First of all - Obligatory chicken picture. This awesome chicken portrait was taken by Paul. I just might have to post this image to Facebook. Darn chickens did some serious pecking at the pink foam around the foundation. I'm torn between hoping they suffer from that stupidity and hoping they aren't toxic to eat, now.
Now that we got past that, we are into putting things back together again. Here we see the giant vent covers that Wayne so skillfully crafted up. We finally put them into the wall to terminate the air exchange tubes. Last week there was a picture of the perforated tubes wrapped in poly film. We, instead, decided to splice the perforated ends below the ground level to non-perf pipe inside the wall.
The North wall has been full of utilities that we've had to figure out how to install in this wall. Above is a picture of a sewer vent, and an electric box for communication conduit and wires.
Below is Wayne working his magic, again, in the form of a mini, super insulated damper for the combustion air intake for the fireplace.
In other news, as the roofers cut in the ridge vent, I got a chance to check on the settling of the insulation in the spacer trusses. When I blew it in there, I filled it to the top, counting on it settling a few inches to leave a ventilation space. This is what sweet success looks like.
Another success this week was breaking into the old flues from the basement utility room. One came along nicely. The other abhorrent and ill-constructed flue from hell took more work, but was eventually re-appropriated for duct duty. It was a relief, once I saw it, to know that I never actually used it as a flue while we have been in the house. These two flues will serve to bring fresh air up into the bedrooms and to bring hot air from upstairs down into the basement.
One totally awesome pre-rinse faucet arrived. It's huge. It's the big-gun in my dish washing plan. It provides tactical support for the stainless sink and stainless counter top.
The two biggest achievements for the week, though, are the completion of the dense-packing in the walls, and the beginning of the window installation. After months of speculation about what we would use to fill in between inner and outer windows, we were pleased to find that these windows will work nicely immediately adjacent to each other. This is largely because of the fact that both sashes slide and are removable. The big triple sash windows may be different, though. We're still looking into this.
We went through much discussion on how, exactly, to flash and seal the windows and handle the spaces between them now that we're doing a gap between the siding and the drainage plane.
So, on Friday, we went on a window installing rampage. We got all but 4 of the outer windows installed! (not counting the basement windows).
Here is a picture of some very beautiful windows. That amount of south windows should be effective.
And at the end of the day there were several proud carpenters in the house. And right after that, Shawn took off on his long awaited honey-moon. We're hoping to get postcards.
The biggest problem with the windows is that I should've ordered them with a clear sealant instead of plain wood. So I bought some polyurethane and with the help of Sean Muller we got a good start at sealing the wood this weekend.
When it came time to do some wiring in the kitchen and actually figuring out what wires went where, Sam and I ended up tearing out a bunch of sheetrock and learning quite a bit about what circuits went where. We only found about 4 abominations that left me feeling vaguely victimized. Not bad. Like so much else about this project, it's so nice to know that those have been fixed. Stay tuned for next weeks progress.
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