Front Porch

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My favorite book on my reading list is ‘Get your House Right’  by Marianne Cusato. The book is an amazing illustration about house design. Especially if you have a tendency like myself to like ‘old fashioned houses’. The book doesn’t talk about how to construct walls, the angle of cuts necessary for roof rafters or how to calculate the load bearing weight of walls. It talks about the design of a house. House design and the general science of art is interesting because to the casual observer, they will instinctively ‘like’ something without knowing why. They will also ‘not like’ something as well without necessarily having an appreciation of what is bothering them about the art or design. It’s not actually an issue of preference ie I prefer blocky houses vs I prefer French country houses. The issue is in our inherent nature. When people in general look at the world, we instinctively look to see if it looks ‘right’ or makes ‘sense’ in our brain. A house sitting on a cloud in the middle of the air looks odd. A house sitting on top of a lamp post looks odd. In the same way, our eyes are looking at any regular house to see if it looks ‘right’. In general, a house should look supported from the ground up ie stone pony wall on the ground supports the brick veneer or siding above. From a construction perspective, it may not be necessary and in fact expensive to build a stone pony wall at the base but from an aesthetic perspective it looks better. Compare this to the house that has a pony wall just in the front and you can see there is none on the side of the house. It looks ‘odd’ or for a house where the foundation wall is showing at the bottom and the brick veneer seems to start 10″ off the ground in the air. It looks odd mainly because it doesn’t look well supported and in most peoples brains it will register that way. Again, it may not be necessary for construction but from an aesthetic perspective it will always not look right.

The same can be said with how our house was finished. When the house was built, our porch was 2′ off the grade and by code did not need a handrail. In addition, the overhanging shed roof was built with a large hidden wood lintel that carried the load of the roof and a support post was not needed to keep it there. For this reason, our porch was finished without a rail and post. This was fine from a code and construction perspective but from a purely aesthetic perspective it looked ‘odd’. The porch looked like a person could fall off the ledge accidentally and the roof had this appearance of hanging in the air above the door. Most people wouldn’t notice why it looked ‘odd’ but I certainly thought it could look better. For that reason, I began to make my porch to complete the front yard.

Again, I borrowed the design from a magazine I love and had been reading “This Old House”. https://www.thisoldhouse.com/ideas/porch-railing-pizzazz. I again modified the design to my needs. The main difference was that I used a 4X4 post anchored to the roof beam and the concrete porch. Than I used PVC boards to cover the post and make all of my flat sawn balusters. In fact, I tried to make everything out of PVC boards to make it weatherproof and rot resistant but they just don’t make handrails and bottom rails out of PVC so I had to settle with what they had at the lumbar yard. The PVC boards were tricky because cutting them created lots of PVC dust and in some cases like the jigsaw, the blade itself would get too hot and melt and ruin the cuts. For that reason, I had to buy a special jigsaw blade for PVC’s. Another problem was the glue to join the mitres. Regular PVC glue from plumbing dries in seconds and that is way too fast to join a mitre edge that may be 8′ long when surrounding the post. Instead, I had to find a special PVC glue specifically for PVC boards that has a longer ‘opening’ time and hardens in 15 minutes. Still fast but enough time to play with. So the porch looks bang on now and even better, it is ‘nearly’ completely rot resistant.

before we built the porch

Always make a jig

Here is my jig for the flat sawn balusters made out of PVC

measuring the length and level of my rail

measuring the height of my finished balusters

this was actually a lot of work from start to end- maybe a month

just gotta finish the trim

Here it is nearly complete without the arches

 

Frontyard landscaping

After the land around the house settled for two years, we finally completed the front yard landscaping and driveway. This was done in the summer over one week. The guys were amazing and quick and they left us with a pale of polymeric sand to keep filling in the cracks as they came. Our landscaping came with runway lights in the driveway, a decorative lamp post (custom built) and garden lights for the house. We waited a long time but it was well worth it.

custom lamp post

laying down unlock

inlay of courtstone pavers cut out of unlock

 

More comments about the ICF

We’ve lived in our ICF house now 3 years so I thought i would give some feedback about the 70,000$ extra I spent on it.

1. I would love to have a backyard pool and that 70,000$ would go a long way to that
2. the house maintains temperature really well. In the summer it takes a long time to heat up and in the winter it takes a long time to cool. I think the heating and AC go on less frequent as a result and you don’t hear them as often.
3. the actual cost of heating is similar to my old leaky 1600 sqft house except I now have twice the area. In canadian terms thats around 1600$ a year. It sounds really cheap but the cost of gas has dropped a lot in the past 5 years.
4. the cost of AC is debatable. My electricity bill is through the roof maybe 1800$/ year but much of that is the crazy video/security/automation I have in the house and my great and wonderful liberal government that has screwed us over in electricity bills!
5. the temperature in the house is very even from top to bottom. The upstairs is never too hot and the basement is never too cool. There is in fact very little temperature difference in the house maybe 0.5 degrees between floors
6. we didn’t get in floor heating but i don’t miss it. In fact, I think it would get way too hot.
7. having a party here you have to be careful because the house actually heats up quickly. In the winter when we had 50 people over the house heated to 28 degrees celsius and I’m thinking of actually turning on the ac now when we have that many people over again regardless of the time of year.
8. it is very quiet- we have a generator next to our house that routinely starts every week and inside the house it sounds like a purr but outside the house ( sorry neighbours) it roars like a broken engine.
9. it feels solid. the house never shakes during the craziest storms outside. Some of which even blew our shingles off.
10. We leave our thermostat higher than in our old house and it still feels comfortable. I think that’s because the old house was so leaky- in our new house we have the summer thermostat set to 25 degrees celsius and in our old house it would be 24 or 23. In the winter it’s 21 degrees but in our old house it was 23.

