Spring

This warm weather is presenting an opportunity to finish the painting work that I didn't quite get to finish last fall. It is basically the portion of the wall under the lower roof over the kitchen.

Second Coat

Before...

... and after

Over the last couple of months I've been slowly working away at giving the house a second and final coat of paint (technically stain, but seems like paint in practical terms) and I'm rounding the corner literally and figuratively on the project.

In September I decided to start at the porch and then work around the back of the house, figuring that I'd cover the cooler parts of the house while it was still warm and then be painting the sunnier sides as the fall progresses. This has turned out to be a wise tactic as we are now in late November and all that's left is part of the south-facing wall.

Progress has been in fits and starts. Hurricane Irene was the first unexpected event that redirected much of our time and attention to helping others over the course of a couple of weeks. Then came teaching an intense two-week course at Yestermorrow, followed last but not least, by a brief stay in the hospital resulting from a cat bite.

Nonetheless, I've been making progress as time and weather have allowed and in this respect, I think we've been quite lucky. The stain requires 40 degrees or above for application, so I've been able to work with very few exceptions right up through the fall.

Our original plan --which we are working to complete-- was to have all the clapboard primed by the factory, then apply a first coat of primer before the clapboard was installed, and then finishing up with a final coat when the siding was in place. Although the house has generally looked finished for a good while now, much of the rafter tails hadn't even been primed, much less painted, and all the nail holes and clapboard butt-joints were rough.

It feels good to know that we're seeing this part of the project through to insure the quality and durability of the siding.

Vernal Equinox

March 24, 2011, at about 12:20pm, just after the vernal equinox

December 20, 2010 approximately 10:00 am on the winter solstice

September 21, 2010 approximately 12:00 pm at the autumnal equinox

June 21, 2010 approximately 12:00 pm at the summer solstice

The photo at the top rounds out a series of photos I've taken at the summer and winter solstice and the fall and spring equinox. You might recall that I got quite excited around the summer solstice last year when I found that within a few minutes of twelve noon on June 21, the only element of the decorative sun pattern on the south face of the house was the sun its self.

This discovery motivated me to document the four points of the seasonal rotation with a photo capturing the shading on the house. As expected the fall and spring equinox shading is pretty similar while the summer and winter solstice shadow contrasts greatly.

This information could come into play in the future if we ever decided we wanted to add shading over the windows in the warmer months to help keep the house cooler. I'm not sure if we'd ever get there but I guess we'll figure that out through experience.

Venting issues

See that white thing just above the back object? That is the boiler vent. The object just above that is the water spigot, and if you look up toward the corner along the same wall you can see the woodstove air intake. Still buried is the intake/exhaust for the HRV unit. I was able to stand on the snow and easily touch the roof

Our car. We got a near record amount of snow for a March storm

This morning we were awoke by the not-quite-full-on smoke alarm signaling intermittently. Not smelling smoke we quickly opened the doors and a bunch of windows in case it was a CO alarm, which it actually seems to have been.

We quickly ascertained that the boiler vent had been covered over by the prodigious snowstorm we experienced last night and today. The boiler is able to detect when the vent is blocked and will shut itself down which would prevent an accumulation of CO.

I suited up and went out to shovel the vent out. The amount of snow covering this thing was stunning. What was curious was the fact there seemed to be a bit of a bubble, for lack of a better way to describe it, around the vent. In other words there was a non-snow space that I shoveled into when I got near the vent pipe. What this makes me think is that the heat of the boiler vent gas was kind of creating its own little pocket under the snow and perhaps this was the reason the boiler seems to have not actually shut down, hence the CO alarm.

With the vent cleared and the house thoroughly aired out we shut the doors and windows and felt okay about the situation. It was a bit later that it occurred to me to check the HRV air supply duct as well. Like the boiler vent, it was also burried, and like the boiler vent it seemed to have it's own little air-space pocket in the snow once I reached it. Like the boiler vent it is venting warm-t0-hot air, so it makes sense.

We take this stuff absolutely seriously; I was aware of these potential problems when the installation work was done, but I got a bit of resistance and didn't push further about locating the venting higher up. I wish I had. The task now is to correct it.

To that end I'd already put in a call last week to the plumber about the situation, so we are going to correct it. On the upside, we are grateful for the alarm system and glad it works.

