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It’s been a couple of months now since the Noble Home was completed and, like most things in life, there has been some good and some bad.

First, the pluses:

The Bryant furnace is very quiet. Despite being directly below the living area you can only hear a slight rumble when it switches on. Given that it’s only 30 feet away from and one floor below the bedroom, I was concerned that I’d be woken up every time it tripped off.

The Mills Store came through with some stylish, all-wood “crew” chairs to go with my table.

No more “ceiling rain”. My working theory of the original event – that snow got sucked into and collect in the air chutes during a freak 2 day storm – seems to be holding true.

Now the “plus ungood”:

There is a phenomena associated with new materials called “outgassing”. It’s what produces that “new car smell” when you drive off the lot with your brand new sedan. Things like vinyl flooring, paint, polyurethane, and even wood have Volatile Organic Compounds in them that vaporize into the air for weeks and months after they’ve been applied/installed. I’m experiencing a lot of this right now in the new addition.

If it were Spring, Summer, or Fall I could open all of the windows for hours on end to speed up the process, but it’s kind of hard to do in the dead of winter (assuming you don’t want to burn up a few thousand dollars worth of propane).

I mentioned this in passing when I last emailed Noah, and he said that he’s recommending a heat/energy recovery ventilation system to all of the other Noble Homers, to pump fresh air into the houses without giving up all of the heat. He recently built an addition to his own house using Thermasteel panels and was surprised at how little air transmission they allowed.

I’ve also noticed that the quite a bit of noise from the outside migrates inside, much more so than in other houses I’ve been in. Being woken up by a chickadee that sounds like it’s on the pillow next to you at 5 AM can be a little startling. I may double up the glass in the clerestory and gable end windows, at least in the bedroom. This effect was really pronounced last Thursday, when a powerful rain storm came through packing 50 MPH winds. I could hear every gust as it plowed into and over the addition.

On the bright side, none of the rain got into any part of the house (basement included), and siding and shingles were still attached when I inspected the exterior the next morning.

Lastly, the main floor flexes more than I thought it would. I-joists have no problem supporting a 20′ span, but they can be a big springy. I can hear dishes rattle on their shelves when I walk across the living room floor. If I were doing it all over again, I’d probably put a few LVLs in with the I-joists to stiffen everything up. I may bring Mike back to “sister” some of the joists if the flexing really starts to bug me.

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I’ll come clean: I really like books. And I’ve accumulated hundreds if not thousands over the years. I even worked at a library in high school, and took full advantage when they were selling off old editions.

Fortunately for me the local Mills Store sells relatively inexpensive 3′ wide pine bookcases, and will finish them for a small extra consideration.

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Every time there is a party the living/dining room seems to go through a new evolution. The latest one moved all of the sofas near the entertainment area and had a pair of tables running the length of the room by the sliding doors. We needed the two tables to seat the seven guests (though we probably could have placed as many as ten or twelve) – my family events are seldom small.

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Did I mention I like books? One day I was looking around in the bedroom and noticed how the clerestory window shelves were just the right depth for the average mass market paperback book. I then realized that I had a storage bin full of mass market paperback books. Something nagged at the back of my brain. Could there be a connection here?

So – on a strictly experimental basis – I’m seeing how I like the new “top row” library in the bedroom. One of the negatives right off the line is that it all but blocks the light coming into the room through the clerestory windows. It also tends to make the room look more than a little like one of those pre-Barnes & Noble corner book stores.

On the positive side, I get to see all of my old novels on display, and it helps the acoustics of the room by providing another soft surface to dampen sound reverberation.

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The poor, innocent breezeway that connects the old and new houses has been taking it on the chin since day one. Whenever company comes over it’s the first place I dump tools and clutter that I have lying about the place. I really need to figure out what’s going to live out here and how everything will be arranged.

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My initial plan was to screw a few bars of coat hooks into the wall of the breezeway, but then one of these over-the-door hook sets caught my eye while I was walking through the local Walmart. I’m not completely sold on the concept, but I figured I’d give it a try to see how I liked it, and the door to the basement was practically begging to be a guinea pig.

