Big Day

The blower-door testing apparatus in place in the west door

Bill running the test

The readings

Sheetrock being lifted by the boom truck into the second floor

The first afternoon's work by the sheetrock crew

Lee and Lou hard at work painting clapboards

The wooden drip-edge detail

Today was exciting on a number of fronts.

The sheetrock crew arrived and got to work, making quick work of getting the first sheets up after spending a few hours loading. Its clear they are good at what they do and its feeling like the right decision to have hired this job out. They'll be back tomorrow and Saturday and expect to have all the 'rock up in about three days.

Even more notable was the results of our blower-door test performed by Bill Hulstrunk. Everything was buttoned up that I could think of and Bill gave the house a go.

The results were excellent. In fact Bill said that this was the tightest house he has ever seen and says he's tested thousands of houses. Its hard to rate the performance other than the numbers: from what I understand, an average house about the size of our house would come in at approximately 2000 cfm at 50 pascals. Ours hit 240 cfm at 50 pascals. For the record, his machine couldn't actually measure as low as the number that the machine was trying to register, alternating between "lo" and various numbers in the neighborhood of 230-240. This is as good as could have ever hoped and I feel deeply satisfied to have reached this milestone.

Toiling away out of the limelight, and trying to stay in the shade of the house were Lee and Lou, Nancy's parents, who are up visiting us and doing some great work painting clapboards. Way to go Lee and Lou!

In other news, Joe and I installed the wooden drip edge yesterday. This is a piece of molding that sits on top of the water table. Its a detail that matches the molding at the top of the window frames and ties the whole look of the exterior neatly.