Author Archives: Karl T. Ulrich

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About Karl T. Ulrich

CIBC Endowed Professor - The Wharton School. I teach, research, and practice innovation, entrepreneurship, and design.

Finishing the House

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Whoa. It’s crunch time. We’re trying to finish this house in the next 10 days. There are about a dozen guys scrambling all over the place. The great room is still a wood shop, but the painters are trying to work around everything.

I suspect if you have a 12-18 month construction schedule you can avoid this. But, we’ll finish this house 7-1/2 months after breaking ground. That requires some overlapping of tasks.

Of course everyone wants to “go last.” More precisely, the painter, electrician, and plumber all declared that they should be the last people on the job. I suspect that if I had wood floors, the floor guys would also want to go last. The reality is that everyone ends up iterating a bit at the end to work around each other.

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Interior Barnwood Mosaic

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I saw a nice wall made by the Lucky Dumpster which was a mosaic of barnwood pieces. I had Trestlewood mill up a variety of colors of barnwood into tongue-and-groove “flooring.” Eric, my finish carpenter, then installed the pieces on the family room wall. It’s excellent.

Here it is finished…

Modern House Numbers

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Modern house numbers are fortunately not so hard to find these days. However, they vary widely in price and in size. I wanted a nice sans serif typeface in a large (i.e., 8″ tall) size. If you want a “name” font you pay a lot of money for those numbers (e.g., Neutra numbers from DWR are $48 each, but only 4″ tall) . However, you can get some nice affordable numbers from, where else, modernhousenumbers.com. Their supplier water jet cuts these from 3/8″ aluminum plate in several alternative typefaces. The styles are nice, even if there isn’t infinite selection, and even if they aren’t the famous proprietary typefaces.

Here are my numbers (8″ high, 3/8″ thick brushed aluminum, in “Palm Springs”). These cost $29 per number. Excellent value.

These numbers are easy to install, although very hard to get in plane and level on barnwood. (You drill a 3/16″ hole in the wall and insert a 3/16 pin with some caulk on it. The pins fit into the back of the numbers.) I didn’t get it quite right, but I suspect I’m the only one who will notice.

Steel Baseboard

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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)?

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Garage Door

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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.

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Paint

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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.”

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Landscaping

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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.

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Wood Ceiling

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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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Tile

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Picking tile is brutal. I hate it. There must be a million options…in a single showroom. I decided to focus on a nice simple tile scheme and to pick a simple affordable tile. I concentrated on the American Olean line, as they have a little bit of everything and they had a good display in the tile showroom. Fancy tile is $40/sq-ft. Tile at Home Depot is $2-3/sq-ft. It’s all the same material, basically. So, the trick (for me) was to find a mainstream tile that could be used in an elegant contemporary design.

For all the showers, I ended up with American Olean St. Germain in “Creme.” I used the 12″ x 24″ tiles laid up in brick pattern. Here it is being laid. I love it. It’s crisp, clean, and contemporary. It ran about $4.50/ sq-ft for the material. My tile guy is very high end…he charges about $12/sq-ft for installation. But, I didn’t want to mess around with quality on this.

For the 48 square feet of kitchen backsplash I splurged on hand-made tile from Heath Ceramics. The stuff is gorgeous. I figured that this was the place to put the beautiful hand-crafted material. When it’s installed, I’ll post photos.

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Doors

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The doors arrived this week. They’re beautiful. I’m really happy with them. The only problem was the stain/finish guy who delivered them knocked them over in his truck and dinged a bunch of them. He’s fixing ’em (cheerfully, I might add). The doors came from Lemieux Doors in Canada. They were hung and finished by subcontractors to ProBuild, my materials supplier. They cost about $500 each, pre-hung and pre-finished (for 7 foot doors 1-1/2″ thick).  The main entry door was a lot more, about $2000 all in. Worth it.

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