Week of June 18 - June 23, 2007

The first piece of finishing the house has begun!!! On Saturday, the crew of Alex, Will, Craig Bickle, Megan, Vinnie, Scott Walker, Chuck, and Mr. Beck were on site to start putting the metal garage roof on. The result is wonderful for all of us who have worked on every phase of buiding this great sustainable house.

A metal roof is very sustainable in that it should last up to four times longer than an asphalt shingle roof. Also, when the roof does need replaced, the roof materials can be very easily recycled.

The materials for our roof were donated by Dimensional Metals Incorporated http://www.dmimetals.com/ . The materials are extremely well formed and strong and this metal roof will be one of the major factors that make our house high performing.

Dimensional Metals Incorporated is also located within 15 miles of our house which means using this metal roof is very much more sustainable due to low transporation costs.

Dave Miller was with us and on Tuesday we finished all the framing punch out items on our list for the second floor.


Alex and Will putting up facia.







Vinnie bending the roof panels to form a drip edge.







A beautiful metal roof is starting to take shape.
Scott and Chuck putting up the first panel after the soffit and facia have been installed.




At the end of the day. From the left:
Vinnie, Megan, Scott, and Chuck.







Good look at the quality detail of the straight facia and soffit.







The completed south facing roof. The north side is half done. We expect to have the entire roof on the garage completed this week.





We graded the entire lot including the lot next door to ours. The cistern was also dug but we have a problem. The gravel backfill of our house intesects with the hole. If we use this cistern as is, our rain garden overflow will migrate next to the house foundation. We are working on a fix but is that doesn't work, we will be forced to abandon and fill in the cistern.



This came flying across our building site today as a complete surprise. We still don't quite know what it was.



Jessica Perotti (Home B.A.S.E. '03 and her mother, Victoria visited the house on Sunday to see the site so as to be able to begin to help with the sustainable landscape plan that will be using native Ohio plants.

Week of May 28 - June 1

Thanks to Lifestyle Comfort Systems for donating the labor to install our heating system. The rough heating system is now finished.





GREEN - HIGH PERFORMANCE FEATURES


We seal all of our duct work to make sure the air gets to where it is supposed to go. The duct sealing mastic was donated by United McGill. In the picture to the left, the mastic is the grey material with the jagged edges around the corners of the duct work. We are trying for almost a zero duct leakage in the final test.



Duct work in the basement. Notice the sealing done at the seams.






Our high performance fan that only uses 14 watts of energy. The fan is so quiet that it is hard to tell it is even on.

Notice the gap in the back draft damper illustrated by pencil inserted in the gap. This is unacceptable to us.

We purchased these spring loaded dampers to replace the awful back draft dampers included in our bath fans. This should help the heating system to perform adequately. We are trying to control the heat, air, and moisture movement in the house. By controlling the air, we will also be able to control the heat and moisture movement too. These types of dampers will help us with this control.

The basement windows were installed this week. Our house is now officially "dried in".







Our high-tech locking system for our house. This locking system has to withstand a certain amount of "foot pounds" if you know what we mean. Wondering how we get into the house with the doors screwed shut? Using a ladder, we get in though a second story window.

We sure hope our donated locks arrive soon.