Construction weeks 33 & 34 – plumbing, hvac and more

manifold system

plastic in the walls

Wow, it’s been a couple weeks since I’ve provided an update. The house has been relatively quiet with only one or two people working at a time. That has since dramatically changed…

Nathan, from Ackland Plumbing, has finished the first rough-in phase for plumbing. We’ve got spiffy (BPA-free) breathable supply pipes running through the house, and a purple one which supplies the grey water. He was explaining to me how, just 10 years ago, a different kind of plastic pipe was getting installed in Canadian houses, one which does not breathe and where water stagnates and becomes unsafe for drinking. Insurance companies will not insure these houses and lawsuits are being filed against the building code. Lesson learned: what seems like a good idea today, may very well prove to untrue tomorrow. And wet things need to breathe, trapped moisture is the enemy of building. I digress. Back to our house.

Nathan managed to carefully maneuver all supplies and drains in and between our open floor trusses and walls. The design of our house helped to facilitate this, with Mark stacking all the plumbing and electrical to one side of the house, over the mechanical room. (This poses absolutely no risk Myles btw (comment from previous post), it’s actually a really clever thing to do when building because all utility runs are minimized in terms of materials and labour). We’ve received numerous compliments on Nathan’s handiwork and it passed the plumbing inspection no problem-o. He’s as excited as we are to have a neat and tidy mission control in our mechanical room, where we’ll go copper for added ‘wow’ factor. Good stuff.

wood fibreboard clads the house until the siding gets installed overtop

the cardboard box phase

Speaking of passing inspections, we also passed our building envelope inspection. Hooray! We were nervous about this one because we weren’t sure how the inspector would feel about forgoing the traditional Tyvek weatherproof house wrap for our wood fibreboard. The wood fibreboard is more common in Europe and is not often seen on our side of the pond. Mark provided specs to the building inspector and explained it to him. We’re fortunate to have an experienced and open-minded official. But there’s no doubt to anyone walking through or around our house that it’s a well-built, thoroughly considered house.

And back to the mechanical room. Hans from Pinwheel Builds met with Mark and dropped off our new Zehnder HRV and heat exchanger along with coils of flexible plastic pipes, which are to be our house’s air ducts for circulating what little heat we require. It’s a pretty groovy system. We won’t have any gross floor ducts, bulkheads or metal work in our house. All you’ll see are small 8” diameter circles mounted to the occasional wall and ceiling to circulate air. Mark went over his plan with Hans and has started installing the ducting himself. Unboxing the parts was better than Christmas for Mark. He was so excited.

parapet roof

new carhartts

From here on out, Mark will be spending as much time as possible working on the house himself. He bought himself a spiffy new pair of Carhartt overalls for the task ;) In addition to starting the ducting, he finished the parapet (a fancy word for structural railing) on our flat roof, cleaned up the front and back yards, and hosted another tour. This last one saw around 30 people who joined as guest of Malcolm Isaacs, who runs the local Passive House courses and is a director of the Canadian Passive House Institute.

brown ash cabinets

On the backend, we ordered our kitchen. Another hooray! Finally. There were a few back-and-forths during the homestretch, which prolonged the process, but were key for getting the details ironed out. We’re really excited about it. We ended up going with Astro Design Centre and have had a great experience working with Dean Large. He ‘gets’ us, in terms of design, and was able to add real value to our design experience, which we really appreciated. Astro also had the finishes we liked the most, at the best price. For example, a gloss white was the same cost as a matte white (typically gloss costs more). And we don’t want any hardware, we want recessed handles (a no hardware look typically costs more). We went with the Astro house brand in white gloss for all the cabinets except those on the backside of the island. The backside of the island faces the living area. For these cabinets we chose a sand-blasted (i.e. textured) brown ash. Haven’t ordered our countertops yet. That’s next.

