Water heater, more wiring and clean up

Aaron helped me again today and we got the tankless waterheater hung on the south wall outside the garden tub. The compartment that we built underneath the unit is for access in case we have a pipe to freeze.Howell King came back today and ALMOST got the wiring finished and ready for the rough in inspection on Tuesday. He'll come back Sunday after church and button things up. In the meantime he gave me some last minute assignments like putting covers on all the junction boxes. Aaron began tidying up around the cottage... here's the pile of junk wood we'll use this winter for kindling in our wood stove. The stack actually looks bigger than it is because of the numerous pallets that make up the bulk of the pile.Here are some photos of miscellaneous things related to our building project... this is a shot of the "guest loft." There is just one sheet of plywood flooring up there now (and no walls) while we wait on the cellulose insulation to be blown in:This is a shot of the kitchen window from the outside with 2" X 4" styrofoam trim which will be covered with stucco in the near future (the wood support nailed on the bottom trim piece will be removed):This is a long shot of the front of the cottage looking over one of our wood piles (our 16' X 20' storage building is in the distance):And here we have Boone-Dog grooming Mosby who is wearing his stylish orange winter coat. Mosby is essentially NEKKID because his fur is so short and needs his coat this time of year to keep him from shivering.The rough in electrical inspection will be a MAJOR milestone for our building progress. Assuming we pass the rough in, I'll immediately go down the mountain and pick up Aaron who will help me put up our white tin ceiling (approx 2 days). As soon as that is finished we'll insulate the attic (one day), stain the concrete (2 days)(it'll be a "chicory" color and look like beige suede) and begin moving cabinets and STUFF into the house. We'll physically move over soon after that.

Lights... camera, action!

Howell King, our electrician, returned yesterday (Monday) and when he left we had LIGHTS (in 2/3s of the house):It's beginning to look like a cozy little Irish cottage don't you think? (sorry for the blurr). If you look closely, you can see the styrofoam trim that I'm gluing around the windows and door. Believe it or not, stucco sticks to the styrofoam.:Aaron and I worked on "spiffing up" the wiring today (I've heard the electrical inspector is favorably impressed if the wires look neat in their runs and in the panel). Howell did a masterful job making the panel look neat and professional so I felt compelled to make the runs look neat and secure (we did a lot of stapling and tying the multiple wires together with plastic mini-ties). We also ran our telephone lines (office, bedroom, kitchen and THE BATHROOM for those important calls from special people).
We also moved the dog pen over off the back of the house so the boys are now living in the cottage. The 20' steel cargo container gets removed tomorrow which will save us $71/month... huzza!
Howell will return and finish up the wiring on Thursday. I'll go in on Friday and request an early Tuesday morning inspection... so assuming we pass the inspection, Aaron and I will begin screwing up the tin ceiling Tuesday morning. I think the ceiling will take about 2 days so I'll schedule the insulation to be blown in on Thursday. Next the floor gets stained and we're almost ready to move in... oops... I've still got to glue the CPVC pipes together so we'll have water.

Getting ready for the rough-in electrial inspection, etc.

