A Month Gone, A Lot Done

October has come and gone, and unfortuantly (or fortuantly, depending on how you look at it.) it was a really busy month for me with HST so although a lot of work got done, no blog was written.

As mentioned in the last blog, the spray foam guys did come in the month of October. They were here for a week in order to put spray foam along the untire underside of the roof, the lake side (south) wall on all three floors (including basement), and a few other places where getting the Rockwool insulation would be difficult. As of the writing of this blog, we are still waiting on the invoice.

But it’s an invoice I will happily pay, as the insulation has made inside the house noticibly warmer than the outside of the house. In fact, I would say the inside of the current house is warmer without proper heat than the old house (which we tore down) was with heat. We have a couple of small electric heaters in it for now as we wait for the furnace people to come install the furnace and duct work.

We did get our fireplace in the month of October, but we need to be able to build the mantle and close in the chiminy before we can use it, and we need the furnace people (who are also the fireplace people) to come back before we can do that. We did get an order of wood, which is piled on the front porch, so that as soon as we can use it, we can enjoy a fire. It’s meant to be complementary to the propane heat that will run the furnace, but given how warm the house already is, we suspect this will heat the house on it’s own.

We’ve also managed to confirm that when the sun is shining and coming through the wall of windows that is our lakeside (south) wall the house warms up quite nicely. This is going to be a nice change to what we were living with before.

In October we also got all the Rockwool insulation completed and sealed with vapor barrier. This has us ready for drywall everywhere except where the duct work needs to go, and we did get the insulation inspection completed this month as well as the electrical inspection for the exterior walls. We also completed the plumbing inspection.

The septic has been mostly completed in October. We need to finish burying it and the pump from the little tank to the big tank needs to be hooked up to power. Power was installed in October (but I didn’t grab a picture of the main pannel) which means we can start installing outlets in November.

The front door has also been installed since the last blog post. Probably a given since I’ve been talking about how warm the house already is. It is a double door we won on auction, and the double door has already come in handy for moving things into the house. We’ve had the whole thing open often since its installation, though we suspect the left side will remain closed most of the time once we’re living in the house.

And we started installing drywall! Unfortuantly the drywall we had has been exposed to too much moisture to put into a house. We have offered it to our neighbour for a garage (where it should be fine) instead of it ending up in the landfil. It held up pretty well considering it’s been in a garage for almost two years, just not well enough for us to want it in our house where we’ll be spending a lot of time.

You may notice from the pictures the greenish drywall. That drywall is mold resistant, so we’re putting it where we expect water. (Behind sinks and toilets, by the washing machine, etc.) As mentioned above, we need to leave the walls exposed for the duct work when the furnace people arrive, but we can install it where duct work isn’t going to be.

Well, that’s all for now. Thank you very much for following along on our journey and for your patience as these blogs have been sporadic. We’re happy to share this process with you. Hopefully you won’t have to wait quite as long for the next one.