Site wall stone veneer sample

As more and more of the concrete site walls are now nearing completion, we looked at a sample of the planned split stone veneer today and approved it. This is going to give all the site walls a very nice and refined look indeed.

More roof

Roofing continues, as you can see in this photo, and we also reviewed the placement of the solar panels on the SE facing roof surfaces today. As part of our LEED silver certification we are aiming to utilize solar hot water from these roof-mounted solar panels for both domestic hot water and radiant heating of the house.

Roof

Very exciting to see the roofers up there this week. The gutters went up last week and this week they are installing cedar shingles on top of cedar breather. The shingles are all pre-dipped in fire-retardant coating, of course, since we do not really want a repeat of the 1960s fire that destroyed the roof and eventually caused the previous owners to cap the house at the second floor.

Pool terrace

Construction of the site walls continues in the front and back of the house and here you can see the pool terrace slowly starting to take shape:

Setting the forms and pouring the foundations you now see here was a bit of challenge in the past 2 weeks with all the stormy days. In fact, we had to remove and reset the lowest part of the forms after the storm you see here, because the forms were swamped with seawater incursion and debris from the waves going over the seawall…

Ballroom

Work on the inside continues with HVAC, plumbing, and electrical on the upper floors while the restoration work of the ballroom or entrance hall in the house is still in progress. I took a series of over 300 photos yesterday – shooting the ballroom for various locations and angles – and created this Photosynth today:

Your computer may prompt you to install Microsoft Silverlight to view this - you will need to do that to view the Photosynth and explore the ballroom interactively.

Basement slab

The concrete slab in the basement level got poured earlier this week. Here is the crew at work smoothing the freshly poured concrete to make sure it is evenly distributed and provides a nice surface for the flooring:

And two days later here is a view of the entire basement as a panoramic shot taken from one corner. Next step will be to set up and frame the walls on the basement level.

At the same time HVAC installation continues and electrical + plumbing installations start next week. This is a very exciting phase of the project…

Winter storm video

Here is a short video clip of the storm conditions at our construction site this morning at about high tide. As you can see, several waves were going over the top of the stone revetment and into the excavated pit where we had already begun building the forms for the terrace foundation.

Storm photos

What a storm! I was at the construction site during high-tide last night as well as today in the morning and the devastation of the sand fence that began a few storms ago is now complete with all sections gone and several of the posts damaged as well.

The waves ran up all the way in the tallest section of our revetment and also easily overtopped the seawall in the lower sections where we had started building the forms for the footings of the terrace.

The erosion of the beach berm continued at a much faster pace than in previous storms and there are literally only four rows of beach grass left.

 

Just take a look at the size of these waves coming in. Those are the biggest I’ve seen this year, but in comparison with the storm in 2007 these are still relatively small. Nonetheless they did all the damage to the beach berm. Our so-called “sacrifical dune” has been sacrificed.

This is the construction site right behind the beach berm. It is now essentially unprotected. Not a good situation for our construction project:

Last, but not least, here is a photo taken from the neighboring Beach Bluff Park and you can see the size of the waves in relationship to the house.

Photosynth of the construction site

I found some time to experiment with Photosynth today and created this augmented-reality view of the house that you can now browse interactively or view as a slideshow.

If you cannot see the above image, you may need Internet Explorer and/or may need to download a plug-in to view this Photosynth - and it probably also only works on a Windows computer…

HVAC Installation

The installation of our HVAC system is continuing and the radiant heat piping in the basement is now all laid out and we are ready to pour the concrete slabs next week:

 

The radiant heat piping is suspended on a steel grid to bring the pipes close to the surface of the concrete in order to optimize heat transport upwards. The pink “stuff” underneath is insulation material.