The House Project: Stone Cutters, Thermostat

I went up there Wednesday to deliver another of lighting fixtures, and there were enough trucks up there that I could delude myself that the house might be done soon!

These guys were up to measure the counters for the Silestone:


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Here they are measuring the countertops.


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My wife and I goofed on our measures of the kitchen--so instead of about $7000 for these beautiful granite-like counters, it is closer to $7800. If that seems like a lot--even the cheap laminate comes to close to $3000 to do everything--and these counters serve a very important purpose. When the time comes to sell the place, the wife of the potential buyer will walk in, see the view, see these absolutely gorgeous counters--and before you know it, she'll be insisting that a million dollars is perfectly reasonable. If you visit the Silestone web site , click on the Amarillo Palmira (that's the kitchen color), the Absolute Green (bathrooms 2 and 3), and the Kona Beige (that's the master bathroom). Three weeks to deliver, cut, and install these tops.

These guys were up to get the cooktop and water heater operational--but there seemed to be some miscommunication with the plumber, who was supposed to install the water heater--and the cooktop hadn't arrived yet.


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As usual, I was hassling my builder about the type of thermostat I wanted--one that would not just be programmable by the day and hour, but one that would know to transition from heater to air conditioning and back again. Our current house has a very sophisticated thermostat that has such a small display that I can't quite read it--and it still requires you to manually select either HEAT or COOL. The idea that the weather might change enough in a day to require automatic change seems a bit much, I guess. But this is Idaho, and that happens!

Anyway, the heating and cooling guy found a thermostat that does this automatic switchover, and has a nice big display.


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It occurred me that since this replaced an antiquity from the 1950s, I should go ahead and program it to drop down to 45 degrees at night, and not warm up until about 10:00 AM, when the workers arrive. My builder tells me that even if it below freezing outside, the heater only takes about 15 minutes to get the whole house toasty--even with a lot of doorknob holes still letting in the cold.

Adding to the complexity of all this was that we hadn't considered (or at least, hadn't communicated) to the vendor of sinks that we would want undermounted sinks. This adds some cost, of course, but it also meant that our sink vendor would be at least four weeks getting us the sinks we needed--in the color Bone. Much excitement, many calls, but the plumber seems to have found a more immediate source.

I really want to get this done--both for reasons of locking in interest rates, and because I want to move Big Bertha up there for deep sky observing. It has been so crisp, cold, and clear these last few nights--and Big Bertha a place where she can go for the deep sky objects.

Last house project entry.

The House Project: When Am I Allowed My Nervous Breakdown?

Because it has taken so long to get to the point where we are ready to put countertops on the kitchen cabinets and vanities--we had to start all over on the decision process about the countertops. Since we started over, we made an entirely new set of selections--but run through the following complexities:

1. We decided that the Silestone cultured granite stuff looked so cool, and it wasn't much more expensive than the Corian ($60 per square foot instead of $43 per square foot).

2. The kitchen and the master bath get the Silestone; we'll use Corian in the other two bathrooms, because it is a bit cheaper.

3. My wife decides to use Silestone in the other two bathrooms--$17 per square foot difference when you only have about eight square foot total isn't that much money.

4. We forgot about the utility sink in the laundry room. Okay. We'll Corian that.

5. Nope. That's below the minimum order for Corian. So we'll use Corian in bathroom three.

6. What's the size of the counters? The builder has clearly the wrong dimensions for the master bath vanities, so we drive up there to remeasure everything.

7. Gee, if we are getting Corian, we can get the sink and the countertop as a single unit. Won't that be cool? Besides, undermounting the sinks we had specified over at Consolidated adds $195 to the cost of the Corian, and the Corian sink included is about $305--so it comes out about the same or cheaper to go for the Corian sink as part of the countertop.

8. But there's no utility sink or even close to that size in Corian.

9. I call the builder from Home Depot, and tell him what we are planning. Then he reminds me that the utility sink is so large that there isn't going to be much of a Corian countertop around it--why not just go for cheap laminate around it, and save the $498 that we would be spending for the Corian countertop and undermounting of the sink? Great idea! Now go back and revisit item #5 above.

I think, if I can ever get hold of my wife on the phone, we're going to do Silestone everywhere now. What we save on the utility sink will be more than the extra cost of doing the third bathroom in Silestone instead of Corian, and keeps a consistent and very sharp looking interior design.

Of course, it is three weeks to get the Silestone ordered up--and of course, that holds up not just the countertops, but also installation of the sinks that undermount the counters. Groan.

I've learned so much from this project. And I hope that I don't have to use that knowledge again!

I Guess I Have To Buy State of Fear

Laurie David, limousine liberal environmental activist who criticizes the masses for buying SUVs--but flies around in a private jet--and is now accused of environmental despoilation on Martha's Vineyard--is attacking Michael Crichton for writing State of Fear.

