Category: RIVER HOUSE (Page 1 of 23)

The landscaping crew has worked on the front yard. The walkway is done except for the lights. You can see it below, including the rocks and some plantings (including a tree).

And the rest of the front yard is now covered in leaf soil and leaf mulch. As soon as we get seeds, we can start planting. We want rhododendrons along the road, and we want a meadow in the yard. But we are struggling to find meadow seeds so we may be forced to put in a lawn, once the watering restrictions are lifted.

Next up for landscaping:

• Final paving of the driveway
• Planting of hair cap moss on the south side of the house
• Lights along the walkway

We have also ordered some signs for that post along the walkway directing people and packages to their correct doors. The signs may be a few more weeks before they get show up.

Even though we have moved into the house, we have still been busy finishing up turning the house into a home.

Lets start outside. They still need to landscape the front yard and put another layer of pavement on the driveway; for now, they have taken the next step by installing our walkway.

Here are two pictures of the walkway, one from each direction. The first picture was taken while the stones were wet and the second taken a day later when they were dry, which is why they look different. The paving stones are blue mist granite, the same as the front stoop.

Do you see that lonely rock along the path. We will actually have six rocks placed next to the path. In fact, earlier in the week, Daphne visited the landscaping company’s rock pile to pick out the rocks she wanted.

Also outside, Daphne has been doing more planting. Here is the area around the backup generator (which has still not turned on for its weekly lubrication run).

To the left is a coral honeysuckle, near the red flag are wild strawberries, around the soaker hose are winterberries, and way in the back are some sedge.

Last week we have the construction team address some things on the punch list. We finally got the screens installed on the porch. Here is a picture of them, although the screens are intentionally almost invisible (even if I was able to get the camera to focus on them).

We also got door stops installed everywhere. Here is an example from the guest bathroom.

The master bathroom door no longer squeaks and the master shower no longer leaks in the basement. The latter was because the plumber over tightened the plug in the trap and it was cracked.

Lots of furniture has arrived and been assembled and placed. Here is the south side of the game room, which is now a reading corner.

On the second floor, we just got the table for the family room delivered. I call this the “Space Alert” table. Space Alert is a cooperative board game that is quite loud when it is played, so we force the players to use the second floor.

Here is another angle on the second floor family room. The couch is now usable. When the movers moved the couch from our old home, they removed the center leg and when they carried it upstairs, they did not reattach that leg. After a few phone calls, they found the leg (it was not in our house), brought it over and installed it so now the couch is usable (although its is far enough from the window that you do not really get a good view when you sit down).

The guest bedroom has been set up. All of the furniture is from our old house, except for the bed frames. That chair does have a great view.

And that’s my update. We are still hanging pictures on the wall. And I still need to finish unpacking and sorting the tool bench in the basement. We are still waiting for the coffee table for the living room, and we are about to order some blinds for the bathroom windows.

We got the last batch of furniture from Cherrystones this morning. Two pieces were our old desks which had been refinished. Daphne’s old desk went into the family room and my old desk is now in the corner of the guest bedroom.

If you look closely at the side of the desk you will see that we screwed up. The electrical (and Ethernet) outlets were too close to the corner to be accessible when the desk was placed. So the furniture installers had to cut holes.

But the star of the show is out new cabinet that divides the dining room from the living room. This piece has drawers, which will be my “desk” drawers since my desk is no longer close to the tall cabinets on the far side of the living room.

If you look closely, you will see wheels under the cabinets. The two halves of the cabinets can be separated and wheeled away if we want more space for parties. Separating them does require removing some drawers and using an Allen wrench, but it is doable.

The other thing you may notice is that the wood is lighter than a lot of our other cheery furniture, especially the chairs and table behind it. This is simply because it has not aged in the light. Our dining room set is 16 years old and has seen plenty of aging sunlight. The new cabinet just needs some time to catch up.