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The Noble home has hosted its inaugural party. The annual New Year’s festivities were held here and the bash was a success. The kitchen proved to be spacious enough to heat, re-heat, microwave, and otherwise prepare the various dishes brought by the guests. The living room area was large enough that people who wanted to watch the Rose Bowl could do so without interrupting the conversations of the people by the table and the other side of the room. The bedroom even worked out as an expedient cloakroom (I didn’t have time to mount the coat hooks in the breezeway).

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And now for the bad news. Last Sunday night I was sitting on the sofa, watching the Patriots get dismantled by the Texans, when suddenly the ceiling sprinkler system went off. I thought this somewhat odd, primarily because I don’t have a sprinkler system!

As I sat there dumbfounded, a stream of water trickled down from the ceiling, across the collar tie, and onto the floor. Most of the 4 to 6 ounces of water came down in the first few seconds, and the whole event was all over in a couple of minutes, but I was absolutely stunned. After I got a bucket to catch the last drips (and anything else that might come out) I called Mike, the builder. His preliminary guess was that there was an ice dam up on the roof that had “let go” and caused the water to flow into the house. The region had just completed a two and a half day snow storm which had exhibited high winds and left about 8 inches of very powdery snow on the roof, so his assessment sounded plausible. Mike agreed to drive out the next morning to inspect the situation.

I spent the rest of the night trying to figure out what had happened. We had been so careful in the construction of the roof, to prevent just this sort of thing from happening. The source of the leak in the ceiling was four and a half feet from the interior wall, which meant – with the 3 foot overhangs – the ice dam would have to be 7 feet long. That just didn’t sound possible.

I sent Noah an email to see if he had any ideas, and to ask if any of the other Noble Home builders had seen anything like this. He responded that he hadn’t heard of any roof leaks, but then the other Noble Homes had the steel roofs, not the shingled like mine.

Trust me, there are few things more heartbreaking than spending an entire year building a new addition, moving into it, and then having it spring a leak a week later.

Mike and his assistant, Mike, drove out the next morning to investigate the leak. We looked over the source of the problem inside, and then went up on the roof. Mike and Mike shoveled off the area immediately above the leak and used a broom to clear down to the shingles.

There wasn’t any sign of an ice dam. Not even a ridge at the very edge of the roof.

We brainstormed a little while we were up on the roof, and Mike’s best guess was that the extremely fine size of the snow flakes coupled with the high winds during the long storm had allowed snow to get into the ridge and/or soffit vents. Once inside the roof structure, it was only a matter of time before the snow melted and followed the path of least resistance to the soffits. Somewhere along that route in one particular bay the water found a screw hole and ran down it into the living room.

I did some Googling and found out that a number of people had reported wind-blown snow getting sucked up into soffit vents like a vacuum cleaner. When a strong wind blows over a house it can create unequal pressure across the two eaves, and if the snowflakes are small and light enough they can get hauled into the attic of a house by the draft that is created. A couple of contractors wrote in forums that it wasn’t unusual for them to find piles of snow in peoples’ attics during the winter!

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The end result of our investigation was that at I was going to watch the eaves during the next few snowstorms, to see exactly what happened when the snow was blowing around.

Since that time (almost exactly a week ago as I write this) we’ve had one more light snow storm, and I saw no indication of snow moving up into the soffits. Granted, there wasn’t much wind – barely a breeze – so I’ll have to repeat the exercise until I get conditions similar to the original storm.

On the bright side, there hasn’t been so much as a drop of water from the ceiling since last Sunday, so it could have been one of those freak, once-in-10-years events. I hope.

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The Post-Christmas break proved to be a great time to move into the Noble addition. I spent the mornings shopping at Target, Walmart, Lowes, and Home Depot for missing items (curtain rods, bath mats, etc.) and the afternoons moving bookcases, shelves, and miscellaneous gear.

Speaking of Home Depot, I owe them a tip of the hat. I brought in a cardboard box full of the “Massachusetts Illegal” smoke alarms, told the returns clerk my story, and she gave me a full refund for each of the eight $48 units. I did have to go back into the aisles with an associate to find a box with the same model of alarm (so that the clerk had a UPC code to scan into the system) but it was pretty painless otherwise. I was pleasantly shocked that they were willing to take them back without packaging or receipt (though the fact that I had charged them on my Home Depot credit card may have helped). I didn’t ask too many questions after I had my $400 refund!

