Ceilings, painted walls and other Winter colors

It's winter again and the days are short and cold. Most of our work is inside but there is still plenty to be done on the exterior. I finally put the metal cap on the second vent box last week. In the spring we will put the roof vents on these two boxes.
We had a day of nice weather so we clad the back porch ceiling with plywood. This will serve as a sub-base for the wood cladding we have been saving over the years. The original house has a lot of wide plank, heart pine on the walls and floor. We tried to save as much as possible during the demolition phase. If we have enough, we will use this to clad the porch ceiling.

Meanwhile, the walls were being painted inside. The front room is almost finished and should be ready for use by the end of the year. Julie's boyfriend dropped by to have a look....

Ceiling Panels

With the walls primed, we began staining our ceiling panels. Because of the cold weather we had to stain all 16 panels inside the house. We had panels drying everywhere! We are using 1/2" Sandyply plywood panels that will match the existing ceiling we installed 6 years ago. It's a lot harder to discard a piece of cabinet grade plywood than a sheet of drywall so we spent a lot of time laying out our cuts. Glen came back to give us a hand and the installation went off without a hitch.

Corner beads and Tape seams

With the drywall in place, Sam and his crew began taping and mudding. I had forgotten how drywall cleans up all the rough corners. After looking at rough framing for the last 8 months, the precision of corner beads and taped seams was a welcome addition to our little project. We haven't turned on our heat pump this season because of the dust and the cold weather was coming fast. Sam and the guys worked straight through Thanksgiving weekend to help us get ready for the upcoming cold spell.



Sam and his guys did a great job of cleaning up some difficult corners where the new house met the old.After a fresh coat of primer (yes, low VOC) we were ready for some paint!

Insulation

We used a Knauff insulation product called EcoBatt for this phase. It's a fiberglass insulation product but has a brown, rather than pink or yellow color to it. It is formaldehyde free and uses a specially formulated binder material to create the batts. For more details visit http://www.ecobatt.us/eco_batt.html. None of the workers on this page are wearing dust masks but we did. Fiberglass is fiberglass and it stinks to breath in. One thing I have learned about insulation that is worth noting; when you are installing insulation in ceilings, make sure you extend the insulation beyond the plane of the top plate. This can be tricky with cathedral ceilings but top plates conduct a lot of heat energy through the exterior soffits. We made it a point to do this in the new construction, and correct this in the original construction. This meant extending the ventilation baffles further into the soffits as well. Other areas of concern include corners, tees and headers within exterior walls. Corners and tees can be configured to accommodate insulation. These are hot spots of energy transfer in typical residential construction. Headers are another problem. Typically, headers are made with 1/2" plywood sandwiched between two (2x) members. This 1/2 material can be replaced with rigid insulation board to break up the thermal bridge. The plywood doesn't serve any structural purpose and transfers heat energy back and forth through the wall. I missed the header tip on our project but maybe you won't! You can find all these tips on the Earthcraft website.

Drywall continued...

The loft in the front room is coming along. Our little wood ladder is still around and just may end up becoming a permanent fixture.
Here is my to do list for the evening. The third bullet is one of the most important. For those of you familiar with the EarthCraft program, this is a key item. All the HVAC connections will be sealed with duct mastic. This is one area where the EC inspectors get tough. Although our project would not qualify for this program, we are following many of the guidelines. I will have to complete this before we close everything in with drywall. Unfortunately, they recommend against duct work in between cathedral ceiling joists, but this is our best option for air mixing at the front of the house.

One day we will actually use this front door!

Help from Bill and Don

We began installing drywall in early November and had help from Bill and Don. It was exciting to see the rooms take shape. Let's hope we didn't forget any wires or pipes!




















You gotta love that Roto-Zip!
Winter has begun to reach its cool fingers into our little construction project again. Memories of last fall's rain storms still haunt us all! We are all working like crazy to get our little house warm.
There will be many long nights ahead....

Chinese Drywall?

Let's hope not. We began installing drywall last weekend and made good progress with the help of Don, Bill and Chad. We will have more shots soon!

