Day 248 - The end of a pane-ful experience (almost)

Sunday December 11th, 2005

If you've been following this blog, you know that the windows were received with grills in the transoms and not in the main casements. Unfortunately, because the grills in the casements wouldn't line up with the ones in the transoms, the transom sealed units needed to be replaced also.

The replacement sealed units (with the grills) arrived, and Steve came out and replaced some of the sealed units. Steve also changed the door from the garage to the laundry room. Steve wasn't able to change the windows in the front doors because the battery in his cordless drill died.

The "(almost)" in the heading refers to the transom in the dining room. Part of the grill in the replacement transom came with a crooked piece, a manufacturing defect. So this sealed unit will have to be replaced again! What a pane! (haha)

We appreciate John and Steve sorting out the windows, so we received what we had ordered.

The windows look pretty good, don't they?

Day 246 - Didn't quite make it

The title refers to the electrical inspection. We had expected to have it today, but we didn't quite make it. It is now scheduled for Monday. The networking and alarm prewire will happen on Sunday. The insulator will come and start doing the batts for the cathedral ceiling on Monday. The poly and strapping will start after the electrical inspection, with the plan to have the blower door test this week, and then start drywalling.

In Day 244's post I mentioned the chimney is not straight. Here is a photo of it - you don't need to zoom in to see that it is not straight. Unfortunately, it will take more than just changing the chimney cap as the chimney is strapped in crooked all the way up. I've called the chimney guy but he hasn't responded. It will be very challenging for them to fix it if they delay too long.

For the sake of something different, I took a photo of the the house fom Howie Rd. It nestles into the tree line nicely with no lights on.

Thiis is a photo of the baffles under the roof. These baffles are part of the R2000 spec, and their purpose is to prevent wind from riffling through the insulation and cooling it off. After all, insulation works on the principle of trapped air so if the air is moving it makes sense that you will benefit if you can prevent this. Here is a CMHC quote:

Windwashing occurs where wind blows through insulation disturbing the trapped warm airpockets replacing them with cold exterior air on a constant basis. The effect of this is to seriously degrade the effective resistance value of the insulation. Therefore wind washingmust be minimized as part of the insulation process.

The replacement sealed unit windows have arrived. They are scheduled to be installed on Sunday. We are glad about that as the previous install date we had was after Christmas.

Day 244 - pot lights

Saga of the pot lights

We have a lot of pot lights in our house, Candice Olson would be proud! We have pot lights in the dining room, in the hallway (or the "gallery" as it is called on some plans!), in the kitchen, in the bathroom (shower light), a few in the master bedroom, and of course in the great room.

This story is about the pot lights in the great room.

The great room is planned to have 6 pot lights in total - 4 in the "corners" of the room, and two to accent the front corners of the fireplace. Unfortunately, one of the pot lights on the fireplace is in the wrong place, which means it will need to moved over a little bit, which then forces the 2 adjacent pots to be moved.

In other news, the electrical work will be completed tomorrow, and an inspection for the electrical and the framing (roof trusses) is requested for Friday. As soon as the inspectors come, then the crew will start installing the vapour barrier and the strapping for the drywall.

The plumber will also come out on Friday and complete the roughin. I need to get the fitting for the "utility tub" in the laundry room so it can be plumbed in. Also, the HVAC guys will come and complete their ventilation installation.

The fireplace installation is complete, but they put the wrong cap on the chimney, Charles says it is crooked. Since it's been getting dark when I was on my way out there I didn't see it so will have to call them tomorrow about that.

I am waiting for the networking and security installation people to confirm the installation date.

Insulators are booked for Monday. Then we will need an inspection for that (Tuesday) and an air test (Tuesday).

Drywall could start Wednesday, but we are still waiting for their quotes. I guess it will be hard for that to be completed by Friday. Charles said, with a wry grin, that he thought that was "a bit of a stretch".

The aluminum soffit and fascia installation will start next Friday. Once that gets started, the garage doors can be installed. I sincerely hope we can get the garage doors installed before Christmas.