Keepin' warm

Sunlight on cabinets

The stair railing

The thermostat control

Today we decided to turn our thermometer down to 50 degrees--effectively turning the heat off. It's been in the back of our minds to do this for a while but with our efforts concentrated on just getting the house done it's been easier to let the boiler/radiant system keep the place warm. With the wood stove hooked up and a little more available attention to spend on our wood supply and lighting a fire as needed we thought we'd nuke the back-up heat and see what happens. Mind you it's been unseasonably warm the last couple of days, but it's supposed to cool back down again tomorrow and stay that way for a while. I'm fascinated to see how the house performs.

I got the railing mostly built today. There are some odds and ends to finish up and the whole thing needs a finish railing cap to top it off, but it came out pretty well. To do it again I might make the triplets of balusters a little closer together to accentuate the groupings, but basically I'm happy with it. Moreover, it's great to have a railing in place to do it's job of keep us safe.

Drawer Boxes

Big snowfall today

Cabinet drawers in process. The interconnecting joints are called box joints

Today was an effort to keep warm and work well. We're staying out of the house while the nasty fumes from the polyurethane on the floors dries. Tomorrow is the last coat.

Today I spent making the boxes for our cabinet drawers and it went quite well. The easy part is planing them down to thickness and then the slightly trickier part is cutting the box joints at the ends. This requires some careful set-up on the table saw with a dado blade and a lot of micro adjustments, but in the end I got it all to work neatly.

A box joint is what you'll often see on traditional or nicer cabinet drawers. I'm familiar with making box joints for our bee hive boxes. It it a very satisfying way to join wood.

Tomorrow I'll complete the drawers and think through mounting the doors and getting ready to install the drawers. Maybe I'll even get beyond the thinking part!

Winter Solstice

December 20, 2010 approximately 10:00 am

September 21, 2010 approximately 12:00 pm

June 21, 2010 approximately 12:00 pm

If you've been reading this blog for a while you know that I got quite excited around the summer solstice when I found that within a few minutes of twelve noon on June 21, the only element of the decorative sun pattern on the south face of the house was the sun its self.

I've been anticipating the arrival of the winter solstice and hoping that the weather would permit a noon photo to contrast with the summer event. Tomorrow is the solstice, but the weather report is calling for clouds and snow, so I took advantage of today's clear skies to snap a few pictures of the sun on the house.

What I've noticed and am curious about is difference between the sun's shadow at the mid-summer when it was virtually centered on the gable of the south face of the house, and how now, at the winter solstice the sun is centered on the house at roughly ten in the morning. I know we in the northern hemisphere are tilted away from the sun in the winter, but I think I expected that the sun would still be centered on the house at noon, only at a lower angle. I got the angle part right, but clearly not the centered part. The photo from September shows the sun heading south already.

We'll keep our eye out in March for the next installment.

Pocket Doors

Yesterday morning Joe hung the pocket doors. They look really nice and after we gave them a look and admired them for a couple of minutes, slid them into their protective homes inside the wall.

The last couple of days have been wonderfully warm and today I took advantage of the outside temps to give the kitchen cabinets a first coat of polyurethane finish on the interior. From what I understand, tomorrow and the next day are supposed to be simillarly warm, so I'll continue doing this stinky work outside as long as I can.

Joe is just starting the stair finish tread and riser project with rough cutting all the lumber down to manageable sizes.

Temperatures

The thermometer shows the temp outside (48.4), the temp inside (61), the humidity inside (55) and then the time and date

This whole super-insulated house project is one big experiment in heating and energy use and I'm curious to see how the experience pans out. I'm also not sure what to expect. And so it is that I've been watching with interest how the house has been maintaining temperature over the last couple of months as the fall has progressed and the outside temps have dropped.

We have not yet turned on the heating system or started a fire in the woodstove, but I suspect we'll be doing so pretty soon. This morning was the first time the house dipped into the 50's after bumping around the the low 70's and into the 60's over the last couple of weeks. I'm pretty happy that we've been able to get into the second half of October without feeling the need to heat the house. I've lived in houses in Massachusetts where getting though September was always the big challenge, so being where we are I am pleased that we've not needed to heat yet.

To actually fire up the radiant heat system we need to get the boiler to sense demand via a thermostat which we have not yet installed. I'll be working on that tomorrow.

