The exterior of the entire house is nearly complete. The new roof of the original house was installed last week and the painters need just two more days to finish a second coat of trim. The paint on the shingles and around windows is Sherwin Williams Colonial Revival Gray (ironic given it is a modern house!). […]
The most frequent question we’ve received during the (so far) year-long construction project has been “What are you doing with your old garage?” A variation on this I heard a few times was: “Why do you need 5 garages?” No, we don’t have five cars. The new 3-car garage built as part of the addition is the
Old Garage Becomes a Storage Room Read More »
We’ve always loved Japanese rock gardens. When we lived in Tokyo, every day I walked past the Nezu Museum and admire see their rock entrance. Frequently I’d go into the museum and spend time in the wonderful garden. We worked with Chris Bailey at CS Bailey Landscape on landscape work. We did a few plants but the
Japanese Influenced Hardscape Read More »
The old garage was added to the original Techbuilt house in the 1970’s. Because it is not original from the 1950’s we are repurposing the old garage into a storage room. In the next several weeks, the old garage doors will be removed and several windows installed. This week, the old driveway was ripped up.
Removing the Old Driveway Read More »
Our project has allowed us to consider using smart (internet enabled) products in our newly designed home. There are many products on the market that allow your mobile device to control systems in the house. Some systems including music, thermostat, and doorbell made total sense to use our iPhones to control. But we rejected many
Partially Smart Home Read More »
At Home with Tomorrow, by Carl Koch, designer of the Techbuilt house with Andy Lewis is a very rare book published by Rinehart and Company in 1958.I was lucky to score an excellent example of this book. It’s fun to page through it to learn about Koch and the design philosophy he used to build
At Home with Tomorrow Read More »
We have exercised regularly for many years. While we love being outdoors to run, mountain bike, swim, and surf, the long cold Massachusetts winters mean that for many months in the year we need to stay fit indoors. In the old house, the family room doubled as our exercise area. While it worked okay, we
Our original Techbuilt house was set up when built in 1958 with six rooms. We had four bedrooms upstairs. On the ground floor there were two rooms – we enjoyed a large living room with dining area and a kitchen, which was separated by a wall. The design for the renovation of the existing house
New Steel Beams to Open Up the Techbuilt House Read More »
Like most Techbuilt homes, ours was originally built on a concrete slab. Since our renovation required that we break up the slab in order to install new services, we used this opportunity to convert over to a Hydronic Radiant Heating system. Central Cooling & Heating has been doing the installation and it has been fascinating
Installing Hydronic Radiant Heating Read More »
For the entire five years that we had been contemplating a renovation and addition project to the very first meeting with our architectural team, we’ve always wanted to have a large living room with cathedral ceilings. The TechBuilt house design always allowed for this approach by removing bedrooms, but I’ve never seen it implemented. So it
Two of our bedrooms disappeared! Read More »