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Though my brothers helped me move the really heavy furniture last week, there were still more pieces that I wasn’t too keen on shifting myself. Enter my dad’s 30 year old moving dolly.

Legend has it that he got an old master Italian carpenter to build it for him one afternoon in exchange for a bottle of my grandfather’s homemade wine. However he actually came by it, this dolly was invaluable in helping me move the ten pine bookcases around the house.

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On Tuesday I noticed a strange noise coming from the bathroom heat vent, the one closest to the utility room, and the furnace. It was the same kind of noise you hear when a penny or screw is bouncing around in a clothes dryer, and having a little scrap of metal fluttering around in the internal workings of your new furnace is not the way you want to christen it!

I listened for about an hour, to see if whatever it was would clear itself, but no luck. I popped the vent grate and fished around as far down the duct as I could reach. The only thing I discovered is that the ductwork installers liked to use many long, sharp, flesh-eating screws in their work.

Next, I snaked my shopvac down the vt enpipe, to try and suck the offending material out. No go. Whatever it was continued it’s clickety-clack mockery.

I called my builder, Mike, to report the problem, and he arranged for a furnace tech to drop by the next morning. Dave, the tech, was just as perplexed as me. After also fishing around in the vent with his hand, he went into the basement and prodded the ducts here and there, trying to isolate the problem. After a frustrating few minutes, he pronounced that surgery was in order, and cut an access panel into the main supply trunk.

And lo and behold the problem was laid bare.

The HVAC company has all of their ductwork custom cut by a shop that uses computer-driven machinery. On each piece of completed ductwork they stick a small label, so that the flesh-and-blood employees can confirm that the computer did its job correctly. One of these labels didn’t get scrapped off of the metal, and was trapped inside of the duct when it was folded into its final shape. Over the course of the last few weeks this label has been sitting in the hot, dry airflorw of the furnace, getting hotter and dryer each time the furnace cycled. Yesterday it got dry enough for part of the adhesive to give out, leaving it flapping spastically against the metal walls of the duct. It must have really been going at it down there, because the noise it was making didn’t sound like any paper brushing against steel that I’ve ever heard.

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I really like bookcases, and not just for storing books. If something can physically be squeezed between two shelves, chances are you’ll find me jamming it in there. That includes cups and dishes.

I take a lot of flack from the ladies in my life about this practice. For reasons not completely clear to me, virtually every woman I know does not like to put plates and bowls out in the open, preferring to hide them in wall cabinets. True, they may tend to collect dust, assuming you don’t use them very often. I maintain that they should make it through the washer enough to stay clean. I also like the fact that there is no searching through cabinets when a visitor wants a glass.

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As I’ve been loading furniture into the rooms, I’ve noticed that Noble homes have a surprising amount of vertical space, especially at the gable ends. I knew this would be the case based on the blueprints, but didn’t really grasp the scope of it until I started moving things into place.

It the picture above, I originally put the dresser and the bureau side-by-side, but then realized that there was over 5′ of free space above the bureau. As an experiment, I put the dresser on top of the bureau (it’s lightweight solid pine) just to see how it work look. It’s not quite seamless, but I think I’ll keep it this way to see how functional the configuration is (I used a strip rubber carpet-stop to keep the dresser from slipping off).

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As straight as the floors are, and as well made as the bookcases are, I always need to slip a shim in under one corner or another when I move those pieces around (In the old house, the floors were so out of true that I had to shim both front corners of the bookcases to prevent rocking).

Somewhere over the last few months I misplaced my torpedo level, which fit nicely on the shelves of the bookcases and told me whether the whole unit was leaning too far forward or backwards. (I’ll probably find it three minutes after I shim up the last bookcase, magnetically attached to the back of the fridge.)

I was, however, able to find my 2′ level which, while great for checking window frames, doesn’t really want to sit quietly on a 12″ deep shelf. If you invite a clamp to keep him company, though, it’s a compeltely different story.

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Old Saint Nick dropped by a little early and sent my mortal enemy Zeno packing. In other words, two days before Christmas I got my certificate of occupancy!

