Some deck boards actually fastened

Wednesday

Jon went up to apply finish to the boards. The oil finish said it should be applied above 45F, and the forecast was for a high of 47F on Thanksgiving. So we rearranged our holiday for the weather.

I started out with three hours of sanding. Boooring.

By the time I got o the cabin, the forecast had dropped, plus the can said it's supposed to stay above 45F for twelve hours, so that's not gonna happen. Time for a new plan. I remodeled the little cabin with drop cloths and heated it up to 70F. I stacked the deck boards in there for an hour and a half to warm them up.

I wasn't looking forward to schlepping 600 pounds of hardwood up an icy hill. Thankfully with the chains on the truckasaurus made quick work of the hill.

Finishing with a high-VOC oil finish meant two hours in a respirator. Sanding and finishing boring, but wow, this wood looks stunning.

Thursday

This morning began with some final adjustments on the deck foundation. I had to adjust the stair stringers; somehow I'd laid them them out wrong despite them being only two treads long. I protected the joists with some joist tape.

I added some waxy end-cut protection to the finished boards.

11:00am, and the sun is dropping behind the trees to the west. Winter in the mountains!

Finally I got started actually installing the decking. The first row always takes extra care, plus I was learning a new hidden fastener system.

I managed to get four boards installed before quittin' time. (Photo at top.) The finishing work paid off. The wood looks amazing. We'll have to take our shoes off before we go outside.

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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...

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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