Also, last week we got our porch furniture delivered. Here is one side of the porch with the new couch and rocking/swiveling chair. The is a second chair on the other side of the porch (not in the picture).

No screen on the porch yet. But they are sitting in the garage and will be installed this coming Monday.

Speaking of Monday, the landscaper returns next week to do the walk and front yard, although not the plantings yet. We want a native meadow, but it is currently impossible to get seeds for it, so we may be forced to put down seed instead. However, there are lawn watering restrictions in place so we may have to wait until spring. The porta-potty was delivered late last week for the workers. Its sitting on the side of the garage, out of the way.

It has been almost two weeks in the new house. We are mostly unpacked and I have a few pictures for you.

First, on Sunday evening we played the first game on our new gaming table in our new gaming room in our new house. We did not finish (The Captain is Dead), but we can leave it set up for the next time since we no longer have to game on the same table we use for meals.

When our old next door neighbors came to visit, they insisted that we post a picture of the Instant-Pot corner, which is the North wall of the dining room. These Instant-Pots used to be spread around our first floor in the old house.

On Sunday, we went kayaking on the river once the rain stopped. But more importantly, we started working on unpacking and arraigning the basement. Here are three basement progress pictures. The area in last picture used to be filled with boxes to unpack.

Our poor dragon, which used to live on top of our living room cabinets, needs to be refinished. The two lonely boxes in the above picture need to wait for another piece of furniture to be delivered in a week.

Anyway, the house is livable, but there is still work to be done. For one thing, the front walkway needs to be added, and the front yard needs to be landscaped.

The porch is stilling missing screens — they should arrive this week. The master bathroom door still squeaks and needs some shims under its hinges. And the deadbolt in one of our outside doors can not be closed (or opened) using a key. Two cabinets need to have a fixed shelf removed so they can be used to store brooms. And there is some other minor stuff awaiting attention.

Anyway, I will keep up with updates, but they may be less frequent. At some point, I will summarize the whole build and probably switch the focus of this website.

We have been living in the house for 5 days now. The last 5 days were filled with unpacking, breaking down boxes, putting things away, and doing some minor installations (like mounting my monitor on an arm).

I have pictures for you. Lets start with the game room. The games and puzzles have been unpacked but not organized. We have a brand new gaming table as well.

Also in the game room, we have installed a Murphy bed and cabinets above it where we will store the party chairs and bedding for the Murphy bed. The bed is partially open so you can see it.

In the game room, we are stacking all the boxes that did not come from our moving company, sorted by size.

The boxes from our moving company that have been emptied are in the living room, also sorted by size.

Speaking of living room, we now have furniture.

We are missing one critical piece of custom furniture that is still being built and will arrive in 2 weeks. In its place, we have four boxes with a grey blanket over them. In front of the fake furniture, you can see the remaining boxes for the living room that have to be unpacked. In the background is our dining room table, freshly refinished.

The second floor has a bunch of boxes yet to be unpacked. We are also missing a table (not yet purchased) that will go with the chairs stacked at the right.

It’s the basement which is a real mess right now. Almost nothing has been put away and things are stacked in a couple of different piles.

In the picture below you can see our stuffed dragon, which normally goes on top of the cabinets in the living room, but needs to be refinished.

The movers used paper to wrap everything when they packed us up. Once we unpacked, we straightened out all that paper so it would take less space. Here is all the paper from the boxes we unpacked so far.

This all gets recycled and friends of ours have allowed us to fill their recycle bins to try to get rid of it.

Finally, I leave you with this early morning picture of the river from our living room.

Yesterday the movers came and took everything to the new house. They reassembled any furniture they disassembled, but most of what they packed stayed in boxes. And boy, are there a lot of boxes. It will take us quite a while to unpack, and in the meantime we are having trouble finding things we need right away. (Where is the box cutter packed?)

