Old house to new

This is an experimental video showing a sequence of pictures of the old house last year, and a sequence of pictures of the new house under construction, all from the same perspective across the street.

Exterior almost done

The front porch, siding, and trim almost complete.

Roofing and trim

Jake and Bill finish roofing on the North side. The flying rakes on the front are complete, and the whole roof trim really looks nice.

New boiler

The boiler was delivered yesterday to be installed tomorrow (presumably not in one day). And yes, it's the right one and the right size.

Front porch

Our neighbor Ray admires the new front porch. The Ipe is beautiful and the porch is really well proportioned. There are some problems with the spacing of the boards, which we'll try to fix, but the Ipe is pretty difficult to work with.

Nice surprise

The default wiring plan from MSI is to wire just about every room for telephone and cable TV. We told them not to do cable TV, but let them go ahead with telephone wiring even though we use a cordless phone system. I figured we could use the phone wiring for some other purpose, or pull better cable through their outlets someday if we wanted Ethernet.

Well, when MSI said "telephone" they actually installed cat-5e Ethernet cabling and the corresponding RJ-45 jacks. I don't really know why, and I'm not sure we'll use too much of it since we use wireless LAN. But having an Ethernet run through to the attic is definitely helpful, and today I discovered it's already done.

We'll connect the house to the internet in May. No cable, no phone, just internet.

KHS back from London

I'm back from a quick trip to London on behalf of a client. I hadn't much time for sightseeing, but did manage to swing by Westminster Abbey to see Uncle David, a distant relative. The abbey does manage to uplift the mortal spirit through its soaring gothic arches, despite being haphazardly strewn with endless tombs and memorials. We Scots may rejoice especially in the return of our Stone to its rightful land.

In London we stayed near Hyde Park:

Basement floor

The concrete slab for the basement floor was poured yesterday. Here's the view down the basement stairs:

And the result by the end of the day.

The cool thing about buying yard after yard of concrete is you get to write your name in it...

Ipe porch floor

We've decided to build the front porch floor with a hardwood called Ipe (ee-pay). The original plan was to use a recycled wood/plastic material like Trex or TimberTech. However, those materials don't really look very attractive, they do show wear and wear out, and when they do wear out you bury them in a landfill. Ipe is beautiful, strong, and very durable, and will probably outlast the porch structure.

Roof trim detail

The roof trim is that of a traditional Maine colonial, with

• Roof pitch 10/12


• 12" eave overhang


• 6" flying rake

In this picture, the slight notch at the end of the frieze and fascia boards doesn't match. The frieze is going to be narrowed slightly to make them consistent.

Note that there's no vent in the soffit, in fact there's no vent anywhere in the roof. The roof will be sealed and insulated with icynene foam - what's called a "hot roof" with no ventilation required.

Window trim detail

This is a closeup of the window trim on the south side. The important points are:

• Band molding around the edge.


• Heritage sill.


• Clapboards align at base of sill

If you look closely, you can also see the clapboards are mounted rough-side-out. We thought carefully about this: the smooth side makes a cleaner and crisper sort of look, and 90% of the clapboarded houses in Newton are smooth-side-out. However, the rough side takes paint/stain better, and indeed about half the smooth-side-out houses have some failing paint on them. We also like the bit of naturalized texture from the rough side of the wood.

Heating system capacity

One of our objectives for this house is energy efficiency, and so far we're doing well on that score. The house is well situated on the site, with lots of glass on the south side and not so much on the north. There's no fireplace or chimney to waste heat, and no air conditioning to waste money. It's tight and well insulated, though not "super-insulated" like a true high-performance home.

So now we need to install the heating system for it, and the question is: what capacity is required? It's a simple question, with a simple answer, but it's very common for boilers and furnaces to be oversized and inefficient. Traditionally, this is because installers didn't want to risk dealing with unsatisfied cold customers in the middle of winter. There's also a tradition of engineering conservatism and "fudge-factors" that continues to this day.

We observed this phenomenon at work this week, in the initial proposals for installing our boiler. The heating engineer at MSI sized all the baseboards, according to heat loss projections for each room. They got the important part right, which is the relative balance of heat for each room. They didn't know what sort of a system we would drive the baseboards with, though, or how warm we want the house. So their analysis included baseboard that could be driven at high temperature by a traditional boiler, and also included a 40% "safety margin", which is the maximum margin recommended.