Mike (the builder) met for one final time with the town inspector and the fire safety officer, and they both (ultimately) put their signatures on the last two blocks of the permit card, giving me the right to inhabit the Noble Home addition.

This meeting was actually a repeat of one between these three men a week earlier. Mike and I thought that everything was in place and ready for “the final” on December 16th, but that proved to be wishful thinking.

At that time the building inspector took issue with the kraft paper backing used on the knee wall insulation in the basement and the lack of risers on the basement staircase. It seems that paper on wall insulation is a fire hazard. It can burn in the presence of fire and add fuel to the conflagration. The solution? Remove the paper and cover it with plastic, a petroleum product, which is much less flammable. Of course. No, I don’t really understand the logic either, but ours is not to reason why . . .

The real killer was the fire inspector’s pronouncement: Every one of the nine brand-new, $48 smoke detectors failed the new Massachusetts fire code requirements! There were also a few other issues, such as a couple of the detectors needing to be moved a little further away from the walls – the minimum distance between a detector and the nearest wall is 4″ – and an extra alarm had to be added on the first floor.

This was a bad situation for a number of reasons. One, all of the boxes that the smoke detectors came in had been thrown out in the trash (they were all installed and working. Why keep the packing?). Two, the receipt from Home Depot was missing (probably keeping the alarm boxes company in a landfill somewhere). And lastly, my electrician was out of town for the foreseeable future.

With my options fairly limited, and an extremely strong desire to prevent thing from dragging into the new year, I grabbed my wire strippers and a jug of “red hats”, and started swapping out alarms. It took me an afternoon off from work on Friday and literally the entire weekend to set everything right. Sunday was the most fun. We were having the first big snowstorm of the season, which meant no scrambling up to Lowes or Home Depot for missing pieces.

In the end, it all worked out. I’ll still have to fight with Home Depot over returning the alarms at some point, but at least the project is complete from the construction standpoint. I’ve got $450 worth of Massachusetts-illegal smoke detectors sitting on a bookcase shelf gathering dust, with no clear way to get my money back. Sure, it was my mistake to throw out the boxes and receipt, but I think HD needs to shoulder a little of the blame here. When I bought the alarms, the shipping box on the store shelf clearly said that they were for “new installation”. In my mind, there should have been some notice about them not meeting new fire codes, and only being good for replacement of existing units.

Just for the record, the only type of smoke detector that Massachusetts wants installed in home these days is the “photoelectric” variety. Older models are of the “ionized” type, which gives many more false alarms (especially in the presence of bath and kitchen moisture) and, reportedly, takes far longer to react to smoke than photoelectrics under some circumstances. The “BRK” and “FireX” models have been approved by MA fire departments.

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I spent the fist part of Christmas eve moving some of the smaller pieces of furniture from the old house to the new Noble addition. It’s going to be interesting to see how everything fits together, and just where the various cabinets, bureaus, sofas, and bookcases can the shoehorned into place.

I’ve got a lot of solid pine furnishings that I bought years ago from a great place called “The Mill Store“. This is a Northeast chain of stores that sells unfinished pine, oak, and maple furniture at very reasonable prices. For a few dollars more, you can have your purchase finished in a number of different color stains and sealers, and they can also deliver it locally, for a small consideration.

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The weekend before the failed final inspection I had the Verizon installer out to the house. The appointment had been set up weeks before hand and I had assumed that I’d be done with inspections by the time he came out to wire things up. I didn’t want to complicate things with him doing work on top of the contractor work that had yet to pass inspection.

The “starting time” window was between 8 AM and 12 PM on Sunday (yes, Sunday), so I puttered around until the installer appeared at 11 AM. He spent the next 5 hours running wire between the old and the new basements, climbing the nearby telephone poles, and generally doing what he needed to do to get me Verizon FIOS Internet and TV service.

During construction I had the Coax and Cat-5 wires laid in the walls and run down to the utility room in the basement. This made it much easier for him to set up his gear on the same plywood panel as the main breaker panel and plug the cables into the Verizon router and coax signal splitter he brought with him.

