to inclusions, cracks, and other natural flaws.

The material we selected has a lot going on: much color variation, lots of movement, and large translucent quartz crystals embedded in it that make it sparkle and allow you to see down into the material in places. We were very happy with the whole process. The salesman was very helpful, the templater was accurate and efficient, and the installer did a great job. Now it is time to install the tile floors!

Cabinets

From the outset we were happy with the floorplan described in our drawings with most of the rooms in the house, but this was definitely not true with the kitchen. Flora and I both spend a lot of time cooking and both had very specific ideas about what kitchen functionality should be included . The kitchen as shown in our plans just did not have enough space to allow us to incorporate all of that functionality we desired. I also think that in an open floor plan like ours there needs to be some kind of device to define separation between the kitchen and the rest of the great room. We planned to use different floor tiles in the kitchen than in the rest of the great room, which would partially accomplish this, but I really wanted something more.

We were somewhat overwhelmed with the kitchen design task and even went so far as to hire a kitchen designer to assist us. She came out to the house and we described to her what we want the kitchen to do and gave her the dimensions of our space. She came back the next week with a proposal and we hired her. Unfortunately, that was the last we ever heard from her, despite many phone messages and emails.

We took it as a sign that we needed to do the design work ourselves as we had with the rest of the house, so we started talking about it and within a week we had a workable design. We pushed the kitchen space out farther into the dining room and then used the extra kitchen floorspace to expand our main island so that it could hold both a 36" rangetop on one end and a prep sink on the other. We also added a second island that would function as an eating bar and would provide that separation between the kitchen and dining room.

The tricky part of the design though was to figure our the cabinetry. We knew we wanted quartersawn oak in a honey-brown color, but actually defining the configuration and making it all fit the space took several weeks.   Finally, six weeks after we ordered them, the cabinets arrived, all 34 boxes of them.

The entire room was filled with cabinets, including the gigantic oven cabinet, which nearly touched the ceiling.

Once the cabinets along the walls were in place, those defining the main island were placed

Finally, the four cabinets making up the base of the bar were put in place.

Shown here is the final kitchen configuration.

All that was left was to get rid of all those darned boxes!

With the cabinetry in place, it was time to have the granite guys come out and do the contertop templating.

Passive and Active Solar

I was looking through some old house pictures last night and was reminded of how our design and subsequently the house, came about. The process essentially melded a list of features we wanted into a house shell and floor plan. We prioritized our feature list and separated the "must-have" features from the rest. We then spent weeks searching the Internet for designs we liked and then combined those to make our own plan, which we handed off to an engineer.

One thing that I knew for sure was that I wanted the house to be energy efficient. There are several ways of accomplishing energy efficiency including active solar features, passive solar design, insulating the shell, and installing energy saving/energy efficient fixtures. The heart of our design incorporates passive solar features and earth sheltering and then adds higher than required levels of insulation. The area of south-facing glass totals about 8% of our above ground floor space, which provides a lot of solar gain on sunny days, but not too much in late spring and early fall, when we don't want or need the extra heat.

Active solar features were to include domestic hot water production and hot water radiant floor heating located in cool zones. We had eliminated north-facing windows to reduce heat loss but still had a north side master bathroom that would definitely be a cool zone.

So more than any other part of the house, seeing all of the solar calculations and even seeing the piping, tanks, controllers, and all of the rest installed in the basement and the collector on the roof we not enough to make a believer of me. But once I took my first shower with almost endless free hot water and then stepped out onto the warm bathroom floor, that did it. The only problem is that I now get depressed on cloudy days.