The Falk House

Porch

2010-09-07T18:37:00.001-04:00

Even though it still needs a second coat of paint, the ocean-facing porch is close to being done and we already enjoyed a Dunkin Donuts breakfast on the porch this Labor Day.

Ballroom

2010-09-01T12:21:00.001-04:00

Restoration of the ballroom is progressing nicely. This is the large room at the center of the house that has this staircase leading up to the 2nd floor and the main entrance of the house is to the right of this picture and the exit to the ocean-facing porch is on the left side of the picture. We looked for a good name for a long time and foyer just didn’t sound right, so we ended up calling it the ballroom (and we might even have a ball or two here in the future):

The wall and ceiling are now plastered and we will soon restore the trim and paneling and ceiling beams that we salvaged from the old house and preserved.

Blueboard, Coves, Reveals, and Shelves

2010-08-30T18:11:00.001-04:00

Tons of progress on the inside these days. Blueboard is up on most of the 2nd floor and this week more blueboard will go up on the 1st floor and in the guest suite above the garage. More plaster to follow soon. In particular we now have this cool “Type 2 Ceiling Cove Trim” installed in many rooms on the 1st and 2nd floor, which combines two 1/2” reveals with a curved crown moulding:

And this is how it looks in real life with blueboard on the wall and ceiling and everything ready for the application of plaster later this week.

It will be nice to watch the progress of how this looks once plaster is applied and then when everything is painted. Very exciting…

We also have progress in other rooms on some preparation for the built-in cabinetry, for example here are metal rods that will hold the floating book shelves in my future home office:

As you can see, many of the rooms are getting a very modern treatment, but we are also restoring the historic ballroom, so it will be very nice to see that balance between historic and modern spaces.

Carriage House Roof completed

2010-08-23T18:56:00.001-04:00

The roof on the carriage house has now been completed and I just took a photo of the roof nicely doing its job in the rain. Note the interesting lines of the ridges due to the axial shift between the street-facing side and the ocean-facing side of the building. You can only see that effect from this particular perspective, which is from our future bathroom window.

From down below the carriage house looks perfectly symmetrical from both the Atlantic Avenue side and the Atlantic Ocean side, and you would never know that this axial shift is happening. Interestingly, that axial shift was something we immediately noticed and loved when we saw it in the first set of plans we got from our architects.

Hardscape and infrastracture

2010-08-12T16:36:00.001-04:00

While there is a lot going on at the construction site every day, and we are making great progress on all fronts, not all of it lends itself to beautiful photos easily. For example final stone selections for the hardscape surfaces happened this week and here are the granite and bluestone samples we approved:

On the infrastructure side we are also making great progress and we already have the HVAC system running on the 2nd and 3rd floors and the mechanical room is starting to look like the engine room on a submarine:

And throughout the entire house they are now running miles and miles of cables, sprinkler pipes, radiant heat, plumbing, gas, and water and it is all coming together nicely in a few hubs and intersections like the ones shown in the next four photos:

Last, but not least, we also already have the garage door openers installed and working nicely on all three garage doors. Yes, there are only three garage bays. I’ve been asked a couple of times already if we are building a 7-car garage, but the doors on the right side are just for front- and side-access to the shed.

Turret

2010-07-22T20:25:00.001-04:00

The outside of the turret in the eastern corner of the house is now complete with the installation of the new radius windows and the beautiful shingle pattern between 1^st and 2^nd floor.

This leaves just a few areas of the outside that are not yet finished: the front steps at the main entrance, the back porch, and those corners of the house where we are going to install aluminum storm shutters to protect the windows that are too close to the ocean and seawall.

Aerial photography 2.0

2010-06-29T19:40:00.001-04:00

A little over a year after our first round of aerial photography I asked Northeastern Aerial Photography to do another series of flybys and shoot some new aerial photos to document that current progress at our construction site. Looking at these photos side-by-side it is really amazing how far we’ve come in a year.

More photos and high-res versions of the above images are on my personal photo website…

Pool terrace

2010-06-18T14:18:00.001-04:00

The pool terrace is starting to take shape. The piping and electrical connections are already all in place and the concrete floor and walls for pool and hot tub will be sprayed early next week.

Unfortunately that’s where it ends and we won’t be filling the pool until next spring. Too bad, it would be nice to be able to use it already this summer…

For your orientation: the building on the right is the 2nd floor and roof of the carriage house, which has the garage on the 1st floor facing Atlantic Ave.

View from the boat

2010-06-13T08:02:00.001-04:00

We happened to go past the house on the boat yesterday and I snapped this picture that shows the view from the ocean:

You can already see the new radius windows in the turret on the right side and we’ve also already added the rubber roof surfaces and mounting hardware that will hold the solar panels and you can see those black surface areas on the porch roof and main roof.

