Ballroom

Restoration of the ballroom is progressing nicely. This is the large room at the center of the house that has this staircase leading up to the 2nd floor and the main entrance of the house is to the right of this picture and the exit to the ocean-facing porch is on the left side of the picture. We looked for a good name for a long time and foyer just didn’t sound right, so we ended up calling it the ballroom (and we might even have a ball or two here in the future):

The wall and ceiling are now plastered and we will soon restore the trim and paneling and ceiling beams that we salvaged from the old house and preserved.

Blueboard, Coves, Reveals, and Shelves

Tons of progress on the inside these days. Blueboard is up on most of the 2nd floor and this week more blueboard will go up on the 1st floor and in the guest suite above the garage. More plaster to follow soon. In particular we now have this cool “Type 2 Ceiling Cove Trim” installed in many rooms on the 1st and 2nd floor, which combines two 1/2” reveals with a curved crown moulding:

And this is how it looks in real life with blueboard on the wall and ceiling and everything ready for the application of plaster later this week.

It will be nice to watch the progress of how this looks once plaster is applied and then when everything is painted. Very exciting…

We also have progress in other rooms on some preparation for the built-in cabinetry, for example here are metal rods that will hold the floating book shelves in my future home office:

As you can see, many of the rooms are getting a very modern treatment, but we are also restoring the historic ballroom, so it will be very nice to see that balance between historic and modern spaces.

Carriage House Roof completed

The roof on the carriage house has now been completed and I just took a photo of the roof nicely doing its job in the rain. Note the interesting lines of the ridges due to the axial shift between the street-facing side and the ocean-facing side of the building. You can only see that effect from this particular perspective, which is from our future bathroom window.

From down below the carriage house looks perfectly symmetrical from both the Atlantic Avenue side and the Atlantic Ocean side, and you would never know that this axial shift is happening. Interestingly, that axial shift was something we immediately noticed and loved when we saw it in the first set of plans we got from our architects.

Hardscape and infrastracture

While there is a lot going on at the construction site every day, and we are making great progress on all fronts, not all of it lends itself to beautiful photos easily. For example final stone selections for the hardscape surfaces happened this week and here are the granite and bluestone samples we approved:

On the infrastructure side we are also making great progress and we already have the HVAC system running on the 2nd and 3rd floors and the mechanical room is starting to look like the engine room on a submarine:

And throughout the entire house they are now running miles and miles of cables, sprinkler pipes, radiant heat, plumbing, gas, and water and it is all coming together nicely in a few hubs and intersections like the ones shown in the next four photos:

   

   

Last, but not least, we also already have the garage door openers installed and working nicely on all three garage doors. Yes, there are only three garage bays. I’ve been asked a couple of times already if we are building a 7-car garage, but the doors on the right side are just for front- and side-access to the shed.

Turret

The outside of the turret in the eastern corner of the house is now complete with the installation of the new radius windows and the beautiful shingle pattern between 1^st and 2^nd floor.

This leaves just a few areas of the outside that are not yet finished: the front steps at the main entrance, the back porch, and those corners of the house where we are going to install aluminum storm shutters to protect the windows that are too close to the ocean and seawall.

Utilities in the 21st Century

I can clearly remember the time when I was a kid and my parents would take me on many summer vacation trips to this remote village in the Austrian Alps, called Innervillgraten, where we would stay at a local farm that offered B&B services in the summer months. Back then that farm house had electricity, but no running water or gas, so all heating was provided through wood stoves and you got water from the spring behind the house. And if you wanted warm water, you had to get it from a large pot on the stove in the kitchen.

This past month our construction site reminded me of those days. While we did have some temporary utilities at the site during the entire construction time, the final utility connections came online in the past couple of weeks, and it was interesting to see the sequence.

First we got the new electrical connection up and running, which is now underground and got rid of the wires coming from the pole to the roof of the house. Instead of having a transformer on the pole, we now have the high-voltage lines coming into the property and going to a transformer box in the northern corner of the site. From there, the regular circuit comes into the electrical room in the basement, where we have a main service disconnect switch from which it goes to several distribution panels.

It was very interesting to see that the second utility coming online wasn’t gas or water, but data:

In order to get a telephone line back onto the construction site, we already got the Verizon FIOS fiber-optic line into the basement, which provides us with Internet connectivity plus telephone lines. The setup isn’t quite final yet, but at least we have our Wi-Fi network back and also were able to reconnect the web-cam.

And while we already have the gas and sewer connections coming into the building, they are not quite hooked up yet to all the piping, but water came online a few weeks ago, too, and soon we will have the HVAC system coming online in the 3rd floor, which is a prerequisite for the installation of trim and painting.

Aerial photography 2.0

A little over a year after our first round of aerial photography I asked Northeastern Aerial Photography to do another series of flybys and shoot some new aerial photos to document that current progress at our construction site. Looking at these photos side-by-side it is really amazing how far we’ve come in a year.

More photos and high-res versions of the above images are on my personal photo website…

Summer Solstice Sunrise

Today, June 21, marks the day of the Summer Solstice and sunrise in Marblehead was at 5:05 AM today. I got up at about 4:10 AM to go to our construction site and enjoy the sunrise from the little rooftop porch on the 3rd floor that is located between the dormers of Nora’s future studio and my future home office.

Here is a panorama photo of the pre-dawn sky and ocean from that rooftop porch:

The colors are incredible as the sun rises above the horizon and the rooftops of the houses further up the coast. On the left you can see a bit of the dormer roof as well as the roof of the turret:

After the sunrise I went to Beach Bluff Park where many people had gathered to enjoy the sunrise as seen from the Sun Circle sculpture. As the sun disappeared behind some clouds, I took this photo, which shows our house on the left and part of the Sun Circle on the right:

One nice thought occurred to me today: once the next Summer Solstice comes around, we’ll already be living in the new house…

Construction Site Photosynth

With the lack of a live webcam since the day we removed the trailer a few month ago, many people have asked me if I can post some updated photos of the outside of the house. I found a few hours today in the afternoon to shoot a series of 226 images from all sides and assembled them into an interactive Photosynth:

After you clicked on the above to start the Photosynth viewer, I would recommend going into full-screen mode by clicking the right-most button in the Photosynth toolbar called Expand/Contract Viewer. It takes a bit to get used to how you navigate such a Photosynth, but you can go all the way around the house (except the NE side) and take a look at it from all directions and zoom in on various details. You can also use the slideshow button to play through the images or can jump to certain highlights that I’ve marked up.

Leave some comments to let me know how you like it…

Pool terrace

The pool terrace is starting to take shape. The piping and electrical connections are already all in place and the concrete floor and walls for pool and hot tub will be sprayed early next week.

Unfortunately that’s where it ends and we won’t be filling the pool until next spring. Too bad, it would be nice to be able to use it already this summer…

For your orientation: the building on the right is the 2nd floor and roof of the carriage house, which has the garage on the 1st floor facing Atlantic Ave.