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.

Week of May 21- May 26, 2007

We are just about done with all of the framing except for some very small items and we just wanted to thank Contract Lumber www.contractlumber.com for all their help and support without which we would not have been able to do this project. Contract Lumber has been with us since our first house in 1996-1997. They have provided technical support, some very, very valuable labor, plus just about all that is seen in this blog to date. Their expertise in building knowledge and materials is extensive and formidable. Thank you Contract Lumber.

PS Since we have been with Contract Lumber of over five years, we believe that entitles us to a trip to Cancun.

Thank you Northtowne heating who supplied the labor expertise to install the heating system in our house. In this picture to the left, we are bringing up the trunk line for the second floor after the duct work in the basement has been completed. All of the heating equipment and duct work was supplied by Haebegger Heating and Cooling who sells Bryant equipment.

We are installing a whopping 97% efficient furnace in this house.

These next three pictures shows us drying in our front porch. The photograph to the left is Will and Alex from periods 1/2/3 .





Periods 3/4/5 drying in the porch. If one clicks on this picture to enlarge it, something obviously funny has happened. We'd like to tell what happened, but whatever happens on the site stays on site.



The photo is the front porch that has been "dried in" (made water tight). Notice how we use a self stick ice and water shield and wrapped it over the facias of our roof making it so these boards will not rot. In the house and garage, we used treated 2 x 6 lumber to achieve the same results. This is one of the many details we used to make our house durable and high performing. If you go through this blog one can see the other details we have used.


This is a shot of our garage with it's garage door installed. It's starting to look like a home.






Lindsey in the garage nailing down the bottom plates in our garage using 16d galvanized nails into treated sill plates. We used Borate treated sill plates which are very non-toxic to the environment and do not corrode galvanized fasteners like other treated lumber. Borate is the same natural mineral that is used to whiten clothes. Many of us "Old Schoolers" remember the commercials for 20 Mule Team Borax commercials whose product is still sold to whiten clothes.

Week of May 14 - May 18, 2007

Thank you Contract Lumber www.Contractlumber.com for providing and installing our front/back and garage service doors. Contract Lumber provided Therma-Tru doors which are of excellent quality.

The large garage service door was installed and our garage is now lockable so that we are now ready for roofing and siding material storage.

Almost all of the framing bits that need to be finished for our structrual inspection were finished this week.

We will soon start the finishing stages once the installation of the heating, plumbing, and electric systems get started and are completed. The heating system is tentatively slated to begin on Saturday, May 26. Plumbing will come next and then electric.

Our porches passed their strucutural inspection this week and the students got to meet and talk to the structural inspector on the details of his important job and other topics related to structural inspecting. The students in the picture to the left are adding material so that the alumninum cladding can be installed.



In the ten years of our high school building affordable homes for the America's working families, we have come to understand that it is emotional power that comes to us through this building experience that provides the powerful personal uplift, relationship building and individual growth that is possible in this endeavour.

Friday the 17th was one of those powerful days.

We had students, our mentors Dave Miller and Jim Dupriest, and our student teacher Mr. Miller on site. Jim has been with us for four years and recently has had some neck problems and has not been on site since January but out of the blue he was with us yesterday. Also, Mr. Miller's parents came to site from Michigan and built with the us. What a powerful inter-generational experience for our students to see the parents of Mr. Miller working on our site along with both Dave and Jim. And on top of that, we were all working on such a fantastic affordable, energy efficient, and high performing home on a wonderful warm and sunny day. Our nine years working to help end poverty housing in America has given us the insight that still holds true and that is that we all originally come to build and to help, but we stay and come back because of the realtionships that we build in the process.

From left to right:
On porch: Jim, Megan, Mr. Miller, Dave Miller, Andy Miller
On ground: Anne, Vinnie

Construction as of Saturday, May 11, 2007

Starting the trusses on the garage.









Trusses continue.








Sheathing.






Almost completed garage with house. The garage is completely dried in now (5/13/07) and is awaiting it's large garage and service entry door.







Concrete porch in and porch posts. Students starting to put windows in.






Windows almost all in. The house is awaiting it's front and back doors which will be installed in the upcoming week. Notice the house wrap now on the entire house and the gable returns that have been built on the rakes.





Green Sustainable Building Practice - Window Installation

Wrap rough sill with flex-wrap up and around side jambs. Note the installation of a back dam to have what water does seep in drain back out. According to building scientists, all windows will leak - eventually. This window protocol was taken from the Building Science Corporation's Water Management Guide.





Cut the house wrap above the head jamb and fold it up.








Apply caulk to the window opening. Check to see that the caulk is compatible with the house wrap.







Apply a self-stick waterproof membrane to the side jambs.








Apply a self-stick waterproof membrane to the head jamb. Overlap the side jamb waterproof membrane.






Fold down the house wrap flap and which will overlap the waterproof membrane at the head jamb. Seal the top flap with tape.

The bottom of the window is not sealed to let water drain out.

The concept is to "shingle" the waterproofing materials.

Week of March 19, 2007

The garage concrete slab was done on Tuesday. During the week while we waited for the concrete to cure enough to work on, we put the finishing touches on our front porch roof, worked on framing bits on the inside of the house, cleaned and organized our construction waste. With this done, we can have our site graded and get ready to implement our landscape plan. Since it has been our goal to limit our construction waste from the beginning of the project, we have surprisingly little waste to deal with.

