Interior painting, drainage system, and a garage door

This week was another busy week on the site -the painters worked on adding color to the inside of the house - after all the plastic and paper it was beginning to be tough to remember what it looked like.  We chose the following colors - Ivory Lace, Roman Plaster, Dragonfly, and Silver Sage.  The ceilings in most rooms were 30% or 50% mixes of the wall colors - the 30% was used on the stronger colors while the 50% was used for Roman Plaster and Ivory Lace since they were light to start.  Before they could paint they had to finish staining all the wood trim/doors/beams which they did early in the week and then they moved on to painting the walls then ceilings.

  Once the painting was largely done (except for cutting in the transition corners and all the trim) they removed all the plastic, paper and tape from the windows, doors, cabinets and trim.

The second coat of "added tint" acorn going on the beam - after they wiped if off it didn't look nearly as rich as this dark color.

Family Room - Dragonfly on the far wall, Silver Sage on the right.

Beams stained - before the paint

Another view of the dragonfly/silver sage walls.

Silver Sage and Environmental - it's difficult to see the difference in the two from this angle and in the camera flash.

Kitchen (Ivory Lace), Hallway (Silver Sage) and trim/doors (brown cedar) and beams (Acorn) - all woodwork here still covered with plastic.

Silver Sage on the hallway side of the living room pocket door

Roman Plaster on the living room side of the pocket door

Front door - silver sage paint and brown cedar stained wood.

Hall - silver sage.  That niche at the end may change to Ivory Lace for highlight

Upstairs hallway bathroom.  That's a sun tunnel and no electric lighting in the room.

Ivory Lace in the kitchen - that's the dragonfly wall to the right.

Ivory lace on the walls, alder and cherry cabinets, Carrera marble baking center

 Today the new garage door was installed - it's a Clopay Avante frosted glass door.  Eight feet tall eighteen feet wide so the door weighs in at about 500 pounds. We considered installing it ourselves but the additional charge for having professionals do this one was absolutely worth the money.  Two guys worked on the door for several hours and they knew what they were doing so it would have taken us twice the time.  The opener is a bit out of the ordinary in that it is not installed at the very center of the door - it's offset by a slight be to the left when facing out the door.  Fortunately we had pictures of "before insulation and drywall" which allowed me to cut a small hole in the wall and fish out the buried control wire.  Pictures have paid huge dividends in finding covered switches, outlets, wires, and to help locate where some wires are routed.  The garage door opener is one of the quietest we have ever heard - it's  DC motor that is just about 1 HP for all that weight.  The outside pictures of the installed door show that it was the perfect choice for this house.

View of the 3 panels installed - fourth panel about to go on.

View from the inside - yep, that's a frosted glass door on aluminum frame. 

Here's a view with it installed - but the opener isn't finished at this point

All done - this view doesn't show the true beauty of it

The brown of the frame highlights the window frame very well; and the glass accents the contemporary style of the hosue.

View from the inside after the complete install - you can almost see the off-center nature of the drive track here.  

After the grading was completed, we installed rain barrels under the rain chains (each side of the garage and one off the back deck).  I attached some PVC to the Northeast barrel to allow it to drain directly into the catch basin we installed for that purpose - this catches the East slope of the Garage and part of the North east roof.  The Northwest barrel catches the West slope of the garage and the North slope of the western deck.  That barrel has an overflow outlet attached to a PVC line that runs under the deck and into the 275 gallon IBC containers under the South side of the deck.  The rear barrel currently has no overflow but will feed the IBCs as well as have an overflow that goes into a catch basin below it to get excess water away from the house and flowing down the hill into the intermittent stream via the rip rap field we installed earlier.  Last night it rained enough to fill the 3 60 gallon barrels and add 50 gallons to the IBC container.  The rear barrel was full by the time I left yesterday but it had tipped over this morning.  The soil around the catch basin had turned into a gooey mess with the water - it was  disturbed during the installation of the basin so it will take another rain or two to settle in and compact down again.  I took advantage of a nice day earlier this week (or was it last week?) to spread some seed - Contractor mix on the rear (fescue with a little annual rye mixed in) and winter rye for the front and side yards.  The front and side will not have long-term grass but will have landscaping bushes and mulch.

PVC line from front rain barrel overflow to the 275 gallon IBCs.  Still have to strap it to the deck and put a drain mechanism in to prevent freezing in cold wx.  First test yielded 50 gallons of water (would have been more but I was in the process of test-fitting when the rain started...).

Temp home of the two IBCs - we'll dig out a bit more and elevate them so you can get gravity flow of the water from the two spigots.  Plans also include connecting the two spigots in the front with PVC so there is a self-leveling process as well as putting a powered sump pump in to get the pressure for watering landscape plants when necessary.