Howell Cabin

I scheduled the final inspection for Monday. So, first thing today was to finish up the plumbing on the heat pump water heater.    I took the plastic skirts off the chandeliers and blew sawdust out of the glass cups.   Jeff  and I made trim for the sixteen spots that collar ties intersect the walls in the upper bedrooms, finishing up that project. We installed a piece of metal I made to prevent the corner cupboard door from opening into the lumiere.   I cleaned up the tools and tidied up a bit more in preparation for the inspector on Monday.  I sorted scaffolding and brought a bunch home to sell on Craigslist. 

I came up after work to meet Brian, the contractor who is doing our blower door test: In this test, a big fan pumps air out of the house at a prescribed pressure differential, and then the air flow rate is measured in cubic feet per minute, then converted to whole house air changes per hour. The maximum limit is 5.0, and we scored that. Hooray! Brian said that we'd done a pretty solid job sealing the house, especially for an owner-built house; getting extremely tight seals requires careful awareness of the sealing challenges at every stage of construction. Another thing I learned by building a house. While I was up there, I got most of the way through installing a heat pump water heater to comply with energy efficiency requirements I re-discovered when looking up the blower door test requirements. This is all a bit silly. For our application -- a house occupied infrequently -- the on-demand heater is the best efficiency tradeoff, because it has zero standby waste. Unfortunately, th...

I finished sealing the gaps at the collar ties and the electrical boxes on the vaulted ceiling. Jeff was here, so he and I also worked on cutting trim to make the collar ties look nicer. Christina cleaned a bunch of rooms and oiled the stone countertops, which look amazing now. I also sealed up the can lights and fan boxes.

Christina, Siggy and I spent our independence day at the cabin. When we arrived, there was a rafter of six turkeys wandering around our lot. Siggy and I built a scaffolding for the great room. Then I worked on sealing the easy-to-reach rafters back in the bedrooms. I filled the big holes with spray foam and caulked the little gaps. I got ten of the 18 holes fixed today. The other eight require the scaffolding or some dubious ladder arrangement; I'm "looking forward" to them. We'll also have to come up with a nice way to trim them out eventually; they were a little ugly before and more so now.

Jeff reminded me that one of the things we'll need for final is a "blower door test" which determines how much air leaks out of the house. It's required to be under a certain level to encourage efficient use of heating energy. I got a hold of a contractor who could do the test, and Christina and I met him today. Before he arrived, I called the county to be sure I understood the rules. Along the way, I discovered that our on-demand electric water heater (which uses zero energy during times we're not there) doesn't qualify for the necessary energy "credits" required by our permit, so it looks like we'll be installing a heat pump water heater. And then, when Brian got here, he pointed out several places where we were going to have vigorous leaks, mainly the 18 places where the collar ties pass through the ceiling into the rafter cavity. He refused to take our money for a test, saying we should seal up those leaks and he'd come back later. Dang! ...

In pursuit of being ready for final, I came up and installed the fridge and dishwasher with Jeff. We hung mirrors in the bathrooms.