I continued to finish Howell King's wiring assignments (the stuff that takes no brains and that which Howell can trust a "college boy" with) which mainly includes running conduit in grooves that I had to saw in the AAC block while making square holes for the metal electrical boxes. Here is the work in progress:
Yesterday I began hooking up the plug-in receptacles, to wit:
Alexis wanted to include a picture of the "thingy" that will hold up the living room ceiling fan:Since attaching the AAC window trim will take several days because of the weight of the block 2" X 4"s, I started by "Liquid Nailing" the bottom piece of trim on all the windows. To begin this multiple-day process, I nailed a wooden 2" X 4" to the bottom of the window opening so the block would have something to sit on while the glue dried (the wood will be removed when the glue sets up and the vertical block pieces on either side of the windows will sit on the block bottom piece while their glue dries).So you'll have a better idea of how the trim will be attached, here's a shot of me holding up a vertical piece of the AAC block trim. Stucco will cover the AAC trim as well as the styrofoam behind it. I'll mix up a small batch of concrete and pour an angled sill from the window facing out to the edge of the bottom trim piece to keep water from coming in under the window.
Aaron Gifford came today and finished a bunch of odds and ends-type jobs. Most importantly he adjusted the SW knee wall flashing which was keeping me up nights (shown, below). He used my new "belt-fed" screw gun on Jerry Hawkins 30' ladder to secure some of the HardiPlanks at the tipy-top of the gable end walls (this gun is like a belt-fed machine gun and screws in sheetrock screws... the manufacturer claims that a 4' X 12' sheet of sheetrock can be hung in 60 seconds... I'm not sure I believe that one but it does work pretty well as long as the phillips head bit lasts... two new ones are enroute)... and he continued cleaning up the AAC adhesive "drips" next to the block wall that accumulated while I was laying block (have I mentioned how glad I am that the block laying is FINISHED!?). This needed to be done in preparation for staining the concrete floor. Aaron will come back tomorrow and we'll finish up some more pesky little jobs including more electrical stuff. Howell King can't come back to wrap me up until next Monday afternoon. Hopefully the rough-in inspection will take place next Tuesday and I can start putting up our tin ceiling.

Close to finishing exterior... not counting stucco/paint

Today Aaron and I finished the soffits front and back including the end caps on the overhangs. Now except for the AAC trim around the front windows/door and finishing a dab of HardiPlanking on the south wall, we are essentially finished with the exterior of our Irish cottage (awaiting the light gray stucco). Here's a picture of the soffit on the south overhang with its closed-in end cap. As you may recall, the southside overhang is wider than the front and designed to block the summer sun (which is higher in the sky) and let in the winter sun to passively heat our Irish cottage.
This is a shot of the front overhang/soffit and end cap:
We also finished some odds and ends today including changing out one of the hinges on the back door that was sprung and adding a "sweep" to the bottom of both front and back doors to seal out "Old Man Winter."
Additionally, we started cleaning the concrete floor in preparation for staining it to look like brown suede. The stain will be transparent ("chicory") and will allow the "blemishes" in the concrete (see discoloration in concrete, below) to show through giving the floor a natural stone-like look.Howell King, our plumber/electrician, has been booked up with service work recently and can't come back to help us finish up until Sunday afternoon. The hope is we'll pass our rough-in electrical inspection next week and then be able to install our tin ceiling and summons the insulation guy to blow in cellulose (R-32 front wall, R-50 ceiling). It's gonna be toasty warm this winter in our Irish cottage!

Finishing up the knee wall...

A number of folks have asked why my Irish cottage design included a knee wall at both ends. The answer is simple... most of the pictures of Irish cottages I saw sported a knee wall... so the answer is "for the look." Today Aaron and I finished (99%) the west knee wall. We definitely got better at the process as we went along. What helped tremendously was the auto-feeding screw gun that I bought at Home Depot. A tape of sheet rock screws feeds through the head and makes screwing the HardiPlank both fast and secure. The company claims that you can hang a 4' X 8' sheet of sheet rock in 60 seconds. The gun does work surprisingly well... here's a picture of the west wall inside and out:
Inside of wall:
Outside. We won't completely finish screwing the cap down until the building is stuccoed.
Here's a picture of the back door we re-hung yesterday taken from the inside of the house:We'll move the boys' kennel over to the house soon and they will be the first to move into our Irish cottage (left-to-right: Mosby, Baxter, Boone).

Aaron helped me today

Aaron is 27, long & lanky and can run around on our slick tin roof like a squirrel... well, he can run around like a squirrel after we spray the bottom of his jogging shoes with spray adhesive... REALLY... it makes him kinda like SpiderMan. Anyway he's a good worker and was a BIG help all day. First, we got the two east wall exterior trusses anchored more securely and aligned better. Next, we nailed HardiPlank to the inside surface of the east knee wall and almost finished putting the tin cap on the top. This is a slightly out-of-focus picture of our almost finished wall.
We also replaced the back door frame (the hinges & deadbolt /doorknob routings didn't line up on the original frame and had to be replaced by the building supply) and re-hung the door:

Today was all about wiring...

