Sliding doors

Friday

We picked up our first batch of electrical supplies from branches in Lynnwood and Ellensburg. As you can see from the sign, we weren't able to buy a receptacle.

Jon oiled the last three windows. Siggy climbed a tree and attached plywood to it.

Eliot re-framed the bottom course of stairs.

Saturday

Toby & Dan joined us today for the heavy work of installing the sliding doors. We cut out and furred the openings to the correct size.

Lots of strong people to lift these monsters into place.

There they are, the last of the glass!

It's impractical to oil the panels after they're installed, but we didn't want to leave a hole in the house. So we went to work getting the wood treated and the sliding panels in place.

Siobhan puttied holes left in the ceiling by overzealous nail guns a floor above. Christina sanded it smooth, so the ceilings are ready for oil.

Christina oiled the fir window screens ... and sang Bohemian Rhapsody.

Jan came to enjoy the chaos ... and knit a hat.

Siggy worked on building a pantry for the little cabin.

Toby improved the steps to the toilet for Grandma Jan.

Siobhan made a thing. Guinivere made a plastic utensil holder for the shedlet.

Folks took an afternoon archery break. Bullseyes were made.

Sunday

Remember the wall we re-framed for the electric panels? Our electrician wasn't crazy about that placement. Jon and Eliot fiddled around with the panels looking for a better option.

Guinivere and Eliot loaded up a trailer of brush to take to the neighbors' brush pile. We also grabbed some of their piles on the way up the hill.

Eliot fixed the steel-rope swing. It's safe now!

Meanwhile, Jon put another coat of varnish on the BA column and other bits of structural lumber that needed more attention.

Eliot and Guinivere took tools and pressure-treated lumber down to the canal bridge and gave it a little tune-up.

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

Search This Blog