Drywall

The heading is lower case, because I know it's not that exciting.  But what is exciting is the feeling that we're moving on to the finishing stages!  Still, that will probably drag on for another three or four months.

The first coat of mud!  It took us almost a week to finish the first coat, but second and third will go much faster.  We're using a bullnose corner bead, shown loose on the left and installed on that corner.  It just softens the corner a bit and makes drywall look more like plaster

Downstairs, with drywall.  The green, for the uninitiated, is moisture-resistant drywall.  It's going behind our kitchen counters and laundry / utility area.

Rodney, finishing up the first coat

Johnny, starting the second coat

This is the peak where everything comes together.  The ridges and valleys will be covered by wood trim once the sheetrock is finished and painted.

Clearly not drywall, but it's so pretty I couldn't resist.  Locally harvested (and milled by us) eastern red cedar, for the closets.  This is a highly aromatic cedar that keeps moths out of my wool sweaters.  We'll use it for the interior walls of our closets.

Besides being aromatic, it's also beautiful, with swirls of red, pink and purple.  This all came from a local apple orchard where the cedar trees had been planted for insect control.  They were expanding the fruit trees and cutting the cedar.  We had it sawn into planks, then air-dried and surfaced it into finished boards.

BACK OUTSIDE

I realize it's been quite a long time since I took any exterior update photos, and I've actually made some progress out there.  Here in the front facade you can see that the slate siding is complete, we've just hung the steel balcony, and we've almost finished the porch ceiling.  

Oh, nice -- I just learned how to do captions!  Always had trouble with my text running wild all over the page and seemingly no way to format it.  Maybe I'll go back and fix all my other posts.

We ran out of wood for our porch ceiling - 8 boards short.  Now we have to wait 2 weeks for the new material to come in.  

This is the big wall, the money wall, as Mike calls it.  We've run about as much slate as we can until we place the two lower windows (more about that later).  Those are copper vents about mid-way up the wall (range hood, bathroom exhaust and gas water heater).  This is the service side of the house.  All the bathrooms, utility area, mechanicals, etc. are on this side, because it's the most hidden from view.

Another view of the front, but I chopped off the columns in formatting.

These are the steps down to the lower terrace, just below the spill-way.  They'll all get clad with brick shortly.  We ordered 100 bags of black mortar (really it's not black, but charcoal) and received 100 bags of buff mortar.  But what's another delay, really?  It just gives us time to work out a few more details.

Details such as this, my copper capped exterior outlet.  It will get worked into the slate.

And our copper corner.

The back porch is nearly complete, but again the slate is held up by the window and door details.  We've finished the ceiling and the gable wall, but need to start on the windows.  The balconies were challenging.  They weigh about 250 pounds, so we lifted them close with the tractor, then finessed them into place.

So here's our son's bedroom, looking north toward the meadow.  In the foreground, we'll have a n outdoor shower, and to the left will be the pond.

SPRAY FOAM INSULATION

We gave a lot of thought to the insulation we should use in this house and in the end, decided on a hybrid system.  The roof has 1 1/2" of rigid foam above the plywood roof deck, then about 1 1/2" of spray foam just below deck and finally R30 fiberglass batts.  Each component has it's own role to play.  The rigid foam keeps the plywood somewhat warm, to prevent condensation, the spray foam air-seals the house and the fiberglass batts are still the most cost-effective way to build up R-value.  All together, along with the roof system, it should give us about R50.

The walls are arund R20-25, with 1 1/2" of spray foam and R15 fiberglass.  Except for where they're clear, of course!  Each layer of polycarbonate is about R1.6, so even with two layers and a dead air space in between, we'll be lucky to get R5.  Still, that's better than any window I've ever specified.  

Here, the spray foam guys look like they're being very neat, and they were for the first two days.

Then, the end of the week crept up on them and suddenly they had a lot to accomplish on Friday.  No one likes to stay late on Friday.  I'm not sure exactly what they did - maybe opened the sprayer up a little more - but they sprayed more foam on Friday afternoon than they had in two previous days combined.

Until the gun blew up.  It's hard to really hear a scream through a respirator, over the job-site radio and the other power tools.  Luckily, no one was injured, and the mess was surprisingly contained.  Most of it wound up on that sheet of plastic.  

All in all, I'm glad we did the foam.  I believe it adds rigidity to the structure, provides a fantastic air seal and a lot of R-value per inch.  The sales pitch was grossly exaggerated, but they always are.  You're basically paying for material on the wall, so get a bid and a good measuring stick to check their work.

And, right after the spray foam, we did fiberglass batts, a much more tidy process, I might add.

The Knauf Ecobat, formaldehyde-free, yadayadayada

See how neat these guys are?  They even cleaned up after themselves.  Not like some other spray-foam contractors I know.

PLUMBING & ELECTRICAL

I know it's been pretty silent from me lately, and it's mostly because the stuff we've been working on just hasn't been very interesting.  BUT, that's largely complete, so now I can show you the pictures and move on to more exciting accomplishments!  We did our own electrical work, but hired out the plumbing, mostly because the estimate was so reasonable.  Unfortunately, I later found out that our house is considered 'custom' which more or less doubles the price.  Still the same number of plumbing fixtures, etc. but there's an up-charge for thought.  So without further ado, here is plumbing and electrical...

This is my wife's tub.  It's 5 1/2' long, about 32" high, solid cast iron, and I swear to God it weighs a thousand pounds.  I bought it for $50 at a hospital auction and it's in immaculate condition.  I was pretty proud of myself for that one.