I haven’t used the TV or Internet connection too much (been busy swapping out smoke detectors) but so far, so good. The Internet seems especially responsive, noticeably more so than the old Comcast service I used to have. The installer told me it was because the Verizon system uses a direct dedicated line between the subscribers (like me) and the local switch, while Comcast shares the same line among many people locally. If you have Comcast Internet, you may notice a big drop in performance when all of the neighborhood kids get home from school and all start downloading YouTube videos at once.

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One thing that’s really struck me over the last few days is just how much natural light filters into the Noble home, particularly with a blanket of snow on the ground. A considerable amount of sunshine bounces off of the ground cover into the clerestory windows and illuminates the interior. Now that I’m thinking of it, I don’t recall the automatic flash on the camera I used to take these pictures went off once, which is a pretty good indicator of a high ambient light level.

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I bought this Kenmore dishwasher about 6 year ago, right after I bought the old house. It’s been installed and re-installed at least three times over the numerous renovation efforts in the old house and Noble Home addition. Hopefully he can just go about his business in peace now.

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The first chapter of the project is complete, and now it’s on to the one titled “Moving In”. Brothers Chris and Anthony helped me move some of the larger pieces in on Christmas day (after the traditional family festivities, of course). The distances involved were small (basically from one side or floor of the old house to the new addition), but navigating through the rooms and staircases without demolishing door trim or furniture was trickier than we thought. It surprising how pig-headed a 7′ bookcase can be.

With the construction phase done I may not be posting as frequently to this blog, but I’ll keep snapping pictures and writing up my experiences as long as there is something interesting to tell.

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Zeno appears to be the proverbial house guest that never leaves. No final inspection last week, so no certificate of occupancy just yet.

The propane pipes were checked by the town and given a provisional thumbs-up (There were two small changes that the inspector wanted implemented before the final inspection). With the propane tank now feeding the house pipelines I’ve got hot water, a working clothes dryer, and a functional stove. That’s the good news.

The one thing I really need – the one last, big missing piece of the puzzle – is the furnace. The propane was okay-ed last Tuesday, just before a snow storm on Wednesday. I really didn’t expect the HVAC guys to come out as 5 inches of snow and sleet were dumped on the state. Thursday rolled around and no one had appeared to install the thermostat and, more importantly, test the furnace to make sure it was firing correctly. Friday was the same.

All I can assume is that the techs had higher priority jobs to attend to. I can keep the addition in the high 40s by running the furnace in the old section of the house a little higher than usual (the air circulates to some degree through the breezeway that connects the new and old structures), but there are probably people out there with no heat at all – and that can get pretty serious pretty fast with the thermometer dipping below freezing the last few nights.

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The tankless water heater is a new experience for me. I’m used to the old kind, that have a 50 or so gallon reservoir of water that is continually heated. You get immediate hot water at the tap, but you pay to heat and re-heat the water whether you are using it or not.

Tankless heaters, like my Rinnai, have the copper hot water pipe and propane lines running into them to create hot water on the spot. When one of the hot water taps upstairs is turned on water starts to flow through the pipe in the Rinnai. A sensor detects the water flow and ignites the propane-fueled burner in the unit, heating the water as it flows past. When the taps is turned off, the flame is extinguished and the Rinnai goes back into standby mode.

There are a few drawbacks. For one thing, if you have the hot water on just a trickle the Rinnai won’t detect engough flow to engage its flame (call me when you got some real work to be done!). Another thing I’ve noticed is that it seems to take a while for the hot water to make it to the faucet once the tap has been turned on. This could be due to the cold climate in the addition at the moment, so I’ll keep an eye on this when I finally get central heating. The last issue is that there appears to be more maintenance for the water heater than a convential unit. I’m still going through the manual, but I’m seeing things like annual “scale removal”, emptying “condensate traps”, etc.

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It’s hard to tell if this really means anything significant right now, given that the interior temperature of the addition is only around 47 degrees, but the roof of the Noble Home still has its full blanket of snow from last Wednesday. I’m cautiously optimistic that the “layer cake” roof that so much work went into is really doing its job. If the interior of the addition was at 68 degrees I’d be ecstatic that the R-40 Thermasteel panels and the 1.5″ airspace above them were insulating so effectively that minimal heat was escaping to melt the snow cover on the roof. Certainly the snow on the roof of the old section of the house has completely vanished.