Our computers are set up on our old desks, which will be replaced with new desks tomorrow. The old ones will go back to Cherrystones to be refinished and then they will be returned to be put in other rooms. We had to have the computers set up so we could connect to our new Sonos system and our new Unify Protect system. But also so we could order, from amazon, things we need real soon (cords the telephone, bumpers to stop doors from banding in the middle of the night, etc.)

Here are some pictures. The first is the garage with its new epoxy floor. The floor is still out gassing and we have to open up the garage during the day to help it air out. The vent hood in the corner is where I may eventually install a 3D printer. To the left of the vent hood is our only WiFi, which only turns on when we flip a light switch.

The kitchen is a mess with all the boxes packed by the movers for the kitchen. The dining room table comes tomorrow, so for now we eat on card tables.

Before the normal kitchen stuff gets unpacked, we had to transfer the contents of our chest freezer from our old house to the new house. I made a freezer run this morning with four large coolers and here is Daphne loading up the new chest freezer which had been cooling down all night,

The second floor family room is pretty empty. There are some boxes, but more are still in the basement. The reclining chairs we will put near the windows are currently in our living room until our new love seat arrives (later today).

Its the basement where most of the boxes are. The ones we packed and moved using my Prius over the last month are sorted by room. The boxes and other basement things from the movers are all over the place and need sorting.

Our A/V consultant is done. He installed our Sonos and internet infrastructure. Here is the cabinet in the utility room. Ignore the reflections in the glass. We have four Sonos amps, three sets of speakers (living room, kitchen and game room) and one soundbar for the main TV). We have an Ethernet switch in this cabinet and another one in a smaller cabinet on the second floor. We also have analog phone wiring for VOIP (the VOIP box is also in this cabinet), and a Roku (more on that later).

The plumber installed a water softener for the house. Our water is what he calls middle-hard. We now soften everything except the outside faucets (because the salt in the softened water kills plants) and a line going to a filter in the kitchen for drinking water. You can also see the hot water heater to the left. And against the wall, just to the right of the hot water heater, is the pump that circulates hot water to the master bathroom so we get instant hot (just in that bathroom, however).

Here are some interesting stories and tidbits from the move.

Spontaneous Sound

We have a soundbar in the living room, and ceiling speakers in three rooms. They are all connected to Sonos amplifiers in the utility room (see the picture above). When I was there two days ago, while we were working around the house, the soundbar started playing music, quite loud.

Well, I fumbled around with the TV remote and the electrical kill switch we have on the TV and nothing worked. Finally I was able to switch the TV to using the Roku and that stopped the music. Later in the day, the workers in the house asked if I could restart the music, but I had no idea how.

Then yesterday, it happened again, but this time the speakers in the game room started playing music very loudly. I did not know what to do. So I went downstairs and looked in the wiring cabinet and one of the Sonos amplifiers had a green indicator. I pressed it and the music stopped.

When our A/V consultant came the next day, he explained what had happened. The Sonos amplifiers were configured with the Sonos radio channel that the consultant was using for testing when he set up the units. It turns out that there is a very sensitive touch button on the amplifier’s face that start it playing. The electrician had been working in the utility room with the cabinet door open and if he bumped into an amplifier, it would have started the music.

So no chance it would happen in the middle of the night, while we were sleeping, thank god. And now the cabinet door is closed, so it should not happen again.

Roku Kill Switch

We use a Roku box for our TV (not a Roku TV, but the separate box). At our old house, the Roku would occasionally hang, and when that happened, we would turn off power to the entertainment plugs, which included the Roku, let it sit for a bit, and then turn power back on so it could reboot.

At the new house, the Roku is 30′ away, hidden in the cabinet in the utility room. Because of that, we included in the plans a light switch in the living room that would kill power to the Roku, and just the Roku, in the basement. Well, there was a switch, but it was wired to kill power to outlets under the TV, not in the utility room.

