stuff we forgot to post last year

last summer our front sunroom walls looked like this:

the wood between the windows was very rotten, so we decided we should rebuild that whole wall.  since we needed to accomplish this all in one day so the house wouldn’t be left open and vulnerable overnight, we enlisted the help of a few friends to brace up the roof and frame out the whole wall in one afternoon

here is is braced up with the windows removed:

since this room will be part of the house we will be making into our music studio, we decided to only put one large laminated window in the front wall.   laminated windows are better at sound isolation than regular run of the mill windows.  but they are also more expensive and a lot heavier.

here is the wall completed, before we installed the window:

the floor in this area of the house had many holes and was also very rotten, so we decided to take up the floor boards, add sisters to the floor joists that had sunken in too much, and put down a new subfloor.  we kept all of the salvageable  floor boards we could, by carefully using the flat bar on the groove side to lift it up and back so the tongue remains undamaged.  it doesn’t always work, but i’d say for every ten boards we tried to get up, probably one would get a little damaged.  then we took out the nails and piled them up to save for another project.

we finished our subfloor just in time to bring home a little puppy

walls and windows

we let the concrete set for a few days and then we started working on those block walls.  because the floor in there was previously a few feet higher than this on grade concrete slab, all of the window openings were way too high.   so our first step was to cut the window openings down lower.   we used a circular saw.

then we smashed out the blocks between the cuts with a sledge

then we framed out the window

we did this for the six windows openings and one door opening in this part of the house

then we put a layer of tyvek, and then a layer of that extra polyiso rigid foam board we have laying around.  that’s an r8.

then we framed out a wall in from of that, ran our electric wires, and put in roxul insulation between the studs.  that gives us r23 for these walls.  here are photos of this section from when we bought the house and now:

woods brother in law owns a window company and gave us this salvaged wooden door for our back entry.   we will eventually refinish it.   also in this picture you can see the passive solar working… the south facing windows are all letting the sun in and it’s hitting that concrete and heating it up.  if you put your hand on those sun spots, it will feel much warmer than the rest of the floor.  this will hopefully help add supplemental heat to this room, making this design more efficient.

hydronic radiant heat

we decided to go with a heat system called hydronic radiant, which can really be done many ways, but simply put you have hot water running through pipe under or in your floor.

the reasons for choosing this type of heating system:

- a forced air system blows warm air through a system of ductwork.  it also blows dust, pollen, etc. around and if you have allergies, this can make them worse.

- the radiant system heats the floor and objects in your room instead of the air, so you feel warm without having something blowing on you.  this also means you can set the thermostat much lower.  And the heat doesn’t rise as fast if it’s starting in the floor and the floor is holding that heat in.

- we are planning on turning half of our home into a music studio and we figured having ductwork would make sound isolation very difficult.   (in reality, it posed other problems that we didn’t think of… one of them being that we now can’t have a floating floor, which is the most effective way to ‘soundproof’ your floor)

so…

we decided to try a couple different methods.    half of our house still had a dirt floor, so with that section we decided to embed the pipe in concrete.  the other half of the house has wooden floor joist and subfloor, so for that section we ran the pex loops between the bays and stapled them up underneath the floor.

we got lots of information from  radiantdesigninstitute.com and ordered a layout from them.  the price was low for the amount of questions and support they gave us throughout the process.

for the section in concrete we did the following steps:

1. leveled out the dirt that was on the floor so we can get a good even start

2. figured out the height of the finished concrete by adding up the thickness of all of the layers of gravel, insulation, and concrete, then marked a line on the perimeter of the room by using a laser level (can also use transit)

3. put about an eight inch tall strip of 2″ rigid foam board touching the top of the perimeter line.  this is known as a bond break and it ensures that the heat from the concrete floor will not leach out from the sides through the exterior wall.   we also taped the seams with tyvek tape.  this bond break also served as a guide for where to pour the concrete up to.

4. shoveled in 4″ of gravel and tamped it down with a plate tamper.  this got the gravel nice and compact.

5. laid down a vapor barrier.  we bought a roll of 6 mil black, and the roll was large enough to do 2 layers, so we went ahead and added the second layer.  that way if the first layer gets any punctures from the gravel, the second layer should still do the job.

