Where have you gone, Joe Blogger?

I can't believe it's been a month since my last post.  For those of you on the edge of your seats, waiting for startling photos of a nearly completed house, just ease back a bit and have another handful of popcorn.  Lots has happened, but the visual evidence is not all that dramatic.

Friday, October 24.

I snapped this pic last Friday.  The front porch is now finished and the permanent columns are in place.  These are nice square fiberglass models that should be relatively maintenance free.

We were pretty specific that we did not want to spend our declining years up on a ladder scrapping and painting, so much of the outside of the house will be basically plastic.  We selected vinyl siding (cuz vinyl is final) and PVC decking for the front porch and south deck.

Oh yes, the decking…  And here we launch into a little tirade about how everything is not always seamless in a building project.

Some of the first choices we made were the shingles, the siding and the decking.  The decking came in a variety of colors and grains.  As this was basically plastic decking, we choose a cedar grain because it looked a little less "plasticy" than the oak grain.  Little did we know that the oak grain is stamped on one side and the cedar grain is stamped on the other.  When Kevin and his crew installed the deck, they were very careful to make sure they consistently put the same grain up.

I can't say enough about the quality of Kevin's work.  This house is built like a tank.  Everywhere we look, the quality of the framing is absolutely first rate.  Several of the vendors that we have met with know Kevin's work and wholeheartedly agree, he is the BEST!!

Somewhere in the cycle, there was one key piece of information missing, and long story short, all of the decking was installed upside down, so the oak grain was showing.  All's well that ends well, Kevin and his crew were able to remove and flip the decking, using the same screw holes, and now it looks great.

Inside the shell, the concrete for the garage and basement has been poured and the inside walls in the basement, to accommodate an additional 6 inches of insulation, have been built.  The stairs to the basement have been installed and the finished main staircase, after an unfortunate, but quickly repaired mishap, was also set in place.

Main staircase.

Here's a not so great photo of the staircase.  You can see the white painted risers.  The treads are birch, but you can't see them as Kevin has covered each with a piece of sheathing for protection.

Soffits were also framed for the kitchen cabinets.  We have nine foot ceilings on the first floor, so we were able to have the taller, forty-two inch upper cabinets in the kitchen.  We don't like having an open space above the cabinets to gather dust and grime, and the soffits will allow us to install can lighting that will illuminate the countertop nicely.

Lastly, we tweaked the size of the shower stall in the master bath to make room for a tiled bench.

As I look around the place, it sometimes seems like not a lot has happened in the last month.  But there is one area of the construction that is going full steam ahead, and that is the outpouring of money.  We have selected and chosen and considered and decided until we are both as green as the cash we are committing.  After a grueling day of meeting with kitchen, plumbing and tile vendors, we stopped somewhere to pick up something, and the cashier asked us if we wanted a bag for our purchase.  We both stood there staring at the poor kid.  "I just don't know", I said, and I meant it!!

So the plumber is scheduled to be on site tomorrow to begin the rough-in.  Our windows should be here in about a week, and once those are installed, the electrician will start his rough-in.  Things should start clipping along nicely very soon.

Next time I'll share some more of the kitchen plans and describe some of our other choices.

Framing Nears Completion

Before: August 1

Here are before and after shots from roughly the same place.  On August 1, we had an empty field.  Two months later a very tight shell exists with the deck completed on the south side.

Inside, all of the interior partitions are in place and the basement is insulated, sealed and ready for concrete.  Two sets of stairs have been built offsite and delivered, and are patiently waiting for their permanent home.

After: September 26

Looking ahead,  Kevin and his crew will build the porch on the front and the roof that will cover it.  Once the basement floor is poured, walls will be framed around the perimeter to accommodate more insulation.  Then they will move on to another, less deserving job site while a slew of sub-contractors descend upon the place.  They will return later to do the finish work, install the cabinets and vanities, hang all the interior doors, and do all the little things that I never seem to get to on my projects.

