Construction weeks 37 & 38: electrical rough-ins and drywall

Drywall is getting hung, son!

Mark is full-time at the house these days, including weekends, and it will likely continue this way until move in. I’m pulling double-duty with the rest of life, so all I can muster today is a point-form update. Words, sentences and all the things are feeling difficult. Please forgive me.

• Mark finished running the flex ducting throughout the house.
• Graham and Sebastian continue to install siding. And continue to do an outstanding job of it.
• Yves, started and finished all the electrical rough-ins. Since he has a stellar reputation with the ESA (Electrical Service Authority), we quickly passed the inspection over email.
• Prepared for drywalling, with the help of Brian Rosen, Gary and Alex Sharp.
  • Carried 40 sheets of 12’ long drywall boards up stairs and between rooms.
  • Moved and re-installed our construction stairs away from the wall so the drywall could run past.
  • Since the house is going to be so quiet (outside noises disappear with our thick walls), that means we’ll be extra sensitive to any inside noises. To counter this, we've taken a couple additional steps.
    • Installed resilient channels on ceilings. These are metal strips that the drywall gets screwed into. They reduce foot step noise from floors above by reducing the contact surface area between the drywall and wood structure.
    • Added extra Roxul to our ceilings to further buffer any sound between floors.
• Started hanging drywall! Ceilings throughout the house and the girl’ bedrooms are finished.
• Added structural blocking for our floating stairs — the top two staircases. Some extra structure was added between existing studs to anchor the metal brackets that will hold the treads.
• Ordered custom metal for the interior of the house. Including a metal screen, which will support the other end of the stair treads, and our bridge that spans the open space over the dining room. Both will be powder-coated white.
  • The metal screen will span the height of the main space and frame the stair cases. As you wander through the house, it offers glimpses of the void and of our tall vertical window flanking the opposite side. We’ll hang pants off the screen, and transform it into a bit of a greenwall to breathe more life into the main space.
• Nathan installed 1 of 2 bathtubs. The master bath is going to be a tricky one. The space is tight and looks like we may have been sent an incorrect part.
• Mark ran another air test to the same result of 0.4 air changes per hour. He was hoping to improve upon our last result having filled some known gaps. But with new gaps made for electrical and plumbing, even though there were properly sealed, they may have balanced each other out. Or it might be the OSB that’s ‘leaky’ — it is a construction grade material after all, so at this level of tightness, maybe it just doesn’t stand up 100%. We’re hopeful that after drywall, our result may improve. However, Mark’s not holding his breath. He warned me that even though, in a typical build, an air-test post-drywall can improve 20–30%, it’s unlikely our will because we’re already dealing with such small numbers, and there’s little room for such impressive movement. Still keeping our fingers crossed.

That’s the gist of it. We’re managing many moving parts at the moment, but it’s finally starting to feel like we’re getting close to the home-stretch. The building inspector won’t be returning until it’s final occupancy time. Mostly finishing from here on out.

One more thing before my head hits the pillow: don’t miss Mark’s virtual tour this upcoming Thursday. We’ll post the video on the blog afterwards, in case you miss it. Oh, and check out the photos below.

Drywall on the ceilings.

First board goes up.

Flex ducting complete.

Kids bathtub (concreted added beneath the tub since this photo was taken).

Marvelous Eastern white cedar.

Hardie board too.

Window sill details.

The roof!

Quick screen grab I got Mark to take of his Sketch-up model to show the stair screen and the bridge that floats in front. 

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

Domestic hot water heater

Part 2 of our mechanical system, the domestic hot water heater, explained over casual couch conversations.

Construction week 4: Argh

We ran in to a bit of a surprise during the dig. Was it buried treasure? No, no it was not. In fact, it was quite the opposite. Turns out our yellow house neighbours have a sewage pipe that extends out perpendicularly from their house and several feet on to our land — precisely where our foundation needs to go — before making its way to the street .

It needs to move before we can continue building our home. We lost some precious time last week trying to wrap our heads around the issue. Every house is supposed to have its own separate sewage connection that runs directly out to the street, and not across adjacent property. But the yellow house was the first on the block. These rules did not apply 130 years ago.

Work is starting up again this Wednesday so hopefully not too much time was lost. Doulos will be starting the road cut and servicing work. 

We suffered an unfortunate knock last week. So hopefully we won’t be running in to more delays or ‘surprises’ this week. Argh feels more like F#$%.

Yep. It's a shitty pipe. That's for sure.