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!

Our original plan had it on the staircase wall, like this:

original location of fireplace

and in elevation:

original fireplace location in elevation

It seemed so cool. We imagined a floating, wall-mounted sideboard that happened to have a fireplace in it, very modern and chic. We thought that we’d build a half wall over the staircase so that the stovepipe could run up it. In short, we spent so long planning it and discussing it that we were pretty blindered to reality by the time building happened.

As the wall was being built, we quickly realized that there simply wasn’t room for a big, horizontal, sideboard-type fireplace. I looked around and found a small stove that would fit. I took a photo of the wall and Photoshopped in the stove to scale:

The Rais stove photoshopped in to the staircase wall

We had lost our sideboard idea. We also realized that we liked the light coming down from the upstairs windows, and didn’t want to build the half-wall for the stovepipe. So the pipe would have to run in midair all the way to the upstairs ceiling. Less than ideal. But it still wasn’t enough to make us reconsider.

Our “the emperor has no clothes” moment happened when our friend Beth Cochran stopped by. “Why aren’t you putting the fireplace against that wall?” she asked, with all the guilelessness and innocence of someone who hadn’t spent months obsessing over the house in paper form.

We had our various rehearsed arguments we had thought of over the months when the entire project had been theoretical, but in the end we conceded she had a great point. We looked at it this way and that. I remember at one point thinking that both locations had their pros and cons, and that it probably didn’t make too big a difference in the end.

We played with little pieces of paper that represented the furniture on the living room blueprints to see how we might use the room differently. We realized that our main fear – that the room would become too narrow for the couches if the fireplace was against the wall – was essentially unfounded.

We moved the stove.

Here a few photos of what it looked like as it came to life:

The new fireplace framing

Once the stove was in:

The BIS Nova stove installed

fireplace with taped drywall

The move of the fireplace was interesting not for the facts of the case, but for the process of decision-making. I think it happens more often than you’d care to think: decisions that don’t get made as much as hardened as they accrete sufficient history, time, and effort. At some point there is just so much investment in the path taken that it is incredibly hard to look at the facts anew. Even when the facts are obviously in contradiction with the chosen course.

A few more notes regarding fireplaces that I learned while doing the research:

1. Traditional fireplaces are well-known to be a terrible idea from a heating perspective. When you light an open fireplace, you’re essentially creating a draft that pulls warm air up and out of the house. The fire radiates only a little heat into the room when it is lit, and at all other times the (typically metal, typically ill-fitting) damper allows heat to rise out of the chimney.

2. I was confused by the categories: wood stoves (applies to any wood-burning unit other than a traditional fireplace, but typically means a freestanding cast iron unit), fireplace inserts (designed to be inserted into an existing masonry fireplace), and zero-clearance fireplace insert (does not require an existing masonry fireplace, but still has fairly strict regulations regarding proximity to combustible materials.

3. Wood stove design has been completely overhauled since 1990 due to EPA regulations limiting the amount of smoke to 7.5 grams of smoke per hour. The best get down to about 1 gram/hour and can have efficiencies of 78%. They are typically free-standing pellet stoves. (See the whole EPA list as of Jan 10, 2010). Our zero-clearance insert is rated at at 4.8 gm/hr and 63% efficiency, ratings that are about standard for the style of stove.

4. Some of the higher-rated stoves have catalytic converters, which in theory are a great idea. Rising smoke travels through a honey-combed, catalyst-coated grid. The catalysts reignite the smoke, burning particulates and releasing heat. In practice, apparently, they tend to soot up quite quickly and require regular replacement. The other way of achieving reduced particulates and higher efficiency is to raise the temperature of the fire, which can be done through design and clever use of insulating materials.

5. We installed a hose for dedicated fresh air intake so our stove won’t backdraft.

6. Fans to blow air around the stove and into the room are a great idea. Make sure the model you choose has one.

7. There comes a point when you have to pull the plug on research. We were generally horrified by the curlicued, bad-bed-and-breakfast design of most wood stoves, and really liked the simple, clean lines of the BIS Nova. We also wanted a wood stove, not one built for pellets. And we’re not going to use this for primary heating; to a significant degree our stove will be for the ambiance.

The local brand of closed-cell polyurethane spray foam is Corbond. On their website they have a graph that looks like this:

More Insulation Is Clearly Useless. Or is it?

In an accompanying table of data, they state that the first inch of insulation reduces 72% of the heat loss. By the time you have four inches, adding a fifth inch reduces additional heat loss by only 1%. That inch of foam costs as much as the first inch (and insulates just as well), but is 72 times less effective. So was I an idiot for adding 12 inches of foam to my house? Maybe. Read on.

My initial thought was that everything about insulation is diminishing returns. Let’s say you built a house but didn’t put a roof on it. If you stretch a plastic sheet across the top, you’ll probably reduce heat loss by about 90%. If you replace the plastic sheet with a real wood roof, you’ll probably reduce heat loss by another 90% (for a total of 99% reduction). That means that ten dollars of plastic sheeting gives you 90% heat loss reduction. A ten thousand dollar roof gives you only a tenth of the additional heat loss reduction. So  why would anyone put on an actual roof–and then spend another several thousand dollars insulating it (to reduce heat loss to 99.9%, an additional reduction of only 0.9%)?

The problem with looking at insulation this way is what I call a frame of reference error. Did you ever see the Charles and Ray Eames movie “Powers of Ten” in science class in school? (If not, I highly recommend it: www.powersof10.com.) You zoom from intergalactic spaces down to the earth, spend only a few seconds in a ‘normal’ frame of reference – a park picnic in Chicago – and then dive into an atomic scale. The only reason the picnic appears to be the fulcrum between enormous and tiny is because that’s the frame of reference we understand. If we were atoms – or galaxies – then the tipping point between big and small would be shifted.