I'm not really certain about the order of the subs, but I know that plumbing, electrical, air handling, central vac, wiring for audio and video, insulation and sheetrock will all be installed in the coming weeks.

All ready for my date with the concrete truck.

I've talked a lot about the insulation in the basement, to the point where some readers might assume I'm absolutely obsessed (everyone's entitled to their own opinion!!).  To me this represents what a high efficiency home is all about.  The attention to detail is absolutely mind-boggling.  As you may recall, when the foundation was first completed, two concrete pads where poured in the middle of the basement to support the posts for the carrying beam and the concrete floor.  Four inches of rigid foam insulation was then added inside the footings and around the pads.  Foil covered rigid foam was glued to the basement walls, then ten mil plastic was laid out over the floor and taped to the insulation on the walls.  Finally, four inches of foam was added on top of the exposed footings to eliminate any thermal bridging between the basement floor and the footings.

Once the floor is poured, walls will be added around the perimeter, filled with dense packed cellulose and covered with sheetrock.  All this for an unfinished basement!!

Basement detail

Here's one more drawing of the insulation details below grade.  This will eventually be our little exercise room along with a place for my soon to be acquired pool table.

Until next time ...

I need my space man...

Spaceman Spiff

In advertising, I believe they call this a teaser.  Our little friend here has nothing to do with our building project, but every time I thought about the space within the house, this image popped into my head.  Now I've implanted it in your head, don't bother to thank me.

This week, Kevin and his crew completed the roof, added the sheathing to the second floor ceiling and began framing the interior partitions upstairs.  Until now, our interpretation of the  layout on the second floor was limited to the floor plans and our imagination.  Now that some of the framing is in place, it makes it a bit more real.

Second floor facing south

This shot is the second floor looking south.  You can see the other building project in our little development through the cavernous window opening.  This space will become the guest bath, a small office with a closet and a second bedroom.  The red chalk lines on the floor will soon grow to 8 foot walls.

This space seemed disproportionately large when it was open.  Once you start chopping it into rooms you are immediately hit with the inevitable "will this be big enough"?  The answer is "hell yes".  No matter how you slice it, this is a ton of space for two people, even with the occasional overnight guest and visits from the kids.  I think as parents we naturally think the space needs to accommodate the entire family, as if all three kids are still living under the same roof even though we know about the only time this will happen is during the Christmas holidays and even then, only every other year or so.

It's hard to get a sense of the volume of the room from these photos.  When you're standing in the room, your mind tells you to stop at the partition wall.  When you look at the picture, it's natural to look through the framing to what is beyond.

Master bedroom

Here is a shot of the master bedroom from the corner.   To the right is the open space we saw in the first photo.  To the left is the door to the walk in closet.

We talked about this closet in a previous post.  We reconfigured this a few times to get this just right.  Again it's hard to get a sense of the size of this from the photo, but it is a pretty good size room.  The closet is bigger than the little office, and the office is bigger than my office at work, so all in all, I bet we'll have enough room for our clothes.

Closet

And of course, there is one room in the house where size absolutely matters.  That is the ever important garage.

The garage floor sits about 30 inches lower than the first floor.  You may recall the walls of the first floor are nine feet and the bedroom above the garage is the same level as the rest of the second floor.  That makes the walls in the garage about twelve feet high.  When you're standing in it looking up, it feels like a racquetball court!  But don't you worry, we have plenty of crap to fill that space.  And if we run out, there are garage sales about every 35 feet down here in the sticks.

Airplane hanger?  Nope, just the garage.

With the roof on, I suspect they will pour the basement and garage floor and then we can see some more of the insulation details.

Sadly, this is the part of the project when the visual evidence of progress slows down a bit.  Once all the remaining sheathing is installed and taped, they'll cover the window and door openings and perform a blower test to make sure we're as airtight as we can be.  After that, it's plumbing, electrical and air handling stuff.

