But momentary frustrations aside the house is looking *beautiful*! Check out these photos (kitchen photos to follow as soon as the final appliance install and countertop unveiling takes place):

Living Room

Living Room--with the man of the house swinging in his cradle

Upstairs Landing - Anne's first act was to unpack the books

Bonfire of The (Master Bath) Vanities

Master Bath - Note laundry chute (door in built-in cabinet)

Master Closet

Everett Takes a Meal Break in the Dining Area

Breakfast Area in Kitchen – Wooden Bench Top is from the tree that was on the lot

I spent a lot of time making sure we lit the curio shelf that's in one side of the wood stove popout

The mechanical room is a tad Rube Goldberg – But oh so worth it. If you have 5 hours I'd be glad to bore you about every detail...

Another living room angle

Anne in the den with all of the cra... I mean wonderful personal belongings we moved over

Here are a few quick pix of our house. We’re hoping to get our Certificate of Occupancy in the next week or so, which is required in order to finalize our house mortgage. And since the best rates are given to people who don’t require a long “lock” time, we went with a 30-day lock mortgage last week. So the clock is ticking! Right now the house is in that final pupa stage where it still looks like a construction site disaster, but where it will suddenly at the end, when the debris is moved out and the carpets rolled out, it will suddenly transform into a finished house. We shall see.

House from Street

Back of House

Entry Hall to Living Room

Living Room to Kitchen

Second Living Room View

Reverse Living Room Angle

Kitchen -- Howdya Like the Backsplash Tile?

More Kitchen

North Kitchen Wall

Upstairs Landing

Master Bath

Jess Armitage and Scott McPhie install cabinet lighting and the cabinetry

You can’t really see the floor underneath the blankets, but since the house is going to be so bright and white, Anne wanted a dark floor. It’s a beautiful coffee color that looks like it will really offset the white walls and cabinetry nicely. I spent more time obsessing about the finish. There are several options: very high VOC finishes like the Swedish Glitsa; oil-based polyurethane finishes; and water-based polyurethane. If you search around online you’ll find various people who swear by one or the other product, but the trend clearly appears to be to the low-VOC water-based finishes. They are now so good that there is hardly a reason to introduce higher-toxicity finishes into the house. Our finish needed only a day of drying before workmen could come back in the house.

Upstairs, the landing/hallway area is starting to take final form. The big north-facing windows that give light to the hallway are painted and uncovered again. The small window to the stairwell we added in the last minute to add light to the hall bathroom is in and painted; and the bookshelf is done and painted.

The windows are in and painted; the bookshelf is painted; we're getting there!

In the bathrooms, the addition of the tile is really starting to make the space look plausibly like a usable space. In the photo below, you can see the tiling on the floor and around the tub, as well as the little built-in cabinet that is built up around the opening for the laundry chute (the opening is covered by paper in the middle of the cabinet).

In the master bath, tiles and cabinetry are giving the room a final look

I forget whether I mentioned this previously, but we found that tub on a curb about two blocks from our house. Someone was gutting their house, apparently, and had no more use for this mid-century tub that was almost in perfect condition. We’ll take it!

Putting washing machines in the basement had a very practical reason: every once in a while, they leak. And when it’s on an upper floor, it can create an extraordinary mess. The environmental reason that we didn’t mind keeping the laundry away from the bedrooms is that we hang our laundry outside a good 90% of the time. So even if we’d put the laundry upstairs, we’d still be dragging the hamper full of wet clothes downstairs and outside. Or, given the convenience of everything on the upper floor, perhaps we’d use the dryer more.

Instead, Anne insisted we put in a laundry chute. It’s a fantastic solution to the dirty-clothes-in-the-bedroom problem and it eliminates half of the clothes lugging. Plus, it has the appeal of trap doors and hidden bedrooms: a laundry chute has such a wonderful retro feel that I approved of it on that basis alone.

Once we made sure to have the master bedroom straight above the basement laundry room, we discovered another bonus: the chute goes right by our first floor mudroom, so that when we come back from skiing and you want to unload your smelly socks, you can just dump them into the chute and off they go.