Today's weather held out the possibility of being sunny, which could warm the house up through solar gain, but at the end of the day it was still only around 61. I look forward to doing some solar gain experiments to see how much increase in house temperature we can expect on a sunny day.

On a related note, I've been keeping an eye on the temperature of the root cellar. Through the summer months of July and August the root cellar pretty much stayed constant around 60 degrees, but started to cool off through September down through maybe 55, and now in October has dropped a few more degrees. It seems to me that the root cellar responds pretty readily to changes in air temps outside, so I'm thinking that it might make sense to install smaller diameter inlet and outlet fittings on the air supply and vent pipes. They are currently 4" pipe and I think we could go down to 1" pipes and still provide enough air movement while constricting the rapid movement of large quantities of air.

One window done

Window in the mudroom complete

Landscaping continues

I struggled mightily to work out the kinks to get this window trim project done. Now that I've done it the completed version is a road map for all the rest, so they'll be easy by comparison. In the end I'm very happy with the finished product.

Mac has been continuing work grading the exterior, shaping the contours and putting down top soil. When he's done I come after and throw down grass seed and hay. We built a minor little rock wall at the base of the slope off the west end of the house. It'll make a great shaded sitting spot on hot days in the summer. A tropical rain event has halted all further landscape work until further notice...

Sunny end to a cloudy week

You can't really see it here, but under the overhang there are two horizontal pieces of trim that bring the top of the clapboard siding down a little. The lower piece is bracketed on each end by the curved pieces at either end. I like what it does to the overall look. (Click photo to embiggen the view)

We got almost all the way there with the west wall, but the truth is there are a bunch of trim details as you work up around the dormer that make it a little cumbersome at the end. I did my best to work a few steps ahead of Adam and Joe, but in the end was barely doing so.

I'm really pleased with how all the details are coming together, especially since I really didn't have a plan going into the whole siding project. It was working out that corner post cap with a curve that really set the pattern and freed me up to make the rest happen.

Joe is off to a historical reenactor's weekend and Adam, Nancy and I are headed to the contra dance in Burlington. Tomorrow, Adam and I are going to do a little Saturday work...

Pocket Door Wall

Today involved building the wall between the living room area and the office space. This is a wall with double pocket doors. The doors will roll into the wall to create a wide pass-through opening between the rooms. Our goal here is to have the option of privacy while also being able to keep the office space open and accessible to the larger living space.

The wall took a little planning and then some careful work to build. It is essentially two parallel walls that are joined at the top and then fixed to the floor but have no connection inbetween, where the door passes through.

With the warm temperatures outside I barely needed the woodstove today and by the afternoon it was pretty warm.

I left the space over the pocket door wall open in case we decide we want to install some sort of transom lights overhead, as we are planning to do over the bathroom doorway. The office and bathroom wall frame the stairway on either side and are in the same plain, so there is a logic to creating a similar look across the whole wall surface.

The Standing Seam Roof

This morning the crew from Iron Horse Roofing showed up and began work installing the standing seam roof. Standing seam roofs are top-notch and last for decades and are particularly abundant here in Vermont. To get a longer lasting roof, you'd probably have to have a slate roof.

Just like it looks like in the photos, the roof consists of a series of long pieces of sheet metal with the edges on each side bent up to form a sort of very low wall on either side that lays up against the next piece that is shaped the same way. The mated edges from the paired up sheets are then rolled over to lock them into place, sort of like you'd see with two pieces of fabric that have been paired up, rolled over and then sewn together.

The company warned us that the crew would be showing up weather dependent. Well, this morning it was flurrying and the temperature was hovering roughly around 10 degrees. We wondered if they'd be coming, but lo and behold, they did. I thought later in the day, what would the weather have to have been doing to keep them away?

They may or may not be back tomorrow, but in either case will be back at the beginning of next week to finish the job off. It looks great so far.

Its going to be interesting to watch the snow careen off the roof the next time there is a snow storm.

Root Cellar

Today we wrapped up a couple of day's work with me building the door and Joe building the shelves for the root cellar. Previous to this we insulated the shared walls between the basement and the root cellar to isolate the warmth of the basement, such as it is, from the root cellar.

