Amusing myself with cookies

I've had so much fun assembling and decorating my gingerbread replica of our Beacon Hill Bungalow. I've spent most of the day with my hands gooped up with Royal icing and surrounded by cookie crumbs. Here are some photos of my creation.

Front view, complete with our kitties Tink and Pongo in the front yard. I made the porch from chocolate wafer cookies; the columns from candy canes; and the roof of the dormer from chewing gum. The main roof is green-tinted icing with coffee grounds mixed in to give that "composite roof look". 

 Here we are looking south. I took some editorial liberties and didn't build the bump-out for the dining room and planted a tree instead.

 The rear view. Our back porch looks icy and dangerous without a railing.

 From above, with a dusting of snow.

Home sweet home

Grinders

We are down the last item on the to-do list for the basement before we call in the professionals: rough in electrical for accent lights under soffit in living room. Nevermind that we keep finding things to append to the end of the list. Like grinding down the concrete floor so it will be more level and take paint better. And pulling the staples from the ceiling joists.

Justin spent the best parts of black Friday grinding the concrete floor. I spent the best parts cutting out gingerbread pieces to make a miniature replica of our house (more on that later).

 Here's Justin attacking the last 15 sqft of concrete (behind the washer/dryer). He's had a full day of vibrating.

Here's a progress shot--taken at about mid-day. Doesn't the ground side look so fresh and clean? It is really dusty so it's not so clean but it does look fresh!

Next week, we'll be insulating. Er, we'll be paying someone to insulate. And the week after that we'll be paying someone to drywall. It'll be a liveable space soon!

Closing in...

A view of our new soffits looking westward.

Well, we made a decision on the duct. It's staying where it is. That's option #1 from the previous post. I had 3 construction professionals over and they all thought it was too minor to worry about and maybe not worth spending the money. So, we'll have a little cave of a laundry room.

Despite a really lousy forecast for this weekend, it didn't rain much during the days so re-framing the window in the basement bathroom was more enjoyable for Justin than expected. The only hiccup was a finish nail that went through the vinyl frame of the window and pierced a hole in it. We'll have to figure out how to repair vinyl window frames in the spring. For now, some waterproof tape will have to do. Justin also finished framing in the walls in the bathroom and built a few more soffits. 

 

We've modified the exterior with a smaller window, salvaged from the back of the house.

 

For my part, I tinkered with a bit more electrical work and hammered in a big bag of the nail guards to protect the electrical wire from the drywall screws. And I caulked in the new window and killed the tube of caulk filling in some other random holes.

Let's take a look:

 An action show of Justin putting some sheathing up to fill in where the larger window once was.

My soffit man.

A little electrical re-org--no sooner do we get it installed then we rip it apart and redo it. This is the switch to the living area. It used to be on the wall that the storage room shares with this room but I thought it might be a better fit on an adjacent wall, twinned up with the switch (yet to be installed) for the under-soffit lighting.

 Here's our tidy little bathroom, with a new little window. Justin had to notch each one of those studs in 3 places to fit over the plumbing in the wall.

What to do??

I need a few opinions from any readers out there. We have a conundrum. See, our ductwork in the basement is less than ideal. In retrospect, I would have had the installers of the system originally take a totally different approach but we have what we have and only money can fix it. So, that is where I need some help. Is it worth spending more money and having someone come fix it?

Here's the crux of the issue: The ductwork is too low. Our ceilings are barely 83" in the high spots, before drywall and flooring. Our joists run North/South. Where the ducts need to traverse the ceiling in the East/West direction, they have to mount below the joists. This causes us to lose more height, another 6" to 8" which gives us a clearance of 75"-77" of headroom. Now, unfortunately, the main support beam that holds up the house is at 77" so we are stuck with that clearance when you come down the stairs and turn to the right side of the room. The left side of the room doesn't have any obstructions in the ceiling so we're capitalizing on that area as the living space. But the real stinker is the hallway to the laundry area. The duct that you must walk under is at 75"; that's just 6' 3" and it will be less when we add drywall. Justin is 6' so he barely squeaks under. So, do we do something about it? Here are the options I've come up with:

1. Do nothing; live with it. For the two of us, it isn't a big deal but maybe the prospective buyer (sometime in the long-off future) will scoff at the thoughless arrangement of ducts and soffits and  offer less $$ or not even bite. We were those buyers a few years ago, puzzling over this kind of thing in other homes.