Another unexpected benefit was that the 2′ x 2′ opening that we left for the chute proved to be the perfect chase for our ERV ducts, our solar hot water piping, and the conduit for the wires we ran for our future photovoltaics – all the stuff that runs from the basement up to the attic. In the end, our laundry chute was about about 22′ wide by 18″ deep. Some photos:

the laundry chute opening in the upstairs master bathroom

the laundry chute in the mudroom

in the laundry room in the basement, the chute will empty into a hamper

Mechanical ventilation allows you to control the air flow in and out of the house. But the key to achieving the best of both worlds is a Heat Recovery Ventilator (HRV) or an Energy Recovery Ventilator (ERV).  They both extract the heat (or in the summer, the chill) from the stale air being exhausted and then pre-heat or pre-cool the incoming fresh air. With a transfer of heat efficiency in the 70-90% range, you can have consistently fresh air throughout the home without paying for it on your heating and cooling bills.

Read on to check out all factors involved in the decision:

The difference between an HRV and an ERV is that an HRV only extracts the heat from the air, while the ERV extracts moisture from the air flows as well. An ERV can be a good choice for two reasons: 1. If you live in a very humid climate, you want to keep moist air from entering the house. 2. There is latent heat in the airborne water. If you keep the humidity in the house from leaving, you can capture even more of the heat in your house.

our ERV: Pretty much the definition of "Black box techology"

We live in a very dry climate, so most websites will tell you that we should get an HRV. We ended up with the UltimateAir 200DX ERV because my research indicated that it was the most efficient unit out there. Even with limited moisture content, extracting the latent heat from the water is still important. I also decided that I wanted to protect the additional indoor humidity that we might have (eg from a humidifier, or cooking spaghetti – we live in such a dry climate that I didn’t want to lose all that).

Since we live in a cold climate, there was also one more important consideration. When the temperature outside drops below freezing, frost on the HRV/ERV unit becomes a big problem. You can easily imagine why – cold air is coming in, warm air is going out, and wham! Frost. There is no particularly graceful way of dealing with this. Most units simply run in a recirculation mode perhaps five minutes an hour when it gets below freezing. So the incoming air shuts off and the system just blows the warm indoor air around the heat exchanger. As it gets colder and colder, the unit spends more time in recirc mode. I think they get up a point where they spend 30 minutes an hour recirculating air.

That would seem to work fine, but at that point you’re spending valuable energy on simply running a fan. Even worse, I could imagine unfortunate bathroom smells being recirculated through the house.

Our Electric Preheater: Basically a glorified hair dryer

The other approach is to preheat the incoming air to a point where frost isn’t an issue. I liked that better, imagining that I could blow the incoming air over a heat exchanger coupled with my solar hot water. That proved to be easier said than done (it would require a separate water loop as well as a separate pump to move the water through it). The other option is to use an electric pre-heat. This sounds like a terrible idea–electrical heating!–but UltimateAir is fairly clever about it. The 200DX unit can handle air down to 10F without frosting up. So you only need preheating for several days a year, and avoid all of the wattage otherwise wasted on the recirculating cycles of other units.

Then there’s my in-ground air tube (read about it here). I don’t know how much it’s going to pre-heat my air, but if it manages to heat up the air by 5 degrees, then my electric preheat on my ERV only kicks on then it gets below 5F. I’m hopeful that will only be a few days, maybe one week, a year.

Designing the system

An important consideration is designing the duct placement. The broad idea is simple: You want to extract air from the “dirty” areas of the house (bathrooms, kitchen, laundry) and pump fresh air into the “clean” areas (bedrooms, living room). But one design goal I had was that I didn’t want to have separate bathroom fans in addition to my ERV. And to avoid that, you want to have the system powerful enough to clear out a bathroom after a big shower. The more air extract tubes you put in the house, the more that outgoing air flow is divided up between them. So we decided to put in only four extraction spots: the three bathrooms and the kitchen. I just put in a regular bath fan into the main-floor powder room, and I just skipped the laundry room.

ERV ducting through our attic

The 200DX can exchange 200 cubic feet per minute. If I have four extract points, that means 50 cubic feet per room. That’s not that wonderful jet-engine room-clearing power you can get out of a serious bathroom fan, but it seemed good enough to allow me to avoid extra bath fans. I wanted to avoid them for three reasons: 1. Bath fans cost money. 2. Installing the exhaust hose of the bath fan means yet another hole in the thermal envelope of my house. 3. All the air blown out through a bath fan contains valuable heat I want to capture.