Following suit, we made a decision on our wood flooring and placed the order. We’ve decided to go with white ash from the Wood Source. The same white ash that the city of Ottawa has felled throughout the city to thwart the Emerald Ash Borer. It will be sympathetic to the island wood. We also decided to order some extra wood for the sloped ceiling, which spans our open space, over the master bedroom and loft. A slatted wood ceiling will allow for clever lighting hacks. We’ll be able to hide much of the hardware behind the wood so that we only see what we want to see and can get away with using less expensive fixtures at no aesthetic compromise. It will also look incredibly beautiful. It’s a win-win.

As alluded to earlier, the house is buzzing again this week. Siding has begun amongst other exciting things. Do stay tuned and lookout for another Mark Periscope. He broadcast just today. And hope you’ll join the next house tour!

Periscope: ventilation layout

In case you missed it, Mark walks us through the planning phase of our ventilation system.

Construction week 32 — plumbing and ventilation runs

First family picnic on our rooftop patio. Shared it with some friendly pigeons who decided our new home was also their new home.

Hope you enjoyed last week’s videos. I sure did. Gave me a break from writing. Writer, I am not. Here goes again:

It’s been a couple weeks since my last construction update. We sent the Cornelis Grey crew away last week. We’ll be bringing them back in a few weeks, once we have more work for them. In the meantime, our plumber Nathan from Ackland plumbing, has begun his rough-in work. He's installing a manifold system? It's cool, or so I am told. And Mark, as you may have seen via Periscope, has begun our ventilation layout.

We walked through the house with our electrician, Yves from Portage Electric, to get a feel for our electrical plan in real life. Wow. When you’re lucky enough to be in a position to decide where to put a switch, and what turns on what, you realize what great ‘power’ you have. And what a massive effect the electrical details potentially have on the user experience and enjoyment of a space. It would really suck to be searching around for a switch that was un-intuitively placed. Or if an unsightly 6-switch was in the middle of a feature wall. What makes sense on paper does not always translate when you’re physically walking through a space.

It also forced us to consider what sort of ‘smart’ lighting/electrical systems we might want to consider. I love the idea of walking into a space and having the lights automagically turn themselves on. Imagine no wall switches? Or lights that learn our behaviour. Will these technologies date our house vs. a tried-and-true analog wall switch? As a happy, budget-friendly medium, we’re looking into Lutron’s Caséta system. 

And do we need “cat 5” cable for our internet? If we want to watch Netflix really really fast? I was under the assumption that regular ol’ wifi would suffice for our entire home, but now that the question has been raised, do I want it? Do I need “cat 6” to future-proof? Our neighbours building up the street included some empty PVC pipe behind their walls, for easy wiring access, should they require something they forgot or doesn’t exist yet. I’m going to lean towards less wires = good, whether or not that’s proves to be true. Time will tell.

There are a lot of moving parts that need to come together over the next few weeks, starting with the plumbing, which will carry on for much of this week. Then ventilation followed by electrical. Yves helped us to understand that his job becomes much simpler if he can reuse or follow some of the previous installs. The bigs rocks go in first, then it's easier to fill the gaps with the sand. Or something like that...Once those inside jobs are all finished, we get to cover up those walls with drywall. We’re flying Mark’s brother in from Nelson BC to help us out with the drywalling. He’s a pro, and a Rosen, so it’s bound to be good :) Only 3 weeks away!

We're still placing orders and making decisions on the back-end. We are so frustratingly close to ordering our kitchen. There have been quite a few back-and-forths to nail it down. All of our siding material has been ordered and work is set to begin next week. Really looking forward to that getting under way. 

Mark’s sporadically giving tours of the house to various groups. He loves doing them, even though it’s a time-suck. We’ll be setting up another public tour some time in the next couple weeks, likely on a weekend. You’ll be able to see what’s running through our walls before we cover them up. We will post the time and date later this week.

One last thing: it’s spring! With the warmer weather, it now feels relatively cooler when I walk inside the house. Neat-o. Same principles apply to cool our house as it does to heat it. We enjoyed our first picnic of the season out on our rooftop deck. Fealt great.