Last, but not least, we’ve rebuilt the failed beach berm on the left and turned it into a much stronger cobble-berm with cobbles in diameters ranging from 8” to 30”. Those cobbles are covered with some sand on top for aesthetics reasons and we hope that this cobble berm will last longer than the 10 months that the previous berm held.

We will be adding a bit more sand at the end of the summer and also start planting some beach grass and rosa rugosa at that time to stabilize the berm. We also had to eliminate the beach-side wooden dune fence, after the previous two fences were destroyed in winter storms.

Radius Windows

2010-06-11T07:42:00.000-04:00

As I’ve mentioned on this blog before, one of the challenges of our restoration is the fact that we have one round turret, a round dining room, and some interesting windows in the balcony/lounge above the main entrance. In all these places the original house had radius windows that included curved glass, and none of them was in a state that could be salvaged, so these all had to be custom-made for our project.

After visiting their shop in New Hampshire, we decided to use KSD Custom Wood Products to create all these custom windows for us, and they arrived in the past two weeks and were just installed. Here is the dining room as seen from the porch:

And this is the same dining room from the inside. You can see that these five radius windows all have a curved frame, sash, and the glass has been bent as well, even though this is dual insulating glass. It is really amazing what the guys at KSD were able to do:

The other area that was tricky to recreate an accurate historical reproduction for is the lounge area or balcony above the main entrance. This area had an array of very narrow windows, some of which were operable, and included a radius window in each corner that covered a 90° arc.

Here is a close-up of that 90° window in the corner. It still amazes me that they can actually bend the glass that much over such a short distance and then create the corresponding window frame to hold it.

And this is the balcony viewed from the outside. You can again see the 90° arc windows in the corners and how narrow some of the other windows are, and that results in a very accurate reproduction of the historic look of that part of the house.

Plaster

2010-06-09T21:19:00.000-04:00

Blueboard is already up on the 3rd floor and plaster has been applied in several rooms last week. In this photo they are applying the last finishing touches of plaster to the ceiling in my future home office.

We are now in the situation that due to the phasing of the project in the basement we are still at the rough framing stage, whereas on the third floor we are already done with plastering. This allows us to keep all trades busy at the same time and shorten the project considerably. At the moment, we are about 5 weeks ahead of schedule…

Round, with smooth edges

2010-06-02T12:42:00.001-04:00

One of the features of our house that has always been quite fascinating to me is the round dining room. While the living room and the room above are part of an actual round turret, the dining room happens to be round without the floor above or the porch around it exposing that fact to the outside world. Only the dining room and the basement space underneath it are circular in shape.

Since we removed one of the walls of the dining room to expand the view, we wanted to preserve the roundness of the space and are now building a circular soffit that will be above the dining room table:

Furthermore, that section of the dining room wall that still exists in the round will now get a set of five custom-built radius windows that just arrived at the construction site this week:

These radius windows are amazing, as they are radius frames, sashes, and also use radius glass. They are replicating what was in place historically, but unfortunately none of the old windows were in a shape that would allow us to reuse them, so we had to recreate them.

One they are all installed and the soffit is in place, this will give the room its desired characteristic: round, with smooth edges.

Insulation

2010-06-01T17:35:00.001-04:00

Last week the insulation process continued on the 2nd and 3rd floor of the house. We are using open-cell foam insulation for interior walls, and closed-cell foam for exterior walls due to the higher R-value that can be achieved with closed-cell foam.

In this short video clip you can see some open-cell foam insulation being applied to an interior wall. Take note of how amazing the foam expands from just a very thin layer being sprayed on:

Here is a photo of the same wall completely foamed and cut back to the studs at the end of the insulation process:

Due to all the insulation you can now start to clearly see and appreciate the sizes of the rooms and how the interior space will present itself. Here is a photo of my office in the attic – taken through the doorway – showing more of the insulation materials we are using:

The bluish-gray foam on the left is the closed-cell foam for exterior walls. Here is another example of a corner in Calvin’s room where an exterior wall (on the right) meets an interior ceiling and interior wall.

Over the course of the next 2 weeks we will start to close up the walls on the 2nd and 3rd floor, which is another exciting milestone in our project.

