And there was Light

I may not be spending as much time working on the house, but at least the contractors have been productive.  Tuesday, the mechanical guys installed the water heater that will serve the radiant floor, as well as the associated expansion tank, pressure relief valve, pump, etc.  Now I know I'll be warm this winter!  I don't dare turn it up very high until my second layer of adobe is good and dry or the place will turn into a crack den.

And today, the electricians battled a VERY reluctant bundle of cables to pull them from the sub panel outside into the house.  Lesson learned: two long sweep bends is a tough pull with 2" conduit.  Three bends (like my place) is a real chore!  It was reminiscent of raising the sails on a Maine Windjammer: one, two, three... PUULLLL!  One inch gained.  Sometimes two or three.  It was a nice payoff, though.  On a drizzly, dreary day outside, it was bright and cheery inside for the first time!

FINALLY! The shingling is done

I've been distracted with work, so the practice house has been languishing the past few weeks.  Guess I can't complain--after four months focused on the house, the inflow of cash had been dwindling.  But I've managed to get all the cedar shingles up:

I think every shingle in this little triangle needed to be trimmed in some way except for three.  Five hours later, it's looking good!

And now the shingling is all finished!

And one other small note, the electric company extended service to the new place and installed a meter.  This is the first one I've seen that read zero!

Adobe Layer 2

After dealing with cracking in the first layer of the floor, I wanted to refine my sand/clay ratio, so I tried three more samples at 0.83:1, 1:1, and 1.25:1 rations.  Here are the results after 17 days of drying:

Sample 1

 #1 Obvious failure: too much clay caused it to shrink and crack.

Sample 2

#2 Not too bad, but still a few cracks.

Sample 3

#3 Almost no cracks. Is this the one? I thought I'd try a fourth mix with still more sand to see.

Sample 4

#4 Formed one week after sample three, this one had cracked pretty significantly after only 10 days. So the winning recipe is 1.25 parts sand to part clay.

Most of the first day was spend in the bathroom, sloping the floor to drain to the shower drain and getting a level surface near the toilet. There is still a 1/2” layer of lime plaster to go on top, but I wanted to be relatively precise so that layer can be relatively uniform in thickness. I also wanted to practice creating an attractive, sloped surface.

Here is the main room after day two. Things are moving along much faster with the 1 1/2” layer as compared to the 4” layer! Hopefully the dry-time will be less. Even though the house is closed up, my desiccant dehumidifier appears to be doing a great job of sucking out moisture and warming the room.

Radiant Tubing

I am SO looking forward to experiencing radiant heat!  Think about it: warm feet, nearly constant temperatures with low energy input, no filters to change, no noisy and uncomfortable air blowing out of ducts, no worry about whether there is mold growing in your ducts: the advantages are many.  And in a house this size, it is so simple: There is only one run of 250 feet of pipe, so no manifold and network of thermostats.

The  1/2" diameter PEX tubing was pretty easy to install, even though my friend and I were near the bottom of the learning curve.  (This would be a tough task to accomplish solo.) We spent a couple hours learning that the 1 1/2" tapcon screws were having trouble holding in the adobe base layer, which is noticeably softer than concrete.  Solution: 3" course-thread deck screws driven straight down with no pilot hole.  Not one of those has pulled out.  True, we didn't pull the tubing into quite as small a radius as we might have otherwise, but I don't think there will be any downside.

The only place were we doubled on clips up was where the tubes transition from the floor up the wall to the heater/pump assembly.  You can see the blemish in the adobe where one of the tapcons pulled out.

So next step is to bury the tubes in a 1 1/2" layer of adobe.  That thickness makes it easy to use 2x3s laid flat as screed boards.  The entire adobe assembly consists of the base 4" layer, the next layer at 1 1/2", and the 1/2" finish layer for a total of 6".  That's a lot of thermal mass!  So I'll basically set the thermostat once in the fall and leave it untouched until the end of spring at the end of heating season.

Adventures in Shingling

So after the rain event, I had eight working days to make as much progress installing the cedar shingles as possible before leaving on vacation.  Sure, it's been 25 years since I last did any shingling, but I thought I could make a good bit of progress.  True, I needed the framing guys to install all the trim, and I wanted to pre-paint it while it was easier before the shingles went up.

