the commons

It’s been a while since we’ve posted progress, but we’ve been making it. The kitchen is essentially done and we’ve finished the front stairs, catwalk and engawa (sorry, don’t have a finished photo yet).

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This week we moved forward on several projects. Dad built the frames for the toilets (they’re custom because they’re essentially pit toilets) – we still need to sheet them, and plumb in the bidet, but we’re getting close to having a working bathroom! We also worked on building more of the sliding doors. We’re getting better at constructing them quicker, however there always seems to be a unique challenge on everything we do. The side tables, drawers and bed in one of the rooms are finished, we took a picture to show them off.

And we have one more project in the works: the engawa that surrounds the courtyard. Dad got it all laid out and tacked up and I spent this weekend welding it up. It’s great to see these projects coming together.

I also had the opportunity to go speak at Oregon State University this week. Todd Jarvis, the instructor of Sustainability for the Common Good was gracious enough to invite me down. I spoke about the project and fielded a bunch of questions – I think the students found the project interesting. Todd also runs a blog on grey water, Rainbow Water Coalition, it’s well worth following and has some great specifics about Oregon’s new grey water laws (there’s a post and video about my visit).

We’ve finally finished a little side project we’ve been working on – a bit of furniture.

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We’ve been working on building our interior doors lately. We had two big goals we wanted to achieve with them: sound isolation and light transmission.

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We’ve been a bit quite lately and that’s partially because there’s been a changing of the guard. Dustin has headed off to school to get an Architecture degree and is supporting the project from afar. I (Garrett) have been attempting to take over his duties with the help of my Dad.

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This is just a short note to remind you all that we’ll be showing The Commons on Portland’s Build it Green Tour. Get your 2010 tickets here.

Dustin got a fancy new phone which he’s going to try to post more regular updates with. Here’s the first:

Our friend Tara brought over her eighth grade class for a little tour of the house. The class was kind enough to send a bunch of thank you cards, we thought we’d post some of them for you all to see (click on the images to see the originals).

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Since our last update we’ve made some significant progress on the house. After being set back over a month by Reserve Steel (they took our money and ran), we’re finally getting somewhere. In our down time we did some redesigning of the wall system; we’re going from a double stud wall to a single with insulation hung on the exterior. This should decrease costs and actually improve performance, a double win. So I guess with lemons we make lemonade.

Anyway, we’ve got a second floor and even a roof (ok, it’s only plywood so far). All very exciting. It’s amazing how much the look and feel of our project has changed. It certainly feels much more tangible now.

This picture is about a week old, we’ll get some new ones up soon.

We’ve also been attempting to deal with some privacy issues. A few of our neighbors have voiced concern over our second story looking into their backyards. We have no desire to look into their backyards, so we thought this a wonderful opportunity to use a light shelf. The idea is that windows can be frosted, or somehow obscured without cutting lighting below the eye level. At eye level, a shelf can be hung on the exterior of the building making it so you can’t peer over the shelf. We then paint the shelf white and more light reflects into the building. Yay, for double wins.

Remember to check our photostream, it’s updated far more often than this blog. We’ll try to keep posting as changes happn.

Some anonymous benefactor has uploaded the segment from Renovation Nation that we were on to YouTube. I’m not sure how long they’ll last, so check it out while you can: