Lighting for living room

Now I'm chosing lighting. Most of the house is fairly simple - I know what I want and have picked out nice looking fixtures that are reasonably econmical. But the formal living/dining room needs some special treatment.

Here is the layout with the fixtures we're thinking about marked.
The door to the left is the front door and will have a large glass area. the door at the top goes to the library. The double doors in the right are the big solid doors from the old House Chamber and lead to the Family Room.


The blue rectangles are our Karastan rugs. The red asterisks (*) are currently speced as 3" cans with eyeball trim so they can be directed at art or other things. The large yellow asterisks (*) are five light chandeliers from Golden Lighting.


The wall at the top will be a "gallery wall - the 3" cans should light any art arranged along that wall. The wall at the bottom left marked "False fireplace and shelves" is a Craftsman style ararngement with our stained glass fireplace and glass fronted boopkshelves from the Governor's office. In front of that will be the main seating area in the living room and we want effective lighting for that area.

At the bottom of the right wall will be the sideboard probably with some other furniture on each side and art above. In that corner will be our large corner display cabinet with leaded glass. So the eyeball cans are meant to light that area.

There will be some other lighting in this room from table and floor lamps.

Here is a picture of the chandelier style we're using for both locations in the room:

Unofficial last version of house plan

This is the unofficial last version of our house plan - at least for this week. ;-)
We've cut the corner of the library at an angle and added windows to improve the view (that is the part in color, done by the designer to help us think about it). I stuck in windows over the bookcases in the living room. This is not the designer's final version, but we cannot think of an additional changes we'd want to make.

I'm taking this version around for lighting and plumbing quotes. That is the next message!

Here are larger versions of the draft floor plan - the first floor particularly is a VERY LARGE file!

Some of the special things that will be built into our house

We've got some special items we've collected over the years that we want to build into the new house. The most problematic will be the sand blasted glass piece made by Robert Bischoff:


We've got to figure out how to mount this as a fixed window - with glass on the front and back to protect it - AND edge light it for the best effect. Front lighting as seen here is just not very effective.













These are book cases made from a set that came out of the Governor's office when the Old Florida Capitol Building was restored to the 1905 version. We want to use them to make a faux fireplace wall with a stained glass "fireplace" that was made by Bischoff Studios, possibly by George Greene.





These are some doors from the Old Capitol - the little narrow door is only 18" wide - I think it would be great as a door for a tiny coat closet in the living room. The double doors were the entrance doors to the House of Representative Chambers. Of course, they need to be completely refinished, since the guys demolishing the Capitol were not very careful, plus they've been in storage for over 25 years.



















We also have some other doors that we may take apart for the mahoganey paneling and molding - they were "hidden" doors and have paneling to match the rooms they were in. And we have eight exterior lamps from the Old Capitol - those we'll have rewired and cleaned to use around the outside of the house.

First draft of floorplans and simple 3-D view

MH (the contractor and designer for our ICF house) has sent me the first draft of our plans. This is the low-res version, so the measurements are not readable.
















The side with the wide porch is the north end of the house and the formal entrance. Our entrance will be under the carport/porte cochere.

Panorama shots of the house site

Here are a couple of huge pictures that are panoramas of the house site. The first is taken from about where the north end of the house will be. The second is taken from about where the south end of the house will be. In both, the gate at both ends of the panorama is roughly due north.

Our barn teardown and salvage project

In 1979-1980, we built our first horse barn out of freshly cut cypress lumber. Unfortunately, we let a know-it-all convince us that cypress logs would last as the posts for our two story barn. They didn't. So the old barn was becoming unstable and dangerous and we knew we had to tear down at least part of it.

Here is what the barn looked like before we started:



You can see how the upstairs front "porch" is sagging. What you cannot see is how rotten some of the posts are!

















Here are the sides of the barn showing the beautifully weathered cypress siding. We salvaged almost all the cypress and will sell it for the first reasonable offer.










































Here are the guys tearing down the upstairs.

















We tore down the entire loft and eight of the fourteen stalls, leaving me a six
stall barn - plenty for our remaining four hourses!














We still have some cleanup left to do, but the smaller barn should be easier to maintain. And if I need more space there is always the newer twenty stall barn down the hill.

Here is an older aerial view of the upper 30 acres of the farm. The curving line on the left side is the county road along our frontage. The two large buildings at the top are our barns. The planned house site is about a third of the way from the bottom straight south of the larger barn.







Here is a large view of the house site with a "cut out" of the current plan placed on it. I've angled the house slightly off straight north south the take better advantage of the views and the slope of the site. The red lines are the topo lines - heavy are every twn feet, light ones visible if you zoom in are every two feet.

The drive to the house site will come through a gap in the trees just north of the porte chochere. We'll have a turn around on that side of the house which will provide guest parking. Although the front porch is on the north, the approach will be from the west side.