Saturday we put up the walls on our garage. We built these walls at school during December. Take a look at the December 10, 2006 journal to see us building these walls. With the slab in place, we could measure the exact distance the bottom of the garage door beam had to be above the floor. Mr. Miller, Eugene, and Jesse finished the modification of the beam over the garage door opening on Friday. This 22 foot wall will be moved to site and installed next Tuesday.

VIDEO VIDEO VIDEO VIDEO

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jxGzbRwdQeI

Click on the link above to see our garage being built. With such a rainy week and cloudy beginning to the morning, Saturday turned out to be really warm and sunny.

End of the day. We would have completely finished the back of the garage but we have to cut the door opening in the concrete a bit bigger and we can't do that with the wood wall up. Notice the housewrap on the garage. This feature is usually never done by builders but we are keeping all of the wood assemblies dry and if they get wet, they can dry and not rot.


A nice end of the day and now we have two buildings on our site.

Look at the March 11 journal entry just two weeks ago to see Home B.A.S.E. working in a snow storm.

Week of March 12, 2007

We had almost the full spectrum of weather this week: warm, sunny, torrential rains which flooded our basement, cloudy, snow, sleet, and cold with partly sunny skies.

The front porch with the hip roof was fnished this week. The garage foundation was squared up and the sill plates attached so the walls can go up. We cut off the anchor bolts which were incorrectly placed so as to be flush with the top of the sill plates. We have a video of that below.

Also, the finished grade elevations for the concrete garage slab and apron were established.

Flashing to keep water that filters down between the porch slabs and the house was applied according to the Water Management Guide from the Building Science Corporation http://www.buildingsciencepress.com/books.asp?CatID=21
See the green/high performance detail below.

VIDEO VIDEO VIDEO VIDEO
Steel anchor are bolts no match for Home B.A.S.E
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIHnHjCQvTc
Grinding off the anchor bolts after we countersunk them into the sill plates. Notice the snow on the sill plates.




Framing for the front porch.








Sheathing the front porch in the rain.






High quality work in fitting the hip supports.








Mr. Miller and the finished front porch.






Finished back porch.





Finally, a picture of the Loch Ness monster! Someone unplugged our sump pump from the outlet next door the day it rained 1.5 inches. We finished the cleanup on Saturday.
Mr. Beck said his feet were numb by the time he got to the pump.


Green High Performance Green High Performance
Here we are applying the waterproof membrane supplied by the Contract Lumber Company www.contractlumber.com
This membrane goes underneath the housewrap and extends below the sill plate to keep the water from wetting the wooden parts of the house. This is done only where a porch slab contacts the house. On the rest of the house, a metal drip edge will hang below the first course of siding and will "kick-out" the rain water away from the house.




The garage, squared and plated.

The trusses for the garage will be delivered within a week.

Week of March 5, 2007

Our project is seemingly going just a bit faster now.

We put on our front porch roof trusses this week along with taking out the bracing of our gable end trusses and straightening them. Our trusses are about eleven feet tall, and straightening and re-bracing them was a really big job.

Our back porch is completely finished and the concrete was ordered for the front and back porches and the garage floor. That concrete flatwork will be done when the ground thaws enough for that work to proceed.

We intend to start on our garage this week.

These clothes are illustrative of what it takes to build this house and what we go through every week. Those who were on site Saturday, worked in the rain throughout the morning. They continued to work in the afternoon, and it became partly sunny and warm. Can you identify the wearers of these clothes? Hint, the five present in the picture are Craig, Jesse, Megan, Vinnie, and Jimmy.
Left: Taking apart the trusses. We came in on Monday and started to take the trusses down from the front porch roof. We didn't think we could do that in three hours. Not only did we take them down, but we took them apart, cut them to the correct dimensions and had them ready to take back to the truss company to re-press the truss plates back on. We took them back to the truss company on Wednesday and we picked them up on Friday. Thank you Truss-Worthy Truss company, a division of the Conctract Lumber Co.


We get a lot of extremes in weather, sometimes all in the same day. these pictures were taken on Wednesday. By Friday, we were down to t-shirts. Far left: putting up the back porch trusses. Right: Anne is nailing in blocking to support the back porch trusses.



Measuring for the ledger which will carry the front porch roof sheathing.


Round II: Installing the front porch.







The students who stayed until the end of the day on Saturday always get more than they put in.





Those who build together, build community together. This picture, taken at the end of a long workday, is a visual joke for those who who were together on Saturday.

Week of February 27, 2007

Friday was a day without classes for the students but they came out and put up the front porch beam. The crew was led by Cassie's father who is a contractor who came out to work with us.

Megan and Vinnie stayed until 5:30 to finish up the odd and ends framing bits and sat on the beam for the end of the day picture.
















This pictures below show what could have been a very disheartening story. On Saturday March 3, the entire morning was spent laying out the front porch roof in the living room so that the crew would be able to efficiently lay it out working up in the air on ladders.

However, in our effort to move the project along, we fast-tracked the ordering of the trusses before the porch had been built. Our porch was built in the center of the porch walls (by code) which made as-built porch, four inches shorter than the trusses.

Mr. Beck came out for three hours on Sunday to figure out how to make this right without taking down the trusses but there was no other alternative than to take them all down. So an entire Saturday was for naught.

Will have to take them down next week.


Laying out the front porch in the living room.








Building the front porch, round one.