And this is my son's tub, maybe one day.  This will all be tiled, or plastered, or finished in some way.  The sink is to the right and flows into the tub, which flows into the shower.  Not literally but visually - wouldn't want to brush my teeth and have it flow into the tub.

SLATE SIDING

I know, most people put it on the roof, but you can't see it on the roof, so we've put it on the walls.  I was buying gutters from a local roofing company, and their yard was filled with pallets of slate that they had removed from the roof of a bank.  This was several years ago, and our plans were not fully developed, but it planted a seed in my mind.  Luckily, the slates were still there when we began construction (not many new slate roofs going up), so I bought 1800 square feet for roughly the cost of vinyl siding.  The tiles are about 12" x 20", and are hung with an 8" exposure.  This means that 12" is covered by the tiles above and the wall is essentially three tiles thick.

We're using raw copper as a trim detail at corners, around doors, etc.  It's bright and shiny now, but within a few months, it will dull to a subtle bronze, which I think will work well with the slate.

Metal Roofing

So we've finally put a real roof on the house!  It was about time, as I don't think a heavy snow would have been good for our tar-paper roof.  This is a stainless steel roof, and will hopefully outlast the headaches that it's caused me.  There are companies that make stainless steel roofing (Follansbee comes to mind), but they were a bit beyond our price range.  Instead, we bought two giant coils (2500# each) of stainless directly from the mill and had a local roofing send it through their machine to create the standing seam profile.  The headache came from first estimating the roofing required, then converting to square feet of flat metal and finally converting this into pounds of material.  Mostly I worried that I would make a mistake and end up 200 square feet short and have to put asphalt shingles on the back side of the carport, for example.

Here's the breezeway again, but finally with a roof overhead.  We used the same 1/2" clear polycarbonate for the roof that we've used elsewhere on the walls.  Beyond the simple satisfaction of forward progress, it makes a nice protected work area.  The black rods at the top of the image are 3/4" steel with turnbuckles at the center to prevent the base of the roof from spreading under load.

That's Brian on the ridge, placing clips to attach the ridge cap.  Here you can see the transition from the metal roof of the carport to the clear polycarbonate and back to metal.

And a closeup of that transition...  Needless to say, this roof is slippery - especially when it gets wet.  There was no way to stand on it while we installed the metal.  Everything had to be done from ladders with hooks that caught the ridge.  We would install a piece of roofing, climb to the ridge, move the ladder 16" and climb back down for the next piece.

The view from the north again.  The roof makes the house look much larger than it actually is.  I've never liked huge houses, and I find myself on the defensive when people come to visit the job site.  The house is just over 2000 square feet.  But we've installed over 5000 square feet of roofing (metal and poly combined).  The pitch of the roof, the deep overhangs and the breezeway / carport, together make the house appear much larger.

The Breezeway

Seems like we've been mired down in details a lot lately, but we have made some progress.  Tar paper now covers the walls, we've completed the rooftop insulation and we've framed the breezeway roof.  We chose tar paper over modern house wraps for a few different reasons.  First, it's time-tested and second, it actually becomes more vapor-permeable when it gets wet.  House-wrap manufacturers are still trying to work that one out.  On the roof, we went with 1 1/2" polyisocyanurate insulation.  We've got 4 loooong valleys, so typical roof ventilation would only cover about half the roof surface.  We decided instead to create an un-vented roof system, and insulate above the deck to prevent condensation from forming on the plywood.  It also worked really well with some of our trim details - the 1 1/2" insulation planes perfectly with our 2x4 purlins over the breezeway.

There are a couple conventional houses under construction not far down the road that I drive past almost every day.  The first broke ground about the same time as we did last winter, and the homeowners moved in a month or so ago.  The second began in late September and it looks like they've just about caught up with us.  I just drive by, grit my teeth, and get back to work.

In the photo below, I'm standing in our newly minted breezeway, looking toward the main entry.  Yes, the rafters are blue (greenish blue really).  It's a tradition down south to paint the porch ceiling pale blue, to resemble the sky.  The word is that this keeps bugs away, but I can't back this up from personal experience.  Any way, we'll paint our porch ceilings blue, because I like the color, and these rafters will be the ceiling of the breezeway.  So that's why they're blue.

We've also put up some of the polycarbonate siding.  It's clear, but also insulating, and it comes in sheets up to 6'x12'.  It's an inexpensive way to bring in lots of daylight without building a wall of custom windows, and I like the quality of the light that comes through.  I'll get a better closeup soon.

Looking back toward the house from the carport...

And around the back side of the carport...

Another thing that's slowed our progress lately is our finish carpentry framing.  Typically, most framing is covered by wall, ceiling and floor finishes, but in our house, much of this framing will be exposed.  We spent about a week, for example, sanding and staining the rafter tails beneath the roof overhang.  It was tedious, but had to be done before the roof.  Otherwise, we would have had overspray all OVER the roof.

I don't think I've shown this view before.  It's the view from where our pond will ultimately be, right about water level, in fact.  That's some more polycarbonate going up in the two gables, and copper flashing covering the band above the first floor.

This is our library terrace, which will be just below the dam.  We'll have 3 wide steps up to the library and 3 steps more up to the front porch.  The doors into the living roof will be sliding pocket doors that will be concealed within the exterior wall when open.

And here's the view from the garden.  This shows the roof insulation a little better.  All those spots are 3" washers to hold the material down to the deck.  We should have our roofing on site early next week and the forecast looks great.  With any luck, we'll have a finished roof before the next rain.