28 bundles of shingles

I just about broke my trailer getting the shingles back from the building supply store.  Luckily, they are about 1/10 of a mile from home.

Well as usual, life and work got in the way, and I had to keep revising down my expectation for how much of the house I'd get covered.  In the end, I finished the north wall, and told the framers that if they have some extra time in between other projects, they were free to come down and make whatever progress they could make.

So upon returning from vacation, this is what I found--like someone had picked up my little shack and replaced it with a finished home!

This was a total thrill to see!  There's still a little left do do on the west side.  See that little unfinished bit on the gable?  That took over 6 hours to wrap up yesterday.  I do good work, but I'm slow.  I figure I must have gone up and down the ladder to the roof about 80 times, so if nothing else I got a good workout!

Tar Paper Before the Storm

Sorry for the delayed posting--I got distracted by a much needed vacation!  Rewinding the clock about a month, though, East Coast folks may remember a five days of cold, damp drizzle that culminated in a nor'easter.  That week, I was in major stress mode trying to get the tar paper up to keep the sheathing dry.  I managed to do it in between damper periods, working solo.  Thank goodness for my well-behaved hammer stapler and long overhangs that kept the walls relatively dry even during the light precipitation.  Here's how it looked as of Thursday October 1, just before the major rain moved in that night.

With the house in a short-lived stealth mode, I was ready for the forecast 5-7 inches of rain with tarps, to avoid erosion under the eaves and haybale check dams to slow down the flow of water along the driveway in front of the house.  Luckily, we didn't get nearly that much precip, and it ended up being a slow steady rain rather than a gully-washer.

Blowing in the Cellulose

As I mentioned in the previous post, I have no photos of me and a helper blowing in the cellulose.  It's no big loss, since the process was not terribly exciting from a visual standpoint.  My helper stood by the machine, cutting apart the bales and roughly breaking up the compressed material as it went into the blower's hopper.  Occasionally, theses chunks would create an archway over the paddles that feed the blower, and he had a stick at the ready so he could stir the cellulose and break up the arch and let the chucks fall down.  At the advice of the store employees, we kept the blower door 1/2 open, which controlled how much cellulose traveled through the hose (the airflow is not adjustable).

We did experiment opening the door further to speed things up, and the hose promptly clogged.  Lesson learned--it is a major hassle to unclog the hose!  In our case, the hose had been cut and patched in two locations, which created pinch points to initiate the clog.  We untaped the sections, beat the hose repeatedly, and raised it up to shake out the loosened material inch by inch.  All told, we probably spent an hour unclogging the hose and repairing it.  Two person-hours wasted!

I manned the nozzle, and it was probably even less exciting to watch.  I pretty much stood there and slowly twisted the nozzle while pointing it down into the cavity in an attempt to distribute the cellulose evenly and avoid having it hang up on the Light Straw Clay (LSC).  It's easy to tell when the cavity is filled up to the nozzle since the sound of the machine would raise in pitch.  It's very similar to the sound change when the hose on your vacuum clogs.

Since the stud cavities are interconnected via the thermal break between the inner and outer walls, there was a fair amount of material that would blow into adjacent cavities.  Sometimes, dust even blew out the adjacent fill hole.  For this reason, I would fill all the lower holes in a section of wall before moving to the upper holes.  In the upper holes, I'd start by pointing the nozzle down, and at the first sign that the level of cellulose had risen up to the nozzle, I'd rotate the nozzle up into the the cavity above the top plate (see photos in the previous post).  Once that area was filled, I'd slowly back out the nozzle and sweep it around to make sure there were no remaining voids.  As the nozzle was just about to emerge from the hole I'd signal my helper to turn off the blower.

It ended up taking about 7 hours to blow in 35 bags.  I was left with a bunch of 2-inch holes that were plugged with cutouts made with a 2 1/8" hole saw.

 The plugs were held in with temporary duct tape so the building inspector could see inside if he wanted to.

 After he signed off, I used construction adhesive to glue in the plugs to make them water tight and airtight.  The adhesive has been strong enough to withstand stapling on the tar paper and nailing in the shingles, with only one that came unglued.