I skipped the powder room because I figured that the room would get only occasional use. I put in the bath fan there so guests could “clean up” after themselves should the need arise.

HRV/ERV systems run most efficiently at low continuous flows. I expect to run our ventilation at about 70CFM. To clear out bathrooms, we’re also installing buttons in the bathrooms that you can push t0 boost the system into 200CFM mode for about 20 minutes.

Placing fresh air returns is much easier. Here the idea is simply to bring air to each bedroom and to each floor. The key is to avoid blowing air onto the inhabitants of the house. So hallways and behind doors is a much better place to bring in air than above the couch or a bed. It’s not very much air volume – at 70CFM that’s only just more than one cubic foot a second – so it’s more a dribble than the blowing we’ve become accustomed to with forced-air heating systems. Still, you don’t want that washing over you while you’re trying to sleep.

The ducts in the room are tiny because the system is very low-flow (compared to traditional forced-air heating systems)

Both fresh and stale air tubes run through our laundry chute to reach the upper floors

The stereo/data closet: smurf tubes in the back, blue data bundles on the right, green stereo wires

I have a confession: There’s a good chance I over-wired the house. But I succumbed to the now’s-the-time pressure of realizing that if I ever wanted to put in more wires for either sound, video, or data, then the easiest and cheapest moment is before the drywall goes up. It’s called “structured wiring” because all of the wiring runs back to a central location, as you can see in the photo on the left. (Each one of the wires that goes back to a central location is called a “home run.”)

Here’s what I wired in: data and tv wiring to ten locations and stereo wiring to six locations. Each data/tv wiring location has two RG6 (standard cable video wire) and two Cat5e (ie ethernet internet wire) wires. In addition, to each data/tv location I put in 3/4″ so-called Smurf tubes, which is flexible hose empty except for a pull string. The idea is that in ten years, when we’re all using fiber optics or whatever, you can then pull new wiring through the walls without opening anything up. Just tie the new wire to one end of the string and pull it through the hose.

Read on to see why I went this way.

Why 4 cables to every location? The short answer here is why not (the 4 cables come bundled and cost less than $1/foot). The slightly longer answer is that it provides flexibility for anything you’d like to do. For example, the only place I put in a traditional wired telephone is in the stereo closet. I plan on simply using cordless, Internet-based phones throughout the house. But if I do want to wire in a phone later, I can simply use one of the ethernet wires. Or let’s say I want to have one DVD player in the house feeding several television screens. I could then use the second RG6 to feed the signal back to the central closet and distribute it from there.

I spent a lot of time thinking about the stereo system. If you start looking online for “whole-house stereo systems” you can get quickly bogged down in the options. The big vision manufacturers try to sell you on is that your system should be able to simultaneously handle different music in every room and that everything is controlled by wireless controllers. (And also sell you silly visions of controlling all of your blinds etc via remote control.)

Probably the best value/money proposition in the whole-house music department is the Sonos (www.sonos.com) system. For people whose houses are already built, it’s also wireless.

There are also incredibly expensive whole-house systems that involve fancy in-wall touch-screen controls. They are both way too expensive and also not very future-proof: right now those touch screens seem really fancy, but I guarantee that in ten years they’ll seem horribly outdated.

I decided that building in so much flexibility and hardware was overkill. (And if I did go wireless then I would need to have a separate amplifier in each room, which is clutter I wanted to avoid.) So we chose to put in one central stereo with a six-speaker selector. In each speaker zone we’re installing an in-wall volume control. We hope that this will be a good combination of flexibility and cost efficiency.

I’m a little worried that our in-wall volume controls will seem outdated in ten years too. The other option would have been to go with a 6-speaker selector that is remote controllable. The Aton DLA-6, for example, would have allowed us to control the speaker selections and individual zone volumes from an RF remote. The reason we didn’t go with it is that I was afraid we’d always be losing the stupid remote. The in-wall volume controls might have certain limitations, but at least you always know where they are.

For music control you have to walk to the closet. But since most of our music will be coming off the laptop in the closet (MP3s, Pandora, Internet radio etc) we will be also able to control that from our mobile phones.

Of course, there are always those that say that the world will be wireless within 5 years, so why waste money on any of this stuff? It’s a good question. I ultimately decided to go wired for two reasons: 1) I think that wires will always offer higher speeds, greater security, and better reliability than wireless. 2) As long as you put in the wires as the house is being built, it just doesn’t cost that much. Of course, I’ll still put in a wireless router. Who knows? Maybe all of those data ports will primarily just collect dust.