Today started VERY early for a Saturday morning... it felt like "O" dark-thirty to me but Howell King called it 7:00 AM. In a civilized society 7:00 AM Saturday morning should be reverently reserved for checking your eye lids for holes... but NO! Actually, I was 15 minutes late and Howell was already making preparations to install the steel mast used to connect the electric service to our house from the Duck River Coop pole. In spite of my early morning grogginess we got the mast up reasonably easily and quickly. It helps immensely to have someone like Howell who has done a job like this a 100 times and knows the ropes. Here's the end result.
We needed some more supplies so I went to Home Depot and Howell rescheduled a service call across town. We met up again early afternoon and started doing things inside the house. Howell began hooking up the electrical panel and I did some odds and ends that needed to be done like pulling romex wire through conduit, etc. Here's a picture of Howell's work of art:
Howell showed me how to "make-up" the receptacle boxes and I got most of them finished by the end of the day. Here I am screwing on a wire nut in the bedroom.
Alexis and her Mom worked all afternoon picking up and cleaning up. It hadn't been done in earnest in several weeks so it was no small job. Here's a couple of pictures of what they got done.
Here's the clean kitchen.
Here's the clean & picked up office... that's all the scrap lumber we have at the moment... you'd think there would be more at this stage of the building process?:

I'd been putting this off...

I've been putting off "routing" grooves in the AAC block for the runs of "code required" electrical conduit. As it turns out the job was not quite as bad as I had anticipated. I adjusted the depth of my skill saw blade to the diameter of the conduit, sawed three parallel curfs in the block then knocked out the excess with a wood chisel and hammer. The worst part of the job was breathing the concrete dust... forgive me for this 8th grade boy remark but can you spell "concrete booger!?" There were 10 traces to cut... I got 8 done this afternoon. Here are two pictures of the conduit sitting in their groves. These are shots taken before the romex wire (yellow) is pulled through the conduit, glued into the trace and wired into the metal receptacle box:It's kinda hard to see the grove I cut out but the conduit is actually sitting below the surface of the block wall.Yesterday afternoon Alexis and I went to our "favorite" local saw mill and picked up a load of their tailings for our wood stove. These oak chunks are just perfect for our top loading Tempwood wood stove which will be our primary source of heat in our Irish cottage (plus passive solar on sunny winter days)... approximately 8" X 10" X ??." The price is also perfect... $10 for all we can get on Alexis' pickup... believe me, our load was sitting on the axle.

A little of this... a little of that...

Yesterday and today I plugged away at a number of little - but necessary - things that eventually had to get done. Next week Alexis will be on fall break and will help me with tying up this type of lose ends stuff. Over the last few days I've got some more HardiPlanks nailed up on the south side of the house... only a few more planks and the screwing to finish that up. The stucco will be applied to the three sides of AAC block, the gable ends and then will be seamlessly applied around the corners and on to the HardiPlanks (they are made of concrete).Here is the main electrical panel and the 14 circuits that I have run to it so far (actually from it). I still have to pull a few more wires and hook up the lights/switches in all the rooms. Howell King will come back Monday afternoon to begin hooking up the panel. Meanwhile he has given me a long list of wiring stuff that I can do before his return next week. Jerry "Tennessee" Hawkins, my recently discovered St Andrews classmate of 47 years ago, helped me "adjust" the length of our stairway to heaven... errrr... up to the guest room loft. Jerry has been an unbelievable help especially with his hands-on building expertise and the loaning of his tools (he has "one each" of EVERY tool and fastener known to man in the back of his pickup truck).The last thing I got accomplished today was to glue (with Liquid Nails) styrofoam 2" X 2" strips around the front windows that I had just caulked. I'll glue AAC block 2" X 4" strips over these to create the borders/sill for the front windows. Believe it or not stucco will stick to the styrofoam. BTW Jerry helped with this process too by "ripping" the 2" X 2" styrofoam strips on his table saw... my attempt at cutting them accurately with my skillsaw just wasn't working.