Oh yeah, and on the same day we did this, the spray foam people installed the closed cell foam in the attic.  I have mixed feelings about the spray foam.  Its certainly not a natural building material, and it's expensive.  But it is an ideal insulator in so many ways: something around R-6.5 per inch, it seals out all air infiltration, moisture cannot condense in the insulation so it won't mold, and there is never any settling or other potential installation defects that significantly reduce the effectiveness of batts.  In this house, where I expect to be up in the the attic regularly, I thought it was the best option.  If I had an attic that was not going to be lived in or used often, I would blow in cellulose on the attic floor and just live with the 12-15 inches of depth that is required to comply with the IBC insulation requirements.

Insulation Preparation

The exterior walls are 12" thick.  The inner 2x4 studs are filled with Light Straw Clay (LSC), and the remainder of the 12" will be filled with blown-in cellulose insulation.  Lowes makes it easy: buy 20 bales of Green fiber insulation, and you get free use of their blower.  Like most tasks, there is a fair bit of preparation that needed to happen in order to streamline the process.

Most notably, the light straw clay only extends up to the bottom of the I-Joists that form the ceiling, so I needed to add blocking to seal off the cavity at the ends of the beams.

I nailed plywood panels in using wooden cleats, top and bottom.  To avoid having to measure precisely, I just left about 1/8" clearance all around and caulked them tight.  That took care of the north and south walls.

The east and west walls were easier, since I could just nail up luan plywood strips to the studs (that's the reddish strip on the left of the photo).  The 1x2 straps below the luan will support the drop-in ceiling panels, and they do double duty by giving a clean line for the luan to butt up against.  

For the most part, the stud cavities were filled from the outside via holes in the exterior sheathing.  The one exception was that the areas under the windows were more easily accessed from above.  I bought a GreenFiber Nozzle to reduce the 2 1/2" hose that comes with the blower to 1".  They even sell plastic plugs that make it super easy to plug the 1" holes.   Those are the white circles, with the window on the left of the photo and the 2x4 LSC inner wall on the right. 

I supplemented the GreenFiber nozzle nozzle to help me control the direction of the cellulose as it is blown in.  All I did was cut off the last 3" of the nozzle (after filling in under the windows) and duct tape it to a 1 1/4" diameter long-sweep 90 degree electrical conduit elbow.

I had to determine how far below the top plate of the walls to locate my 2" diameter hole so that the nozzle would point up above the Light Straw Clay.  The magic number was 7 inches to the center of the hole. 

This allows me to blow up to fill in the area between the I-joists and behind the blocking I described above. 

 It's also desirable to point down and towards the plywood.  Since the LSC can be rough, I prefer that jet of insulation to hit the smoother plywood since the straw might tend to catch the insulation and leave gaps below.

It was a hectic day when it came time to buy the insulation and haul it along with the blower machine to the house!  For better or worse, I don't have any photos or videos of that process since we were pressed for time.  More on that in the next installment,.

Sheathing and Windows

This day involved the most overt progress since the framing went up back in July!  The sheathing went out without any drama, thanks to pre-planning by the framers to place studs 2' apart.  But first I had a little work to do to fill up some cavities in the studs that were too narrow for me to blow in with cellulose.

It's pretty low-tech: stuff the gap with rigid foam and use spray foam to seal it in place.  Once the foam dries, I sawed of whatever stuck out.

Big excitement when the windows and door arrived!  Note the sheathing in the background, closing in the Light Straw Clay.  (Finally, I won't have to worry any more about a driving rain re-soaking the LSC.)

Here is my idea for a termite shield: I screwed a strip of the trim material below the sheathing.  The TruExterior, manufactured by Boral, is made up of recycled fly-ash and resin, so no insect will want to eat it.  It is dimensionally stable and immune to water damage, so it will do double duty to protect the exposed bottom edge of the plywood.  So the only thing a bug will see from the ground is cedar (which is naturally insect resistant), TruExterior, and concrete.

All the windows are in!  Ready for insulation.

Electrical Rough-In

There isn't too much to talk about that is out of the ordinary here.  One thing I found interesting was that the electrician found it easier and faster to drill holes in the studs to route the wiring, as compared to running them within the 3" gap between the outer and inner walls.  Now that I see it in action, I can see how it's faster to pull through a hole, rather than having to hammer in staples to support the wires.  In the end, it's nice that they weren't pounding on the studs that hold up the Light Straw Clay (LSC).

 Typical wiring.  I took LOTS of pictures of everything since about an hour later, it was all disappearing behind the exterior sheathing.

