The Well and the Slab Insulation

The well has been dug! Well, at least we hope so... they don't have a final reading on the water flow yet. So here's the story... we have two wells already on the property, but they're both unusable. One is a modern artesian that pumps plenty of water and is 180 ft. deep, but is too far from the house to be of any use. The other is an older style well that is only a few feet deep now. It's also too far from the house site.

We assumed the new well, near the house, would be roughly the same depth as the artesian near the road. We were wrong, however, and we've learned a lot about wells this week. Our new well was dug through 440' of solid rock, and still didn't pump enough water. The options were to either dig deeper, or use a method called hydrofracturing, at a cost of about $1,800. It's not guaranteed to work, though neither is a deeper hole, so either choice entails a bit of risk.

We chose to hydrofracture, so the well company pumped in 2,400 gallons of water, then pressurized it to 900 psi, until the pressure broke and dropped to about 100 psi, indicating that a vein underground had broken, and opened up a new passageway somewhere. They went down another couple hundred feet and did the same thing, pressurizing the water to 1,100 psi until it broke and dropped again. After the pressure has equalized and they can get an accurate reading on the water flow, we'll know how it all worked. Until then, we can rest easy knowing that the well is a cool $10,000 over budget. Yippee.

Our house was built by the Blues Brothers.

The well truck getting started. It's an enormous truck that lifts completely off the ground with the integrated hydraulic systems.

440' of rock has to go somewhere. The powder ran everywhere and tracks everywhere, but it won't be long until the site work is done and we clean up all this mess.
Karen and Mindy worked on priming a lot more of the exterior siding. They'll probably be finished this week, and shortly after that we'll get started with the real paint color.Which we have chosen, by the way! It's called Cranberry Zing, and just to be clear, it's the red on the right, not the pink on the left.
We set up some workspace in the living room. For now, we have the band saw, the jointer, and an assembly table. We bought a Bosch router this week, and that will also be out at the house soon enough. Mindy is heading to Andy and Chris' parent's place tomorrow morning with the Subie and the trailer to pick up the cherry wood for the kitchen.More pinkness. We laid 2" of extruded polystyrene on the basement floor. It looks neat having a totally flat floor down there, even though the surface isn't entirely uniform yet.
Benson also helped with the insulation in the basement. He liked to tape the seams best.
Karen helped in the basement, too. It was a pain fiddling around the plumbing bits.
The next step was to lay down the wire mesh on top of the foam. The tubing for the radiant system will be zip-tied to the mesh early next week. Ideally, the slab will be poured by the time I write next week's post.

The Pinkness

Yes, I know... we missed a week! Chris and Karen were out of town last week, and despite the best of intentions, didn't get a chance to put up a post. Hopefully everything tonight will make up for lost time.

We've had a busy couple weeks, so I'll try to catch up with everything that has gone on. So first off: we can now end sentences with prepositions. Yep. It's all good. Second, we have started priming the ship lap siding, in preparation for it's final color and eventual installation. It's a pretty gruesome shade of pink right now, and really, it looks terrible. The house will be red, so the primer is a mix of white and 1/3 color. This should make the final coat go on well.

Ethan and Eli found a house of their own inside our unit of ship lap.

Ethan is hard at work with the pepto-bismol. Ethan's favorite color is pink, so we may have one unhappy fellow when we start changing it all to red. Speaking of which, we found a Behr paint they call "Cranberry Zing" that we all like. That may be the one.
Eli doesn't have a hard hat like Ethan, but you can't argue with his game face. He is seriously focused. Besides, he's superman!
The backyard is a mess - it's become a staging area for priming the siding. One set of pallets for the original stack, another set for the primed boards, and two painting areas in between. The brown tarp sticking up is covering a planer that we bought last week. We'll use it to build the kitchen cabinets. We also bought a band saw and a jointer, so we're feeling more and more prepared to tackle the cabinet work. A router is on the shopping list, a good blade for the table saw, and that may just about do it.
I don't think the house has changed much from this view, but here you go anyway. We really ought to get those doors put up.
Chris had fun playing with insulation tangrams, fitting pieces together for the final peak on the South side. Where the fit isn't perfect, we'll use spray foam to fill the cracks.
All the insulation is up now. That peak is a looong way off the ground. Technically, we have a few more strips of insulation to do along the bases of the egress windows. But they're straight and at ground level, and we'll get to those right before we put the windows in.
Our plumber has been busy this week, too. He likes to play Sinatra while he's working, which we think is pretty cool. This is the middle bay in the basement, and is just about finished. There are two full baths down here, along with a laundry hookup and an extra sink.

We used the chainsaw for a bit this week also. These are two that Andy took down yesterday. We'll work on some more this coming week. We have a large pile of logs we've saved from the clearing process that we'd like to have milled. A nearby mill has quoted $.25/board foot, which seems pretty reasonable for around here. They charge a pick-up fee, so once we have all the trees down that we had planned to mill, we'll give them a call and arrange the work.
This "stack" is mostly pine and hemlock, and will make a lot of something one day. It will take a year or two to dry, depending on how thick we have it milled . Natural drying takes about a year for every inch of thickness.

