Family, friends, and more walls

We ended up having to rearrange the order of the walls on the entry side of the house, such that there was no sane way to just tip the last section into place. So we rented a reach forklift to lift it out of the house and lower it back into position.

Eliot and I were joined by Siggy and Toby & Daniel Lilja.

My friend Mark, from Texas, came by for a midday visit. Here he's tightening down an HDU bracket.

And here he's cutting some jack studs to length.

Toby and Siggy did some Dolly Derby.

Then they went machete-ing in the woods. At one point they found a really soft stump to attack with their machetes. Siggy had observed a couple weeks ago that this stump had a big wasp nest in it, but apparently he forgot. Ow! They each ended up with a few bites.

Daniel takes a turn at an HDU.

Eliot practicing his backing-up skills ... on the forklift.

Daniel drove the forklift down the driveway to put it away.

Toby added some panel edge nailing on one of the wall segments we installed.

In the afternoon, our friends Chase & Katie came by for a visit in our peaceful woods. Here's Katie taking a turn at Dolly Derby.

At sunset, we're putting together the last first-floor wall section! Well, the last one we can build on the floor, anyway. The very last one gets built in-place.

By the time the plywood went down, we were working under the construction lights.

Erik came up to pick up the kids, so we finished off the evening with milkshakes and dinner at the Cottage Cafe.

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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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