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!)

Windows are here!

The windows did actually arrive today, and we had extra guys and equipment on site to help get these behemoths up the hill and into the house. It was quite the team effort! They'll be installed in the next couple of days; hopefully they'll all be properly in place by the end of Friday.

The windows were transferred from the 40-foot container truck at the bottom of the hill to the open truck.

They were then hoisted from the open truck and guided to the doorway.

The biggest window was well over 1,000 pounds.

"Smaller" windows -- only a few hundred pounds -- could be walked into the house.

The biggest window has the sliding door to our deck.

Details, details

Val is currently consumed by detail work -- making sure all the elements we've discussed with H&H over the months are managed satisfactorily -- and we love him for it. What a grueling job! The e-mail trains are long, often confusing and frequently just die out with no clear resolution. We have discussed automating the sliding panels that will shield the southern exposure of the lower floor from the heat of the summer sun (not realistic), prewiring for speakers (which includes specifying what kind of wire and exactly where we want them), and what kind of finish our interior doors and finishes will have (more work to be done on that front), among many, many other topics. Bryan and I are on our computers, looking at interior door hardware and other finishes. We're also back on the road, looking at samples of floors (tile and otherwise) and backsplashes, and finalizing our lighting selections. We picked out our lighting back in June so we would know what our budget needed to be, but now we need to confirm -- and check out the LED products that have come out since then.

In the meantime, our roof is completely done, although the solar tubes that haven't arrived yet will be installed later. We have showers installed and plumbing plumbed, air ducting in place, and even our central vacuum is plumbed. We have gone over our electrical plans in detail with Val, and we'll probably walk through the house with the electrician next week, making sure all lights and sockets are where we want them. And a crew is removing the thickets of scotch broom and poison oak that still choke the western edge of the property.

So much going on, and so little visible from the outside!

But wait! The windows will finally arrive TOMORROW. We are thrilled and can't wait to see them in place while we feel the house warm up and dry out.

Roofing and ducting

Today I drove up to the site and discovered actual shingles on our roof. It's looking more and more complete each day! And the windows are due on Monday or Tuesday, so hopefully by the end of next week we should be more protected from the outside temperatures when we wander through the house.

We also have a guy working on our deck flooring, and the HVAC guy has been busy, too: We have new air ducting all along our downstairs back wall and vents opening up here and there. Tomorrow the central vacuum guy is coming. It's a busy place these days!

The guy on the red motorcycle

By Friday, all the shower/tub inserts were officially installed, more plumbing was running through the walls, and we even had a couple of skylights in their boxes (for our garage) delivered to what will be our front door. Even the hookup for the future washing machine in the master closet was in place, for when we're old and grey and don't want to haul up and down the stairs just to do laundry -- we'll be able to live entirely on the main floor. It was a gorgeous, sunny day, and I hung out on my incomplete deck for a while, enjoying the view and soaking up the sun.

The guys weren't on site for the most part on Friday, but Val showed up on his motorcycle to check on the skylights. This was both fortunate and entertaining. The fortunate part is that Val noticed that we had only received two of our three skylights, so he was able to follow up on the missing skylight right away, and he moved the skylights somewhere far less obvious than the front door. The entertaining part involved our closest neighbor, Deenie, who (with her husband) was the original owner of all the lots on the ridge. One of her sliding glass doors faces our land, and she has enjoyed watching the activity and progress around our new home. On Friday, she called me to tell me that someone on a red motorcycle had parked at the bottom of the driveway and was walking all over the property; she was concerned that this person was "casing the joint" and thought I should come check it out -- but not alone, just to be safe. My current neighbor, Amy, was outside washing her car and agreed to run up to the property with me, so off we went. As we approached the property, we ran across the guy on the red motorcycle -- Val, of course. All was well, Amy got a tour of the house, and I called Deenie later to update her. She told me that after she hung up from our first call she wondered whether it might be one of our builders, but she thought it was worth checking out anyway. "I'm not being nosy," she said, "we just look out for each other around here." I am completely in favor of that! We're happy we have such concerned neighbors and conscientious builders, and we'll be on the lookout for ways to return the favors.