House completed

Here's the house just before the move last Wednesday, taken with the new Lumix camera B gave me for my birthday. The house is complete and ready for occupancy, the landscape is about half done.

Michael Shea is our landscaper, his guys Kevin and Roger are building the stone walls using Pennsylvania Flats. The wall along the driveway replaces the one from the previous house. The walled garden beds below the front porch also serve a functional purpose: they reduce the drop off the porch to 18", so we don't need a safety railing across the front.

The front walk will be made of the S&H bricks from the back porch of the old house.

Painting prep

We're painting the interior ourselves. This means we're also prepping the interior ourselves. Originally this wouldn't have been too bad, since the house came prepped and primed from the factory. But then we ripped out about 400 square feet of various walls and ceilings for building inspections and rework.

The plasterers who finished the attic also did the patching. They tried to use plaster as much as possible, but where they were joining with the factory drywall they had to use joint compound (mud).

I didn't fully appreciate the difference then, but I sure do now. Plaster veneer is skimmed on, flat and level, and is extremely hard and virtually unsandable. It has to be done right the first time. Drywall mud is soft and sloppy, and cannot be done right the first time. Instead, you put too much on and then sand it off flat. This took me a week of late nights, generating more than 10 pounds of fine dust.

But now all the plaster/drywall is prepped pretty well, with a coat of a sealer called GARDZ that seals in the alkaline lime plaster for painting.

Almost there

Sorry for the long delay. I lost my camera, and have been terribly busy.

The house is completely working, and has passed its final electrical and plumbing inspections. Final fire and building inspections will be on Tuesday, and we move in on Wednesday, May 30.
My birthday is Tuesday - someone has a BIG wrapping job ahead of them.

We may not actually have a certificate of occupancy on Wed. It can take up to 10 days for the city health dept to sign off on occupancy, although there's no inspection involved. But there's no problem moving our possessions, and the worst case is we have to spend nights at our neighbors house.

More plastering today

The plasterers didn't finish on Friday, plan to finish today.

Systems up and running

The electricity is on and complete, all lights and outlets are working. The gas meter was installed on Friday, and we turned the boiler on on Saturday. So now there's water and hot water.

We're preparing for final electrical, plumbing, and fire inspections later this week.

Sheetrock tomorrow

Attic walls and ceiling go up tomorrow, along with patches in the rest of the house, like the kitchen and entry ceilings which we opened for plumbing work. Everything is insulated and wired and ready to be closed up. My son and a friend of his helped me pull several runs of hot pink cat5e ethernet cable from the attic to the basement last weekend, along with a shielded cable for balanced audio between family room and attic.

I also ran simple phone wire to connect our telephone ringer, a nice two-tone bell that Betsy's grandmother rented from AT&T for some 40 years. After her grandmother passed away, Betsy called AT&T and told them the bell had been paid for decades ago so we were keeping it.

Electrical service?

Our electrician Chris Veliotis, setting up the electrical service again yesterday. This is our third or fourth attempt at this problem, and I think we've finally got it.

Electrical Code requires that the main service line stay clear of any window opening, such as that bathroom window on the corner, by 36" to each side and by 0" on the top. The code also requires a "drip loop" before the wire enters that conduit. Although the code allows the electric company to be pretty sloppy about how they install that drip loop (they can have 12-18" of extra slack), the final result can't violate the clearance requirements.

If you then add our inspector's incorrect calculation of the roof clearance requirement, and my desire not to run big ugly conduit all across the front of the house, you get quite a puzzle. The miscalculation was calling our porch roof flat, even though its pitch of 2.5:6.5 is greater than the required 4:12 - which means the service line has to be 8' above that roof, instead of the 3' requirement for a pitched roof.

But third time's a charm, and with that little turn around the corner I think we'll be fine. We might even have electricity this week.

Laundry room floor

The laundry room is on the second floor, near our bedroom. The washer and dryer are Bosch Next 500 models, which are high-speed front-loaders. The word is that they can vibrate a lot, although you can minimize that with proper levelling. So we wanted a floor that would dampen vibration and absorb noise.