On the bright side, we start to have a more active role in this process.  We've already selected the shingles, siding and decking, plus the interior flooring, carpeting and tile.  Next we'll select the kitchen cabinets, bath vanities, countertop, doors, doorknobs, paint colors, trim, etc., etc., etc., basically everything that transforms a bunch of building materials into a home.

Almost sunset

Here's one more shot of the house just before sunset.  We sure are looking forward to moving in so we can watch that sunset from our front porch.

To quote a famous song from my youth: "Y'all come back now, ya hear."

Clever Title Goes Here

For several reasons, I have not been able to post for two weeks.  I had some computer issues, and did not have access to my photo library while my laptop was being repaired.  I was also off on my yearly bike trip with my good friends Geoff and Denis, our twenty second year.  That in itself is blog-worthy, but I'll leave that for another day.

So back to our little project.  Much has happened in the last two weeks.  I'll let the photos do the talking.
 

Second floor deck

The second floor, deck and exterior walls were added and the interior "mirror walls" were finished.  Unlike the first floor, the interior partitions could not be built on the second floor until the roof trusses were done.  This is to accommodate the sheathing that is added to the underside of the trusses to complete the "building envelope".  This term has at least two meanings.  When I referred to the building lot, the building envelope is the part of the lot where you can actually build a structure.  This is usually dictated by local zoning rules.  Within the structure itself, the building envelope refers to the parts of the house that are insulated, in our case, very well insulated. 

This sheathing will eventually extend under the entire ceiling.

So back to the second floor.  There is a layer of sheathing that sits atop the outside wall and extends past the mirror wall roughly four inches.  The roof trusses will sit on this layer, and the building envelope will be completed by the aforementioned sheathing, nailed to the trusses and seams taped with our "super tape".  Insulation is added above the sheathing and between the exterior and mirror walls.  All warm and cozy.  The fact that so much thought and effort is being expended on the insulation is especially comforting, as we had to fire up the wood stove in our rental house for the first time last night.

Rigid foam under basement slab.

There is also activity going on in the basement where our excavation contractor is levelling the gravel and adding four inches of rigid foam insulation.  Additional foam is added on top of the exposed footings to eliminate any thermal bridging.  Once the roof is finished, our basement and garage floors will the poured using one of those cool concrete pumper trucks. 

Back outside to get a few shots of the rooflines.  When we were waiting on the trusses, we would look at the house and think, "it looks kinda small".  Now that the roof trusses are installed and we can see the height of the house, the thing looks HUGE!!  From the road it looks like a castle.  I wonder if there is a decent moat builder in Addison County?

Moat goes here!

They also added the framing for the deck on the south side.  Originally, this extended roughly half way down the south side of the house.  Keeping with our "bigger is always better theme", we had them extend this along the entire side.  Hope passing airplanes don't mistake it for the runway at BTV!!

We were a little worried about being high enough to see the mountains over the tree line.  This shot was taken from one of our bedroom windows.  As you can imagine, we are worried no more.
 
Another change we made was to leave a peaked ceiling in the bedroom above the garage.  The

Front (west) side.

original plan called for a flat ceiling at eight feet.  This space will also have a walk-in closet and our laundry room.  Here are shots of this room looking north and south, toward the main space.  With the area above the garage, the second floor will be about 1,380 finished square feet, compared to 960 on the first floor.

So the roof should be finished next week and the second floor partitions will be completed so we can get a sense of the layout.

Stay tuned, lots more to come...

Facing north.

Yup, stil have a view.

Ya gotta believe me, I'm being framed!

The framing crew is here and things are clipping right along.  I drive by our property every day on the way to and from work, so I can see if there is activity in the morning, usually around 7 am.  I always stop on the way home to see what has happened that day and snap a few pics.

Sunday afternoon.

This series of photos was taken each day this past week, starting Sunday afternoon, just to get a good before picture.  We've had a stellar week of great building weather, so Kevin Lovejoy and his crew were able to make great progress.