Three last things I wired into the closet: 1. I put in a pair of wires from the master bedroom to the stereo closet so that we can watch movies in bed but run the sound through the in-ceiling speakers. 2. I also put in two ethernet cables from the mechanical room up to the closet, so that I can monitor electrical and energy consumption rates. 3. And I wired in USB cables so that we can connect two little webcams to keep an eye on the house (and our cats!) when we’re gone.

Here are the stereo closet design specs:

Stereo Closet Specs

Mike Mcpherson runs our blower door test

There are three ways that energy is transferred: radiation (that’s what makes your face feel warm when the sun is shining on it), thermal (that’s what burns your hand when you touch a hot stove), and convective (like when hot air rises). And here’s the thing about insulation: insulation is tested by how it slows down thermal transfer. When you’ve got a leaky house, then the stated insulation value written on the package when you bought it won’t mean a whole lot.

And all houses leak. Most of them leak a lot.

I don’t think there are any national standards when it comes to how airtight a house has to be built, but recently, a test called the Blower Door Test has become popular. We just did one on our house and learned some remarkable facts. Read on!

The idea behind a blower door test is to close all the windows and doors, putting a fan in the front door and depressurizing the house by blowing air out. Then an attached computer calculates the rate at which air seeps back in and presents it as the number of times all the air in the house would be replaced per hour. The Air Changes per Hour (ACH) is done at 50 Pascals of depressurization, so you’ll see the “ACH50″ number quoted when comparing houses.

Mike McPherson, the guy who did our house, compared the test to seeing how the house performs when a 20-mile-an-hour wind is blowing at the house from all sides. So the test does two things: one, you see how leaky your house is. And two, perhaps more importantly, you can walk around the house and feel where the air is blowing in.

Crappy houses might have an ACH50 of over 10. Well-built houses these days, Mike says, average around ACH50 of 5 to 8. Energy Star, the government program to highlight “energy-efficient” homes, require an ACH50 of 4 to 7 depending on the climate zone. Below 3.5 you need active air handling (ie the house is so tight that the air would get too stuffy without mechanically ventilating the house). Anything below 2.0 is really getting somewhere. The tightest standard I’ve come across is the Passive House standard, which requires a 0.6 ACH50.

When Mike turned on his machine, it said our house was 1.78, which Mike said was the equivalent of having roughly a 10×10 inch hole in my house open 24/7. The point of doing the test now, while the drywall isn’t up yet, is so you can walk around, plug the leaks, and make that hole smaller. And so we set out.

Check out this short video I made of the test:

As you can see, we spent the bulk of our time walking around behind Mike’s infrared camera and caulking all the holes he found. We went through three big tubes of caulk in an hour. The most common gaps were around the windows, although there were other things we found: nail holes, air gaps around ceiling can lights, and a few places where the foamers hadn’t filled wall cavities completely.

On a philosophical note, I was struck by how “smart” air was. The moment the fan was switched on air found every last single crack in the house and came streaming in. I imagined how complex a computer program you would need to model the entire house and the air flow so that you could find the tiny little nail hole a careless carpenter left in the upstairs middle bedroom. But the air molecules had no such worries. They just followed their nature and poured in.

So if the average house has an ACH50 of 5 to 7, how often does the air actually leak out per hour when the house isn’t pressurized? Dividing the ACH50 number by 20 is a good rule of thumb. That means that if your house has an ACH50 of 5, then all of the air in your house leaks out six times a day. And double that is quite common. If you have an ACH50 of 10, then all of the air leaks out every other hour! Talk about heating the great outdoors.

After plugging all the leaks, Mike turned on his machine again. 1.55. About 12% better, but I was disappointed, to be honest, that we didn’t make a bigger difference. Mike didn’t know what else to do. Usually, he said, it’s easy to make more progress, but sometimes all the work doesn’t do much. He claimed, plausibly, that our double-hung windows might be a culprit. Casement windows, since they clamp shut, are much tighter than double-hung windows, where the two windows just slide past each other.

We’ll do another blower-door test when the house is done. Mike thinks that we should get down to about 1.2 once all of the drywall, doorknobs, window trim, etc are installed. Let’s hope he’s right!