THE WOOD STOVE BOX

We began working on the concrete wood stove box last month. We built the formwork out of 3/4" plywood, welded wire mesh and reinforcing ties made from threaded rods. Within this box we ran 3/8" pex tubes that connect to the backup heating loop in the concrete floor. This loop is separate from the primary heating loop driven by the solar hot water panels. It will serve as a back up heating source at night or on cloudy days.
When complete, this will be a 3 1/2" thick, 3 sided concrete box that will transfer heat from the wood stove into the circulating water and down to the concrete floor. We hope to pour the box in the next few weeks. More details on this to follow....

We reworked some of the HVAC ductwork to fit the new room layouts. This return vent was relocated to the West wall of the bedroom overlooking the loft space. We have it sealed up right now while we work on some of the drywall. I have been applying duct mastic to all the joints to prevent any air leakage in the future. We are doing this to the existing registers as well. This is not a code requirement but it will help reduce the amount of air leakage in an around the supply registers throughout the house.
We increased the size of the opening in the original loft to have more free air movement throughout the house. The whole house exhaust vent on this side of the house is located above my head in this photo. With the new opening, we will be able to exhaust the original loft through this space.

HAPPY HALLOWEEN!

Happy Halloween everyone! We have been working hard over the last month and have lot of photos to show. There are still some gaps in our envelope so spiders and birds have been joining us inside our house. This guy was a little large for the unsealed window gaps so he hung out on the front porch for a week or so.

REMOVING THE DECK

While we cleaned up the front, Dad was getting things ready to demo the deck back on the East side. Without any type of cover, the deck took a beating from the sun and rain. We got 7 years out of a 5/4" treated pine deck but it now needs replacing. We decided to keep the structure and find a new decking material that would last a little longer.
We have looked into several options and now realize that the southeast U.S. has an abundance of trees but none of them are appropriate for exterior decking without the aid of modern chemistry. The West coast has Redwood, South America has Ipe and Garapa and Australia has Ironwood and Eucalyptus. (BTW, if you have never seen Garapa take a look, the stuff is beautiful!) I recently came across a product call Timbersil. It's made from SYP infused with glass to create a durable, non-toxic and non-corrosive material that is guaranteed to last 40 years. We will continue to look into this so stay tuned.

Steve decided to skip a beautiful day at his new beach home and join us for a little manual labor.
He and my dad are getting ready to open up the last wall that separates the old house from the new. As you can see all the wiring is being saved so some of this work was more like surgery than demolition.
The front room is opening up...

Meanwhile, on the West side of the house the interior walls were all coming down. The picture above is from the new entry looking back into the existing house. The one below is looking into the new space. We had some last minute design changes after we removed all the walls and spent that evening redesigning interiors in this area.

The exterior sheathing on the original house was tongue and groove southern yellow pine. We salvaged most of this for the ceiling area back on the East side.

EAST SIDE continued..

Not only is demolition dangerous, it's messy. Everyone worked hard this weekend and we all began to see the new house take shape.
With the East wall removed we can now begin to see our new space. I can't wait to get those colored panels for glass wall above.

THE ENVELOPE IS COMPLETE

We finished glazing in the corner window above the deck. The mullions and framing were cut from stock Douglas fir boards. Most of the glass was taken from left over samples that I have been collecting over the past few years at work. We have ordered colored recycled resin panels from Lightblocks that will eventually replace 6 of the glass panels shown here. These include blue, green and red panels and should be here in a month or so. We have been saving the exterior planks from the original house and will use these to clad the ceiling over the porch.
We began removing the south east corner of the house, including the window box I built 5 years ago. It turns out that the angle I chose for the roof here was off and we hope to correct this in the new renovation. The house is actually 18-20 degrees off of true south so this window was letting in more light during the spring and fall then we anticipated.
A temporary wall was built inside the house to separate the living space from the demo area. Our small house is a lot smaller now but it's livable. It's like living inside an art installation with really good light quality.