Glass success.

Friday

Mike made it back this weekend, and we got to work on the windows.

Look at that, a dozen windows in the front!

We even had enough time to get a lesson on ordinary windows. Here are the kitchen windows going in.

Eliot & Mike were justifiably proud of their work. They got out the big selfie-stick (above) and took the cool shot at the top of this post.

In the evening, Eliot finished up the tree-trimming.

Saturday

We finished up the top layer of flashing on the front windows.

Then we punched through the back of the house and put in the upper-loft window at the very top....

...and the windows in the girls bedroom on the second floor.

While we worked, our plumber Pete came up and finished up the drain & water work in the crawlspace. It looks fantastic.

We quit early today. A puff of tool exhaust blew a chip of sawdust around Eliot's safety glasses and into his eye. The pain hung around a while, and we concluded it must have scratched his cornea. Ow. We went back to the hotel to rest. I treated it with saline that turned out to be contact lens cleaner solution -- thanks, Dr. Bursett, for providing an emergency phone number! Turns out it was a non-emergency, but I felt pretty dumb. A long night's sleep was enough to heal things up.

Sunday

We put in the boys' room windows.

Here we're setting up scaffolding and installing the stairwell windows.

Christina got Siggy started installing pipe insulation in the crawlspace.

Then she worked on oiling the window interior wood trim.

Archery!

The kids cleaned the smudges off the outside of the windows.

Eliot & Siggy bouncing around in the lift.

Back to work! We set the upstairs bathroom window, the last glass on an upper floor.

And then the kids drove the lift down the driveway for the rental company to pick up.

Final score: 23 windows installed, 11 windows and 2 big glass sliding doors to go.

Comments

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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