Fancy trim. And siding.

Saturday

Eliot detailed the front wall to prepare for installing its 2x trim.

We built a 12-1/2"-wide board from tounge-and-groove car decking. This took far longer than we'd hoped. The delivered materials were junk; we had to go back to the store to hand-select some decent boards. Then we doweled the butt joints and glued up to the full width. Then we ripped it down to the final width, cut to length. Sanded, added bondo wood filler, sanded some more. Then we ripped three features into the board to help it shed rain, and primed it.

I'm telling you this to explain how we spent a whole Saturday and didn't actually attach anything to the house.

You know what takes the edge off a long day? Barbecue at Smokey's at sunset.

Sunday

We realized midday that we were short a couple pieces of flashing. Eliot drove into town to buy some, but neither hardware store that's open Sundays stocked it, so he came back with an empty rack ... and a flat tire. Sigh.

Well, we're definitely not getting through the big stack of premium lumber this weekend. Better put it in the house to keep it from warping before we use it.

Here's the one piece of wood we installed on the front of the house, 4pm Sunday. This is the 20-foot long, 1-foot wide piece we built on Saturday At least it looks pretty good!

We rounded out the evening by finishing up the siding and trim on the North side of the house. This is filmed in grainy-o-vision because it's already so dark out that we put the last few nails in by flashlight. Now three walls are completely sided (but still need window trim and battens).

Tuesday

Eliot's last day at the cabin before heading out to college.

We finished preparing the upper horizontal board, another glued-together piece. Note the chamfered corners, ready to line up nicely with the trim on the upper windows.

In it goes! Only two o'clock in the afternoon.

The next pieces are all single pieces of wood; these should go fast, right?

Nope! Every piece needed custom bits of tapered profile, rabbets cut out of the back to set neatly over the nailing flanges, and (above) slots routed where the flashing material on the wall is built up too thick. Cut, test-fit, mark, cut again. Prime, drill...

Finally, putting in the vertical boards. We got three more boards in before 7:30, as the sun began to sink behind the mountains in the west.

We would have loved to get farther, but here is the beginning of the trim on that front wall. Hooray!

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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