Snowmobiles, deck joists, and a heater

Friday and Saturday

Most of the time we spent goofing around with snowmobiles, which aren't really part of the cabin structure per se. We gave each machine a sporty vinyl race number to make it easier match the covers to the sleds.

On Friday Christina finished gluing down the bathroom floor tiles; we didn't get a photo before stacking supplies on top.

The kids couldn't resist snowmobiling until after dark. We took this dusk shot by Big Creek, about a quarter mile behind our cabin.

Saturday started with more noisy-sled riding. Christina cleaned up messes and glued down the aluminum border for the crawlspace access door. Siggy got confident enough to ride a sled on the steep hill behind the shed to park it.

Sunday

Jon drove back over the mountains to get things more prepared for the winter that's already well underway.

The two beams that were in place Siobhan and I had covered with plastic to avoid accumulation of more ice. I melted a little more ice off with a heat gun. Then I tweaked the shim to get things level, and screwed them into place.

Next, I cut a dozen joists. The joists have a little tab to support the decking where it disappears under the door threshold.

The first nine joists went in pretty fast. The sky was blue with a few clouds.

I ran out of joist hangars, so I ran to town for parts and a burger. Right about then the snow arrived, so the last six joists took more time just to keep sweeping the snow out of the way. I knew things were getting silly when I had to scrape ice off the table saw.

Before it got too dark to measure, I banged out a new set of stairs for the porta-potty. Our plow guy demolishes them if we forget to move them out of the way.

My enthusiasm for building deck joists was to provide a safe place for the expensive hardwood decking to rest for the winter. The sun was just setting at this point, so I restacked a bunch of lumber in the cool glow of an LED flashlight.

Then I hauled all the tools down to the storage container and re-stacked all the other spare lumber under the big eaves.

One more task before I go. The four plug-in 1500W electric heaters are having a hard time against the cold weather, and we have 1°F weather in the forecast. I hung a 4000W workshop heater and plugged it into the dryer outlet.

I turned off the water pump, drained the water system, and spent two hours home driving over the pass in blizzard conditions.

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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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