Completing second-level floor framing

On Saturday, we assembled the second half of the balcony framing. We stitched together two 13' pieces to make a long rim board.

That thing weighed about 200 pounds, which took a little muscle and creative routing for two of us to get up to the second floor.

Eliot marked the beam for brackets.

We tipped it down, installed brackets, and then tipped it back up onto the cantilevered beams we put in last weekend. Here Eliot's using a 6" screw to suck the rim board tight against the beam.

Once the rim was in place, we could hang the short beams off of it. Left side in the photo below; they're short because they stop at the stairwell opening.

In glorious VR: https://photos.app.goo.gl/hxnFhJQKRvcH7jZV9

Sunday

We finished up a couple rims for the 2x10 section of the floor framing.

Oh, I forgot to show off my fancy joinery last weekend. The 4x10s and 2x10s land on the same wall. I wanted them to both bear full width, which, with some careful rearranging of the 2x10 joists, was possible almost everywhere. In two spots, they had to share, but I notched the 4x10s to get as much bearing as I could on the wall.

Blocking. Lost of blocking. Dozens of stupid little boards, none longer than 15", to keep the joists upright along their length. I say "stupid" because Eliot got pretty bored of installing blocking today.

We wrapped up blocknig around 4PM, so we took the little break to organize our workspace. We had built this rack for drying the finish on ceiling material for the v1.0 cabin plan, which is no longer in play. Now that the rain has come, we're having trouble with our stacks of spare lumber getting soggy and sometimes moldy. So we pulled the rack out of the cargo container and put all of our spare lumber in it to keep it off the ground and let it dry out.

That gave us room to reorganize the cargo container, so we pulled all the buckets and tools out and cleaned house.

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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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