Day 243 - cheap lights

Electrician Dave said that he wouldn't want to install our permanent exterior lights until the exterior is completed. Since only the hanging light will be able to be installed (once the soffit is completed), I purchased some cheap lights for the other locations. Only $5.95 each.

Completion Plan

This is Dave's and Charles' plan (from about a week ago) to complete our house for the end of January.

Week of: Description
Week 1 (Nov 28): Electrical, plumbing, central vac rough in, interior framing. Tubs and toilet delivered.
Week 2 (Dec 5): Complete electrical, plumbing rough in. Poly and strapping.
Week 3 (Dec 12): Strapping, drywall, insulation.
Week 4 (Dec 19): draywall, mud, sanding, priming / prime check.
Dec 26: no plans - catch up.
Week 5 (Jan 2/06): Mud, levelling, flooring
Week 6 (Jan 9): Doors, painting, cabinets
Week 7 (Jan 16): Trim, Electrical, plumbing finishing.

So... lots of time!!!

In other action... another drywaller and painter came to measure and give us a quote. Also a guy who does railings came to give a quote for the stairs to the basement.

Day 242 - Fireplace installation

Monday, December 5, 2005

The fireplace arrived today. This is a photo of Randy, one of the the installers at work inside, fastening the chimney in place with strapping. Unfortunately, they only had a 20' section of the chimney, and needed to get another 10' piece to complete the installation. In addition, they were also missing the the propane field conversion kit. They expect to be back on Wednesday or Thursday to complete the install.

While the fireplace installers were fastening the chimney inside, Dave and Charles were covering up the chimney box outside. Here you can see Dave "hanging around", after putting the last piece of plywood on the chimney.


Electricians have been busy, wiring away. This gang of 5 switches is by the front door. Lots of switches!!! Let's see if I can remember what they are all for: inside foyer, outside door, garage lights, eave plugs. Okay - that's only 4 so I am missing one.



This is the view out of basement window looking towards the lake. The wide bars are the grilles in the window and the X is the scaffolding that's in place at the front of the house.

Day 241 - it's the cold & flu season...

...and -- guess what?? -- I have a cold. It was milder here today than yesterday, but I felt not so good so I didn't go out at all. Freda very kindly went out and got some more Halls for me.

We had planned to go to the land and throw the kong for Tawny today, but didn't because of the cold.

Robutussin and Sudafed... here I come!

Day 240 - finalized the cabinets

Yesterday I started feeling pretty lousy at in the afternoon, with the same symptoms of the cold that plagued the crew this past week. Drat!

Given that I was feeling under the weather, today felt very busy although it wasn't really. We met with Heinz the cabinet maker yesterday evening, and although we had a very good idea about the handles, we needed to finalize the laminate counter tops selection for the main bath and the laundry room. So today we went to the kitchen design center and selected Formica Madras Indian Slate.

On the way back we went to the Orange Borg to pick up the sink and faucet for the powder room which had arrived. While we were there, we checked out the cabinet handles as well as the undercabinet lighting. Since Freda wanted a special knob (knob A on this page) from Lee Valley for the laundry room, we popped over there to pick these knobs up. There is no other brass colour in the house other than these knobs.

Last week I calculated how much energy would be required to heat up the slab. Unfortunately, the house was not closed up and heat turned on before it got quite cold. Now the themal mass of the concrete floors are working against us, as we have to heat up all that concrete. These are the calculations I did then. I think you can follow along with reasoning.

Mass of concrete
23 cubic meters of concrete for both main floor and basement floor. This translates to 30.08 cubic yards per floor. One cubic yard of concrete weighs 4000 pounds, each floor has 120,000 pounds of concrete (60 tons) to be heated.

Temperature differential
Let's assume the main floor is at -5C, and the basement floor is +2C. Let's further assume that we want to get the floors to +15C, which would be a temperature for working in, drywalling, etc. This means we need to heat the main floor by 20C and the basement by 13C.

Energy (BTU) cost
1 BTU is the energy required to heat 1 pound of water by 1 degree Fahrenheit. Lets assume that this applies to concrete also. So we have to convert the Celsius temperature diff to Fahrenheit and multiply by the weight of the concrete.

