More Color

Here is some pics of the freshly painted garage siding. It is fiber cement just like the clapboards on the house but just has a different pattern to give it the shake or shingled look.

Farmers Porch and Sheetrock

Lots of new pictures to share...

Mechanical Room

Heat Recovery Ventilator

Domestic water manifold and future site of radiant manifolds and boiler

Pantry

Walk out end of basement

Office

Upstairs Hallway

Living Room

Master Bath

Beadboard and Shiplap

We decided an easy way to give the house some character would be to use some alternative wall coverings than traditional dry wall. Dani is a real stickler for the whole cottage look, so we found a few ways to bring the cottage look into our farmhouse theme. While about 70% of the house will be drywall, we decided to use bead board for the walls and ceiling in the kitchen and upstairs hallway and shiplap in the living room (horizontal runs) and mud room (vertical runs). Most of it will be painted white but still give the walls some texture or character. Here is a few pictures I found to show the two materials...

Here is the horizontal shiplap, kind of hard to notice, but click on the picture to enlarge...



Vertical shiplap...



White bead board ceiling and walls...



And to contrast that all white kitchen (walls, ceilings, cabinets), Dani has approved her custom island color with the kitchen designer this week... We should have cabinets delivered in 3-4 weeks, hopefully they can go right in!

Insulation, Siding and Sheetrock...

Seeing sheetrock ready to go up is a happy sight... We have finished insulating the walls and the drywallers will be in next week to start hanging and taping... About 70% of the house will be sheet rock, while we are going to use some millwork from a local lumber yard to cover a few room's walls. I will see if i can find some examples of the look we are going for later on... We also had some help running the ducting for the heat recovery ventilator this last week, so that is complete. And the most noticeable changes are the completion of siding on the front of the house and the beginning of the farmers porch out back... I will be home from work in a few weeks, we are planning on emptying the storage unit and loading up the basement. My stay home will be quick, two weeks, so we are hoping to be finished up when I return in mid November... Maybe I will get lucky and Dani will be all moved in when I return! Lucky her...




Insulating blanket to reflect radiant heat up... These are installed about 2 inches below the radiant tubing between all floor joists.



Sheet rock ready to go up!



More yellow...

Not much has changed outside in the last week, but the inside is almost completely insulated. Here is a nice picture I got off the appraisers report from last week, according to that, we are 68% done... Still hoping for a late October completion date... fingers crossed. We also had the Energy Star inspector in this week for our first inspection. We were planning on trying to get the house Energy Star certified, but its actually a requirement for all newly built homes in Hinesburg.

Front Door

Despite getting many weird looks when we answered the commonly asked question "what color is the front door going to be?" Black it is!

Insulation began today. We purchased 1800 board ft. of spray foam insulation from Tiger Foam. It is a DIY insulation so we were a little sceptical, but when comparing prices to a professional outfit we took the gamble. Although I wasn't able to be there for the spraying, Joe reported that it went pretty smoothly! It came with a big sigh of relief on my end of the phone in Brazil...

We decided to use spray foam insulation to give the house an air tight seal. Although commonly used exclusively, we made the decision to spray 1" which will give an insulating value of R-7 and then fill the rest of the wall cavity with R-14 fiberglass insulation. This will provide us with the tight package of spray foam while keeping costs down.

One drawback with having such a tight house is the "breathing" properties are cut off. To compensate for this we purchased a heat recovery ventilator. It is an air exchanger that will replace stagnant air in the house with fresh air outside. It has a small heat exchanger built in that uses the heat from the outgoing air to heat the incoming supply air, thus eliminating cold air infiltration in the winter.




Any front door color suggestions?? Right now we are thinking black...

Fading Green...

Its nice to see the green house wrap finally disappearing beneath the siding! Here's a few shots of the front. The Fypon header and pilasters were installed this week, they are made from molded high-density rigid polyurethane and much like the trim we used, they will give an authentic look while having a long maintenance free life.