Scott Adams on Evolution vs. Intelligent Design

It rather surprises me:

I’ve been doing lots of reading on the subject, trying to gather comic fodder. I fully expected to validate my preconceived notion that the Darwinists had a mountain of credible evidence and the Intelligent Design folks were creationist kooks disguising themselves as scientists. That’s the way the media paints it. I had no reason to believe otherwise. The truth is a lot more interesting. Allow me to set you straight. (Note: I’m not a believer in Intelligent Design, Creationism, Darwinism, free will, non-monetary compensation, or anything else I can’t eat if I try hard enough.)

First of all, you’d be hard pressed to find a useful debate about Darwinism and Intelligent Design, of the sort that you could use to form your own opinion. I can’t find one, and I’ve looked. What you have instead is each side misrepresenting the other’s position and then making a good argument for why the misrepresentation is wrong. (If you don’t believe me, just watch the comments I get to this post.)

And my oh my! He was right! I used to understand when the Young Earthers would get frustrated, nasty, and vicious. (Well, okay, that's just Ken Hamm.) But now it seems to be the defenders of the True Church of Darwinian Evolution (which doesn't include all evolutionists) who are having a little trouble keeping their tongues in check.

House Project: Lighting Fixtures, Countertops

Apparently when we picked out lighting fixtures at Grover's Pack and Pay in Boise several months back, we didn't give them the detailed list of stuff that our builder would need--so we had to FAX that over to Grover's on Friday. They didn't have everything in stock, but they had most of it. To speed up the process, because there was a real possibility that the electrician would be back from elk hunting in time to get started Saturday, we picked up everything that was ready Saturday morning at Grover's and delivered it.


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It just barely fit.

Most of the painting has been done in the evenings, and we noticed a couple of rooms that, in the cold light of day, need a bit more painting, so we whined to the builder.

We also discovered that the counter tops we picked out at another store seem not to have made it onto the order list. I'm not sure if that was our fault or theirs, but my wife noticed that the selection and pricing was better at Lowe's. Our builder already has an account at Home Depot, however, and the selection there was even a little more attractive.

We had originally planned to use laminates for the countertops, but after more examination of the choices and prices, we decided on Corian for bathrooms two and three, and one of these cultured quartz stone surfaces that looks like granite (okay, granite on acid) for the kitchen and the master bedroom. Our current house uses a granite tile on the kitchen counters which, while quite dramatic, requires a bit more maintenance than the cultured stone surfaces--and is harder to keep clean, because of the grout between tiles. This cultured stone surface is a single sheet cut to dimension, and three centimeters thick.

Oh yeah, here's one of the lesser views from our house, of Bogus Basin ski resort to the east.


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Last house project entry.

House Project: Topless Cabinets

We ran up to the house last night to make some last minutes decisions about countertops and backsplashes for the jetted tub and the kitchen sink. There are cabinets in the kitchen and vanities in two of the three bathrooms--but all lacking tops, of course.

The kitchen:


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Looking down into the island where the cooktop goes, I don't see where the downdraft exhaust exits the building.

Bathroom three is tiny, and has a correspondingly tiny vanity.


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We have long felt that too much space is wasted on a huge master bathroom. We may have gone a bit far the other direction!


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Utility room sink cabinet.


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Last house project entry.

National Propaganda Radio Reported This?

And Instapundit, as much as he is "deeply unimpressed" with Intelligent Design critiques of evolutionary theory, admits that this is scientific McCarthyism.

It's time to start carrying an umbrella, to deal with the results of the pigs relieving themselves as they fly overhead. From NPR:

Richard Sternberg, a staff scientist at the National Institutes of Health, is puzzled to find himself in the middle of a broader clash between religion and science -- in popular culture, academia and politics.

Sternberg was the editor of an obscure scientific journal loosely affiliated with the Smithsonian Institution, where he is also a research associate. Last year, he published in the journal a peer-reviewed article by Stephen Meyer, a proponent of intelligent design, an idea which Sternberg himself believes is fatally flawed.

"Why publish it?" Sternberg says. "Because evolutionary biologists are thinking about this. So I thought that by putting this on the table, there could be some reasoned discourse. That's what I thought, and I was dead wrong."

At first he heard rumblings of discontent but thought it would blow over. Sternberg says his colleagues and supervisors at the Smithsonian were furious. He says -- and an independent report backs him up -- that colleagues accused him of fraud, saying they did not believe the Meyer article was really peer reviewed. It was.

Eventually, Sternberg filed a complaint with the U.S. Office of Special Counsel, which protects federal employees from reprisals. The office launched an investigation. Ultimately, it could not take action, because Sternberg is not an employee of the Smithsonian.

But Sternberg says before closing the case, the special counsel, James McVay, called him with an update. "As he related to me, 'the Smithsonian Institution's reaction to your publishing the Meyer article was far worse than you imagined,'" Sternberg says.

The letter from the Office of Special Counsel is here.

Look, being persecuted and retaliated against isn't proof that Intelligent Design is correct, but the evolutionary establishment's foaming at the mouth suggests that ID has hit a nerve that "Creation science" never did. That's because Intelligent Design has a few proponents who are legitimate scientists, working in the fields of biochemistry and microbiology--and some of its criticisms are very powerful.