Joining us now is Greg Vangrover from the Ketcham Reflections company.
Hi Bob.
And we're talking shower doors here, huh?
Yes.
Now how far along are you?
Tell us what's happening.
OK, right now were finishing up.
What were doing is putting on a silicon sealant to seal this unit up, because this unit is not only going to be sealed for water leakage and seepage, it's also going to be sealed the whole steam, we seal the whole shower enclosure.
Yeah,right.
And so that means it you have to put silicon in addition to the regular metal stripping that is going up against the wall.
Correct.
We use Silicone around the whole perimeter, and even insert in other instances, we're using magnets and weather stripping to also sealed.
So the weather stripping you see right along the edge here.
Correct.
And want to get a little bit too to close in there?
Don't you need to be able to vent this somewhat?
Yes.
Well, what we did is we added a custom flip panel here, so what happens is after you take your steam, you can so you don't create mildew and to much moisture inside the shower.
And on normal mornings when you take a shower, and you're not taking a steam, you're in a rush, you can open that up and take a normal shower and it won't be too hot.
Excellent.
Now what type of finish is this cause the actual components are solid brass, aren't they?
Correct there solid brass and inside each parent holding it together are solid brass corner blocks, which will prevent the unit from corroding inside and blowing up and coming apart.
And this particular finish is brush chrome and we chose that to match the fixtures that are in the rest of the bathroom because we will the finish that is available.
Now this is unusual though.
Most, most often you see the shinier finishes, right?
Right.
Most times you would see a polished chrome plated brass and that is because most fixtures that you see are polished, chrome plated brass.
Its the most durable finish and it holds up, and it's bright.
And we did one like that in your wife's bath.
Exactly tell us about that one.
Now what we did was since it's bigger and it's a little more open we, in one of the joints we removed the vertical metal and that, we were able to butt glaze the glass and open up the whole shower, so when you walk in, it's a very open appearance.
Now tell us a little bit about installations like this.
This is really custom.
It's not very easy.
It's very custom it looks simple, but really its not because, what happens is the units and the openings are designed by designers and architects.
But since everything that you to build and especially with what you do building older homes.
Not all the walls are true or plumb or the angles be true or plumb so what we do basically is we take the drawing and we come out and we field measure and we put levels on it to see if the wall's lean out because we will cut this out of square just to fit the opening and to fit your particular bath.
If you have to.
True,
Right,
We have to, and then what we do is we need factory trained installers because Most of these pieces will fit right in but they have to know exactly where each piece goes to lay it out so it is a very tight fit.
No, I'm familiar with them.
it's a work of art.
Thanks a lot Craig.
Thank you.
Okay, well we're going to go down to the now look at some other fabulous gadgets, come on.
Now one gadget that you really should have is a carbon monoxide detector.
And this one is battery powered, so we don't really need the electrician to do it but thanks for getting it up there Barry.
No problem.
Now, you have done all the wiring in this house, every light fixture.
I want to thank you for that and for sticking around for each.
Why is this an important item to add?
Well, carbon monoxide is colourless and odourless and you never know it's coming until it sneaks up on you and it's too late.
Exactly, and these of course can be tested and should be tested regularly.
That tells you it's working, right?
Yep.
Good.
Thanks Barry.
No problem.
Now I reserved two spaces of the basement for special purposes.
One of them is a wine cellar or cellarite.
It's only about 8 by 8.
But we're below grade and we've got the old stone walls here.
And one of my treats is this Marvel wine store system for special bottles or for party needs.
You can chill about four cases of wine in each one of these and you can keep all your Chardonnays' and stuff for a party and then you can also control humidity and temperature, so that you can take good care of special red wines.
Then on the other side of this area, I have got plenty of room for wood storage.
And one of the key things that I wanted was to be able to get it up to the first floor easily.
So there's a Canadian company called Bruce Fowler Industries that makes this Woodwaiter and you can load it up.
It's got a worm drive on either side so that it can really, really move a lot of firewood.
And all it takes is about a minute, and it will be in my living room.
And of course the firewood is right where you need it, in the corner of the living room, but just about five feet from our fireplace, so that it makes life pretty darn comfortable, huh?
Now, you'll notice in this room we've gone to pretty traditional color schemes.
We have a kind of vanilla color on the walls, and a nice, white trim.
And the reason we did that was, well, a number of reasons.
We have such strong colors in the hall and in the other rooms, and we have so many strong colors in our possessions.
We love bright colors that the only piece of furniture that we really bought from this house was this terrific red sofa from baker.
And you know, when you love color like that, sometimes you really need to draw back, architecturally this room is interesting its got good proportions lots of day light.
One big flaw that it had was originally if you remember we had a kind of a 1970's ceiling treatment with a cove running around the entire perimeter of the room with little tiny lights everywhere, very inappropriate for an 1890's house and we put in a new ceiling and added this wooden crown molding around the entire perimeter to kind of give it the right sense.
And of course the last thing that you have to worry about in rooms like this is how to light them, because they're big and you need different types of lighting, so we brought in the ligtholeer dimming controls, the brilliance controls, so that we can have, oh say in an area like this, we can bring down the light just to the right intensity so that bright colors are not overpowering and in another area where you might have a painting you can do just the right kind of lighting.
I'm real pleased with the way the house is coming, is coming together.
Got to break for messages.
Don't go away.
Well now it's getting time to say good bye again.
After 10 months of actual work and a 26 visits here at our house, the p lace is finally done.
And I really want to thank all the poeple that really labored through lots of difficulties to make this happen for us.
Also want to thank the neighbors who have had to live with lots of construction debris, construction trucks and noise over the course of the last 10 months.
That's it for his time.
Till next time, I'm Bob Vila.
It's good to have you home again.
