Category: RIVER HOUSE (Page 3 of 6)

If you have been following the blog posts, you may remember that our house design is height challenged. Because of the zone that the house is located in, there is a maximum height for the house measured from the lowest point of the ground at the basement wall to the highest point of the peak of the roof. Our lot is sloped, so while at the front of the house the basement is almost completely below ground, at the back of the house, the basement is not underground at all.

Because of the height limitation, we have been forced to have the roof lower than optimal, which means that most of the rooms on the second floor have places where the ceiling slopes down. For example, this is the second floor family room.

We have recently decided that we were not going to extend the basement under the porch. The ground under the porch will be crushed gravel and open to the back yard. We will probably put a kayak rack there and store our boats under the porch. Well, by not enclosing this area, the lowest point on the basement actually moved to the West and uphill a little. This ground level at this new lowest point is now 2 inches higher then the at previous lowest point, which means we can raise the roof by 2 inches.

But before we got too excited by idea of reducing the encroachment of the roof into the second floor rooms, we got the results of our HERS (Home Energy Rating System) score, and the architect realized that we need to add an extra 2 inches of insulation to the roof. So no interior change at all.

The regulatory gods giveth and the regulatory gods taketh away.

Last night was another Natural Resources Committee meeting featuring our project. We were last on the agenda and had to sit through a lot of discussion of other projects, but after 90 minutes, they got to our request for changes (rebuilding instead of renovating the garage and removal of one additional tree, which was found to be unhealthy).

I am happy to say that after almost no discussion, our changes were approved with no additional conditions.

Meanwhile, we met with the architect again and reviewed the design of mechanical systems (heating/cooling and vents) and also the changes needed based on the assessment of the structural engineer. I will probably be writing up a post or story page on those topics once I get a copy of the drawings.

We have an arborist on the team who has been managing the processes of getting approval for tree removal. During his last visit, he identified a tree that was not scheduled to be removed, but was, in his opinion, in moderate to high risk of failing and falling on the neighbor’s house.

Unfortunately, this tree is within the jurisdiction of the Natural Resources Commission, so we need their permission to remove it. And more unfortunately, we failed to ask for their permission by the deadline for submitting items for the the January 29th NRC meeting.

However, today we got some good news. The NRC will allow us to amend our currently outstanding submission for the January 29th meeting. This is important since we want to do the tree removal soon, and it is best if we do all the trees together and not leave one outlier for a later date.

We were on site today planning for the tree removal, which we hope to schedule in early February. The tree removal will give me the first chance to test my construction camera, although I probably will want to choose a different location for the tree removal since my planned location does not look at most of the trees being removed.

Here is a short time lapse test of the construction camera. Next time, I need to adjust the frame so I see less on the right side and more on the left side, since the new house will extend significantly past the left edge of this frame.

This image is taken with 2 seconds between frames. I will probably switch to 30 seconds between frames when I use the camera for real. That should get me a 30 second time lapse movie each day.

Here is a still panorama of the river view from today as well.

I want to the site this morning to scout out a location for my construction camera. The tree I was going to use is too large for the strap I had, so if I decide to use that tree, I will need a second strap to go around the circumference. I will make that decision soon.

Meanwhile, while I was on site I saw that the arborist has put up the tree fencing. Here is a picture of one of the fenced areas. Any tree with red flagging tape around is marked for removal (you can see some beyond the fencing).

When I was making reference calls during the builder selection process, I talked to one couple and asked a few questions about how they interacted with the builder and they mentioned that a lot of the decisions were handled by their designer. They had a designer. We didn’t have a designer. We had an architect, a civil engineer, a mechanical engineer, a structural engineer, an arborist, a landscape designer, a builder, an EMF specialist, an electrician, etc. but no designer.

But then I realized that we did have a designer for this project, its just that I had not been paying them. Daphne has been handling the role of designer for our Sudbury River house. With some guidance from the architect, Daphne has been making all the decisions that a professional designer would handle.

So that leads me to Daphne’s latest design vision. The proposal is to add woodwork accents to the living room (and also the dining room although I do not have a picture of that). Here is Daphne’s hand drawing of the proposal, which I annotated with labels.

In this sketch, it is as if we are standing between the dining room and the living room, looking South towards the living room wall where the entertainment system will be located. The idea is to have wood slats that go up the South wall and across the ceiling, meeting somewhere over the reclining loveseat (not shown).

It should look very pretty but will also provide some level of sound dampening and maybe also break up some of the EMF standing waves that would otherwise bounce off the flat surfaces. Daphne would also like cove lighting around the outside of the living room ceiling, but we are not sure can make that work since it requires a significant drop ceiling.

If you do not know what cove lighting is, here are two pictures from the internet.

As part of the Natural Resource Commission filing, we have a long list of “Order of Conditions” that we have to meet. There are 58 total different conditions (1-19 and 21-59; number 20 does not apply to this project). Most of these will be handled by the builder. But yesterday, I met condition number 10.