On Sunday we have a foundation ready to go and a pile of foam insulation.

Monday evening, the first floor joists are all in place along with the supporting beam in the basement.  This is the first time I've been able to access the basement as there was finally a ladder available to climb down.

This won't be finished at the outset, but we plan to add a small exercise room and finish off a portion for that man-cave that I've always wanted.  Since I was in High School, I've dreamed of having a pool table but never had the right space for it.  Good things come to those who wait.

Monday evening

By Tuesday evening, the decking has been glued and screwed down and the outside walls are starting to take shape.  There's lots of little intricacies involved in the framing.  There is an outside wall that contains all the headers and structural stuff needed to keep the house standing.  Then there is an interior mirror wall to accommodate 12 inches of dense packed  cellulose insulation.

On Wednesday evening I was pleased, (thrilled actually), to walk inside the house for the first time to get a feel for the size of the

Looking East through the mud room.
 

downstairs.

You can see from these photos the cool green sheathing and tape that forms the vapor barrier on the outside of the house.

By Thursday evening, all of the interior walls on the first floor were in place.  Now we can finally get a sense of the size and flow of the rooms as well as the views from the windows.  Even though it was a bit overcast, the Adirondacks were stunning.  We chose 9 foot ceilings for the first floor and I'm glad we did.  The extra height and large window openings really provide an airy feel.

One of the windows on the south side.
 

You can get a sense of the size of the windows on the south side.  The pretty blonde in the picture stands about 5 foot 2.  These windows are triple glazed and Nate Hayward tells me they will generate more BTU's in the winter than our heat exchangers will.  I'll have a little more data on these in a future post. 

 

We've maximized the glass on the southern exposure and minimized it on the north side of the house.  I believe we'll have two windows on that side.  All we had to do was look around our little neighborhood to see examples of just the opposite. 

 

Another area that received great attention was sealing the gap between the foundation and the sill plate.  Most builders would lay a strip of foam under the sill and call it a day.  Ours ran two beads of heavy duty caulk under the sill and compressed that into place.  They then caulked the seam outside the sill, then sprayed foam insulation on the inside of the 


A view of the front of our house.

sheathing and compressed that into place.  Lastly, more of the special tape will be applied to the bottom of the sheathing.  You can see an example of this on the front of the house.  If air permeates one of these boundaries, it still needs to get thru three more in order to find its way into our house.

 

Unfortunately, the 9 am delivery of materials to install the second floor deck arrived around 2 pm, so Kevin and his crew lost some momentum on Friday.  We are still thrilled at the amount that was accomplished in one week.

 

Stay tuned, there's lot's more to come...

 

How cool is your project? Take this simple test...

Based on the plans, I thought it would be bigger!

How many of these do you have on your building site?

None:  your project is lame!


One:  your project is very cool!


More than one:  DUDE!!

It’s been just three weeks since our building permit became effective, and a great deal has happened in that time.  If you were to walk by the property, you might not think this is the case.  Looks can be deceiving.  There is and was a whole lot going on that you may never see again.  

Foundation accessorized.

Once the foundation cures for a few days, a tar based waterproof sealer is applied.  This is the “little black dress” that all foundations covet!!  As far as I can tell, all of Addison County sits atop clay, so the groundwater is pretty close to the surface.  As an aside, this is also why some properties require a mound system rather than a cheaper leach field.  Two of benefits of this building lot were access to town water, and an installed mound system for use by our little association.  

So back to wet basements, which is what we really want to avoid.  After the foundation dressing, the perimeter drain is installed around the outside of the footings.  This is a four inch pipe with holes that surrounds the foundation just above the footers.  This pipe is laid on gravel, covered with a cloth landscaping fabric to prevent the holes from clogging with sand, and then covered in sand.  These are all connected together and to a drain line that directs the water to blue sky and little drainage ditch at the western edge of the building envelope.  I don’t have a photo of our drain before it was covered, but you can see the white vertical pipes at the corners of the foundation in this photo.  These are clean-outs for the perimeter drain.  Should the drain get clogged, you can run a garden hose in to un-clog them.  