Soffits, manifolds, and fire places

2010-05-09T20:14:00.001-04:00

This particular corner of the ceiling in my future office was the subject of extended discussions at last week’s site meeting. Originally there was one soffit over the window on the left and one separate soffit over the window on the right, but we were able to come up with a better way to connect those soffits and, thereby, make the corner and the connection between dormer (on the left) and main roof (on the right) a much cleaner line. It is nice to see that this was built in just a few days to match exactly what we had discussed:

As part of our HVAC installation we are now also seeing plumbing manifolds for the radiant heating system in our floor appear in various locations:

And the fireplaces have all been installed. After a long decision making process we ended up eliminating the brick chimneys and went with gas fireplaces everywhere, which allowed us to get more LEED points. The steel framing around the fireplaces is necessary because we are using a flush-mounted installation.

And here is another view from the outside – this time from the Beach Bluff Park next door. The park still needs lots of help to get the spring clean-up done and to do some important regrading after the winter storms. If you haven’t done so, please consider donating to the park e.g. by buying an engraved plank on one of their walkways.

Thank you!

View from the ocean

2010-05-08T22:45:00.001-04:00

I went out on the boat this week and took a few photos of the construction site from the ocean. The first one is a head-on view directly from the SE that shows the entire revetment, the new site walls behind the revetment, and all of the house and carriage house:

The second photo was taken from a location a bit further south off Preston Beach and it shows the house almost from an exactly southerly perspective:

Siding

2010-05-07T10:35:00.000-04:00

The main roof is now complete and work on the porch roof as well as the carriage house roof has begun. At the same time the window trim and siding on the 2nd floor is nearing completion. In this photo you can see the ocean-side roof surface areas where the solar panels will be mounted and you can see all the trim details and siding on the 2nd floor that is already in place:

Here is a detail of the decorative shingle pattern that Thad Siemasko has created for a few spots between the windows on the second floor:

Roof nearing completion

2010-04-20T15:17:00.001-04:00

Work on the roof is now nearing completion, with just a few pieces of the ocean-facing dormers and turret remaining. Here is a great photo of the two dormers facing Atlantic Ave, where you can see all the copper flashing, windows, trim, and shingles:

Work on the flashing around the chimneys also still continues:

And here is an overview of the almost finished roof from a bit further away:

Different approaches

2010-04-20T15:01:00.001-04:00

Construction of the site walls and new fence alongside Atlantic Ave began this week and here are some photos from across the street:

I also took a photo from Beach Bluff Ave across the field:

And one from further away on Atlantic Ave in Swampscott to show different approaches:

It is starting to look good from all these angles…

Stone landscape walls

2010-04-20T13:58:00.001-04:00

All the concrete site walls are now disappearing behind a beautiful field stone veneer that is being created by the masons from R.P.Marzilli. Here is a section of the curved stone wall at the ocean side that is still under construction:

Another segment of that same curved wall can be seen behind the top of the large stone revetment when viewed from the beach at low tide:

And here is a corner of the site walls in front of the house near the garage:

Library space

2010-04-01T20:31:00.001-04:00

This week we removed the floor of the former kitchen to open up the space that will eventually become the two-story library. The basement slab is already prepared and so the next step will be the framing of the structure for the balcony that will run around the first floor. But until then there is this huge two-story open cavity that you can peek into from adjacent spaces on the 1st floor:

Electrical installation

2010-03-24T17:13:00.001-04:00

As the electrical installation gets into full swing on the 2nd and 3rd floor with recessed light positions all verified and outlets as well as switches placed in the correct location, the main electrical closet in the basement is taking shape with the installation of various circuit panels and main breaker.

Site wall stone veneer sample

2010-03-10T17:22:00.001-05:00

As more and more of the concrete site walls are now nearing completion, we looked at a sample of the planned split stone veneer today and approved it. This is going to give all the site walls a very nice and refined look indeed.

More roof

2010-03-10T13:22:00.000-05:00

Roofing continues, as you can see in this photo, and we also reviewed the placement of the solar panels on the SE facing roof surfaces today. As part of our LEED silver certification we are aiming to utilize solar hot water from these roof-mounted solar panels for both domestic hot water and radiant heating of the house.

Roof

2010-03-09T09:04:00.001-05:00

Very exciting to see the roofers up there this week. The gutters went up last week and this week they are installing cedar shingles on top of cedar breather. The shingles are all pre-dipped in fire-retardant coating, of course, since we do not really want a repeat of the 1960s fire that destroyed the roof and eventually caused the previous owners to cap the house at the second floor.

Pool terrace

2010-03-08T08:28:00.001-05:00

Construction of the site walls continues in the front and back of the house and here you can see the pool terrace slowly starting to take shape:

Setting the forms and pouring the foundations you now see here was a bit of challenge in the past 2 weeks with all the stormy days. In fact, we had to remove and reset the lowest part of the forms after the storm you see here, because the forms were swamped with seawater incursion and debris from the waves going over the seawall…