Our Green Home...

We wanted a "green" home, but this is not exactly how I had imagined it. I learned from now on to always try a sample on the house before you go ahead and paint the whole thing. The light green looked a lot more like sage than mint on the paint chip... but what's done is done, it is starting to grow on us.

Otherwise things are moving right along and by the end of this week I think the drywall will be finished. It has really changed the look of the inside of the house. Below are a couple sneek peeks.



This is looking almost from one end of the house down to the other.



This is a look down into the front of the house from up on the balcony under the clerestory above.


Last weekend we were blessed with an 80 degree day and we started working on the barn. Basically after we started we realized that we needed to actually tear down half of it, it truely was beyond repairing. We will try to save the siding and as much wood as possible for future chicken coop. The kids had fun making teeter totters from some of the wood. While Karen and Aki made a "bouncey" board...

Cool Whip !!

First it's gophers, and now it looks like someone came and blasted the inside of our house with Cool Whip! The kids, and Karen would like that, but actually it is our new icynene foam insulation. This was not the way we had planned to go with insulating the house originally, but after I had our Energy Star home rater take a pre-insulation look at the house, he thought it was the way to go to seal of any and all exterior penetrations.

In a rather unconventional approach here in the South, but not unheard of, and perhaps the "wave of the future," our attic and roof will not be ventilated. We have insulated and sealed off the entire exterior envelop of the house including the soffits and attic. Our attic will be be semi conditioned and the temperature there should be within about 10 degrees of the inside house temperature most of the time. This is a big advantage as we have almost all of our duct work running through the attic. So when the HVAC system is not running the duct work will not excessively heat up or cool down. That should prevent that initial blast of hot or cold air we had in our last house. I had some concerns about the asphalt shingles overheating with an unvented roof system, but studies have actually shown that such roofs only get about 10 degrees hotter then a vented roof. Our shingles are a light color and will still be covered under usual 30yr. warranty.

We had essentially every crack in the interior framing caulked to prevent any air leakage. The foam insulation goes in as a liquid and quickly expands to 100x its original thickness to fill in all of the cracks and voids that conventional FG insulation could not.( There are some pretty neat demo videos on line if you Google icynene videos , if your interested in seeing how they install it) Since the house is now so tightly sealed we were also told that we needed to install a ventilator system to exhaust some internal air from the house and bring in fresh air. So we installed a small unit called an ERV(Energy Recovery Ventilator) It will be set to run 20 minutes or so out of every hour. During that time it will exhaust air over an energy recovery core and preheat/cool the fresh incoming air(passively) and add to/remove moisture based on the time of year. Otherwise we would have no air exchange inside the house except for when we went in and outside. The fireplace does have it's own air intake duct from the outside so that will not be an issue. So, again, if all goes as planned we should see very reasonable heating and cooling costs and recover our investment in all of this technology in about 50 years! Ha! Not really that long, and to be honest it is more the thought of being proactive in reducing our energy consumption then recouping our costs. I would estimate that our annual heating/cooling/electric costs combined will be about what we just paid for natural gas only in our current rental house for just the past TWO months.

This week the house should be drywalled, at least the initial phase of hanging it. We still need to have our well drilled and septic system installed.

Otherwise we have ordered our meaties (50- late March arrival) and turkeys(15- late April arrival), a true sign that spring is just around the corner!!

Gopher Problem !??

So we had not been out to the land and house project for several days, ... when we arrived to see how the building progress was going we were shocked to see what appeared to be the invasion by some type of prehistoric sized gopher! To our surprise there was a five foot high mound of dirt all the way across the field!




On closer inspection we realized that it was really the beginning of the trench for the closed loop of the geothermal heat pump system we will be using for our main heating and cooling system for the house.

At the bottom of this 6-7 foot deep trench will run x2 ~ 2 inch diameter, 1000 feet long loops of polyethylene pipes in which an eco- friendly antifreeze like liquid will be circulated underground from the house through this loop to extract heat from the rather constant 55-60 degree earth at this depth. In the summer it will use this cool temperature for AC purposes. The actual heat pump unit including the blower is smaller then a regular sized refrigerator, and supposedly as loud as said refrigerator when operating. It is touted to be one of the most energy efficient ways to heat and cool. Coupled with our passive solar design, and hopefully well sealed and insulated housing envelope, it should mean minimal usage of fossil fuels in the years to come. Unlike our current rental house which just left us with a $500/ December natural gas bill! Which might be "OK" had we actually had a comfortably warm house, but that certainly was not the case.

The house is coming along, last week saw that the siding was mostly completed. This is not the color the house will be, but just that of the siding itself.

We are hoping to fix up a couple issues this week, have the HVAC install completed, and maybe electrical wiring started. If all goes well we may have the garage shed and barn wired for electricity as well by the same electrician . That is the quick update for the week.

B-r-r-r!

Wah, wah, wah, ... all I seem to be doing lately is complaining about the cold weather down here. I know it could be worse, it just is not supposed to be this cold in NC! And what is with all of this snow!?

