Preparing the foundation

On Saturday, we showed up with a concrete mixer and a rock auger to set rebar into the bedrock. But, it turned out I had misremembered where the bedrock was exposed: it was exposed at the first site we considered, but the new site, set down the hill thirty feet, was covered with soil.

On Sunday, we rented a cute little digger from Home Depot in Issaquah and towed it up the hill. When we got there after lunch, Eiot asked for the keys to drive it off the trailer. Oops. The keys are still in Issaquah. Three hours later, we're digging.

Because of the late start, we did quite a lot more digging on Monday.

We didn't get very far before we hit bedrock after all. Here Eliot's trying to make a flat spot to place our footing blocks on. After twenty minutes of bashing away at this rock -- and it was a soft rock! -- he said, "I now have a greater appreciation for the people who built the pyramids."

On Tuesday and Wednesday, we built a jig to level and position the beams. We trimmed the beams to length: for some reason, our 16' beams were 16'1". We leveled and squared and leveled and squared a dozen times.

Then we cut and positioned the concrete form tubes in place, positioned metal support brackets on the beams, and lashed rebar into place to strengthen the columns.

Colin and Calvin came over to help.

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It is DONE!

The final inspection was today. This guy is Levi, the county inspector, and as you can see, we passed! He only had two questions for me. One was about the energy efficiency credits and the blower door test, for which I had the compensating paperwork for the low-flow faucets already prepared. The second was asking for a smoke detector outside the bedroom; I pointed up and he saw that we already had one tucked into the alcove. And that was that! I got up at 5am to be certain I'd be here before the inspector, and I was ... by about five hours. In that time, I took another truckload of tool buckets down to the storage container, then picked up all the floor protection in the great room and vacuumed and mopped. It's glowing! Then I went back down to the storage container to get a hammer so I could glue in 32 wood plugs to cover the screws for the french doors. I fought with installing the screens, but the frames are too big! The manufacturer said "yeah we don't even make th...

Odds and ends

I made progress on a bunch of little things today. I painted a fencepost in 12" segments and pounded it in at the property line, where the outdoor camera can see it. Now we can measure the snow accumulation. I worked on finishing up almost-complete receptacle branch circuits. The first one I worked on was a little mystery: all the receptacles were installed, but the power didn't reach past a certain point in the line. After some investigation with a wire tracer and watching through the videos we took before covering the walls, I worked out what had happened: two receptacles shared a stud bay, facing into opposite rooms. The plan had been to bring power up to one box, jump over to the other box, and continue back down to the crawlspace to the next box. We forgot the jumper. I couldn't fish a wire between the boxes myself, so that repair waits. Upstairs, installing two receptacles completed the branch. The bathroom vent hole in the tile backer board was a skosh too small. ...

Energy efficiency testing

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...

Howell Cabin

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