Techbuilt Renovation

Building the Entrance Hall

The new entrance hall will serve to connect the original 1958 Techbuilt home with the addition is a fun, funky, and fascinating design. (The existing front entrance to the original house will go away).

The inverted roof is held up by steel posts and a steel beam, On top of the beam is a steel channel for water to run down to what will ultimately be a Japanese garden.

The stairs to the second floor of new addition and a new set of stairs for the original house will start below the end of the two halves of the roofline of the entrance hall making for a very open and inviting link between the two halves. When we stand at the top of the stairs on the new side we can see all the way down the entrance ceiling to where the front door will be.

Joe, our architect, had a wonderful vision for how the buildings could be connected as well as how the design can serve as art. The way that he designed the steps to go up following the roofline of the entrance hall is remarkable. It's exciting to see what it looks like because the drawings are difficult for me to visualize.

I’ll post about the entrance again when the work is further along.

 

Installing Windows in the Snow

This week the team is installing energy-efficient windows and doors from Pella into the new addition. Considering the cold and snowy weather and how drafty the original 1950s windows are in our existing home, we’re thrilled to have these windows go in.

In phase two of our project some time this summer, they will use the same product to replace the windows in our existing home.

The Pella product is a good choice for us because it is energy-efficient at a reasonable cost. Considering how many windows we have, both of these factors are important.

The windows are pre-primed white on the inside and the outside are finished in black which is an important part of the external color palate we selected.

 

Ready for Winter Weather

The team at Patriot Custom Homes has made excellent progress over the past three weeks. They worked really hard to get the addition ready for the inevitable Boston area snow.

Just a day before 3 inches of snow fell, all new roof areas had Ice and Water shield applied and all exterior walls were covered with the Blueskin Weather barrier.

Exterior Color Palate

Our builder asked us what color we wanted for the exterior trim on the windows. It seemed like a simple request and he needed an answer within about a week.

Just the window trim color, right? Wrong. That single decision effects everything on the exterior, so rather than just selecting the windows, we decided to approach the entire exterior of the house.

So we met with Joe Welch, our architect at C/W Design Group, to discuss the exterior color palate. I was certainly happy that we had an incredible architect and an accomplished artist (my wife Yukari) on the case because the nuances of color make my hair hurt.

We looked at the exterior color choices for the shingles, the horizontal tongue and groove wood, exposed beams, window trim, metal roof, front door, and stone accents.

The importance of making sure that all these elements work together is clearly apparent to me, but being out of my league when Joe and Yukari were discussing the merits of each of many dozen shades of gray – “too much blue in this one” was a typical comment – I was happy to defer.

While I did have theoretical veto power over any of the choices, I was happy to et the experts have at it and agree with the final choices.

Windows are ordered (with black trim) and they should be installed within 2 weeks.

Three Car Garage with No Posts

As we were watching the framing of the new part of the house, we were thrilled to discover that the enormous three-car garage was being built without the requirement to have support posts. We found this to be remarkable since there is an entire second story to be built above the garage.

Our current garage, which will eventually be demolished, holds two cars and has no second story above yet it requires two annoying metal posts in the middle of the garage to hold up the roof.

Our builder Dylan James from Patriot Custom Homes chose to use engineered wood products from the Boise Cascade Company to build the new structure to create long continuous spans in the garage. The continuous header over the garage doors is a Versa-lam 2.0 3100sp and the I-joists are 14” BCI 90’s-2.0.

We were fascinated by the products and wanted to learn more so we found this Technical Guide for Floor & Roof Framing Construction from Boise Cascade Engineered Wood Products that details the products Dylan used.

Green Building Products

Boise Cascade Engineered Wood Products are environmentally friendly green building products. They build better homes with stronger, stiffer floors using only wood purchased in compliance with Sustainable Forestry Initiative (SFI®) programs.

Boise Cascade begins with wood fiber, a “renewable resource”. The trees are nourished like any other crop – planted, grown, harvested and re-planted for future generations. Boise Cascade can make engineered wood products using smaller trees than needed to make “regular” dimension lumber. And as trees grow, the forest consumes CO2, a greenhouse gas, which is then encapsulated and stored in the products.

These Boise Cascade products are eligible for LEED®, National Green Building Standard™, Energy Star® and other national and regional green building program credits.

Porta-Potties and our Renovation Budget

When our renovation and addition plans were nearly completed by our architect Joe Welch, we started a series of meetings with our builder, Dylan James to discuss the construction budget.

We had an overall number that we were willing to spend but the first rough-guess budget came in substantially higher. Ugh. So we had to buckle down to get to specifics.

The process of meeting with individual contractors for elements such as electricity, heating, and roofing took time. In addition, vendors for elements such as the garage doors, lumber, and windows needed to work up quotes based on the plans – some were fast and others took many weeks.

As the individual vendors’ and contractors’ estimates and proposals came in, Dylan added each to a spreadsheet. We could begin to see how the numbers added up to the eye-popping total.

