Starting on siding

Time to give that first piece of siding under the electric meter some company.

Friday

detailing the housewrap

that's a purple thistle!

five wasps nests

ripping down a 24-foot-long board. definitely a two-person job.

placing the rest of the fan air vents, so we can work around the blocks as we install the siding

planer shavings

Saturday

the lift is popular

we always say he grew like a weed, but this weed has him beat

guinivere helped eliot with detailing the rest of the walls

guinivere cutting some detail flashing

the first row on the first wall is done.

work today was cut short -- because Jon cut his finger short with a box knife while scoring a siding panel. eliot and guinivere got some more prep work done while i cleaned up tools with my remaining functional hand. this explains why i'm not typing much today...

dinner was pizza at Beau's, a favorite in cle elum

Sunday

back to work, installing head casing trim over the windows

lifting second-layer panels up with two people (nineteen fingers)

this weekend we got about 3/4 of the west wall completed.

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