So we asked the electrician if he could fix that and he was able to run a wire down to a new outlet begin the cabinet in the utility room, which is now labeled “switched”. Then, the next day when the A/V consultant came, we asked him to move the Roku plug to that switched outlet.

Well, said the consultant, that was actually the wrong thing to do. It turns out, unbeknownst to use before then, that the A/V consultant had set up a web address where we could remotely reset any of the Sonus amplifiers or the Roku. No need for a switch. Sigh. We just wasted a bunch of electrician’s salary to wire up an outlet that we did not really need.

So now, if the Roku hangs, we will first try the web site to reset it, and only if that fails, will we use the switch. So for now, we have tape under the switch to keep it turned on unless we really need it.

Mystery Black Marks on Floor

When we were unpacking our clothes, there was a mystery stain on the floor. It looked like black streaks and it took some scrubbing to get rid of it. One feature of the luxury vinyl tile flooring is that it is rougher, meaning less likely to slip on the floor. But those ridges mean that dirty can get stuck easier and it is harder to clean, as we just learned.

Well, we really wanted to figure out where those black streaks were coming from. As it happened, we noticed some black material under the shirts, which had not been smooshed into the floor yet. We also saw some read and green material mixed in.

What we thought at the time was that some piece of clothing which had been in our old closet for a long time was breaking down and shedding material. We looked at everything and could not find any likely candidate. Then, Daphne noticed that some of our hangers from previous visits to the cleaner had a foam protector on them. Like the hanger below.

Well, it turned out we had a few hangers like that and when that material ages, it breaks down and drops black, green and red stuff onto the floor. Mystery solved. We looked at every hanger we had and removed all the hangers that had that foam. Hopefully, that will be good enough.

Broken Phone System

At the new house, we town internet service. But the town does not do telephone service. Therefore, we have switch over to using voice over IP (VOIP). I ordered a service and a few days ago the connection box (ATA) came in the mail and I added it to the internet cabinet the way I was instructed by email from the A/V consultant. Then I tested the phones upstairs. No dial tone. So I took a phone and plugged it directly into the ATA and it worked fine. Then I took that phone upstairs and pick a different jack and plugged it in. No dial tone.

So I contacted the A/V consultant and he suggested that the electrician look into it since it was probably the electricians wiring that was at fault. The next day, we added it to the electricians list. He poke around for quite a while (translation lots of hourly billing) and finally figure out that the cable from the ATA to the first junction box was bad. He replaced it with a cord from one of our phones. That fixed it.

The next day the A/V consultant apologized. He had use an old cord he had handy and it was bad. He did not test it. Sigh. Now we just have to wait for our phone number to transfer from the old house.

Anyway, today is unpacking (as will be the case for many days to come). We also got some furniture delivered and will have more tomorrow, so pictures will wait until then. In the mean time, here is a picture of Daphne at Fairhaven Bay looking at the aquatic flowers. This is from a morning hike.

First I will update you on the occupancy permit process. We have successfully passed all the necessary inspections. Two documents need to be given to the building inspector on Monday morning, and he will turn around the occupancy permit by end of day Monday. Tuesday, we move in.

Let me show you progress pictures. First they fit the electric oven into the cabinet by widening the opening.

Outside, they put gravel on the walkway, which is only temporary until the landscaping is done. The gravel will keep the movers from tracking dirt into the house.

On the second floor, we positioned and then had them install, the pull up bar. It is positioned for Daphne and me. Tall people may find it mounted too low.

The media consultant finished their installation. Here is the living room TV and sound bar.

Here is the second floor wiring closet where we have an Ethernet switch.

And here is the main rack with an Ethernet switch and the doorbell and camera equipment.

The plumber has installed the water softener.

I do not know how to use any of these things, but I will be trained in the coming week.

I forgot to get a picture of the new garage epoxy floor, which will be drying until Monday. Inside the house, on Saturday, they will put the final coat of finish on the hardwood floor and stairs. On Monday, the construction crew removes all their equipment. The dented appliances get replaced on Tuesday, the same day that the movers arrive.