I'm quite happy with the both the door and the shelves. My inspiration for the door was the typical design of a walk-in refrigeration unit such as you'd see in the back rooms of a restaurant or supermarket. They are big insulated doors which have a really wide flange around the perimeter of the door that mates with the outside wall when the door is closed. We installed the door and it worked smoothly; when you are in the root cellar you see nary an inkling of light, so it seems to seal pretty well. With a couple more tweaks it'll be just right.

Joe's shelves are beautifully crafted,industrial strength, and sized nicely for the various canned goods we will be storing. At this point we have shelves on two sides of the root cellar with room for more should we decide at some point we need more storage space.

I'll build a sliding latch for the door at some point, but for now I'm just glad we have a functioning root cellar that allows us to finally store our various goods such as saurkraut, olives, canned tomatoes, ketchups, chutneys, carrots, beets, cabbage, potatoes, celariac, and many other goodies. It is a treat to finally have the root cellar in operation. The temperature in there this evening was 37 degrees. The temperature outside is hovering just around zero. Fun.

Oh yes, we also put in the door on the west end of the house facing the garden. It looks great with the funky green color we've chosen and it sure beats the plastic tarp we were getting by with.

The wood stove has proved to be a godsend. With very low temperatures it makes working in the house bearable, if not quite pleasant if we get it really fired up.

Upcoming: The electrical panel goes in; the roofers come to install the standing seam roof; Joe and I begin building in our secondary perimeter walls along the inside of the house.

Stay tuned...

Woodstove

The Jøtul 4 doing it's work...

...me doing mine...

...and the stovepipe its

Joe and I installed the woodstove and most of the stovepipe on Friday, Nance and I picked up the one last piece of pipe we needed on Saturday, and today I fired up the ancient Jøtul woodstove we inherited with the property. I'd never really paid much attention to this stove; its been sitting in the corner of the garage for many years.

Once we had it in place in the house I was better able to appreciate its stately good looks, and once I'd fired it up, I was certainly able to appreciate its ability to warm up a frigid house.

After a couple hours of burning out the dust and breaking in the new pipe, the stove and I settled in for some comfortable work in the house. I'm working to get the paint/urethane finish on the garden-side door, so we can put it in the frame and be able to properly close the house. All the other doors and windows are in and good to go, so this last door is the final element to go in.

It was peaceful to be able to work in a warm, comfortable space with some relaxing music on and the snow swirling outside. Already I feel a sense of what its like to inhabit the house and it feels really really good.

Windows and snow

A visitor...

The door opening is covered in plastic while the door is awaiting its paint job

North side of the house--done

Today we charged ahead getting windows in. We tackled the high ones off the second floor on the back of the house and it all went fine, despite heavy swirling snow all around us. Today we got our first significant snowstorm of the season and now have maybe 8 or 9 inches. It felt like window by window we were truly inching out mother nature's ability to get into our house--no more wind or snow drift.

Tomorrow we'll put in the last three windows and the door that leads out of the basement to the hatch. After that we'll install the big old woodstove from the old house that once stood here to take the chill off inside while we work.

Windows go in

The supervisor wondering why I'm taking a photo and not working

Prepping the window openings

A window in

Jeremy and Sally holding the big window just before installation

The big window in place

Yesterday and today we've been installing windows and its going very well. As if on cue, the weather seems to suddenly feel raw and cold, with a persistent wind--a fine motivation to get those windows in! Its snowing this evening as I write this.

We started in the back of the house, on the first floor, with some of the smaller windows and have been steadily moving around to the front of the house.

Even the smallest of these windows are pretty heavy, so it takes some concerted planing to move them and get them into the openings. Each window opening requires a careful flashing detail before installation.

In our living room portion of the house we have a window that is something of a picture window that measures 6' x 6'. This creature weighs a ton and we knew we'd need some help. A phone call to Jeremy resulted in Sally, Jeremy, Anda, and Silas showing up to give us a hand. With all of them plus Nancy, Joe, and myself, we were able to carefully manoeuvre the massive unit into place. Getting that window in was a big hurdle and the rest are manageable by comparison. We'll polish off the the rest of the first floor tomorrow and maybe make a stab at the doors.

Every new aspect of the house brings a moment of anticipation and curiosity. Will we like it? Does it look like I thought it would? I have to say I'm really pleased with the windows; they look really good. Joe said they looked "old fashioned", which I took as a positive indicator of what I was hoping for.

Big thanks to Sally, Jeremy, Anda and Silas for showing up to help when we needed a few extra hands!