Street View

Until recently, our house wasn't on Street View. The images must have been from early in 2009 before any construction had begun. Now it turns out that Google has caught the construction progress of the garage over a series of a few days.

Day 1



Mike Dangelo and his crew weren't there, but Chris Pare was installing the new dog fence wire.

I had no idea, but...

We were both outside as the Google cameras came by. Chris had found an old manhole structure which we had guessed was used at one point for irrigation of the old cranberry bog.

Day 2

This time it was a sunny day and Dangelo was back. This is a view from the Our Lady of Victory exit drive. They only went part way up the hill, but from a little higher up you can see both sides of the garage at once.

Day 3
Finally, in this view from Church Hill Road, you can see that they're putting the rafters up.

Building the eyebrow dormer

I thought that an eyebrow dormer would fit in with the architecture of the house and garage quite well, so I started a little internet research to see how people had built them in the past. Most of the processes involved pencils and strings to make the radius curves, and often they were built on the ground and lifted into place once everything was test fit. There were many ways of framing them, some with rafters perpendicular to the front face and some with ribs. I decided that ribs would be the easier way to go, and since laminated veneer lumber, also known as LVL or the trade name Microllam, is available in large sizes, I utilized a piece of 1 3/4" x 24" x 12' LVL to form the ribs. Rather than the labor intensive pencil and string method, I opted for a 3D CAD model which I then turned into full size paper patterns like this.

The exterior trim is cut from a sheet of Azek cellular PVC. I had based the size of the dormer assuming a 4'x8' sheet of Azek, but later found that the local lumber yard stocks it in 4'x10' sheets and it would actually have cost more to special order the 4'x8' piece. I might have flared the ends a little more knowing that. I even laid out the patterns for the double 1/4" plywood sheathing using slightly larger top pieces to compensate for the plywood thickness.

Here it is with the ribs going into place.

This is what it looks like from the inside.

And here's the outside with the shingles and trim installed.

The gable roof is only about 14' deep and there is a triangular flat roof in back which is hidden from sight. Even though the garage is a trapezoidal shape, it looks almost rectangular from most viewpoints.

A Garage!

When we built the house, we had maxed out the buildable portion of the lot and figured a garage would probably never be possible. However, about a year ago I looked into the wetland regulations and found out that there were provisions on constrained lots where one could gain permission to essentially purchase back the right to use a portion of your own land. Our wetland consultant wasn't certain we could gain approval, but it was certainly worth a try.

I prepared two schemes, Option A which was the desired plan, and Option B, which was my fallback option. Option A was a small rectangular two car garage.

And Option B was a trapezoid.

However, the Conservation Commission was very much against allowing the disturbance of anything within 50' of the former cranberry bog and wetland, but gave approval for Option B. This was last October. Now I have some catching up to do on the blog posts.

 

It's an odd shape and makes the construction a little more difficult, but is certainly much better than no garage at all. The rear of it follows the wetland buffer boundary, the left side parallels the house and deck, and the right side parallels the lot sideline. Here's what the garage will look like.

The view from the street will look pretty normal, but if you stand back far enough, you will see both sides of the garage at once, giving just a bit of a fun house effect.

It's a BRICC House

Last Thurday I received a pleasant surprise. I had entered the house in the Home Builders & Remodelers Association of Cape Cod BRICC (Building & Remodeling Industry on Cape Cod) Awards competition and ended up winning the Best Single Family Home under 2500 SF. Here's the certificate and nifty etched glass brick.

The BRICC brick is pretty cool and I had to work to get a good photo. I tried a few different approaches, but the best one came from resting it on the black velveteen bag with the sun shining through. Then I stood back about ten feet and used a little fill flash to bring out the foreground.

This was the first time the HBRACC held the competition and they won't hold another one until 2014 so I'm glad to have received this one the first time around.

Webstats

Although I haven't added any new posts in quite a while, the blog still seems to be generating interest. I signed up with Histats a couple of years ago and it's interesting to see how and why people get here. Google Analytics has similar features but the illustrations from Histats are a little more dramatic.

This chart shows the stats for September. There seem to be a good number of new and repeat visitors every day. It turns out that there's more activity now than there was back when I was regularly adding posts.

And this is an indication of how people find the blog. Some access it directly or from a link on my website but most people seem find it from internet searches. There was an interesting bump when the Smurf movie came out due to smurf related searches, but now the smurf hits are primarily from people looking for smurftube info.

And the visitors come from all over the world too.

Seeing Green

Because we built a LEED home – and because it’s a good idea – we made sure that we utilized environmentally sensitive landscaping. This includes things like drought tolerant plantings, reduced impervious cover and provisions for reduced water usage. We did look into a rainwater storage system, but in New England things get complex, expensive and require too much maintenance for the water saving potential.

