Whitehall

Things have been busy, with interior framing, rough-ins, and the wood stove installation. The last post showed creating the wood stove hearth. The masons have been here and finished the wall behind the wood stove. I moved the stove into place and cut the connector pipe for the fresh air intake. Bay Stoves supplied the stove pipe and did the install. I preferred that they climb up on the roof and work on the scaffolding to install the flue. Installing the exterior stove pipe Jotul 400 Wood Stove and Flue We did a good job of aligning the hearth, the wall, and the wood stove. Everything went together as it should. The flue goes straight up through the roof. It is about 25ft of flue, mostly double wall flue pipe. Only the first four foot section is single-wall stove pipe. The fresh air intake works great, preventing warm inside air from feeding the fire. It will also prevent the cool inside air from leaving the house in the summer. We have a big pile of scrap lumber and the woo...

We've been working on the Jotul 400 wood stove hearth for several days. Since it will be very visible, it is taking a while to get everything just right. The stove manual says that the bottom heat shield allows us to just use a layer of non-combustible material under the stove. But we feel better by making a more heat-resistant hearth. The subflooring is 7/8 inch Advantech engineered oriented strand board (OSB). On top of that we glued 1/2 inch of Micore 300, a mineral fiber insulating product (R1.1 for the 1/2 inch). The next layer is 1/4 inch Durock fiber cement board, attached to the Micore with Versabond thin-set mortar applied with a 1/4 inch x 1/4 inch grid mortar trowel. We bought slate tile (real slate, not an engineered product) at Home Depot called Montauk Blue. They have it in several sizes. We needed both 12 inch square and 16 inch square to fit the hearth. We have a wet saw, which makes cutting tile a breeze. Well, today was a bit cooler than a breeze. The water that...

BWC rented a hydraulic truck crane for the house assembly from WO Grubb . They specified a 50 ton crane, but Grubb didn't have one available. Instead, they sent an 80 ton crane. It has five stabilizing pads, including one that's under the front of the truck. The counterweight consists of four big pieces of steel that weight 4000 or 6000 lb each. The crane looked very well maintained. We had two operators over the course of the 14 days of the crane operation, Mike and Charlie. They both were excellent. 80 Ton Crane The picture may not convey the size of the vehicle. On the side of the crane is a dimension chart. We had already used the crane dimensions to locate where the center pin would go, allowing for clearance of the counterweight to swing 360 degrees. This label also has lifting and counterweight information. Crane Dimensions I had done crane work in the past, but never with a boom crane, so there were some new hand signals to learn. For example, "Boom down,...

With the building under roof, we shifted our attention to the interior by framing the interior walls. First Floor Framing Turning Empty Spaces... Into Framed Rooms We would like to get some heat into the structure, so Keith and I worked on the wood stove hearth and have it ready for tile, which has to be ordered. The wall behind the wood stove will be finished in the same stone that we're going to use around the entry and on the visible parts of the foundation. Technically, the hearth doesn't need anything other than a non-combustible surface if we use the heat shield. However, we feel better about using a 1/2 inch layer of Micore 300 on the subflooring, covered by a 1/4 inch layer of Durock fiber-cement board. Thin-set cement will hold the tile to the Durock. Wood Stove Hearth Underlayment We cut 45 degree angles on the hearth to eliminate the corner trip hazard. The hearth will be slightly higher than the surrounding floor, so we will frame the hearth...

Wednesday, 1/17/18 Today is the last day of the house assembly. The Bensonwood crew is finalizing all the sealing and doing a blower door test  ( DoE article on blower door tests ) to check for air leaks. The test uses a fan in a doorway to pull a vacuum on the house. We then walk around to feel and look for air leaks. A thermal camera may be useful when looking for leaks. We found two, which we quickly closed. Philip Sets Up Blower Door Test The blower door test was very successful. Bensonwood is known for tight buildings, with blower door tests that register less than 1 air change per hour at 50 pascals. (Pascals is a measure of pressure. 50 Pascals is .00725 psi, so it isn't very much pressure.) Our house registered .6 ACH50 (air changes per hour at 50 Pascals), which is the threshold for the  PassivHaus standard. (The actual measurement was 600 CFM50 at 50 Pascals, then the ACH50 figure was calculated, based on the interior volume. An interesting article about bl...

Tuesday, 1/16/18 Today will be busy. Roofers arrive at 7:30 (a bunch of them were there at 7am). The wood stove flue installer from Bay Stoves will arrive at 8am. The Bensonwood team will be replacing the compromised electrical wire that we discovered last night (see prior post). And the Lundberg team will be installing doors. (Unfortunately, my GoPro camera became unplugged from the big battery pack that supplies power all day. So I have a few hours of time lapse and didn't get all of the roofing or of the master bedroom door being set. I was a bit distracted this morning, with all the planned activity, and somehow missed that it had become unplugged or that I hadn't fully connected it when I installed it in the container at the end of my extension pole.) The roofers impressed everyone. They had a 46 square roof finished in less than a day. There must have been three or four teams working on the roof and another one or two fellows working around the edges to set the d...

Monday, 1/15/18 Cold temperatures have returned, with the thermometer about 20F in the morning. It's hard to decide if it is better to be cold or better to walk around in sloppy, muddy conditions. Temperature about 30F is actually not too bad if we're properly dressed and it keeps our boots from getting muddy. Today was dedicated to getting the roof sealed. The Bensonwood team spent most of the day on the roof, installing screws, foaming the gaps between roof panels, and taping seams. The roofers arrive tomorrow morning about 7:30am and we need to be ready. At 5pm, I tested the four electrical wires for the fans in the four upstairs rooms and found one of them had ground shorted to black (hot). Not good. We quickly identified that a screw near the bottom (down roof) of one panel had penetrated the wire. We considered options and talked with some folks at Bensonwood. The resolution was to get a long electrical drill and an extension (they come in 5ft lengths) and drill a ho...