Sanding and finishing all week

I took this week off to make progress on pre-finishing the trim boards.

Monday began with a lot of sanding

and a lot of finishing

The tree removal crew is up here, as well. We're thinning trees to help make the house safer with respect to forest fires, to make the remaining trees grow bigger, and perhaps to make room for a few different species. We really like the dark forest, but it'll be a better dark forest in a few years with fewer, bigger trees.

Tuesday

meant more sanding and more finishing. Siobhan came along. She split some firewood and kept her archery skills sharp.

Wednesday

Would you believe it? More sanding. More finishing. I finished the last of the sanding today. The sanding would have been much faster -- this wood left the mill beautiful -- except that, in shipping and handling, the wood took on a bunch of gravel, scratches, staples and forklift abuse. It was really frustrating cleaning up unnecessary damage.

Thursday

Three more finish applications. With the free time I have now that sanding is done, I built racks to hold the doors and jambs, which I'll be finishing in the tent after the trim boards are complete.

The tree guys are wrapping up work around the cabin.

Friday

Finally! I put the first coat of finish on the last sawhorseful of trim wood.

I also cut up the last of the dry firewood from six years ago when the septic field was installed and trucked it over to the woodpile to keep Siggy and Siobhan busy.

The utility closet had a plywood subfloor which I hadn't seen for years while it was the home of the wood stove crate. Now I'm realizing that with the on-demand water heater it'll be mostly empty, and useful for things like a vacuum and brooms. I have a big pile of custom-milled fir flooring left over from the upstairs bedrooms, so I decided it wouldn't take long to scrap together a nicer floor for the closet.

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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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