What does this have to do with insulation? Consider this: that Corbond graph showing insulation effectiveness would look exactly the same (aside from the numbers) if it went in 1/10 inch increments or in 10 inch increments. The first 1/10 of an inch is a lot more effective than subsequent fractions of an inch. The same holds when comparing increments of 10 inches.

So the only reason we think of those additional inches as being a waste of money is because we’re measuring on the scale of inches.

So how much insulation should we use?

The financially-minded title of this post, “diminishing insulation returns,” implies the answer. We need to look at the point where the incremental insulation costs more than the cost of the energy saved over the lifetime of the insulation. It really doesn’t matter whether the inch of insulation saves you 72% of your heat loss or 1% of your heat loss. It matters whether the absolute savings outweighs the absolute cost.

Here, of course, the calculation becomes fairly complex. Some largely unknowable considerations:

1. What’s the “lifetime” of the insulation? 30 years? 50 years? 100 years?

2. How will energy costs change over that time period?

3. What’s the net present value of those energy costs (ie what will the inflation rate be over the lifetime of the insulation)?

I would suggest that a conservative place to start would be to assume a 30-year lifetime, no change in inflation-adjusted energy prices, and ignoring the time value of money.

The guy who did the calculation of my house energy efficiency (Called a HERS rating – Google it), Matt Primki in Billings, provided me the following information: 1 square foot of R-1 insulation costs $1 to heat for a year in Bozeman (using $8/decatherm natural gas in a 8000 Heating Degree Day climate). Using that data and combining it with the cost and R-value of a specific insulation type, it’s easy to calculate the ideal amount of insulation. Using a 6.2 r-value/inch (typical closed-cell foam) at $0.65 per board foot (what my local guy charges; one board foot is a 12-inch square one inch thick), here is the calculation:

With these parameters, the 4th inch of insulation becomes partially uneconomic. Varying the parameters moves the “economically ideal” amount of insulation, although by less than I would have thought. Triple the price of energy, and you should use 6″ of insulation. Quintuple the price and you should use 7″. Triple the price of energy and assume a lifetime of 60 years, and the formula recommends 8″.

I was really surprised to see how little the recommended total insulation changed. I also learned that, from a strictly financial point of view, I potentially overinsulated my house in some places.

There is one important caveat if you’re using this approach to plan your insulation. As your house approaches Passive House standards (ie becomes so well insulated that a traditional heating system is no longer needed), the calculation changes dramatically. As you deduct the cost of the heating system, the cost of insulation effectively drops dramatically and the cost/benefit scale shifts.

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

I was researching Bozeman’s temperature data the other day to understand the weather conditions my house’s heat recovery ventilation system will face. On the Western Regional Climate Center’s website I found a table of data of daily highs and lows in Bozeman, averaged over the years 1971-2000. It was fascinating because the averages smoothed out into an almost perfect graph:

Daily Highs/Lows in Bozeman, MT 1971-2000

The graph almost doesn’t quite capture just how smoothly the average temperature rises and falls. For the first two weeks of January, for example, the average lows are 12.2, 12.4, 12.6, 12.8, 12.9, 12.9, 13.0, 13.1, 13.2, 13.3, 13.4, 13.6, 13.8, and 13.9. It continues that way, almost exactly 0.1 degree per day, until three days at the end of July, where the highs are 83.3 and the lows are 52.8, and then the temperature begins to slide back down.

I think of Bozeman weather as unpredictable. It can snow in July and it can be shirtsleeves weather in January. Yet when you average together just 30 years of data, weather has already given way to climate, and suddenly it becomes obvious: when it comes to a warming planet, even one degree has nowhere to hide.

See the complete data here: http://www.wrcc.dri.edu/cgi-bin/cliMAIN.pl?mtboze

We have an in-floor radiant hydronic (ie water running through tubes) system divided into five zones. When I heard that the plumber was planning on five thermostats, one in each zone, that seemed like a lot of hardware on our walls. And then I got it into my mind that, c’mon, this is 2010, I should be able to control the temperature of my house from my cellphone, over the Internet, etc.

Aside from the gee-whiz nature of controlling the temperature from far away, I came up with two scenarios where it might be really useful: 1. You leave home on a trip and forgot to turn down the temperature (or just aren’t sure if you did). 2. The big downside of radiant systems is that they take a long time (several hours) to come to temperature. So I imagined us coming back from a long trip and pulling out our cellphones in the Minneapolis airport and turning on our heat so the house is toasty when we land in Bozeman.

Well. With the goal of having one central thermostat gathering input from five temperature sensors and then connecting the whole thing to the Internet, I quickly waded into a world of extraordinarily expensive systems. You can do absolutely anything, it turns out, but before you know it someone wants to charge you $5,000 for it.

The Internet-controlled BAYweb thermostat

So I started backpedaling. What if I still had five separate thermostats, but each was Internet-controlled? Here I had greater success. I found a great thermostat from BAYweb (check it out) that combines a really nice clean wall mounted unit with full Internet control.

But the Bayweb units are about $200 each. Your basic thermostat is in the $30-40 range. A 5-2 programmable one (ie you can have one programming setting for weekdays and one setting for weekends) are about $50-60. A 7-day programmable one (ie every day can have its own settings) are about $70-80. So the Internet control still adds quite a bit of cost, especially since we need five units.

In the end we decided to go with one of the BAYweb ones for the main floor, and then get 5-2 programmable thermostats for the other four zones.