 With a 3 1/4" deep box in a 3 1/2" wall, there was very little LSC behind the boxes that needed to be cleared away to give access for the wires.  Note the data outlet with the blue wire: he had to cut out the entire back of the box since the wire is so fat and can't be folded up inside like romex.  Mental note: stuff a rag in here before blowing in the cellulose or you'll get a spray of insulation inside the house.  (For the record, I DID remember!)

Sorry that the black waterline is catching your attention, but the intention was to show the neat routing where all the cables enter the service panel.  The fussy guy in me appreciates this attention to detail.  Apparently, this makes a good impression on the inspector too.  He spent more time talking about code issues with the electrician than actually looking at his work.  Another easy sign-off!  Love that!!!

Interior Framing

The interior walls are pretty minimal.  

 This shot shows what it was like to work on foam blocks in order to avoid blemishing the adobe floor.

The floor was too soft to screw into, so the bottom plates are not screwed in yet.  As a result, I have diagonal bracing that keep them aligned.  After the top plates were fastened in, the wall were quite secure and those diagonals were removed.

Ready for the rough-ins!  The bathroom is on the left, and the utility closet is on the right.

For some reason, I'm really excited by the attic.  I guess I just gravitate toward quirky, intimate spaces.  (That may explain why I enjoy camping in tents and cruising on small sailboats!)  It was unnaturally gratifying to cut out the hatch to gain access to the attic.

Drying the Adobe Base Layer

Sorry, I know I'm behind, but as the next few posts will show, there has been another deluge of activity at the practice house.  Here are a few photos showing the drying process for the adobe floor:

After four days, the floor had developed some cracks.  Typically that means the mix was too rich in clay, or that there wasn't enough straw in the mix, or both.  I'll have to fine tune the next layer.

After seven days, a few grains of wheat had spouted, like in the Light Straw Clay walls.  (This was the only cluster of sprouts--there were probably only 20-30 total, with most being a single blade.)

 On day nine, I filled the cracks.  For the larger cracks in the photo, I used a mix of clay and sand in the same 1:2 ratio as the floor and brushed this dry material into the crack.  Using the spray bottle, I wet out the dry mix and used a magnesium float to work the material around to blend the filler in with the two sides of the crack.  The floor was way to soft to walk on, so I was kneeling on 2" thick foam blocks. Note that the clay had been run through a window screen to make sure it was very fine and would enter the crack.  I'm not sure why this photo doesn't reflect the brown color of the adobe, so don't dwell on that.

This shows the floor after smoothing out all the cracks.  Small cracks that couldn't be filled with the dry mix were simply smoothed out with the magnesium trowel after a light spray from the water spray bottle.

After two weeks, the cracks have opened up again, although not as wide as the first time.  This shows the floor as repaired the second time.  I've also just finished the interior wall framing, walking on 2" foam boards the whole time.

While I have no photos, the floor has subsequently endured many trades-people.  After roughly a month of drying, it's now dry enough to walk on gingerly but is still easy to scratch/dent with fingernail or if you drop something onto it.  I didn't think it was fair to ask the contractors to be that careful, so I laid out plywood boards for them to walk on.  They were cool about it, and while the floor's surface is now somewhat haggard looking, it's still in fine shape for what comes next.  Basically, all I need is a reasonably level surface to which I can attach the hydronic heating tubes.  It doesn't need to be pretty at this point.

The Adobe Floor is complete!

Wow, it was a hot week to be lugging around heavy stuff, but the adobe floor is in, leveled, and drying!  A rough calculation shows that I moved around 8,800 pounds of materials, with a little help!  Actually, we moved it twice: once to add the clay, sand, water and straw to the mortar mixer, and a second time to wheel barrow the completed batches into place.  Enjoy the photos:

The first day's progress: four batches.  What's that in the lower right of the adobe?

Cat Prints!  The curious neighborhood feline that likes to visit my barn evidently wanted to see how solid the new adobe material was.  Answer--not very!  Come back in a couple weeks and  it will feel like concrete.

Day two was slow because of all the plumbing penetrations

Moving along on day three, also showing a few tools of the trade.

On day four, a Wednesday, there is hope that I'll finish on Friday and be able to enjoy my Saturday.

And on day five, it's looking like I'll finish easily  tomorrow.

And the payoff... Finished!

It even looks like the photos in the books!