20C transition is 36F (main floor), and the basement 13C is 23.4F. Multiplied by the weight of the concrete, we get a requirement of 7.1 million BTUs to heat up both slabs.

Heating efficiency
However, since the main floor slab is below freezing, the water would freeze in the pipes if we ran the hydronic heating first -- this would not be a good thing. Since we need to heat the air first to heat up the slab, we are not going to get great efficiency as this is not as efficient as direct heat transfer through the hydronic system. For now, let's assume that the heating efficiency is 60%.

Propane requirement
Propane has 91,000 BTUs per gallon. Given the BTU requirements (7.1M), and heating efficiency (60%), we come up an estimated 131 gallons of propane(US gallon) to heat both slabs to 15C.

Do we have enough propane?
We should have had 3 big tanks delivered, but they only delivered two. The three tanks hold 1100 litres, so our two tanks should contain about 733 litres. Converted the estimated volume of propane required into litres, we get 495 litres required.

So we do have enough propane in the big tanks, although it will use about 70% of the tanks' contents. This translates to a cost of approximately $400.

It really is too bad we weren't able to get the vapour barrier on sooner so we didn't have this extra expense.

Day 239 - more photos

Friday December 2nd, 2005

These electricians are running all the wire for the various circuits through the attic space. These neat bundles of wire all come to this wall in the master ensuite bath and will run down the outside of this wall (in the garage) to the panel in the basement.

This is Dave preparing for the arch from kitchen to great room. Dave had some great ideas to make sure the arches have a similar look and appear balanced..




This is one of the things the plumber urgently needed - this is the shower control installed in the master bath shower area. The other parts (tubs, etc) are in the basement for when they are needed.


The pipe from the well was cut right above the level of the concrete. The speculation is that this was done by the floor finishers. This meant the concrete had to be chipped out from around the pipe, the damaged section removed, and then a new piece spliced in. The chipped out concrete will need to be filled in after.

Day 238 - framing almost complete.

Thursday - December 1st! December??? Wow! Time is sure flying.

Well, I got to the house in daylight today, so was able to take some photos. Lots of progress to show you.

This is the arch from the hallway to the great room. Note that the radius of the curve here matches the radius of the curve on the top of the window. The plastic obscures the partition a bit, but it will be beautiful. There will be a column on each side of the opening to the great room.

This photo is looking using the special X-Ray Vision setting on the camera to see through the wall of the closets to the master bath. There are lots of wires and plumbing. The plumbing store that is supplying our fixtures delivered the two tubs, a toilet, the bath faucets, and the shower valves.

Dave is taking advantage of the nice weather to build the last of the returns for the gable ends. We are supposed to get some light snow tomorrow, so there won't be too much more opportunity to do this. Snow usually doesn't stick here until after mid-December, but that is only 2 weeks away!

This is a photo of the basement. As you can see, there is lots of plumbing etc... here. The plumbers are using this white tubing for the main part of the plumbing. Since the tubing looks the same, how do you tell teh hot and cold supply apart? Well, the plumbers put black tape on the cold supply.

As part of the weather proofing, all the gaps around the windows and doors are foamed, as well as the sill plate and the cuts in the foam created by the electricians when they are doing their work. You can see all the foam around the windows and the sill plate in this photo.

Here Patrick is installing the hurricane clips on the trusses. Patrick wasn't feeling well so he went home a few minutes after this.

In other developments...

Fireplace... installation scheduled for Monday
Countertops... we originally wanted to get granite counters for the kitchen and master bath. However, when we changed the sink/faucet for the powder room, we thought we would like to get granite for the powder room as well. The company that we were going to hire to supply the granite quoted us what we considered an outrageous price for that 3' piece of granite. (Just to show how unreasonable it was, the Orange Borg price was only $31 more -- and the OB is one of the most expensive.) We found a local granite supplier that will supply and install all the granite, including the powder room, for a slightly lower price than our initial supplier. (If they hadn't been so unreasonable about the powder room counter we never would have looked for another quote...)