2. Reroute the ducts around the south and east perimeter of the room, building a mile of soffits around the laundry room and picking up the E/W trunk at the far east side of the house. I'm not sure that this is mechanically a sound idea for airflow. I'm sure the cost of this is high--probably $1000 or more.

3. Reroute the cold air return and offending hot air duct into the joists above allowing a little overlap into the head space but not 8 inches. This idea might be pretty expensive too and it might not deliver enough volume in the ductwork for the furnace to do it's job well. We'd be taking a 2-joist wide cold air down to 1 joist-wide and we'd be taking a 8"x24" hot air duct down to 10"x14". We could probably spare another few inches of headroom to get a hot air duct that is 15"x14" which gets us the cross sectional area that we started with. The cold air is more of a challenge.

4. Build a 30" doorway in front of this duct so that visually, the duct is obscured from plain view. The door would open and reveal the low hanging duct right in it's head space. I think this is a little sloppy, construction-wise and aesthetically, it is a slight-of-hand. Any prospective buyer would see this for what it is but because the door can be sealed, the duct can be out of sight/out of mind until you need to wash your socks. 

5. Move the furnace to the center of the house, right underneath the main East/West trunk and avoid needing the low hanging duct altogether. We can carry back the branches that go to the second floor in existing joist bays. We lose square footage having to add a second utility closet for the furnace. The existing utility closet can't shrink down because the sumps are permanently located where they are on either side of the furnace. Moreover, the gas piping to the furnace would need to be rerouted as would the venting and drainage pipes for the furnace. I don't even want to guess at what this would cost but it isn't cheap. 

Here's a 360 degree look at the offending duct:

 Looking east into the laundry room, the low duct is the one hanging North/South.  The cold air return is directly above it tucked into two joist bays. If we built a door (Option #4) it would tuck in right in front of this duct, scooched to the right of the E/W duct in this photo. If we went with option #5, the furnace would relocated to where the existing framing is bumped out on the left of the photo.

 Looking west while standing in the laundry room, the low duct is all you can see.

 Here's the low duct exiting the furnace. You can see the sheet metal above the duct fencing in the cold air return in the joist bay. (Picture taken looking south)

Here's the final view of the low duct, picture taken standing near the furnace looking northward. The duct perpendicular to the main duct travels along the main beam of the house and will be soffitted in at 6'5" along with the main beam.

Leave me a comment with your thoughts. Should we make do with what we have or should we open our wallets and stimulate the economy some more?

Lights! Ducts!

Saturday it was my birthday and Paul Simon's too. I spent the better part of the morning honoring our birthdays with an 8-album music marathon of Paul Simon tunes while Justin and Jason, a sheet metal journeyman that Justin knows, rearranged the ductwork in the basement. We now have all of the necessary ductwork to heat the basement and some of the ducts for the upstairs reorganized for optimal ceiling heights.  Being my birthday, the guys wrapped it up in the early afternoon so Justin and I could get on with our celebrating.

 Justin, a sheet metal apprentice for the day, patching the old duct for reuse.

Jason is fitting our new East/West trunk of duct with a branch for the bathroom.

 

Here's my new design for the mantel. Justin gave me the urn on the right for my birthday. I plan to hang a large mirror above the mantel in lieu of that too-small artwork.

We amateur electricians have nearly completed the wiring for the basement lights and about 60% of the receptacles. This is my first time really working with wiring in a house. I've done little projects here and there but I've never wired up a lighting circuit until this basement project came along. Now I've got my 3-way switch badge and new breaker badge. The best news of all is that we now have a respectable number of lights in the basement to actually carry on down there without dragging around the clamp-on construction lights. Woohoo!

Cross Post

We spent a couple of weeks in Europe last month. Check out my update on my other blog: http://www.l-c-f.blogspot.com/2012/10/oktoberfest-and-spa-mania-2012.html.