You can also see a little of our geo-thermal loop in this photo.  I wrote about this in a previous post.  In short, this is roughly 300 feet of plastic tubing that runs out of the basement, around the house and back in.  We’ll use this to steal some of the ambient heat from the earth to make our heat exchangers even more efficient.  Don’t worry, the earth has heat to spare!

I never want to see you again.

Next our hard working excavator dug another huge hole to drop in our 1,500 gallon septic tank.  The sewer pipe runs through the foundation wall to the top of the septic tank, another line runs out of it to the line that feeds our aforementioned mound system.  I’m told you never want to see the septic tank again.  If you do, it means something has gone horribly wrong, which is usually really expensive and happens at the worst possible time (like there is a good time to be swimming in sh**.).

Additional trenches are dug for the water and utility lines, which in our case are fed from different corners of our lot.  

The foundation is backfilled with sand, and the garage and basement are filled to the appropriate level with gravel to await the concrete pad, which will be poured later.  

As I watched them add and level gravel for the basement floor I noticed a four inch pipe that runs from the center of the basement to one of the foundation walls.  It was being covered with gravel and had a 90 degree elbow on the wall end to extend it above the level of the poured floor.  

“Hey Nate, what’s that for”?  Nate Hayward from Hayward Design Build is our builder extraordinaire.  “Well Gary, that is for radon mitigation.  We always add a pipe below the cellar floor and vent it up through the roof.  If you ever get a high radon count, you just add an in-line fan to the vent which will suck all the radon from beneath the foundation”.  I can’t imagine what this would cost if you had to install this later by digging a trench in the foundation, running the pipe up and out through the roof, etc.  Adding it now, just in case, costs next to nothing.  

Porch pillars.

Lastly, the pillars for our front porch and side deck are installed.  You can see just the tops of these babies in this photo.  

I’ve had some experience building some decks and rebuilding some porches.  I’ve always dug holes by hand, poured a footing for each one, or more recently used those “dinosaur feet”, then mixed up a bunch of bags of concrete to create each necessary porch pier.  What a wicked pain!!  It’s expensive, rarely much fun, and adds at least two days before you can start building anything. 

I was introduced to these pre-cast pillars when I built a deck for my sister earlier this summer.  Hard to tell from the picture, but these are about 5 feet tall with a big base at the bottom.  The excavator digs a big hole, drops them in place and you’re done.  Couldn’t be simpler!!

The only down side is, this is not a DIY installation.  These things weigh a ton, (sometimes literally based on the design), so you need big equipment to get them in place.  If you already have an excavator on site it’s a no-brainer.

Now we wait for the framing crew.  Next time, I’ll tell you about windows that generate heat in the winter…

Bevis and the Brush Hogs

For a few weeks, I felt like a kid again.  I remember how time seemed to move so slowly when you were waiting for something to happen.  Like the end of Chemistry class so I could go play hockey.  Time sure dragged while we were waiting to hear from the bank about this construction loan.

Funding a building project is quite different than getting a conventional mortgage.  When you buy an existing house, you hire an appraiser to look at the property, and they will compare it to other properties, generally in the same area that have sold recently.  Then you sign a forest full of paperwork and the property is yours.  Couldn't be simpler.

With a construction project, you still hire an appraiser to review the property, but in this case, they need to determine what the house will look like in 6 months.  They might go out and look at the land to see if it's a Florida swamp, but generally the valuation on the house is more difficult.  Again, they prefer to compare it to similar size houses that have been built and sold recently.  In our case, we had a few problems with that.

First off, we're building in Addison County where there is much less new residential construction than in Chittenden County.  We're also building a high performance home.  There are none of those in Addison County, and lastly, once you build a high performance home, you typically hang on to it, so no high performance homes have sold anywhere near here recently.

