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.