A tour of students from Algonquin College studying architectural technology. And a view of our messy post-winter construction front yard.

My wee ones staring out the sitting window #milwaukee

Construction week 30 – siding

After 30 weeks of construction, our interior wall cavities are nearly complete. They will contain our electrical and plumbing 'behind the scenes' as to not breach our Passive House air barrier. But before we can call up the electrician and plumber, The Cornelis Grey crew has a few more interior jobs to finish up first. We also need to make some key lighting and plumbing decisions. Decisions decisions. 

On that note, we crept a little closer towards making some other big decisions. The biggest of which is our siding materials and install. We’re going with black hardie panel on the inside core, and natural cedar on the enveloping sleeve.

Our cladding choices

We want this inside core to feel as if it were rising from the earth, as one monolithic shape. Mark is typically not a huge fan of hardie board, especially in our case, because the standard flashing details (at the corners and between boards) can feel clunky and disjointed, which works against the unbroken, monolithic shape we were hoping for. But the price and practicality of hardie panel is hard to beat (vs. cement board). Never one to compromise, Mark has designed some custom flashing for between the boards and corners. He’s also craftily designed our electrical panel (where the meter sits on the outside of the house) and eavestrough system as well. We’re getting it bent and cut out of matching black metal. Metal is pretty cheap, even when it’s custom. It’s details like this that we hope will shine through in our house.

The cedar sleeve is the protective wrapper hugging the house. It echoes our living space and forces inward focus, which stems from our love of courtyard architecture. The black hardie-paneled core grounds the house, while the cedar screen lifts it. 

We drove out to Smiths Falls this weekend to take a look at some cedar. There are so many benefits to cedar siding. We plan on allowing ours to age naturally, which will turn it from a warm blond wood to an soft silver colour. It’s super no maintenance, is water and insect resistant, and lasts a lifetime in its natural state. It’s also grown locally and milled to our specs. What’s not to love?

Eastern white cedar, aging gracefully like Meryl Streep

Before: logs of easter white cedar 

After: milled 4" eastern white cedar with 'v' groove

I've explained a bit of the 'why' behind our siding choices. But there were certainly many other factors that played unto our decision-making. You may have noticed we have two brightly coloured neighbours? If you haven’t, one is canary yellow while the other is straight-up orange. On the one hand, we could have followed suit and painted it a wacky bright colour, becoming Ottawa’s very own ‘painted ladies’. But on the other...we’ve decided to contrast them by keeping things natural and neutral, while complementing them with a solid ultramarine blue door. We’ll be introducing more colour with our front yard planter boxes and decking, which will incorporate some rusty-coloured weathering steel. The house will probably recede as it ages gracefully and settles into it’s new home on the street.

And last but not least:

Drumroll please….

The preliminary air test was completed. 

Stay tuned for the results, hehe. 

Hint: we passed with flying colours.

Construction week 29 – interior walls

Interior walls somehow make the spaces feel bigger

Interior walls are complete. We are holding off on building our service cavities until Mark can perform an air test. He can’t perform the air test until the shell is completely sealed. He can’t finished sealing off the shell until he gets more tape, which he ran out of late on Friday. So...the air test will have to happen next week.

It’s important that the air test happen at this early stage because if we find gaps now, they’re easy to fix. If we wait until after we build the wall cavities, we’d have to take them apart to get at the leaks. The air test is important because the performance of our house hinges on it being of a certain value. Any amount we exceed this value, drastically improves our energy model. Our target is very aggressive, so we’re not expecting to beat it by much. But we hope so. We hope it breaks records ;)

Mark is contemplating whether or not to Periscope the air test. If you want to see it, let us know! Once we’ve run it, we’ll write another post going into a bit more detail.

What else happened last week?