6.  then for the layer of insulation, we decided to also double it up.   earlier in the year, we got a large pile of polyiso boards from a contractor who over ordered.  they have a cardboard face to them, and are generally used for flat roof insulation.  we used that as our first layer of insulation, which we believe has an insulation value of R8.  then we bought 2″ thick boards of the blue dow rigid foam board (R10) for the final layer.  we taped the seams once they were laid down.

7.  then a layer of wire to reinforce the concrete

8. then it was time to lay out the loops of pex.  pex is now being used instead of copper pipe, which makes this type of heat system much more affordable and hopefully more likely to last longer without breaking.   we secured the pex to the wire with 8″ zip ties

9.  we hired a couple of guys to come in and pour the floor as well as some steps going down to the basement. we put a pressure test on the two loops of pex to make sure there weren’t any air leaks during the pour.

that’s pretty much it for that section.   we believe the concrete section will work better than the wooden section because mass stores heat very well, so when that concrete is heated up, it will stay warm on its own for a good amount of time.  also because our house is south facing, we put a big window on that side of the house and the sun will shine in, hit the concrete, and warm it up.  that’s called passive solar.  in the summer the sun will not hit the concrete floor because we have a good overhang and the summer sun is much much higher in the sky than the winter sun.

in all, we have 6 loops of the pex, and each loop is between 300 and 400 feet long.  500 feet is the maximum length of pipe you should use before the water in the pex loses too much heat.   we ran all of the pex in the system to the manifold, but for the soldering of copper, pumps, heat exchanger, and expansion tank from the manifold to the water heater, we had our plumber friend george help us.

for this system you can choose between tankless water heater, boiler, or water tank.  we went with a high efficiency water tank because the tankless weirds us out a little and the boiler is too powerful for the size of our house.  this water heater also heats all of our domestic water.

kitchen floor

it’s been a year since we bought the house, and finally we have a floor over the old kitchen area.  with the help of a couple of our friends, we were able to choose where the perimeter ledger boards should go, and then wood and i framed out the joists.   we were baffled for a very long time about what to do with the concrete platform in the corner, but because we raised the floor up a couple inches we were able to insulate it pretty well with some scrap rigid foam board and spray foam between the joists.  since we will eventually be running our heat system through our floor with hydronic radiant tubing, we definitely didn’t want any of that heat to escape through that concrete to the outside.  we couldn’t take the platform out because part of the house is resting on it.

here’s the framing job we did:

and here’s a before and after of this part of the house:

 

a small room

we just finished building a little insulated room in the attic to go get warmed up in and have a place to lock up our tools.   here it is before we finished it off. the church across the street had some extra drywall scraps, so we ended up using those for most of the walls.  we learned how to frame out a window and door, and also run electricity in for a switch, receptacles, and a recessed lights.  electricity is the only straight forward thing we’ve done so far, so we liked that part.

 

we’ll eventually be building a cordwood wall, which is basically logs debarked, cut up into foot long sections, and stacked with mortar.  we cut down a couple of catalpa trees that were too close to the house, and are now working on debarking and preparing them to air dry for about a year before we can safely use them without having them crack.    normally it’s only feasible to debark wood by hand in the spring, when the bark easily peels off due to the sap flow, so since these trees were cut in the winter, we bought an attachment for the chainsaw that debarks and also can notch wood.

we also decided on buying green log slices from a sawmill, sometimes called “natural edge” boards.  we’ll also have to dry these out for about a year.  our plan is to use them for siding.  at only 60 cents a board foot, we’ll be saving a lot of money if they don’t crack too much as they dry.  we read that sealing the ends with a product called anchor seal will prevent checking (splitting) at the ends.  hopefully that will work.

the next immediate project is to frame out this floor, and to build new stairs to the basement.  we’ll put the stairs where we cut into that block:

the roof the whole roof and nothing but the roof

we’re done with the roof.  we put the last shingle on the day before christmas eve, and right before the first snow storm.

we were able to recycle all of the old shingles.   the price to have them recycled is a lot cheaper (around 39 dollars a ton) than putting them in the dump  (89 dollars a ton).  it just took us a while to separate them out from other debris and leaves.

