green building tagged posts

OK, sorry, I couldn’t resist. It was either that or borrowing the lines or titles from one of these songs:

• Neil Diamond’s “Stones”
• Queen’s “We Will Rock You”
• Bob Dylan’s “Everybody must get stoned…”
• Of course, The Rolling Stones’ “Only Rock ‘n Roll”

I’m sure there were others I could have named too.

What’s this all about? You may remember sometime back I wrote that when Edith and I had selected granite slabs for counter tops in the house, we had NO idea it would take so long before the house was ready for them. As a result, we didn’t reserve them, and because of that, the suppliers sold the pieces we’d picked. D’oh!

So now that we’re finally ready for the slabs, we had to go back to the suppliers and see what they had. OK, no problem, right?

No. Problem.

One of the suppliers no longer ha...

I know I’ve written about lighting before (like last time!) but this has been one of the biggest things to work on lately. The good news is that we’re now well on our way to having everything sorted out. Last week I approved one part of the order, for much of the decorative lighting, but then lighting expert Faith and I had to sort out some details regarding the under-cabinet lighting in the kitchen: would each bank have to be turned and off individually, how long could they be (these are LED light strips), what I might want besides outlets in the tracks between the light strips, etc. By using this kind of lighting system, we can mount the outlets, USB charging stations, and all sort of other gizmos (which I won’t be doing, but could) on the tracks...

Man, what a busy couple of weeks it’s been since my last post! One of the key things we’ve needed to finalize at this stage is all of the light fixtures and switches. You might think this would be a simple matter, but no, not in this house, anyway.

Take the lamp that’s going to hang over the table in the dining room. First of all it’s heavy: 35 pounds! Second of all, it’s going to hang from a high ceiling. Third of all, that ceiling is sloped. Can it hang from a sloped ceiling? One that’s that tall? How do we mount it to the joists? Are we going to have to redo the drywall? If so, we need to do that while the drywall guys are still on site.

Then there are the outdoor lights. Cochise County has a “dark skies” lighting code to keep the night-time skies, well, dark...