Week 11: Sept 7 - 11

After a week of working out at the house I am sore and tired. I am not used to 10 hours of manual labor. My fingers have blisters, blood blisters from hitting them with a hammer, slivers and small scapes of them that are amazingly painful. Last night I came home so tired that all I could do was take a shower and lay around. Thank goodness for Viki, who is taking care of all of the baby's needs.



This week the exterior doors were hung along with all of the windows. and the house was wrapped in a tarp like material that is suppose to help seal the house from all of the wind we get in Idaho.

Excavation has begun on the driveway and the garage floor was poored with cement. We are going with asphalt with a cement curb edge on the remainder of the driveway portion primarily because it costs less, but also because it doesn't crack and split as noticably as cement. The plumbers installed our new on-demand water heater and Viki's soaker tub.
We decided to go with the on-demand water heater for a variety of reasons. First, our roof line with the dormers over the garage made it such that in order to vent a regular water heater through the roof, and stay in compliance with code, we would have had to have a 10 - 12 foot exposed pipe running from the garage roof to a point above the house roof line. Aesthetically, that is not acceptable so our next option was to take some room out of the kitchen and upstairs living room to accomodate the pipes in the wall. I didn't want to loose any space, especially in the kitchen so we said no to that option. Next was a direct vent, basically a fan assisted venting, of the water heaters out the side of the house. Two regular water heaters direct vented ended up costing more than the on-demand system. Besides satisfying the particular design challenges of our house the primary selling points behind the on-demand, tankless water heater is that money is saved by not constantly having to heat a tank of water and that one can have limitless hot water. We will see! Between the mounds of laundry, dirty dishes, and dirty bodies in our house we use a lot of hot water

I started pulling wire for the electrical system. Tom, Viki's brother, has been helpful to come and assist me. Neither of us really know what we are doing and it shows - look at this confusing mess.>