Here is the current version of my house plan. We've cut off the two downstairs extra bedrooms, flipped the house (to the left is north) for better views and reduced the size of the formal living-dining room. This layout lets us put the formal entrance and front porch on the narrow end of the house and well away from our mud entrance and our parking area - and I can have the porte cochere I always wanted!

I've got a similar layout with the half bath moved to the library so the library could be used as a guest room, but this one seems more efficient since it clusters all the plumbing together. I'm just not sure which would be better for getting plumbing upstairs for the bath and bedrooms upstairs.

IKEA Atlanta Store Plan

Here is the floor plan for the Atlanta IKEA store:



Other good info thanks to Jennoconn from the IKEA Fans Forum:

Parking: I always park in the lower level of the deck in either C or D aisles. This is close to the escalator/elevators and the moving ramp when you bring your stuff to your car. They do have family parking but I can never figure out how to get there.

First floor: When you come up the escalator or elevator you stop in the "greetor lobby" they used to always have someone standing there to help but I haven't seen anyone lately. There's a bathroom there and an ATM. To the right is the "ladybug playground" as my daughter calls it. To the left is the cinnamon roll eatery, the checkout lanes and past them the returns and pick-up.

Up the escalator: If you head to the right you'll get the usual path of display rooms --) sofa section --) futons & coffee tables --) chairs --) media & bookcases --) the kitchen displays start and dining tables & chairs --) Kitchens! --) bedrooms --) closet & dressers --) office --) bathrooms --) kids stuff --) then ends at the restaurant with the bathrooms down the hall and the stairs and elevator down to the Marketplace.

Of course I rarely go that way - I go backwards and through the shortcuts.

at the top of the escalator I turn left --) go into the kids area and the 1 st shortcut (between the toys and the kids tables and chairs) which takes you to media then you can follow the path to dining and kitchens. Kithens have been my main focus so usually I'm wiped out and head to the restaurant or down to the marketplace following the same shortcuts.

Downstairs: I don't know the Marketplace as well but I'll give it a try. Kitchen & dining --) rugs & office supplies --) window treatments & textiles --) bedding and bath textiles --) laundry & storage --) lighting & more lighting --) pictures and mirrors --) nick nacks and animal stuff --) baskets & vases --) outdoor & plants & bathrooms. From there you pick up a flatbed cart if you need to get anything in the warehouse. After going through the warehouse you find the seasonal stuff and the beloved As Is room. Check out is next and there are self-serve lanes as well as, standard.

So that's the store but I'd like to add info about the area.

Ikea is part of a new multi-use development called Atlantic Station and is off of the 75/85 connector at 17th street downtown. It has condo/loft/apartments buildings, a "strolling mall" with all the stores having sidewalk entrances. There's a Dillard's and all the standard Bath & Body Works etc. There's a multiplex movie theatre and a number of upscale/trendy restaurants and bars. see http://www.atlanticstation.com/ if you'd like more info.

Smaller House Plan

OK, reality has set in - the house has to be smaller! Here is a smaller version of my house plan - basically, I've squared up the basic house and chopped off the downstairs bedrooms and extra bath. But I could not make this work since there was no place for our study (what we now have as a computer room/office and library). Before, one of the downstairs bedrooms was going to be the study.

So I added a study and I've moved the screened porch to the southeast corner, behind the study. This lets me simplify the roofline and if we wanted to someday enclose that porch, it will be easier. With that in mind, we'll probably not brick inside the screened porch, just use Hardie lap siding. Right away, we would not have a porch on the east side of the house, but I'll probably have them pour a concrete pad on the east side of the house. Then down the road, we could roof over that side for an open porch - or put on awnings to direct rain away from the doors on that side.

Now the plan will be to go ahead and finish out the bath upstairs and maybe one of the upstairs bedrooms. I have not drawn up the upstairs plan since my idiotic program has decided to stop showing me where the cutoff for 8' walls is. Before we had gables out the front and back, but I've decided that to save money we'll do one wide gable with a hipped roof only to the east (back). This means no Jack & Jill bath up stairs because the plumbing would be complex, but that is OK.

This is not a finished plan by any means, but here's the changed design:



This cuts the downstairs from 2270 sq. ft. to 1978 sq. ft. Frankly, I have no clue how big the upstairs will be - my sketchy plan right now is about 700sq. ft. but I do not know if that is realistic considering the roofline. I consider the minimum for a bedroom to be about 12x12' and a bath about 5x8' so that would be a minimum of about 350 sq. ft.

Tung Oil vs. Polyurethane on Pine

OK, found the digital!
First shot is tung oil on Southern Yellow Pine, but with dark & pure tung oil combinations. On the right, I wiped pure tung oil on, let it sit, wiped off the excess, then wiped on dark tung oil. On the left, I mixed pure & dark tung oil cut with citrus solvent, then wiped the wood with that combination. To me, they look pretty much the same.