I’ll keep another eye on this in the future.

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I threw the next few shots in for some seasonal flavor. One street over from my house/project the neighbors took a pallet of bags and put candles in them. They made lines of these “bag lights” on both sides of the street, stretching as far as the (camera) eye could see. The “Santa’s Runway” effect is much more impressive in person.

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Many years ago I had a friend who was fascinated with Zeno’s “Dichotomy Paradox”. One day he came over to me at school with a broad grin on his face and said “Do you know that we can never get anywhere?”

“Tell me about it, ” I replied, having just spent the previous night working on a yet another meaningless high school assignment.

“According to the ancient philosopher Zeno, if you want to walk from here to that cute girl over there, you’d have to go half the distance to her, and then half the remaining distance, and then half that remaining distance, etc., etc. You could get infinitely close to her, but never quite reach her.” He had the smug look of a new lottery winner coming in to work for the very last time.

“Right, let me see if I have this straight,” I replied. “To get over to the girl, I walk half the distance to her . . . ”

“Yes,” he said

“. . . and then I walk the other half of the distance to her.”

“No, no, no – You aren’t getting it . . .!”

We had a long discussion about sophistry after the inevitable argument.

What does this have to do with building a Noble Home? Well it seems that the closer the job gets to completion, the slower it seem to go.

The big hold up over the last week has been the propane hookup. As I believe I’ve mentioned before, there is no natural gas main in the street so it’s propane, oil, or electric for heating needs.

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Originally, the service tech from Suburban Propane was scheduled to come out two weeks ago to move my existing 120 gallon propane tank from one side of the house to the other and hook it into the new pipe system in the Noble Home addition. There was a miscommunication regarding which appliances had to be connected and functional before the tech arrived, which postponed the install until the day before Thanksgiving.

Two days before the re-scheduled appointment, I received a call from Suburban Propane saying that they would have to change dates again. The technician who was going to perform the work had to rush to the hospital with his wife – she needed an emergency C-section! It’s kind of hard to be angry about a delay when you hear that! (Both mother and bouncing baby boy are doing fine, by the way)

On Friday two technicians came out to move the tank, make the final connection, and set the regulator for the tank. The guys were great and had the whole job wrapped up in about two hours. I saw the new furnace and water heater fire up for the first time, and actually got hot water from the kitchen sink! It may seem minor, but after seven months of construction it felt like a giant triumph.

The only catch was that they couldn’t leave the propane on. They had to disconnect the regulator and close the valve on the tank until the town inspector comes out and approves the work they did. Then another Suburban Propane tech will come back out to switch the gas back on. Estimated delay: Sometime next week.

Of course, without propane I can’t run the water heater or the furnace. Without hot water, I can’t get the final inspection done for the plumbing, nor can the HVAC guy come out to do final tuning on the furnace.

You can see where Zeno starts to fit into this whole process.

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The long Thanksgiving weekend saw R&D electric on site, finishing up their final items on punch list – including the installation of the eight (8!) talking fire alarms.

Building codes have evolved a long way since it was considered the height of fire safety to have a couple of $10 battery operated “puck” fire alarms screwed to the ceilings in your house. In my area, code requires you to buy $50 alarms that detect both carbon monoxide as well as smoke, not just beep but talk, and all of the units must be wired together. This includes the old part of the house as well as the Noble addition.

After grumbling about the $400 for parts plus the $300 for installation labor, I have to admit it’s a pretty cool system. Every time we’d hook up a new unit I’d test the network of alarms. From one part of the house to the other, one room after the next, a strident woman’s voice would proclaim “Fire! Fire!” followed by “Carbon monoxide detected!”, as the individual units fired off in sequence. I’m guessing that it won’t be quite as cool at 3 AM in the morning, more like a lively episode of Ghost Hunters.

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I can take credit for the wiring of the data plates (except for the coax – Thanks, Walter!). Punching down cat-5 wires into wall jacks isn’t too complicated, once you get the hang of it. The little clip on the back of the jack can really to a job on your fingertips, though, as you try to hold the jack while punching the tiny wires into place with the tool.

I’m just hoping the plates don’t come shooting out of the wall at some later date. There is a lot of slack coax and cat-5 wire coiled up behind them. I wouldn’t be suprised to see a bulge on the exterior sheathing . . .

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This week the list of outstanding tasks shrank from 32 to 19, and everything that remains is fairly minor stuff. The end is near (in the good way).

One big achievement this week was the kitchen. The last of the appliances came over from the old part  of the house and all of the cabinetry (new and old) was put in place. I’m particularly happy with the microwave shelf over the stove. Over-The-Range microwave ovens are nice, but they tend to be a bit pricey, and I’m not a big fan of built-ins. With a shelf, I can put whatever I want over the stove now and swap it out with something else later (it also makes replacing a dead microwave a snap).

I was pleasantly surprised by the amount of space in the kitchen/entryway area. I always knew it was going to be a galley-style kitchen, but I had a nagging feeling looking at the blueprints that it was going to be too narrow, that there wouldn’t be room to work in it. I’m not an Iron Chef finalist, but there seems to be plenty of room to swing pots and pans without clocking the person next to you.

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Another big event this week was the tiled shower/tub surround. Mike had all of the 12″ tiles cut and in place in one day, and grouted two days later.

I’m definitely going to have to double check the area above the tile, where the collar tie meets the wall. I don’t want any deflected water from the shower working its way into or underneath the wood. An extra coating of polyurethane, a nice fat bead of DAP 3.0 sealer, and all should be well.

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See that innocent-looking bar light in the picture above? Installing it went from a simple 5 minute job (just read the instructions on the back of the package! What could be easier?) to a 45 minute, two-man, knock-down drag-out, electrician vs. drywall brawl. The worst of it was finding the free wire that Tom had left in the wall when the initial wiring was done. We knew it was in there somewhere, but we just didn’t know where. Since I had the smaller – er – more dexterous fingers I got to stand on the ladder and fish around for the end of the 14-2 cable in the wall. Take it from me – standing half on a ladder, half on a vanity, with your arm jammed into a hole in a wall up to the elbow loses its appeal pretty quickly.

We did eventually find the wire by fishing around with a bend piece of 12-2 wire (it had fallen way down in the wall cavity, probably during the sheetrocking). We may have scared it to the surface with some of the language we were using.

Speaking of lighting, I’ll be using some enclosed CFLs in the bar light. I’m using CFLs throughout the house to try and save on electricity. Power isn’t getting any cheaper and I should pick up a few dollars in savings over the 9 year life of the bulbs. Ideally, I’d like to use LED bulbs (they last longer, are instantly at full brightness, and are even more efficient than CFLs) but right now they are too expensive to justify.

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The last milestone this week was the plumbing. All of the supply and waste pipes are in place and, as of last night, working perfectly. I’ve been fooling about with the various appliances and fixtures to make sure they still work and nothing leaks. So far, so good.

The last major hurled is the propane hookup. I’ve got a technician from Suburban Propane coming out next week (the day before Thanksgiving, of course) to move the 120 gallon exterior tank to its new resting place and make the connection to the new pipes. Firing up the stove, dryer, and water heater will be great, but getting that furnace going is becoming more vital with every passing sub-freezing night.

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The key moves this week involved the kitchen and bathroom. Mike and company moved all of the old base cabinets, the stove, and dishwasher from the old kitchen into the new one. With the addition of the Toto toilet, the set of fixtures in the new bathroom is now complete.

R&D Electric continued to chip away at the wiring punch list. The big milestone was putting all of the connections in place for the propane appliances.

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Lee the Plumber was a pipe-fitting, PVC-cutting berserker this week. The two times I visited the site while he was there I tried not to stay in one place for too long – for fear of being accidentally glued or soldered to something.

Lee got almost all of the major appliances and fixtures (stove, sink, dishwasher, vanity, toilet, clothes dryer) hooked up to the water, waste, and gas systems.

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This week was a big one for flooring. Over the course of three days the crew put down all of the 3″ pre-finished Maple boards in the bed and living rooms (about 640 square feet total). Mike also found someone to install the sheet vinyl flooring for the bathroom, kitchen, and breezeway.