Our first step was to hire a Landscape Architect. My Ornamental Horticulture class was from way back at the University of Florida so I was a little out of my league. We hired Andrew Garulay, who also works at Down Cape Engineering, the engineers who prepared our site plans. He had never designed a landscape for a LEED project, but had the knowledge to get us through the process.

His design primarily uses drought-tolerant native plant species. We have a limited area of lawn, which I kind of like, and the grass is a drought-tolerant fescue. The lawn is so small that I mow it with a newfangled Fiskars non-powered push mower in less than 15 minutes.

I figured I’d do the LEED calculations for the water-efficient irrigation system myself, but I have to laugh when I go back to the LEED Method for Calculating Reduction In Irrigation Demand formulas. I couldn’t even find some of the factors and rates they were looking for so I couldn’t complete the calculations if I wanted to. This method is so convoluted that I don’t think anyone ever uses it. Fortunately the USGBC has an easier alternate path for this credit.

Here’s what things looked like pre-landscape.

And, with the work of The Natural Landscape, here’s what it looked like the next day.

It was quite a transformation. I’m happy with the way it all turned out, but have to admit that at I did at times wonder if I would have been happier if we hadn’t restricted our choice of plantings. Maybe we could have created a more vibrant landscape. This is what it looked like at the end of April this year, just about one year after installation.

I was amazed, though, when I compared the photo above with this one from mid-June. In the span of a little more than a month, things really came to life.

Now we just need to get the weeds to take a break. The soil on Cape Cod is primarily sandy and well drained, and weeds seem to love the new loam and the drip irrigation. Just when we think they’re almost under control, new ones pop up to take their place.

IHYD

Back in July we were driving through Osterville and saw some signs with arrows which said IHYD. Since there was water line replacement going on in the same area, we guessed it was part of that. We were wrong. Then, a week or two later, we saw some Lightnin Production trucks and trailers hauling through Osterville and out of curiosity followed them. When they passed the Wianno Golf Club, we figured it might be something golf related. Wrong again. Not long after that I saw that Adam Sandler was filming his new movie I Hate You Dad (which may be retitled Donny's Boy) on Seaview Avenue in Osterville. Now the IHYD signs made sense. They were filming around Boston and then at several locations on Cape Cod. This is a replica of the green monster that they built at a local middle school, complete with the Citgo sign.

I wanted to find out a little more about what was going on and discovered the I Hate You Dad extras Facebook page. They were still looking for extras, so I replied. I wasn't called for the wedding scene at the mansion on the ocean in Osterville, but did get a call for the beach scene in Dennis. This was my big break.

As an extra, one needs to call in the night before to get the details and location. I was in Central MA the night before and, during a torrential downpour, found that I had to be in Dennis at 6:30 AM. I figured we'd be hanging out at the beach in the pouring rain. It wasn't raining at 6:30 but the day did not look ideal. They bussed us the final half-mile to Chapin Beach and I was amazed at the size of the operation. We went through check-in and a wardrobe check and then they fed us breakfast. Then we went to the beach. I was expecting to see what's going on, but most of us really are background. After some filming, they moved us around a couple of times and, just when it looked like they were going to film right next to me, they changed their mind and sent most of the doubles to the food tent. I was one of the dozen or so herded back to the dunes to wait. They filmed while we were just out of eyesight and eventually sent us to the tent too. Then it was lunch time.

There is no shortage of food or lack of food variety on the set. It's amazing that more of the crew aren't overweight. I was also amazed at the quantity of people. I would guess there were well over 200 including cast, crew, support and extras.

After lunch, it was time for the traffic jam scene. Forty extras were bussed back to get their cars for the simulated Cape Cod traffic jam. Then we sat for six or seven hours. It wasn't so bad, though. Here's the Mustang they had 'stuck' in the sand.

That's Adam Sandler and Vanilla Ice - yes, that Vanilla_Ice. I thought he was through in the 80's. From what I see, he's having a bit of a resurgence. After seeing what they go through to hire extras, it seems like they could have just enlisted some of the spectators. This is one ugly condominium with an amazing view.

The beach photo doesn't really do the scene justice. Those are tide pools. When the tide goes out the pools and sandbar must go out for over 1000 feet.

When the tide came back in again, all of this disappeared.

Finally it seemed that they were ready for the final scene of the day. It looked like Sandler and Vanilla Ice abandoned their 'stuck' car and were walking up the street right by us. Except that when I looked over, it wasn't actually them.

Look close. It was their doubles. Vanilla's green outfit certainly is a classic, isn't it?