Insulation

Because of our recent network outage, I missed reporting on a lot of activity at the house last week. The biggest item is that the insulation has gone in. We found out that our new house has the distinction of being the first house in town to get these:

Is that cool, or what? That is a little styro-foam beer cooler that has been installed around every electrical box on the outside walls. These are now required by the new electrical code to make the house “greener“. They replace those dorky little rubber thingys that go under the switch plates that are supposed to keep out the drafts and that work about as well all those other dorky after-market retro-fit solutions like the silly washers that were supposed to go into your shower head that turned your shower into a spray mister an annoyed everybody to the point that most people just threw them out (like we did).

Our house has a special box around every single outlet and/or switch (on the outside walls) to keep out the breezes. How’s that for green?

But you can no longer see those boxes because they have been covered with fiberglass insulation.

Kitchen

Plant room

More plant room.

Living room.

Hey! Look! The wall board has arrived. I guess we get walls next week. Cool.

We can get excited about insulation because our old house had none, zero, nada, nichts, bupkis, insulation in the walls, thus causing us to weep each time the oil truck showed up (a frequent event back then).

Along with the insulation, they are putting in the heating system. And that involves…..  Duct work.

More duct work.

Duct work in the attic.

Duct work in the basement. That’s a lot of ducts.

But there’s more than just the ducts going on. Here is my favorite item… the fully functional, non-plugged-up, brand new, connected-to-the-sewer, stand pipe for the washing machine.

You will notice that it is now plumbed with our PEX tubing. We will be able to put hot and cold water into the washing machine so that it can wash our clothes and subsequently go down the perfectly clear and open drain and not spill onto our floors causing consternation and cursing. As our builder would say, “It’s all good.”

But wait! That’s not all. The electric panel is in.

And that goes out to a long conduit that goes all the way up to the roof…

Wow! That’s a long pole! It isn’t connected to the electricity yet, but it will be soon.

The water meter is in!

That measures the water that goes into the PEX tubing that goes to the washing machine and subsequently goes into the fully functional, non-plugged-up, brand new, connected-to-the-sewer, stand pipe and out to the brand new sewer connection all the way into the street and into the town sewer system with no tree roots in it… whew!

The radon vent has been put into place.

The radon vent is the pipe that has the turquoise bottom. I don’t know why it has a turquoise bottom, but it does. Radon, as you know is that horrid radio-active gas that comes out of granite and slowly poisons you if you don’t get rid of it.

Since the house is sitting on top of a granite ledge it is quite likely that there could be a radon problem under the basement slab. To avoid any problems in the future, we had them put in a radon vent up through the roof. This is just a horizontal, vented pipe under the basement floor that bends up and goes vertically through the roof. If any radon comes out of the granite under the slab, it is simply vented harmlessly out of the house.

This is a passive radon vent, meaning that there are no blowers or fans in it. In most cases that is all that is required for dealing with radon. If we do need to install an active radon system, the pipe will already be there and all we will have to do is add the required blowers to vent the slab. That will be way cheaper than having to dig up the slab with air hammers and install the pipe after everything is done. Cheap insurance.

BTW, I have heard in the rumor mill that some of the popular granite kitchen counter tops are suspected of leaking radon into houses. I don’t know what you would do about a problem like that. Our kitchen counters will be quartz.

Well, that is enough. I have violated my own “15 second rule” on blogging (“If you can’t read it in 15 seconds, it is too long”). But there is just too much happening now to show it all in 15 seconds.

I will end this entry with some photos of the house with the morning sun on it. I usually don’t get over there until evening when the sun is at the back of the house. It looks really nice with the dappled sunshine on it, don’t you think?

Um. Disregard the porta-potty. That is a temporary fixture. We will have real toilets that flush.