A busy electrician

The last couple of weeks have involved a lot of work for the electrician: running the wiring; roughing in all lights, sockets and switches; and even planning for our future television viewing. We currently have Comcast, which offers us a wide variety of cable, phone and internet services -- but it's not available at the new location. Which means we have to figure out what we're going to do for television, or what we might want to do someday. Unfortunately, we don't know how good of an internet connection we'll have and therefore whether we'll be able to stream the things we want to watch. Our neighbors don't offer much encouragement on this front: Even the neighbor who works for Intel doesn't have fabulous internet -- which is tough, considering that we currently have pretty fast internet (except late at night, which we blame on all our current Intel-employee neighbors) and that we used to live in Korea, which has the best internet accessibility of any country. Our standards are high, and we'd hate to have to settle for less. Bryan has been researching this at a leisurely pace, but now he's stepping it up and adding various forms of satellite TV into the mix. (He gets this job because he knows which sports channels are critical for him, and my TV-viewing is sporadic at best.)

In the meantime, we have Agepan on the entire exterior of the house; the siding will go on after insulation, which is due next week, and drywall will go in at that time as well. Next week our concrete floor should be cleaned and etched, and the following week we get our garage doors. Visible progress is coming, but it's been slow lately.

We also have our new stairway underway, with our excellent reading nook. (Actually, it's probably done by now; I took these photos over the weekend.) And the house is slowly being dried out from its months of exposure to Oregon rain; the floor and walls can't go in until the house reaches specific moisture levels.

In front of the landing will be a reading nook, with a shelf built into the drywall of the landing.
Under the landing will be a small storage area.

This little machine is drawing the moisture out of the walls and floor and heating the interior of the house.
Just opening the doors and windows allows that moisture to leave the house.

On Sunday afternoon, after the house has been closed up with the machine running
since Friday afternoon, the house was warm and humid.

The mudroom solar tube is in -- as is the rough-in for the track lighting.

Part of what's been keeping the electrician busy is all this wiring: It runs along the downstairs back wall, into the laundry room, out the back of the laundry room, and into the breaker box in the mechanicals room. Whew!

Lost in lighting

Despite having reviewed all our lighting decisions and "finalizing" our choices, we are still making changes. Today we walked through each room in the house with the electrician, going over every light, switch and plug. And, of course, changing a few things as we went. It's hard enough for me to keep up with our changes, much less keeping our builders, electrician, and lighting contact apprised!

While we walked through with the electrician, he marked the subfloor with the locations of some of the plugs and lighting fixtures:

We also got to admire (though not walk on) our new garage floor, complete with sealant:

And the Agepan is going up around the house, changing its appearance yet again:

The cedar siding will go over the Agepan on most of the house. Here on the south side, we'll have cedar on the top level and hardiplank on the bottom, where the big slatted screens will slide back and forth across the windows to protect us from the heat of the summer sun.

Blower door tests and advanced weed whacking

During this last week, Bryan and I have picked our wood floor, tile floor, bath tiles, mudroom floor and backsplash. We also changed and finalized our light fixture selections and even purchased the can lights so the electrician can start to rough them in within the next few days.

While we were doing that, our awesome crew was installing and sealing our gorgeous new windows. The house looks and feels different yet again with the windows in:

At the same time, a guy named Milton and his crew were cutting and then hand-pulling as much as they could of the scotch broom/blackberry/poison oak mess on the hillside by the wellhead. Hand-pulling was the best option because they were trying to get as many roots as possible out to keep that area clear of these nasty invasive plants, and the hill is too steep for machines.

Here's what it looked like back in October 2011, before it got cleared the first time and then sprayed:

We had quite an adventure trying to find our wellhead in this mess!

And here it is now:

This is the same view as the top photo, taken from the wellhead. 

We have a line of thickets left to clean up, but it's currently housing a large number of birds.

Today was a big day for us because we had our Passive House blower door test this morning. All openings to the house were sealed (the doors and windows are now sealed in place, so they were just closed), and air was blown in to pressurize the house. Once pressure is maintained, the guys could measure our air loss rate. We rated .37 CFM (cubic feet per minute), and since passive house minimum is .6 CFM we're well below the passive house levels. Once the air loss was measured, the guys used a fog machine to see where air was escaping. Even though our house met passive house levels, Hammer & Hand wants our levels below .2 CFM -- so I'm sure the guys spent part of their day sealing whatever leaks they found.

The round black thing in the bottom of the red door is the fan that pressurized the house.
With such a tightly sealed house, it doesn't take much to pressurize it.
(This is the door to the garage.)

Skylar shoots fog at a window while Peter watches for leaks from outside.

Skylar shoots more fog at our deck window, which also has a sliding door; either Peter or Val is on the ladder outside, trying to pinpoint a leak. Tom is the communicator, cell phone in hand: Because our triple-paned windows are so thick, the guys couldn't hear each other between outside and inside, so they used their cell phones as walkie-talkies.
(And earlier, we'd used our phones as flashlights as well. Gotta love technology!)