The first proposal was to install a boiler capable of driving all 130 feet of baseboard with 600 BTU/hour per foot, plus another 40% "safety margin". This led them to recommend a 155,000 BTUh condensing boiler. My own heat loss calculation concluded that the house needed 40,000 BTUh to maintain 65 degrees in 0 degree weather, so something was clearly amiss. In fact, at the lower temperatures of modern boilers, the 130 feet of baseboard only consumes 1/2 the heat capacity.

We needed a more credible analysis, so our architect got a pro to do a quick heat loss estimate. He used a whole-house method comparable to mine, and got about the same answer except he recommended a 40% margin on top of the whole-house loss.

So his recommendation was 67,000 btuh, my calculation was 64,000 btuh, and we'll go with a boiler that's rated for 80,000 btuh (what's called the I=B=R rating). That's still probably too big, but it's a modulating boiler which means it can turn down its fire automatically, so the efficiency won't suffer too much.

Heat loss calculation

I just consider the house as an aggregate envelope - the room-by-room allocation of baseboard capacity has already been done by MSI heating engineers. There are five sources of heat loss: walls, windows, basement, attic, and infiltration. I presume 0 deg outside temp and 65 deg inside temp. Considered in turn:

• Exterior walls comprise 2851 sq.ft., at R20 lose 9266 btu/hour.


• Exterior windows comprise 573 sq.ft., at U=0.34 lose 12663 btu/hour.


• Basement ceiling is 1142 sq.ft., at R20 lose 1428 btu/hour (assumes basement at 40 deg soil temperature).


• Attic roof is 1600 sq.ft, at R20 lose 5196 btu/hour.


• Attic gable walls are 250 sq.ft., at R20 lose 813 per hour.


• Infiltration assuming 0.4 ACH (9000 cu.ft.) lose 10689 btu/hour.

Total is 40,000 btu/hour. I think the 0.4 infiltration is conservative, and the house should actually be in the 0.2-0.3 range according to its construction practices.

Siding and Trim

Good progress last week on the window trim, roof trim, and siding. They started on the South side, will proceed to West, North, then build the front porch in a couple weeks before finishing that side. With good weather, the exterior should be pretty complete by the end of March.

In bad weather, there's lots of interior carpentry to be done this week: seaming the walls and floors together at the module boundaries, and building the basement stairs.

Basement still full of snow

The basement still has about 1-2" of icy snow, from the storm before we installed the house. We melted the first 6" with a large propane heater (serious carbon monoxide hazard), then switched to calcium chloride which made some progress over the weekend. But it's going to be cold this week, so I doubt we're going to get it melted and ready to pour the concrete slab floor.

Kitchen sink

Here's the kitchen sink, from my designated position in front of it: I'm the dishwasher in the family. The aperture looks through to the family room so I'm not isolated after dinner. (This is one of those panoramic photographs, so the lines look curved but they're really straight.)

MSI did a great job installing the sink under the solid countertop, the only problem is it's the wrong sink. I wanted a large single bowl, not two small ones. With two small bowls you can't soak a pot, and you have to choose which sink to wash things in, so the gunk goes down the disposal.

It was perfectly clear on the spec, so I'm sure they'll replace it if I insist, but I hate to see good work torn apart just because of preference. Maybe we'll just live with it for a while.

Utility reconnection stumbles out of the gate

One of the benefits of modular construction is that the electrical circuits are wired and inspected on the factory floor, so once their installed it's easy to get the real electrical service up and running. Many projects don't even need temporary electrical service, and we're fortunate to have generous neighbors who let us borrow a circuit's worth.

Not so easy in Newton, however...

The modules are wired, the panel installed and half-wired, and grounded to two 8-foot copper rods driven under the basement. But the electrical inspector says we can't get service until the water line is in. Since we can't dig for the water line until April 15, we're going to have to keep running on temporary power.

National Electrical Code says service must be grounded through two electrodes, just like we did. The water line, if present, may substitute for one of the electrodes but you still need two.

Massachusetts Code is slightly different, says that if a water line is present you must ground the electrical service through it.

Newton interpretation is that if a water line will be present you must ground the electrical service through it. No water, no electricity.

Kind of pointless and irritating, but not really a big deal. We are going to run into bigger problems in the utility reconnection, though: the water, gas, and sewer fiefdoms all have their own issues and inertias.

Movies for Macs

I can't encode movies for Quicktime, but here they are in Google Video, which should work for many viewers...

Module setting day 1

Module setting day 2