 

roofing… still…

well, we finished roofing the back of the house, which took a long time because a lot of the rafters and boards had to be replaced along the way, and we had to set up ladder and roof jacks with planks, which took a while.   we’re nearly done shingling the front also.  just a little flashing and finishing up to do.

first we took all of the shingles off.  i (nicole) hung down from a harness and wood worked on the six layers of shingles on the ridge.

 

 

then we patched the rafters from the inside and the rotten boards from the roof jacks.

 

here’s a before and after of the back of the house:

we also took out all of the floor joists in the long narrow part of the house, so we can put radiant tubes in concrete for heat.    we found about 27 skeletons.

our next step will be cleaning the yard and recycling all of the old shingles, and then working on windows and floors.

 

 

dumpsters, demos, domes

we finished framing out the roof, and we found enough plywood scraps from construction dumpsters around town to use as sheathing.   we had to buy a few boards of plywood for areas where our scraps wouldn’t do, but overall we used mostly what we took out of the dumpsters, which we feel good about.

we found a restaurant that is being demolished this week, and we bought all of the interior rough cut cedar wood for a couple hundred dollars, and we got a ton of it.   wood’s parents came out to help us pry it off the walls, take all the nails out, and strap it to our truck.  it was a ton of work, but we think it’ll be worth it.  otherwise the wood would have been going to the landfill.

we also took a trip up to vermont to visit our friends heather and lori, who were having a work party to start their home, which will be a 13 foot  superadobe dome.    basically the process involves agricultural feedbags that are filled with earth and sometimes a little concrete, laid out in a circle using a center compass, and then tamped down.  between each layer is barbed wire, so the bags don’t slip at all.   we were only able to stay for a few days, but we got it good and started.  hopefully we’ll be able to go back to help them finish it up in a couple of months.

tearing down a roof when it’s 105 degrees

we decided to work on the part of the roof that has the most leaks.   this room will be part of our passive solar design/experiment.   the basic concept is that the summer sun is much higher in the sky than the winter sun, so we measured the amount of overhang we will need to block the summer sun out,  while still letting in winter sun.   we’re going to build a wall there that is very dense, either out of something like cob (clay, sand, straw) or bricks or something along those lines.  in the winter, the sun will hit that wall and because it is dense, it will hopefully store that heat and heat part of our home.   what we’ve studied is that even after the sun goes down, that wall will still have the heat stored in it and will release it throughout the evening.

here is a picture of the main concept, only this design is mainly using the floor as the thermal mass instead of a nearby wall:

we are trying to find salvaged or free materials for as many things as possible.  if anyone has ideas on something to use for the decking (the material that supports the roof material)  please let us know.  most builders would use plywood here, but we are trying to not use plywood.  it’s easy and cheap, but the life cycle of plywood isn’t something that’s very attractive to us.   we are trying to think of how something is made, and who it’s effecting, is it something that would be safe for those people, and would it be safe in a home, how long will it last, and when it is no longer usable, where does it go?  plywood has so many toxins in it (formaldehyde is a common one) that we’re pretty sure the people making it are probably sick from it, and on top of that, even though having some in our home may not effect our own health much either way, why take the chance if we don’t have to?   plywood can’t be recycled, so it goes into a dump with all of the chemicals that are in it.   it seems much more wise to use something that won’t make people sick, and can be burned or recycled later on when it’s no longer usable.   the down side to this is that buying sustainably harvested lumber is very expensive.   there are so many materials that are perfectly usable that people are throwing out or don’t need, so we are trying to find things like that.

ps we did end up using plywood for the subfloor in this room because we got it for free from a contractor who was about to throw it out.

we also bought an angle grinder to cut out the pipes in our basement.  nicole wore her mom’s old steel worker hard hat:

update

we haven’t posted anything in a while, but here are some new pictures of our house, and some of the progress we’ve made.   we finally cleared everything out and also now have electricity.   we put in 2 beams and raised the ceiling joists, and will be starting on the roof this week.