Garage Workbench

After the house was built, I was spending so much time building the closets, than the mudroom that I got fed up and decided to stop working on the floor of the garage. To be honest, I should have built this first but better later than never!

After watching the builders work I learned a vital lesson in construction. If you can build a jig, any jig than it would be better than free handing cuts over and over again. A simple jig is measuring a cut on a workbench with a mitre saw and just screwing a stop at the point that you want. For example, if you want 10 boards cut a 2′ each than just measure 2′ and screw down a wood stop and than cut all 10 boards. They don’t have to be measured after the first cut and in fact they will be more precise and identical than if you measured each individually. A jig can be made for most purposes but I find having a wood work bench more useful than a store bought mitre saw extender because you have the flexibility of screwing things right into the top if you want or need to make a jig.

I built this workbench out of construction grade plywood. The design limitation was that I wanted it to fold into the wall for storage (only takes us 6″ floor space from the wall when put away) yet it allows up to 8′ of working space for cutting full boards. The middle insert is levelled to the top of the mitre saw. The mitre saw can be dropped in or removed to drop in a router insert to make it a router table. To make it complete, it has a 4″ overhang all around for clamping, a power bar for turning on equipment and it is levelled to the top of my table saw as well for large cuts.

With this table, you can make almost anything by yourself! Rip 4X8 sheets on the table saw by yourself- no problem. Rout 8′ lengths with no jiggle- no problem. Again I won’t get into the details. The design idea came from http://www.core77.com/posts/25533/the-story-of-how-ron-paulk-discovered-he-had-inadvertently-created-a-product-design-hit-25533 and http://www.ana-white.com/2015/04/free_plans/fold-down-workbench-featuring-wilker-dos and was of course modified to meet my needs. The ideas for the drop in router insert with a pneumatic lift came from Colin Knecht of woodworking web https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oiBUMnAstj0. Here are the pictures!

 

had to work on the floor initially

i than built the undercounted cabinets being careful to leave a 4″ overhang for clamping

bottom of insert. all screws were made with pocket holes for strength

what it looks like on floor with insert cut out of the top

cutting boards with pocket hole jig

cutting legs, holes were made with a drill press

table completed on ground

mounting stud

table anchored to mounting stuff with piano hinge

on wall with stops on all side to keep from falling

finished look

router table insert was made

i bought the weatherboards and the plastic router mount

insert in table

in routing position

in open position to adjust router

back of router table insert with knob screws to adjust. table also has a powerbar in front for turning on easily and a mount in the back of the insert for the shop vac!

Ultimate mudroom

When we built the house, one of our pet peeves from our previous house was that we had no proper mudroom/ closet to put all the kids stuff in it. So when we designed our house, we purposely made a large mudroom that was accessible from our garage and from the front door. It was also designed so to be easy to clean, warm and easily hidden from the view of the front door by closing a door. For these reasons, our mudroom was places in the middle of our house adjoining the house itself and the garage and was included in the envelope of our ice building with a proper basement (useful for additional storage) and proper venting.

Unfortunately, as I have said before, the builder built us a great house but with nothing in it! So if you want to sit and hang your coat or just tie your shoe than you have to go the extra mile. At that point, we had no money anymore so that extra mile meant that I would build the mudroom myself from ideas I got from the internet.

The idea for my mudroom came from the ‘smiling mudroom’ from ‘anna white’s ‘ blog http://www.ana-white.com/2011/09/smiling-mudroom. I modified the idea to work with the dimensions of my own mudroom and built it scratch from birch plywood and reclaimed old growth pine flooring from the demolished house (yeah for recycling!). It took me over a month and I must say, my wife was pretty sceptical at first but in the end, it turned out awesome! I won’t get into all the details but you can look at the pictures yourself.

I made one stencil for the dividers and copied it over and over again with a jigsaw and a router. the ends have glued veneer. the bench was filled with wood filler and floor sanded to a fine grit than stained.

the room is L shaped and the little portal window allows light in from the porch

my hand drawn design and dimensions

thats reclaimed old growth pine on the bench. I bought the pantry cupboard from home depot

covered floor for working on

 

Getting Settled

We completed our house in the summer of 2014. Our house was modest, elegant, comfortable and beautiful. Almost everything we wanted but it was largely empty. The builders were great at building a great house but even after finishing this, there were many other projects that had to be done. Initially, those were five main areas: the mudroom, the porch, a work bench in the garage, the frontyard landscaping and the backyard landscaping. There are many more projects that will come, but those are the ones that we did right after.