Slacking

So what's happening? What's new? Do you blog anymore? Are you mad at me? Are you still alive?? Just some of the exciting questions people have been asking me lately so I figure I better update my blog (OK, and my blogging sisters have made me feel like I'm slacking). First of all, to answer the questions above; lots, not a lot, occasionally, most likely no, got a pulse so pretty sure yes. I've just been a little busy and have a lot on my mind lately.

Now that's out of the way let me try to bring you up to date with the house building. I've continued to put up siding working mainly on the 2nd level. I'm about 3/4 done now. I find it fun to work off the roof and nailing siding is pretty easy to do, at least for the shorter pieces. I'm still trying to figure out how I'm going to do the peak on the front side of the house. The roof cutting across makes it impossible to use a ladder or the scaffolding easily. I might rent a boom lift for a weekend just to make life simple. That would also allow me to trim some trees along the driveway that need to come down.

On the inside I finished with the master bath shower. The picture is looking up at the ceiling, the 4 galvanized caps are for the shower head, and the other object is a light can. I lowered the ceiling 6" so I could install a Kohler Water Tile rainfall shower head. This still will give me over an 8' ceiling in the shower (most of the main floor is 9'+ ceilings). The shower head has four separate inlets and takes a little creative piping to make it work right.

I also finished hooking up the fireplace fresh air inlet. Its just some 5" ducting that runs around the garage wall at the ceiling level. It then goes up through the floor and hooks into the fireplace. This allows the fireplace to use air from outside of the house rather than taking all the nice warm air from inside the house. Once the insulation is in I'll be building a sofit around the garage so the ducting won't be visible.

Also down in the garage I built a wall and doorway for the mechanical room. The main reason was to give me a place to hang the main floor radiant manifold and hide the drain stacks coming down from the upper floors.

The power rough-in is now 99% done. I spent the last week or so wiring the breaker panel up. Out of 42 spaces I only have 10 left. Actually 2 of those are gone as I've decide to pre-install all the wiring for a hot tub. Yes, its kind of overkill. Every room has its own power circuit, and the master bath has two 20 amp circuits all its own (I'm not sure what I'll be using them for but at least I have the option of running 2 hair dryers, a curling iron, toothbrush, shaver, TV, radio, microwave, circular saw, DJ system, etc all at the same time in the bathroom! Please note, didn't say I would, just that I could!) The only other thing I have to wire is the boiler and radiant system, more about that in a minute. The rest of the wiring I have to do is the communications, TV and thermostat wiring. These should both go fairly quickly as they all are just going to run from the room to a box in the mechanical room.

Back to the boiler; it arrived. I'm using a high efficiency modulating condensing boiler, everybody understand? Well if you don't here's a quick explanation. It tries to suck every bit of energy out of the fuel it burns and only puts out the amount heat it needs to. The end result is that the exhaust gases are cool enough to vent out through PVC (plastic) pipe. The other nice thing is that its small (16" wide x 24" tall). Of course the first thing I did to my new $3000.00 boiler once it was unpacked was to take it apart. Yes, I think I'm crazy too. Unfortunately to make it run on propane I had to install an smaller venturi in it (speaking Greek to some of you again or, in reality Italian). So after studying the instructions for an hour I unscrewed 5 bolts pulled a few things apart, put the venturi in, and screwed it all back together. Now all I have to do is hang it on the wall, install the piping, wire the low water cutoff switch to the boiler, the boiler to the pump, the pump and boiler to the controller and the controller to the thermostats.

Now you know what's been on my mind! Any questions???