That’s when we started a series of compromises. We wanted to get the overall spending down but we didn’t want to substantially alter the design of the house.

There were some quick and easy wins such as changing the type of metal we will use on the roof. This change alone saved nearly $50,000. But we were unwilling to save another $30,000 by going from metal to asphalt.

Going from custom window shapes to standard shapes helped a lot. In our original plans, many of the windows were not rectangular. While it looked great for windows to follow the rooflines, going to standard Pella shapes and sizes saved us money.

We worked through each of nearly 100 line items in the budget one-by-one looking for ways to save money.

We also found many items that without the budget document we wouldn’t even have thought of, like foundation insulation.

Wow! I never even considered we would be paying for a porta-potty! But there it was on the budget – a line item for “on site sanitation” coming in at just under $2,000 with the job earmarked to NSC Restrooms.

The porta-potty is an example of “you can’t get it cheaper”. While we considered asking Dylan and his crew to pee into buckets to save some money, this didn’t seem like a smart way to conserve.

It took us about 4 months of work to get the budget to the point where we told Dylan to start the work. But the effort was worth it so we can minimize surprises and enjoy knowing the house is being built at a price we can afford.

With Foundation Work, Progress Happens Quickly

After more than a year of planning, we were certainly eager to get going with our renovation and addition project. But we weren’t quite prepared for the swift progress that the first few weeks of construction brought.

With the unusually warm late autumn and early winter weather this year, once we gave the go ahead to start work, our builder Dylan James jumped into action. He wanted to get the foundation completed before the winter weather kicked in.

I was surprised by how many things had to come together to get the foundation done. There was excavation of course. But I didn’t realize the surveyor had to come three different times – to stake the excavation, to mark the location of the footings, and to mark the location of the foundation.

At each step, the Town of Lexington was required to come on site and inspect the work to ensure that we were up to code.

And at each point Dylan was juggling the team from Northeast Concrete who were doing the form work, the concrete trucks, and the like.

From the time of the last tree cut down to the completion of the foundation work was less than one month. Quite remarkable, I’d say.

Rock Collecting

As the excavation work for our addition was beginning (and how dramatic it was) I noticed a bunch of large rocks being dug up.

I figured that these would be terrific materials to build a stone wall, so I asked the crew to please save the stones.

At some point near the end of the project when we turn to landscape and hardscape, we will find a place for a stone wall.

A brief history of New England Stone Walls

Growing up in southern Connecticut, I always admired the stone walls that were everywhere. Because I could see the walls even in the woods, it was clear to even my elementary school self that the walls were made a long time ago.

New England’s wall stones date back to between about 30,000 and 15,000 years ago, when the Laurentide ice sheet retreated and left billions of stones scattered throughout the area.

But the stones weren’t exposed until the 1700s and 1800s when there was widespread deforestation in the area by New Englanders who needed vast amounts of wood to build houses and heat their homes. When the ground was laid bare, frost penetrated deeper than before, churning up the soil and bringing stones to the surface.

Most of the region’s stone walls were built during the Revolutionary period between 1775 and 1825, a time that has been called the "golden age" of stone wall building. Over several generations, more than 200,000 miles of stone walls were built.

Most of New England walls were built to divide fields by ownership or to separate animals and crops. Laws in Colonial America required a farm fence to be 3 to 4 feet high. But since walls were built by hand, most did not reach this height as it was much more effort to lift the stones to do so. Therefore, farmers added wooden rails to top the stone helping to pen in animals.

The majority of New England farms were abandoned by the end of the industrial revolution as traditional farming gave way to better jobs in factories. But the walls remained.

For more, check out the article The history, science and poetry of New England's stone walls by John-Manuel Andriote.

Demolishing the shed

One of the major challenges with TechBuilt homes is they have no basement and no attic. Combined with the small closets customary in the 1950s, there is way too little storage for a modern family! 

Many TechBuilt homeowners build sheds for storage. When we researched our shed we learned that it was not original to the home but had been constructed at a later date. Therefore we were comfortable with the demolition. 

And yes, the design of the new addition to our house has plenty of storage! 

Tree Work

We regret having to take some trees where the addition to our home will be located.

When we consulted with John Marquis of Marquis Tree Service we made it clear that we wanted to save any tree that was not absolutely required to be taken.

Once the project is complete, we will plant appropriate trees to replace the number that were taken.

The Marquis process was amazing to watch.

There were six men working with two trucks, a big chipper, and an enormous crane that must be 20 stories tall.

For the medium trees, the workman would go up on the crane, tie the harness at the top, then rappel down. Then he would cut the tree and the entire thing would be lifted and moved over to the chipper. The entire process for a medium tree took about ten minutes.

The large oak tree on our property came down in about half an hour. They cut half the top and then removed it with the crane. Then the other half. And the entire base went last.

We saved several cuts from the large oak that we will install in our new entrance hall.