The baseboard in this house is 1/8″ x 3″ hot-rolled steel strip. It came in 20 ft. lengths and was installed with McFeely’s washer-head combo-drive screws centered on the strip. The finish carpenters did it. They were curious if not skeptical initially. By the end, they loved this stuff. There is only one seam in the entire house (on a 25 ft. wall). It went up easily. I plan to do nothing to this. Everyone likes the way it looks too. Did I mention it is super cheap ($0.60/ft or so)?
I bought a relatively cheap and ugly steel “raised panel” garage door. I then had the roofers apply the steel siding panels to it. Then, the garage door guys came back, weighed the door, and hung it with the appropriate springs. The whole thing cost about $2000, much less than a “custom” door.
Tile is hard to choose. Paint not quite as bad. Still, there are lots of choices.
I’m going with the Benjamin Moore “Affinity Colors” which allegedly can be mixed and matched arbitrarily. Here I’m trying out a few options. Home Depot will mix 8 oz. jars of paint from the Benjamin Moore fan deck chips for about $3 per jar. So, I had a bunch of colors made and tried them out. I knew this, but forgot: don’t test really subtle differences; they don’t matter much, and are so subtle it isn’t clear the small swatches would tell you much. Just test the really distinct alternatives. However, you should definitely test. In my case, I decided that these reds were just too red. I’m not going to use them. I’m using variants on the khaki and two shades of the “pumpkin.”
Of course no one has any money at the end of the job…so the landscapers kind of have to make do. My guys (Sierrascape Landscaping) did nice work over 2 – 1/2 days in early November. They built three nice retaining walls, created a rock-lined drainage ditch around the property, installed a 5-foot wide border of river stone on the ground under the roof line, spread top soil over the site, and seeded it with “cabin mix,” a high-altitude meadow grass. We’re hoping that come spring, this seed will germinate and return the landscape back to nature, approximately.
The wood ceiling in the great room and master bedroom is 1×6 clear mixed-grain hemlock. I had it prefinished, so the finish carpenters just pin nailed it in place, filled the nail holes. It’s then done. No one has to get up there again. This material is not cheap: $1.72/linear foot for the material and $0.67/linear foot for clear finish. So, this comes out to about $5.50/sq-ft of finished ceiling for material, including about 10% waste. My finish carpenter, Eric Epps, first stapled up black landscape fabric (cheap). I had him leave a 3/8″ gap between boards. This gives a nice linear effect. Everyone loves this ceiling.
Note that I discovered that the “sag rods” which hung from the ridge down to the horizontal tie rods were not supporting any weight of the tie rods. I didn’t like them in the first place, so had Eric and Spencer take them down. We now have just nice clean horizontal tie rods with no vertical elements. They don’t sag noticeably.
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