Long story short, that appraisal took much longer than we anticipated.  Thankfully we had an appraiser, and make no mistake about it, you do not have any choice in the matter, that got it.  He understood the inherent value in a high performance home even though there was no hard evidence to support it.  And since this house cost 15% more to build, the appraisal needed to come in that much higher than a regular energy star home.  Our guy took the time to speak extensively with our builder to understand all the expensive stuff that makes this house different.

When the bank finally received the appraisal, they had to review it because the appraisal was 15% higher.  We were told at the very beginning of the process that there is no evidence that high performance homes sell for more than conventional homes.  This is crazy!!  They are so much more economical to heat and cool it just makes sense they would be worth more.  Again, the problem is not many have been built and fewer have been sold.  Eventually, the world will catch on, but it sure is a pain to be a trail blazer.

Finally everything fell into place and we closed on the land and the construction loan on the same day.  Our builder got our building permit, we waited the required 15 days, and all of a sudden, things started happening very fast.  The next series of photos were all taken within 10 days.

Bevis and the Brush Hogs.

First all the growth is cut with something called a brush hog, which would be a great name for a rock band.  I know that "Bevis and the Brush Hogs" would be HOT!!.  Next the surveyor stakes out the boundaries of the lot and the building envelope, which is the part of the land on which we are allowed to build.  Next the builder comes and stakes out where the house will go.

Staked.

Sure, it's a bit of a hole, but we like it.

Footings are in.

Foundation complete.

A quick aside here.  Our builder mentioned several times that the orientation of the building on the lot is key.  So many times he'll see an otherwise beautiful home with the garage on the south side of the house.  That way in the winter, you'll enjoy that afternoon sun, as long as you're willing to sit in the garage!!  So he spent a good part of the time orienting the house with a compass.

The next day, I stop by the land and there is a big hole in the ground and several huge piles of dirt.  By the end of the second week, we have footings and a foundation.

Our builder sent us a note at the end of the week to tell us they will give the foundation a few days to cure and then they will be back to lay out the geo-thermal loop and backfill the foundation…

The geo-WHAT??

Up to this point, I must say I was completely ignorant about the geo-thermal loop.  Not anymore dear readers, and if you continue to the end of this post, you too will be conversant in the topic.  You will be a hit at cocktail parties, and you won't even need to wear the lamp shade on your head!!

To understand this, you need a little background on how a high performance home is built and heated.  First of all, it is super insulated.  I've attached a sketch of the insulation in just the basement.  I'll discuss more of the insulation specifics as the house is built.  Secondly, the house is sealed very well so fresh air must be constantly circulated from the exterior.  Lastly it uses a heat exchanger, actually ours will have two, to heat the incoming air using the outside temperature.  It works like your refrigerator, except that it is incredibly efficient, and you can't keep beer in it.

In the heat exchanger, the old warmer air is used to heat the new cooler air.  As much as 90% of the stale air heat is maintained during this transfer process.  So by now you are probably screaming at your computer "but what the heck is a geo-thermal loop!!"

The geo-thermal loop, my friends, is a plastic pipe that runs out of the basement at the very bottom of the foundation wall.  It loops around the house, roughly seven feet underground, and comes back in on the opposite side of the house.  Water, or eco-friendly anti-freeze is constantly pumped through it and it gives our heat exchanger a little help conditioning the outside air.  The temperature at seven feet is a fairly constant 50 degrees fahrenheit at our latitude, winter and summer.  So this gives the heat exchanger that extra boost that it needs to be even more efficient.

And here's the kicker, in the summer, you just flip a switch and the heat exchanger works in the opposite direction.  It takes the hot air out of the house and exchanges it for cooler air, again with a boost from our geo-thermal friend.

There's a few videos that explains how this works.  You can find one of them here.  Admit it, you want a geo-thermal loop now too, don't you??

Next time, I'll talk more about the progress and other cool features of our home to be.