The Last Upstairs Windows

We were busy with windows and wood this weekend. Benson, Ethan, Eli, and Mikey, a local friend, all helped Mindy move several big stacks of wood out of the way. After the windows were installed, we hauled logs with the Subaru, and have almost cleared the whole path for the well truck to come through.

We put in more windows this week - all of the upstairs windows are done now! We have four egress windows to put in the downstairs half wall, but we won't do those until the floor has been poured. These three are in the South end of the dining room.This is taken from the kitchen, after we had the three kitchen windows put in. We were concerned about the difficulty of installing windows on the upper levels, but they all went very smoothly. We were glad to have started with ground floor windows - we had a good system down by the time we did any ladder work with them.

The South wall of the house. We have a few pieces of foam to put up near the peak.

This angle shows the view of the house from near the entrance to the house site. I'm standing near the rock wall where the garden will be, and the driveway is just to my right. Despite the bright silver facade, the house is not visible from the road now. We'll be on our own for awhile, and then sometime in early November we'll be visible again.

This view hasn't changed much. We have the kitchen window successfully moved and installed, and you can clearly see where the old spot remains. That has been plugged with new insulation. If you look closely, you can see Mindy about to hop out of the kitchen door. I didn't see her there at the time, or I would have waited until she was in mid-air to snap the photo. :)

The Waffles

This was one of those weekends where most of our "free" time was already spoken for. Not much was done at the house other than some wood moved and some layouts marked.

Sunday was a gorgeous day, and we ate lunch at the house. Our first meal cooked in the house, in fact! We had two waffle irons plugged into the generator, and had a lovely meal with all of us and Matt and Hannah (Andy and Chris' sister).

This is the current view from the mudroom entrance. Andy and Chris moved two stacks of wood on Saturday afternoon, and will continue to work on the remaining stacks this week.

We love craigslist. Karen and Mindy get pretty concerned with our zeal sometimes, but it usually ends well. "Wait, wait, wait... where do you think you're putting that sink?"

The sink on the right will be in the laundry room, and the overturned sink we're not quite sure about yet. Worst case scenario? It ends up back on craigslist for some other lucky guy to admire.

Yes, more craigslist. This clawfoot tub will be Chris and Karen's tub - we'll scour the outside, and it should clean up real nice. The claws are in their attic at the moment, collecting dust with a whole lot of other salvaged building materials.

Mmmm.... waffles. We cooked in the living room, and boy did they smell good!

The East Roof and East Windows

This is a special holiday sized post. We worked for an hour or so on Friday night, most of Saturday, and until early afternoon on Monday. It was a gorgeous weekend.

Andy and Chris finished the East roof on Saturday morning, then put up the ridge peak. They may look quite comfortable, but that roof is pretty tough on knees and ankles. There are just a few screws left to finish, and then we won't need to be back up there until we put in the vent stack for plumbing and the chimney pipe for the wood stove. It cleans up a bit of space in the backyard, too - it's nice to see the roof up and installed instead of laying around.

Karen took these pictures, and this one gives a better sense of scale. It's a long way up there. We had some rope tied off to a tree and the Subaru, but it kept getting in the way. We only used the rope after we had put the last piece of roofing up, and no longer had the lathing strips to walk along.
The rarely photographed East side, just after the roof was finished.It's a good feeling to know that we won't need to mess around with tarps anymore. They kept a lot of moisture out of the house, but they are a real hassle.

Karen is working on some bits between the dining room. I had a great close-up shot of her swinging the hammer, with insulation particles in the sunlight, a woman very focused on her work. She made me promise not to publish it, but this one's good, too.
Eli was helping to measure. He's quite happy to pose for pictures. Andy replaced our temporary stair treads with the actual 2x12 treads we'll use permanently. He's cutting a piece of sheathing for Karen now.
The new stair treads are installed here. We don't have the kick boards put up yet, but since that will require a lot of ripping with the table saw, we'll wait until we have that up at the house before we do all of them.
Wow... all clean! We had some company over to the house on Monday for a Memorial Day BBQ, and while I'd like to say that we cleaned the house before they arrived, we didn't. There's always so much to do! So yes, our guests cleaned our house for us. Yep, we'll have them over again. :) Note our shrinking stack of windows here, too. Our window count is as follows: 18 standard size, 2 kitchen size, and 4 egress sliders. That's a lot of windows to install, but we have 7 standard windows under our belt now. Not quite on the home stretch, but no longer beginners.
These two are in the North end of the loft, in a bedroom.
These three are in the living room, and look East. They'll let lots of morning sun into the house.
This is the East side of the house, and from this angle, you can see all the windows we've put in so far; two in the upper level on the North side, two in the Northeast corner, and three in the Southeast corner.The parting shot for the day. Karen, Chris, and Brian, a local friend, have all done some work on moving the kitchen window. You can see where Karen has sheathed up the hole for one window, and two bents further South, you can see where Chris and Brian sheathed around the future window. Some trimming of the insulation, then that will come out. The sheathing will be a bit more tricky to trim out, but we'll let you know how that goes.

