Saturday, November 22, 2014

Moved in

Well, I still have a dumpster in my driveway, no kick-plates on my kitchen cabinets, lots of unfinished trim, no screens on the screen porch and a zillion other little things but the house is done enough that I was finally able to get my occupancy permit and move in!


 In the pic above you can see the outdoor part of the mini-split heat pump.


 On the right in the photo above you can see the intake and exhaust for the HRV.


You can spend a fortune on lighting fixtures.  These pendants about the island were $14.99 from IKEA.


The wall-to-wall carpet in the bedroom is Mohawk Everstrand, a product made from recycled plastic bottles.  It's not the absolute softest carpeting one can buy but it's pretty darn soft.   Mohawk claims they recycle 14,000 plastic bottles every minute making this carpeting!



Installed the kitchen myself - which is why the kick-plates have yet to be installed.  Total cost of the kitchen was about $7000 not including my labor. $4000 more for appliances. If you've ever built a kitchen you'll know how inexpensive that is.  I can't say enough about IKEA cabinets.  Solid, well engineered and remarkably inexpensive.  Of course, you have to install them yourself.  Pretty easy to do until you get to the island where some intermediate carpentry skills come in handy.

The refrigerator is this one from Summit Appliance.  It's not huge but it's counter depth, very well laid out and very quiet.

The range is from Sears.  It's an electric induction range which so far seems to be working great.  I do have to buy new pots and pans as my old stuff was aluminum which doesn't work with induction.



In the picture above you can see where fresh air comes into the house just above the heat pump unit. The idea here is that the cool fresh air will mix with the warm air from the heat pump unit preventing a cool draft from the fresh air vent.  So far it seems to be working well.

The heat pump is the smallest available from Fujitsu that has managed to keep the house comfortable on some 25° F nights we've had recently, even though I'm running the HRV on high.  I plan on running the HRV on high for the first year or so to keep the indoor air quality high during the period of highest out-gassing of any of the finish materials or new furniture.

And that big empty spot below the heat pump - that's where the aquarium is going to go!

I will continue to post on this blog to report on how the house is performing as well as to fill in some details that I never got around to discussing, so keep checking back.


Monday, June 30, 2014

Landscaping

There's still plenty to do in the interior but April and May are the best months for putting in a new lawn and planting shrubs.  The whole yard is just dirt at this point from all the trucks and machines rolling over it these past few months. While in some ways, I hate to plant a big lawn that'll need to be mowed every week, it's important to stabilize the soil so that the rain doesn't erode it all away into the lake.  In fact, the building inspector won't issue a certificate of occupancy until the site is stabilized against erosion.

My landscaping plan calls for reducing the grade of the back yard by building a retaining wall several feet back from the lake.  This should give me a more usable back yard, slow down the rain runoff as it moves toward the lake, and create a border between the wild growth by the lake's edge and the lawn area.

I hired Ed Coykendall and his company Landscape Artisans, to do the work.


The retaining wall under construction



This is the section of the wall where we'll attach the wooden steps that lead down to the dock.


Done

A few months laters with the stairs down to the lake.

The sidewalk going in in the front





Graded, shrubbed and seeded


Hmmm, what's that?

Ah, someone else likes my new yard

Looks like at some point this summer I'm going to be seeing some baby
turtles coming up out of the lawn.


Looks like a house!


Wednesday, April 30, 2014

Cavity insulation and finish work

To complete the insulation, we first sprayed a layer of closed cell foam on the basement ceiling. Closed cell is quite a bit more expensive than open cell but the basement is outside the thermal envelope of the house and the closed cell foam will provide the air barrier.  We hired a company called Green Cocoon to do the work.


The closed cell foam has a slight greenish tint to it.  I only had a single layer (about 2") applied to save on cost.




After installing the foam, we added batts of Roxul mineral wool for a big boost to the R-value at a relatively low cost.  The Roxul also provides fire resistance, which otherwise would have had to be provided by spraying a fire resistant coating onto the closed cell foam.  The coating actually costs way more than the Roxul but provides no additional insulation.


Upstairs we sprayed in open-cell foam since we weren't depending on the foam as an air barrier.



In the picture below you can see that they do every other cavity, to make it easier to trim the overflow.






Prestained knotty pine arrives from Duragroove.  Two palettes remain in the picture below but there was a third one when we started.  The boards are all 16 feet long and since I couldn't find my extended fork lift we had to unload it all by hand.



And here's what it looks like installed.



In the picture below you can see the indoor unit for the heating/AC system.  That one unit is supposed to be able to heat the entire house.  Above it you can see the vent from which fresh air will come into the house. Since that air will be colder (in the winter) than the air in the house, putting the vent above the heating unit will hopefully temper any cool breeze from the fresh air vent.


Sunday, January 26, 2014

Midwinter Update

Here's a current picture of the house:


There's a front porch now, the roof has been shingled, the windows and eaves have been trimmed out and most of the siding has been installed.

The siding is cedar with a factory applied coat of Defy Extreme Stain in light walnut. It'll need a second coat in the spring and hopefully only every 5 years or so after that.

The trim is a composite called Boral TruExterior Trim.  It's a polymer composite with fly-ash filler that won't rot, takes paint well and is very dimensionally stable. The crew said that it worked like wood and was much easier to deal with than PVC trim.  All the trim will get painted a medium brown in the spring.

The roof shingles are GAF Camelot II shingles in Barkwood.  This was an upgrade over the standard 30-year architectural shingles.  They're heavier, have a longer warranty and, of course, cost more.  What I didn't know when I opted for them, was that they are significantly more complicated to install. They're too heavy to weave together in the valleys so painted metal flashing is required instead. But what really threw the crew for a loop was that rather than every shingle being identical there are about 10 different shingles that need to be applied in a particular pattern.

Here are a few pictures of the house from the lake: