Drywall is up!

The drywall is up throughout the house! This next week will be spent mudding the drywall and covering all of the screws.

Take a look at some of the photos - everything looks like a sea of white right now.

Have your Say!

We erroneously ended up with Brown fascia and WHITE soffits....we were intending both to be Brown. We would like to hear your vote - what do you think of the Brown / White Combo???? Keep in mind that the house colour will eventually be yellow, not the white you see today.

Click on Comments to add your thoughts.

What's Going On?

It has been awhile since I've updated the blog that's because progress has been slow due to the holidays. There have been some changes though:

• The wall framing is just about complete


• The electrical system has been roughed in
  
• The plumbing has been roughed in
  
• The HRV (Heat Recovery Ventialation system) is in


• The Geo Thermal system has been installed and turned on. There is now heat in the radiant floor.


• The radiators have been installed upstairs.
  
• The fireplace has been installed...the chimney just needs to be put through the roof.


• The skirt roof installation is in progress.

Next week: Drywalling begins!

The main floor, with the back of the kitchen wall. (A pantry / cold storage room will be behind this).

The skirt roof is being added - there will be a gable roof in the middle section.

The fireplace (including a pot hanging inside for cooking!)

A very simple and straight forward maintenance room! This is just part of it...I think we'll need a week long seminar to figure out what everything is and how it works!


The radiators. What can you say....they are ugly as hell (not what we envisioned at all!), but we do need to heat the upper floor....


Some of the framing. This is the closet of the yoga room (great room upstairs), adjusted for shelves and separate storage in the top section.

A Sight for Sore Eyes

Work continues in the house on framing, electrical and plumbing.

In the meantime, our soon to be neighbours sent a photo taken Monday morning (Jan 12th) outside their window. It looks like we'll soon have some furry neighbours too!

The Present has been Unwrapped

For the first time in months, the house is visible from the outside! The tarps have been removed, the scaffolding is gone, and you can finally see what the house actually looks like.

Here is a picture of the front of the house, the side which faces South. The band in the middle of the house is where the skirt roof will be added - a second layer of roofing which will overhang the lower windows (and provide additional shade / cooling in the summer).

Here is a picture of the West side of the house....

And the view from the East side....

Eventually the house can be painted, but it has to wait a year so that the plaster can cure and the minor cracks can be repaired.



This week, the framing also began, and the divisions between the rooms upstairs are underway.

Plastering Complete!

At long last the plastering is complete, both inside and outside. Here are a couple photos of the inside.
Downstairs:

Upstairs:



The Well? Still waiting for the lab tests.....stay tuned!

Well?

Look at this innocent looking drilled well. It stands there solitary, like it doesn't have a care in the world. It turns out that this little guy (actually not so little, he's 192' tall), contains methane. It's funny how that little word can get you a whole lot of attention!

A couple phone calls, and our well site turned into a CSI investigation. The Fire Department, The Ministry of the Environment and a Government Geo-Scientist all came to pay a visit to our little well.

They extracted some very delicious and refreshing looking water, which they will be taking back to their labs to examine further. Would you like a taste?

Stay tuned - we await the findings from Gil Grissom, Horatio Caine, and friends to tell us how much methane is contained in our little water samples. Next, we get to invite an engineer to come and tell us how to properly deal with the methane found within our water.

One possibility is that an aeration tank needs to be installed to try to separate the gas from the water before it is pumped into the house. All I can hear is more well delays.....

The GOOD NEWS is that plastering has started inside the house, and about 1/2 of the upper floor is done. It looks truly amazing! The rounded walls around the window make the wait worthwhile!

Plaster at Last!

The well continues to be a far distant dream, but we have started the plastering by using a water tank instead. The cold weather makes it more difficult to plaster so it is great news that the plastering has started now before we have to contend with snow as well (which could be any day now). Here is a photo of John Crowe, the well driller, hard at work. Unfortunately he is finding more sand and clay than water.

There is an 1100 gallon water tank that is being used, which needs to be filled on a daily basis. It takes a lot of water for the plastering job!

In addition to water, sand and cement are used. You can see the big pile of sand.

The great news is... the Exterior plastering is done and it looks amazing!! I have added some pictures here but it really doesn't do justice to how fantastic it looks. It's hard to get a good photo with all of the scaffolding that is still there.

Next week - plastering inside the house!

Here are some photos of JP from Generation Solar (http://www.generationsolar.com/) who came to do a site assessment to help us situate our Solar panels.

And here is a photo of the pipes that have been laid for the Geo Thermal system. (5 loops, each 300 feet long).