• Our flat roof was insulated. Mark spec’d a ‘dense pack’, but the installer gave us more of a ‘pillow pack’. So they had to return and fix it. Which goes to show it really helps to have a general contractor who knows what to look for. Good job Mark!
• We installed the air vapour barrier against the basement walls, which forms part of our continuous air barrier line.
• The plumbing vents rough-ins went in.
• AND we settled on the lighting for our open space. It’s been a major design dilemma. And had the potential to cost muchos dineros. We got clever and are designing our own lighting system, which you shall see when it comes together in real-time. We’re very excited about ticking that one off the list.

Next week: air test!

Basement air and vapour membrane

Plumbing vents through the roof (pre-insulation)

Attic insulation (blown-in cellulose)

Our building shell carpenter crew

Now that the shell is complete, I’ve been meaning to write a retrospective. What was good about our wall assembly and what wasn’t. What we learned and what we'd do differently next time. I’d like to get some input from the guys who actually built it: Justin, Mark, Blair, Tyler and Kyle from Cornelis Grey. Look for it soon. But for now, I just wanted to give our crew a shout out.

Hats off to them. They were great to work with, super professional and genuinely nice guys. Even our neighbours have commented on how courteous they’ve been, which is a huge bonus (gotta keep them in our good books seeing as how we are borrowing power, water and do need to live beside them eventually). Justin Corkum led the team. Mark really enjoyed working with him. They had a great dialogue back and forth and were able to forge a strong, trusting working relationship. Justin is moving on to another company. While we are keeping most of the crew, we are sad to see him leave. Thanks for all your help Justin!

Justin working on our temporary door — check out the routered handle!

Building a house is akin to giving birth

This past weekend, the Chelsea Passive House clients of Mark’s, invited everyone who worked on their home over for a wine and cheese mixer. It was really special and in many ways, the carrot at the end of the stick for me. I asked Mrs. Chelsea Passive House, ‘was it all worth it?’, because if you read my last blog post you will know that I’m a stress-case at the moment. Her response was on-point. She said, “it’s like asking a pregnant women while in labour if it’s worth it”. Couldn’t have said it better myself :) Right now I'm in the thick of a really long one...

Construction week 28 — kitchen design

We’ve been finalizing our kitchen design. Check it out! Mark had originally designed the kitchen to fit Ikea components, in case we decided to go that route (for economic reasons). But after meeting with a couple kitchen designers and weighing the pros and cons, I think we’re going to go custom. And we were casually browsing appliance stores this weekend when we stumbled upon a built-in refrigerator at an ultra discount floor model price. It’s the same price as the other non-built-in option we were contemplating and has all the nice design features and benefits that we were looking for. So, yay!

We approached several kitchen designers with our initial design. They were able to bring some outside perspective to our layout. Kitchen design is something that architects do as well, but kitchen designers really know their products and details like under sink garbage options and drawer vs. door that really help. I wouldn't say they 'designed' out kitchen, Mark did, but they helped work through the details with us.

Deciding on our appliances also weighed in on our decision making. I’ll write a separate post about the appliances, because it requires one (Passive House limits our options in this area). We went back and forth on a few items. Wall ovens vs. island oven and pantry space. Pantry space was important to me. Even though I like the idea of a wall oven, pantry has a higher priority for me in terms of chest-height accessibility. We have ideas for finishes, but that will all be worked out once we design which company we’re going to go with. Both are great options, it will likely come down to cost and who we like working with.

As an aside, we aren’t basing all of our decisions on cost alone. It definitely weighs heavily, but we also want to work with people with whom we actually like. Mark wants to build long term relationships and find people he would feel comfortable referring his future clients to as well.

And on to week 28...

Our crew started on interior wall framing and have been going around the outside of the house on scaffolding sealing and taping the wood fibreboard spots they missed when they had to stand up the walls. Mark also did some more interior air barrier sealing with that Siga tape.

We’ve also been busy pulling quotes together and meeting various sub-contractors on site for things like siding and ceiling insulation. Starting to make some headway…
Our roof is getting insulation this week. Walls continue to go up. Hopefully Mark will be able to perform our first blower-door test and we’ll begin the service cavity walls as well.