The West Roof

Friday evening was a complete downpour. Hours and hours of steady rain. Saturday, on the other hand, turned out absolutely beautiful. Sunny, low 70's, low humidity, and that perfect crystal clear air that you only see right after a storm. A great day for building.

We worked on three main things on Saturday; installing the roof, installing more insulation, and cleaning out the house. Andy and Chris were there first, then a local friend came by to help for a few hours. Mindy and the boys showed up a couple hours before lunch, and Karen came by just after lunch, when she got out of work. Eventually we were all there, and all busy.

We had never installed a metal roof before, so there was a bit of fiddling as we learned what to do with it all. Chris spoke with John at FirstDay during the week about overhang, cutting the metal, how to carry it, and a few other things.

A few things to note: our Canadian model has nearly 1,600 sq. ft. of roofing area. Each roof piece is 3' wide and 24' long. They are heavy, awkward, and in the sun they get hot. Seriously hot. Too hot to touch, in fact, and we learned to move our hands quickly. Even so, we both ended up with sore spots on our left hands where we braced against the roof. John recommends a cordless drill for this job. We agree that it would be slightly easier without cords, but we chose to spend $4 on gas rather than $100 for two inexpensive cordless drills.

This is how we began:

1) Measure the roof to see if it's square. It was pretty close, and the roof peak was about 1/4" longer than the bottom edge of the roof.

2) Carry a roof piece to the corner of the house that will be seen first. This was a tip from John, and since that corner happens to be on the right hand side of the roof, it worked out well.

3) Place the roof piece with the correct amount of overhang, as measured from the roof peak.

4) Punch a hole in the roof with a 20d nail, then screw the roof piece in place in that one spot only.

5) Measure the bottom of the roof piece to ensure it is aligned with the same amount of overhang as the top.

6) Punch a hole and screw the bottom in place.

7) Andy then worked from the top, and punched a hole at each lathing strip location in the middle of the metal roof's valleys.

8) Chris worked from the top with a drill, and screwed the roof in place, working each row from right to left.

9) When Andy had punched every hole, he began from the bottom of the roof piece with his own drill and screws.

In this picture, you can also see a bit more insulation put up on the South wall. We dropped quite a few screws off the roof as we were working, and we were impressed with how far away from the house they landed. More than six feet!

This view will change soon... Karen and Mindy want to move one of the kitchen windows. Andy and Chris don't. So we've all agreed on a compromise: Andy and Chris will move the window.

Remember way back to a few months ago, when I used to post a shot from this location at the end of every day? That seems like a long time ago... in a galaxy far, far away. Anyway, here's the roof from that spot against the cherry tree. The roof comes to within about 2" of the peak of insulation. The ridge peak will overlap several inches on both sides of the roof.

The roof droops a bit on the North side. We'll correct that when we finish the exterior siding and frame the lip under the metal eaves. Until then, maybe we'll put up something so it doesn't look like it's going to flop over.

Saturday's work ended with darkening clouds and the sound of thunder. The West roof is nearly done, and two strips are up on the East roof, too. The rest of it is tarped until we get back up there next weekend.

Mindy and the boys cleaned the house out beautifully - every wood scrap and every bit of sawdust is out of the house, and boy does it look good. They also cleaned out a bird's nest. Yes, another one... this one was in Chris and Karen's bedroom, and had a couple eggs in it. Too bad for the birds, and we're sorry we didn't see it sooner.

Karen helped Benson moving wood around outside and on insulation. We'll all be happy when the insulation is finished. It's stinky, noisy to cut, and tastes bad. Yeah. Don't ask.

The Tools

We were all out of town this weekend for Andy and Chris' younger brother's wedding. Congratulations to Russell and Amy!

So yeah, nothing was done on the house. We did think ahead, though, and took this picture last weekend so we would still have a useful post for the blog. This is a one-stop picture of nearly all the tools we've used so far to build the house.

John at FirstDay has a good list of recommended tools, and many of them are pictured here.

I won't itemize each tool individually, but if you have any questions, I'll try to answer specific questions as best I can.

The only two high-dollar items are the generator and the Makita circular saw. They're both worth it, and we wouldn't hesitate to buy the same models again. The generator is a 2200 watt unit with a Honda engine, purchased for $500 from Northern Tool. The Makita is the model mentioned on John's list, and cost about $150 from Home Depot. Everything else cost less than $200 combined, and is really all you need. When we build our next FirstDay, we won't need to add another tool, and there isn't anything we wished we had this time.

We appreciate good tools, and generally try to buy the best we can. To that end, we never really felt like spending enough on a cordless drill to add it to our shop. We've been happy with our manual bit and brace, and only used a traditional corded drill for the sill plates.
Ok... no more fluffy posts. Time for some meat and potatoes progress next week.