Today is Wednesday, which means another house meeting. The next meeting will be a few days after we move in, to list the things that may be problems. I will summarize where we stand, and what’s left to do.

Lets start with the saga of the range. We had bought a Kucht propane range, but it was not on the Massachusetts approved list, which meant that we failed the plumbing inspection. The builder and the construction team said they had never seen a plumbing inspection fail — ours was the first. Once I got ahold of a manager at Kucht, I learned what happened. It seemed that Kucht let their Massachusetts approval expire. They were working on reinstating it, but that was not going to happen any time soon. I suspect that when we picked out the range last year, it was on the list, and it fell off the list in the intervening time.

Anyway, after dealing with Kucht and then Lowes, I finally got approval to return the range, which will be picked up this Friday. Meanwhile, the new range arrived at the warehouse this morning and we sent down a crew member to pick it up and bring it back.

It had a different layout in the back so they had to move some pipes around, but they got it working before the end of the day.

Daphne is not in love with the red buttons, and will try to see if there are black versions. But it is good enough to pass plumbing inspection, now scheduled for Thursday at 1pm.

Not everything we ordered fit. Because the range also has a propane oven, we wanted a separate electric oven to use. Unfortunately, the cabinet middlemen mis-measured the opening for the electric oven, so the opening is not large enough. There is a plan to fix this in time for the move, however.

For the other appliances, two arrived with dents — the chest freezer and the washing machine. Both will be replaced next Tuesday (which is also moving day, so chaos). Meanwhile the dented washer (and non-dented dryer) are sitting in the laundry room so you can see them. They are on a raised pedestal so no bending down to load and unload them.

In the kitchen, they installed the refrigerator, including piping in water for the ice maker.

And both dish washers were installed and running when we got there (for testing purposes).

While we were there, we worked out placement of grab bars, towel racks, toilet paper holders, etc. We also pick a location for the pull-up bar on the second floor. Here are the grab bars by the master bathroom toilet, whose location is dictated by the ADA.

And since I did not have a picture of it before, here is the bathtub in the master bathroom. (Its grab bar is not installed yet).

I also took a picture of the extendable ladder that goes up into the crawl space under the roof for access to the ventilation system. I have been told that this is a high quality ladder that can handle an overweight repair person.

Yesterday, our media consultants did a lot of work including installing the ceiling speakers (2 in the kitchen, 2 in the living room, and 2 in the game room). Here are the game room speakers. The other speakers are round.

We had picked out hinge stops to prevent doors from slamming into walls, but the builder discovered that those hinge stops did not work with our door frames, so we spent a bunch of time picking out alternatives for every door that had a planned hinge stop. In most cases, where possible, we will have a wall mounted post near the floor that will prevent the door from opening too far. When that did not work, we will just mount a clear bumper to keep the door knob from damaging anything when the door opens.

Here is a partial list of upcoming items for the next few days.

• Finish plumbing install including water softener and also reworking the pipes leading to the exterior faucets so they connect to pre-softened water.
• Install garage epoxy floor Aug 6-7
• Finish internet and media installation Aug 7
• Finish the final coat on the second floor flooring and stairs Aug 8
• Cleaners Aug 10
• Install the replacement chest freezer and washing machine Aug 11
• Fix cabinet face around electric oven
• Add basement stair nose (a piece of trim between the stairs and the flooring)

Here is the list of remaining inspections.

• Plumping final Aug 6
• Fire inspection Aug 6
• Building inspection Aug 7
• Occupancy certificate Aug 10

And here is a partial list of what will not be done by the time we move in.

• Install the screens on the porch
• Install the Murphy bed in the gameroom
• Final paving of the driveway
• Landscaping of the front yard including installing the walkway and grass

Current estimated occupancy permit date: August 10, 2026.