This is our ten year old SYP in a place where it gets little sun.













This is pretty much the most distressed section of floor in our house - right at the kitchen door where all the traffic goes, water gets spilled, cats run around scratching it, etc.











This shot shows the difference between wood protected from and exposed to the sun. For years we had a cabinet sitting on this section. At the top was covered, bottom got sun. Please excuse the dirt - and expect scratches on pine!











We saved some of the prettiest pieces of pine for our cabinets - this is the section of one of the upper shelves we made out of left over flooring. It gets a lot of sun since it is right at the kitchen window. Nice heart pine, considering what we thought we were buying was low quality grade D lumber!

These are my tests of tung oil on Southern Yellow Pine. The tung oil is from the Real Milk Paint Company. I used two kinds - Pure Tung Oil and Dark Tung Oil. For both, I cut them 50-50 with Citrus Solvent, also from the Real Milk Paint Company. Since I also wanted to test Real Milk Paint as a stain/wash, I also ordered some Sky Blue Milk Paint.

The wood is left over pieces from when we did the floors in our current house about 10 years ago. This is not ideal since the surfaces have been exposed to the air. We could not sand them as much as we'd like since our sander that had not been used for years fell apart when we tried to sand the wood. So the wood is not well sanded and has a little bit of a hardened and polished surface. Here are the pieces before any finish is applied:
















I ended up not using all the pieces, so from here out there are only four pieces of wood. Here they are after the first coat:















Here are the pieces of wood with several coats of tung oil. I applied tung oil over the milk paint as that is one way recommneded to make milk paint more water resistant for kitchen use. I also wanted to test the "antiquing" effect of the dark tung oil over the paint:



As you can see, the dark tung oil is VERY dark. I delayed posting the pictures since I meant to do a test with mixing dark and pure tung oil to lighten the overall effect, but have not had a chance to do so. The Real Milk Paint Company recommends mixing the Pure and the Dark Tung Oil to adjust the color.

I also need to take pictures of the same Southern Yellow Pine that we have on our floors to show what color they are after ten years with and without exposure to sunlight.

Here is the latest version of my house plan with a close up of the kitchen area. The door at the end of the stairs is under the high end and is to the pantry. Under the rest of the stairs will be probably a broom closet and storage. The alcove across from the washer & dryer is where we will have our bench for putting on boots and shoes.

House plans

It looks as though my new house may really happen! I have been talking to contractors and think I have settled on an ICF builder to build my house. Not only is the technology superior to regular stick built houses, it will be better insulated, tighter and MUCH stronger. AND the pricing is less per square foot - as much as 25-30% less.

So now I have to decide on house plans - I have two current designs that I like a lot. The first is right at 2250 sq.ft. but I do not like where the stairs are. The stairs do not go to a living area, they go to what we will use as conditioned attic storage. So I do not like that this plan has the stairs in what should be our best view of the farm:
The second plan is a little larger than we need, and needs some tweaking, but I like it better. Ignore the furniture layouts - that is just to test how our furniture fits.



Both plans need a coat closet for the "formal" entrance - the entrance from the wider porch at the bottom middle. The entrance to the left at the bottom will be our "mud entrance" where we will come in & out the most. There will be ramps at all entrances, including the one at the top leading from the screened porch down.

And since these are preliminary, siz and placement of exterior doors and windows is pretty arbitrary.

Oh - materials - outside: brick siding (Cherokee Brick Co. Mosstown) and metal roof (Union Corrugating Royal Blue).

Inside the floors will be tile and Southern Yellow pine. The tile will be Daltile French Quarter, Cobblestone in the mud entrance, family room and kitchen and Bourbon Street in the Master Bath suite and laundry room. I have some white slate texture tile I will probably mix with a neutral blue gray tile for the other bathroom.
French Quarter Cobblestone:

French Quarter Bourbon Street:


The pine floors will be in the bedrooms and formal living and dining rooms. I am not sure if I will have the floors done in polyurethane clear coat, poly with stain, or tung oil, either dark or regular. I need to get some stains to test and some tung oil to try out. Here you can look at the pine floors in this house. They were finished with clear poly but I think that would be too light for the effect I want in the new house.

The ICF contractor does his own CAD work and will work with me to refine the plans. So now to get other people's opinions! What do you think?

I've got a Piano!

I got home with my "new" piano Thursday!

This is actually a piano that has been in my family for over 100 years. It was made sometime around or before 1905 and was in my great-grandmother's house in Escanaba, Michigan as far back as my father can remember. It came to my family in Florida when that house was closed in the 1950s or early 60s.

I learned to play what little I know on this piano and always enjoyed messing around on it.

I picked it up in Tampa last week and brought it to my home in Tallahassee.

Here are pictures of the piano towards the end of the move: