July 30, 2012 - Siding and Insulation

Well, as usual, things seem to be flying along!  The siding is as finished as it's going to be until after the roof goes on.  Due to a longer than expected lead time on the roofing material, that's not going to be for another week or two, but we're loving the look so far. Here's a view from the back: 

And the front: 

 

 And here's the house-side of the garage:

Also, our garage now has a floor! We're pretty excited that someday soon we'll actually be able to park in here!

 The guys also added some special self-adhesive insulation to bridge the gap between window frames and wall framing, seen here:

After that step, any additional gaps were eliminated with expanding foam sealant.  (That's the yellowish substance you can see oozing out toward the bottom right in the next photo.)  After living in drafty older homes, we are thrilled to know our new home will be so seriously air-tight!

Finally, we were delighted to arrive at the house on Saturday just in time to watch the insulation get blown in!  It was a pretty cool (and very messy) process in which the insulation was supplied from a truck via a giant hose (seen in an earlier picture of the front of the house) and sprayed onto the walls.  This alone was pretty messy, and the result looked like the top of the wall between the door and the window in this photo:

Then one guy went over each wall with this spinning metal roller that scraped off all the excess insulation to prep the walls for drywall, leaving giant piles of "snow" that the kids were dying to jump in.

When that step was complete, another guy came along behind him to vacuum up all the excess fill.

When the job was done, our house looked like this:

I'll leave you for today with a close-up.  Can't wait to see what it all looks like when the drywall goes up!

July 11, 2012 - Garage and Windows

 
Well, it's official!  We have windows, doors, a porch, and a garage! 

We are loving the look of the house with the porch on, and I think it will be such a nice place to sit and watch the kids play in the neighborhood when they get older.

The garage looks enormous, party because it had to be raised up to meet the grade of the alley in back, and partly because of the deep trusses required to accommodate the future green roof.  Once we get the yard finish graded and add some raised beds I think it will feel a little less massive, and of course that green roof will be well worth the little bit of extra height!

The other bonus is that between the garage and the huge tree, the rear of the house is actually very private:

When you do get past the tree though, you can see our windows!  We are so glad we decided to go with the black frames, and can't wait to see it all come together with siding and trim. The doors will be painted too, but we weren't 100% sure if we wanted black or the dark grey trim color, so we decided to get them pre-primed and figure that out once the siding is on.

We went with a triple-pane vinyl window with Krypton gas between the panes, which give us an R-value of 5.56 (or U-value of 0.18).  For those who haven't done hours of research into energy-efficient windows, this is pretty close to the best performance you can get in a window outside of some crazy-expensive European ones, so we're pretty excited to see how they feel in the dead of winter.

We love our windows from the inside too.  My favorite is the one above our bed in the Master Bedroom.  I just love the little view of rooftops and trees that it frames out!

June 27, 2012 - Exterior Foam

Well, we've been in and out of town again to visit with our far-flung siblings, so we've been getting more photo updates from our sweet neighbor.  Here it is on June 27, when the 3-1/2" of rigid foam were being applied to the exterior.  There are two layer of insulation (2" and then 1-1/2") with staggered seams to further discourage any air leakage.  On top of this there is another layer of OSB to help with the rigidity of the vinyl siding, and then a layer of housewrap.  This system (in addition to the interior insulation to be added after the house is weather-tight) should keep us very warm and cozy come winter!

We also had some progress on the garage,.  The foundation is in!