Day of destruction, pt. 2

(Erin posting this one):
Good things about construction starting:
-- We broke ground before my water broke. Whoo-hoo!
-- A Bobcat going up and down the driveway is pretty entertaining for a 2 y.o.
-- They got so much done! Check out the photos. I was really impressed.

Bad things:
-- At 7:15 one of the workers asked to use our bathroom. Grrrrr.
-- It was SO loud. As in earth-shattering, wall-shaking loud. I'm hoping it's not quite so bad once demo is over. I feel really bad for our neighbors. Unfortunately, there's usually someone home on both sides of us. We might have to ply them with Porto's Bakery goods this weekend to sweeten things up.
-- Our phone stopped working about an hour in, and was out all day. Ooops. I do have a cell phone, of course, but reception sucks inside our house so it isn't super-useful.

They are ahead of schedule (yeah, I know it's only been a day, but I'm optimistic!), so we'll have a couple days off (good for neighbor relations). At the end of the week they'll be marking for the foundation, and on Monday they should be digging trenches. Or pouring concrete. Or something like that. Stay tuned...

Day of destruction

They rolled a Bobcat digger down our driveway this morning. It had a mean looking jackhammer thing stuck in its maw, so I knew it meant business. They're going to take out the back porch and the two sheds behind the garage.
Also, it turns out that a guy chipping the stucco off your back wall with a power tool at eight in the morning is every bit as loud as you might expect.

Interior demo clarified

We found out today that the interior demolition (blowing away the back wall/fireplace in the living room) has been rescheduled for much later into construction. Whew. They'll wait until they're ready to connect the new construction with the existing house. My optimism forces me to guess "October".

Poor asbestos guy

asbestos
Originally uploaded by japunto.

I feel bad for the asbestos abatement guy who showed up on Friday unannounced. He didn't really know the details of the gig and J.D. wasn't there yet. So, he did what anyone would have done -- he rang the doorbell. How could he have known that a very hungry and tired pregnant woman who'd just gotten home from a spectacularly lousy morning with her toddler would open the door? From what I gather, the ensuing exchange was not pretty.

J.D. did show up a few minutes later and they went about their business outside. Hope he didn't take it personally.

We are still trying to figure out what the construction schedule means when it talks about "interior demolition" beginning May 1st. We've been told that they wouldn't be doing anything inside the existing house until as late as possible. I'm guessing we just don't know how to interpret the jargon, but we're eager to get clarification on it.

Signed

After an round of email clarifications with James, we signed the contract last night. This means that we need to agree on a start date now. Then, unless we change the scope of the work, it'll be an eight month countdown until it's finished. Let the games begin.

A couple of other things we're doing that I haven't mentioned: James suggested widening our driveway a bit and installing a fence to completely enclose the front lawn. This is great, as it'll really make the front yard more functional and prevent us from parking the front right wheel of the minivan on the lawn. We've really worked up a nice hole there.

We raised a concern about noise pollution in the front two bedrooms. Since the wall seperating the hallway from living room is going away, we worry about it getting too loud in there for sleeping young ones. J.D. said they can add some insulation to the remaining walls and put in thicker doors.

Contract is ready

I've said "we're going to start construction in two weeks" at least five different times by now. This time, I may be right. Our contract with the architect is ready, so we ought to be really starting for real this time.

CA | Boom

Hi, I'm Erin, JP's wife, and I'm doing a guest stint on Parkhaus today. We went to CA Boom today, which is a really cool home design show.

We're considering ditching the planned addition in favor of a series of sheds www.modern-shed.com. Just kidding, James! But we hope to add one in place of the lead-paint peeling husks we have in the backyard currently.

I'm also crazy about some tile that we saw, which maybe could be an accent in the master bath. It's fused glass; doesn't seem to be on their website, but there are these amazing drawer pulls (Did you ever think anyone could use "amazing" and "drawer pulls" in the same sentence?)

I think we've also ruled out using a concrete counter/sink in the bathroom. It's much smoother than I thought it would be, but probably too big a custom expense for us. I'd rather have cool tile!

Not that we'll have any money left for furniture, but we really liked this guy's stuff: www.yglesiaswoodwork.com. And he's just around the corner in Glendale.

That about wraps it up. Ronan is eagerly awaiting the arrival of the carpenters. Of course, we'll see how he feels about it when he can't go into the back yard! Hopefully they'll have some big machines to make up for it, though.

Meeting the builder

We met with James and JD (the builder) a couple of days ago. It went great -- we really liked JD, which is very important, considering he'll be the point man here watching over the construction, hiring the subs, etc. The structural engineer's drawings have been approved, so it looks like we'll begin construction in April.

Construction soon

We'll be meeting with James soon to discuss a construction start date. Should be sometime in March.
As I mentioned to reader barlo in the comments section a couple of posts ago, I'm starting to look into setting up a camera outside to take a few photos each day during construction so I can do a time lapse video. Why? I must have seen the Grid sequence in the Godfrey Reggio/Philip Glass film Koyaanisqatsi too many times when I was a kid.

Fun stairs

I'd love to know why all stairs don't have a slide built next to them. This is great fun.

Here's the writeup from daddytypes.com:
Minimalist architect Alex Michaelis first made news when he bought a 4,000-sf vacant lot in London for £750,000. (Apparently, several centuries of concentrated building tends to deplete a city's supply of vacant lots.) Then, because local zoning boards restricted him from building anything higher than the 6-foot high wall around the property, [??!?] he designed the whole house to be underground. And incredibly eco-friendly, from the self-sustaining water and heating systems to the insulated walls, solar panels, and grass roof.

Oh, and it's beautiful, modern, and light-filled, thanks to carefully positioned windows, lightwells, skylights, reflections off of the swimming pool, and thanks to painting every built surface a blazing white...

Oh, and it's a kid's paradise, with a climbing wall, a built-in slide, play terraces, and wide open playspaces for his three (four?) kids. Oh, and the pool's optimized for kid-sized swimmers, not adults. It all adds up to make them the most popular hippie mole people in their school.

Leanarch render

Armando at Leanarch added our project to their site, including two of the image based lighting renders I created.
The description they wrote for our project is great:

"The design of this addition for a young and growing family was inspired by the whimsical interior of the existing residence. Although the aesthetic of the new addition is distinct, the proportion and massing are based on the layout of the original home. A centrally located art studio has retractable walls so that it can be opened to the interior courtyard. The master suite on the second floor has access to both a deck and balcony in order to survey the play areas within the yard. The playful contrast between new and old, and the rich palette of materials speak directly to the client's participation in the design process."

Light probe

This is what the light probe looks like. It's a photo I took of a chrome ball which has been distorted in a way that my rendering software (mental ray) understands. The final one I used was a combination of mutliple exposures and multiple angles to remove me and the camera tripod from the picture.
I'll use it for both the lighting and the environmental reflections (off of window, for example) in the 3D scene. 

Lighting

Armando from LeanArch asked if I could do some renders of our house plans for their website, so that's what I'm up to today. I'll be using a global illumination method called image based lighting to create the render. This works by first taking pictures at multiple exposures of a chrome ball to capture the true lighting and reflections of our back yard. These are then converted to a high dynamic range image (HDR) which will serve as a lighting cue for all the points on the surface of the 3D model. I'll post some work-in-progress shots as I go along.