The structure of the laundry room turns out to be ideal, and I still wonder whether MSI did this deliberately. The floor of this 5x6 room is supported by 6 engineered joists, which are connected only to the band joist at the edge of the house. That is, there's no direct connection between the second floor structure and the first floor ceiling, they're decoupled. We added some 2x6 cross-bracing for good measure.

The actual floor is 3/4" plywood with 1/2" durock. The tile is set on a waterproof membrane, so we don't need a pan under the washer to catch water: in the unlikely case of failure, the little water the washer holds can just leak onto the floor. (Washer pan/drains are problematic because they aren't allowed to drain into the sewer.)

Under the floor is 4" of rock wool for noise control, plus rigid insulation around the exterior. The laundry machines will rest on 1/2" compliant grommets.

I hope this makes the laundry room acceptably quiet, because I don't know what more we could do.

Kitchen tile

Our tile sub, Bob Ziegler, will finish the first floor kitchen/hall tile today. In this (lousy) picture from Saturday he's about half done, the diagonal layout means lots of pieces need to be sawcut.

The upstairs tile is all laid square and will go quickly, he'll be done this week.

It looks beautiful, I'm very glad we opted for diagonal layout. Will post cleaner pictures later.

Fire retardant paint and fire safety

I ordered an intumescent paint additive which adds fire retardance to any latex paint, mixed it into a can of white primer, and gave it a quick test. It works!

The stormboard on the left was painted with plain latex primer. The stormboard on the right was painted with the same primer, with an additive called Flame Stop III mixed in. They were both exposed to a candle flame. The untreated board is shown after 90 seconds, when it ignited and sustained flame. The treated board is shown after 180 seconds, and still hasn't ignited.

Intumescent coatings work by forming a foam at high temperature. In a thick industrial coating, the foam would be inches thick and really fireproof the structure. In a thin paint the defense is minimal but significant.

We'll use this primer in the kitchen, behind all the appliances and cabinets.

Other fire-safety measures include backing the refrigerator, dishwasher, and stove cavities with rock wool, and wrapping bathroom fans with UL94-V0 nitrile foam. These materials are all good sound absorbers, as well as fire retardant.

Then there's all the building-code measures, like sealing floor penetrations with fire retardant caulk and foam, hardwired smoke detectors, egress codes, etc.

Attic radiant barrier installed

The outer half of the radiant barrier was installed today in the attic - all that shiny aluminized housewrap. The early returns suggest that it works: air temperature got up to 83 degrees today, shingle temperature reached 135 degrees, but the attic temperature didn't get above 85. The attic is still completely open to the rest of the house, until the walls are built, so it's absorbing all the heat load from the house as well as solar.

The rest of the barrier goes right under the drywall. I'm going to leave the lower half (cripple walls) unfaced, to avoid more interference with wireless signals. So far both cellular and wlan signals seem to be unaffected.

New gas line

Our new gas line was installed today. We thought they would reuse the existing line, perhaps with a new sleeve, but instead they trenched a new line to a new location across the street. The trench was actually subterranean, made by a "trenchless impact borer", which looks like a 4" torpedo with a hydraulic line.

I warned them they didn't want to dig 4 feet down in our previously excavated sand, but they don't seem to listen to homeowners. Didn't lose the utility pole, they just had to go wider than expected.

That black thing on the wall above the gas pipe is actually the chimney for the new house. With no fireplace the only exhaust is from the gas boiler, and since it's condensing, the exhaust temperature and waste products are minimal.

New water line

Our new water line, 1" shiny copper, was installed on Saturday. Michael Shea did the excavation, Newton public works did the plumbing. The water meter will be installed Thursday - I requested it three weeks ago as soon as we got the installation schedule. Until then, we have unmetered access to Boston's finest Quabbin Gold.

Catching the breeze

Finally a nice spring day and I can open some windows. Working on the first floor with a window open at each corner of the house (plus the front door) is remarkably pleasant. The breeze flows through the house, and it feels like there must be an ocean view somewhere near.

Icynene foam insulation

Anderson Insulation insulated the attic with Icynene foam today. Very cool stuff: here's a quick movie of the fellow who spent about an hour spraying the attic, followed by before and after pictures of the attic peak.