Not a lot going on down here lately. Karen and the kids have hopped int he Explorer and drove all the way to Tulsa, OK. She reports an uneventful trip, and said it was really not that bad of a drive. They will spend a week there with her family over Christmas before they head back.

I am holding the fort down, working over the holiday and keeping an eye on our house building project. Even though things are probably going well overall , I think I am going to end up with an ulcer as I fret over every little detail. This is absolutely the last time we will do this!! ( H-m-m-m, I recall uttering those same words about seven years ago!)

We do have our roof shingled now, windows were installed last Saturday. Plumbing going in this week. GT heat pump supposed to go in next week. Probably electrical the following week. Siding in the next week or two. I think we may be on track for a March move in?

Here is a recent photo after windows installed. Hope everyone has a great Christmas!!

Baby, It's Cold Outside!

Journal Log: 12/06/2010 It has been about six months in the rental property. We survived the long hot summer and the crops were good. We were bracing for a cold winter and it has finally arrived. The pantry stores are good, but we are not sure if we are going to survive the freezing temperatures at night. We find ourselves sneaking into bed earlier each night to protect us from the nighttime temperatures as the old furnace seems to have trouble keeping the farmhouse anything close to warm. The temperature in the kids rooms upstairs was 49 degrees this morning, but they don't really complain, they are snuggled under many layers of blankets. Tonight with lows predicted in the teens we may need to move them downstairs and close off the upstairs which is really only passively heated by the downstairs. I hate getting out of bed at night to use the bathroom, as I have found that getting out of bed at night in your skivvies to urinate leaves my toes with frost bite and takes 30 minutes under the blankets to recover my core body temperature. Though it has been better after I started wearing sweat pants and sweat shirt to bed. We had to chip ice off the toilet this morning before we could flush.... well, not really but I won't be surprised if that happens by the end of winter!

We received our first snowfall this past Saturday with about two inches of accumulation. It was beautiful. We were raking leaves at the farm when it started and the kids were quite excited about it. So were Karen and I, as it got so wet it became unbearable to continue raking and hauling leaves that we had to just quit and sit back and enjoy looking at it.

Despite the cold, we are going to hunker down and suck it up. Hopefully next winter we will either be basking in the warmth of the sun indoors, or sitting by our fireplace keeping all warm and toasty! The house is coming right along and we absolutely are loving the way it is starting to look. It is hard to convey the open inside with the camera as the depth of field is so short with my lenses. But here is a peek at the outside.

We are hoping to have the roof shingled this week, and the windows should arrive late next week. I am crossing my fingers they do not botch up the special windows for the South side(front) as they are a key component of the passive solar design. The geothermal heat pump is supposed to be installed next week. It will not be operational until the house is wired and insulated. That is all the news from down here, right now I need to get my sweats on and go to bed!

Thanksgiving Day Update...

We hope everyone had a great TG ! We spent the morning delivering TG dinners through our church and the Durham Rescue Mission to some families in need in Durham. The rest of the day we spent preparing our own dinner, and later enjoying it with some of our friends.

Today I am home with the kids on a rainy day, so thought it would be a good time to update our homestead progresss. A lot has happend on the house over the past week or so. It is mostly framed up at this point. The second level proved to be a bit challanging to the framing crew and slowed them down a bit. I am hopeful we will have the roof up by the end of next week.

Below is most of the first floor framed up. This is looking at the front South side, it will have a lot of big windows which you can barely make out the roughed in frames of.

This is a shot of Aki coming up the stairs to second level. That area behind him will be a BF nook.

This is a shot looking down into the kitchen, dining, and living room from front to back. This area will be mostly open with a cathedral ceiling. The narrow area to the left will be a balcony overlooking this area. Some of those lateral beams will be visible, they will be drywalled.

This is the most recent shot I have of the framing. Some of the windows are covered with OSB for now. You can see part of the chimney chase framing just beyond the front entry. The beginning of the clerestory is framed in at the top of the roof.

And the following are just a couple shots trying out the new camera. There was a beautiful sunset on my last drive to our rental from the land. I had to pullover to capture this old tractor silhouetted against the sky.

And last weekend another sunset against our old barn caught my eye!

Slab Happy!!

Things have really been moving along with the new house construction. Most of the drainage plumbing has been stubbed in for under the slab. Almost all of the water supply "pipes" (actually tubing) will run through the walls or first floor ceiling. Next they had to fill in the interior of the house with gravel and dig out the interior footings for the support walls, fireplace. Then 2 inches of foam board insulation was fit over the gravel. Next a plastic vapor barrier was applied over that. Finally a four inch thickness of concrete was poured this Friday morning.








Tamping the gravel and applying foam board insulation (R-10)

The first of many concrete trucks, a truck was scheduled for every thirty minutes, I can't remember how many cubic yards of concrete, I think 36 ???

The next day we had our first floor completed, the framers started some work, but the studs were not delivered so they were limited in what they could do. They did mark off all the inside walls so we could get a feel for the layout and size of the rooms. This house feels "just right"!!