Originally, I had planned to put down the vinyl myself, but after looking into the difficulty level and time required, I decided it would be better to leave it to someone with the requisite skills and experience; You only get one shot to cut and glue the vinyl correctly. It’s also wise to let them do the measuring to determine how much material to order. I hadn’t ordered enough, and ended up running around the day of the installation trying to get more vinyl that was fairly close to the color and pattern of the sheet I had originally bought.

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On more than one occasion I’ve been asked “Why Vinyl? Isn’t that stuff cheap, ugly, non-biodegradable, ozone-depleting, and the root cause of national obesity?!”

Well, I can’t argue with all of those points, but my decision-making process broke down like this – There are only three real options for flooring where water will be involved: Tile, Vinyl, and Linoleum.

I ruled out natural and engineered wood right off the bat. I realize that a lot of people use wood in their kitchens these days, and it certainly has a nice look, but I’ve heard stories from contractors about the warping and rotting that can happen as water works its way under the boards over the years. I even saw this myself under the original sink in the old part of my house. Granted, there are some types of new engineered planks that are touted to be completely waterproof and the manufacturer guarantees them for use in baths and kitchens, but somehow I’m not inclined to be an “early adopter”, at least in this case.

Tile is the thing to have these days for kitchens, bathrooms, and entryways. On the plus side it’s tough, durable, good-looking, and adds a lot to the resale value of a home. On the other hand tile is cold underfoot (if you walk around barefoot or in socks), is more expensive to install, the grout has to be maintained periodically, and if you drop something breakable on it . . . I’ve seen elegant glasses hit tile and not just break but detonate on contact like a fragmentation grenade.

So with those thoughts in mind I was all set to lay down some genuine Linoleum (brand name “Marmoleum”, from Forbo). Although the term Linoleum is often used interchangeably with vinyl, it’s really a much better material. It’s VOC free, uses all-natural ingredients, wears like iron, and reportedly even has anti-bacterial properties.

And then I saw the price – $5.50 per square foot. My hardwood Maple flooring only cost $4.50! Given that I could get very good quality sheet vinyl for less than $2.00 a square foot, and the construction budget was already tight, I had to go with vinyl.

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The tile is going to be used for the shower surround above the bathtub. Mike the Builder suggested going with larger individual tiles to reduce the number of grout lines on the wall and make for a quicker installation job overall.

I picked porcelain tiles for their impermeability to water. Natural stone and ceramic tiles are water resistant, but aren’t quite in the same class.

Remember to pick up the bullnose tile to trim the outer edges of the enclosure. I didn’t realize it was needed and had to run around town trying to find some that matched the original tiles, well after I had purchased the original 12×12s.

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Per building code, the basement ceiling bays must be insulated. This keeps the first floor warmer and prevents the furnace from firing more often (and burning more fuel).

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After their exterior adventures, the painters turned their attentions to the inside of the house. They’ve been working on the walls, window trim, and doors for the last two days, with some fairly good results to show for it.

They’ve been using Benjamin Moore “Aura” paint, at my request. It’s rather expensive ($70) compared with Home Depot’s standard stock ($20), but it does have a few advantages. For one thing, the primer is mixed in with the paint, so that a whole labor-intensive step can be skipped (yes, the painters primed anyway, but accidents happen). The extra $50 per can pays for itself if you calculate the number of hours you save by avoiding that first priming coat. Secondly, it is really low in VOCs; not quite the zero VOCs of some of the other brands out there, but pretty close. Why not use a zero VOC brand? I was all set to use Home Depot’s “FreshAire Choice” line of paint, but then ran across an article in Consumer Reports that said it performed about as well as diluted milk. Ah well, maybe they’ll work out the kinks in the next formulation.

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The painters have a clever trick for finishing multiple doors at the same time. They stand them up on their bottom edges next to each other, with each door angled slightly crooked in relation to the one next to it, like an unfolded paper fan. They then tack them together with short pieces of wood and screws that go into the tops of the doors just enough to hold everything in place, leaving a space between each panel and its neighbor.

They then walk around this impromptu modern art installation with their spray guns and blast liberally. It’s a simple matter to unscrew everything the next day and put the doors back in their frames. The small holes on top of the doors will never be seen by anyone.