Shower pans and some pre-drywall details.

Eliot and Jon were supposed to install battens, but the rental shop lost our order for the lift. We put a few up using ladders before Eliot had had enough.

The insulation guy did most of his work earlier this week. The house is now much quieter and darker than before. We actually have to use doorways now.

Siggy helped get materials and tools out for making a pony wall and curbs in the bathroom.

Eliot installed the pretty blocking in the entryway.

Christina and Jon sawzalled the shower drains off the pipe and spliced on stubs of straight pipe that connect to the fancy Wedi shower pan system.

Jon and Siobhan put a dozen more battens on the west wall.

Eliot reframed the stairwell wall to be ready for drywall.

Christina measured and cut the Wedi shower pan. She was understandably nervous; that was a thousand-dollar piece of the finest German foam. It came out perfectly.

Siggy added a slide to his housetraption.

Guinivere helped clean up cords.

Siggy hung around with Eliot at the pizza place.

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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...

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...

Appliances and mirrors

In pursuit of being ready for final, I came up and installed the fridge and dishwasher with Jeff. We hung mirrors in the bathrooms.

Howell Cabin

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