The architect ordered the sign from Staples, and I placed the sign next to the driveway. Fortunately, the ground was not frozen so I was able to push in the mounting frame. It is mounted just in front of the property line stake (not on the stake). We may want to move it at some point.

This is not the only signage we eventually have to display. At some point we need to post a complete copy of the Orders and Conditions in a water tight box with the DEP number on the front. We will also need to have signage on the tree protection fencing.

You can see that it has recently snowed (just an inch or two). Here are two pictures of the view of the river taken a week apart. As you can see in the later photograph, the river is now iced over, but I doubt it is safe to walk on right now.

It was a somewhat stressful process that took longer than I wanted, but as of today we have officially decided that David Jenkinson of Jenkinson Homes has been selected to build our Sudbury River House. David has no web presence, so I cannot add a link. But he has been building and renovating homes in Concord for many, many years. David only works on one project at a time, so we will have his full attention until mid 2026 (fingers crossed).

The selection process started with the architect putting together a preliminary packet with all the known details of the proposed house (although not everything was known). We then asked four different builders to put together a proposal, and we gave them a month to get back to us. All four visited the site (I was there for two of the site visits), and they talked to the architect when they had questions. In mid-December, we got back all their proposals.

Our architect then merged all the proposals into one spreadsheet so we could compare the bids, line by line, as fairly as possible. Not every bid included the same breakdown, but that was cleaned up for the comparison. The bids were similar, which was expected. The material costs should be the same in all four bids and the subcontractor quotes should also be similar, so a lot of the difference in price came down to overhead (the spreadsheet approach allowed the architect to fill in missing line items, so an incomplete breakdown did not mistakenly result in a very low bid). The schedules were all reasonably close.

After we got the bids, I met with each of the builders to hear their pitch and ask questions. We held those meetings in mid-December at my current house. Following that, I asked for and followed up on some references (although did I really expect to hear bad things?). For some of the builders, there would be site supervisors and project managers and I tried to meet those people as well to get a feel for them.

The selection process was not easy. All four builders seemed great and I believe that all would be able to do a good job. My architect had some experience with all of them; and, they all seemed interested in the project. At the end of the day it came down to big versus little. The little builder (whom we ended up selected) is basically a one man shop. He is the site supervisor and the project manager. At the other end of the spectrum, two of the builders were larger firms who build multiple houses at the same time, and use a project manager and separate site supervisor for each job. I was ultimately able to meet the project managers and site supervisors who would be assigned to our project (something I wanted to do before making a selection).

I want to make it clear (since I know at least some of the builders have visited this web site), that this was a hard, agonizing decision and I would probably have been happy working with any one of builders who bid on the project. I am not going to go into more detail about why we chose David Jenkinson, but it was close and I actually had made a different choice at first, but changed my mind after sleeping on it.

Next steps:

We have a structural engineer and mechanical design firm working on details of the house. The structural engineer makes sure that the house will not fall down (which means, among other things, deciding where we may need a steel beam). The mechanical design firm deals with the heating/cooling system as well as energy recovery system and ventilation systems (e.g. kitchen and bathroom fans). Once we have the details of those designs, our architect can put together the necessary packet to give to the town so we can get a building permit. I estimate that we are two to three months from having the building permit.

Meanwhile our newly selected builder says that the removal of the stump in front of the garage (seen below) may actually damage the garage foundation so we may need to consider rebuilding the garage in place. This would require another visit to the Natural Resources Commission (which would happen in late January), but we do not expect any problems getting approval. We will start that process now.

We are also investigating what asbestos remediation the town will require before demolition. That work can proceed as soon as we know what needs to be done.

While all this is going on, Daphne continues the selection process for interior details, fixtures, lighting, doors, bathtubs, etc. We think that we have decided on the siding material and color (Nichiha Vantagewood cement siding in “poplar”), although the color we chose is brand new and may not be available for a few months. We have also chosen the roofing material and color (Enviroshake in “aged cedar”), and the trim color (matte black). We also have the window details (Marvin casement windows in “black” with natural wood trim exterior) almost ready so windows can be ordered soon. It will be a modern look house, with a Class A fire rating and materials that should not need to be replaced in our lifetimes.

Finally, I have started looking for a construction camera that will take time lapse pictures of the process. I will install that on a tree near the wetlands, looking back towards the house, before we start work.

I have been visiting the property every week or so to make sure things are OK and see is anything has changed. Inside the house, I saw places where the inspector had taken samples for asbestos testing (spoiler: there is asbestos). And outside the house, a few weeks ago the arborist came by and put up yellow flags everywhere we will need to add tree protection boundaries. Here is what those flags look like.

The red stake in the background is the property boundary. These flags are on the North side of the lot, just past the driveway.

While I was there, I took a picture of our view from the main floor of the existing house. You can see some ice on the river, at the edges. I was told that the river usually freezes over, although not in the last two years. There were different sets of tracks in the snow, but I was unable to identify the animals since the snow is not very deep.