We continue to have issues with our internet, uploading pictures has now become somewhat difficult but still possible under good circumstances (I’ve not been able to deduce exactly what those circumstances are!)

Since the last post I managed to get most of the master bedroom area  tidied up – we moved the bathtub into the master bath, and in doing so discovered that I actually cut one of the floor tiles wrong, so it looks as though I’ll have a bit of an adventure pulling up that tile and then re-cutting and laying a new one.  I will probably put this off until we do more tiling and rent the tile saw again.

We also managed to get the toilet installed in the master bath, and connect it to the plumbing, so at least now we have a properly functioning toilet that we don’t have to flush with a bucket of water (that was getting old!)

With the cleanout of the bedroom largely complete, I finally got around to installing the last of the vapour barrier and drywall in there, all that’s left is some drywall around the fireplace (has to wait until we fully connect the fireplace).

Once I got that squared away I have been continuing on with the hardwood floor – to keep the hardwood floor going straight in the bedroom, I screwed a sheet of plywood to the floor to provide a solid backing and ensure none of the flooring boards shifted as I nailed them down with the nailer.  In the picture below, you can see I am installing from left to right (looking in the bedroom door) – after I get the “right” side completed, I’ll take up the plywood and use a “spline” to reverse the direction of the tongue & groove flooring (more on this later) and finish off the “left” side of the room, and that will be the end of the flooring except for some trim pieces here and there.

Hope you enjoyed the pictures and we’ll be trying to post more frequently now that things are coming along a bit more quickly.

Well, it seems as though spring is finally here, and we are so happy to see it after such a bitterly cold winter.  I must apologize for the delay, this post was supposed to go up a while ago but I have been having troubles uploading pictures lately  🙁

Since the last post I have been tackling projects on several fronts – I kept going with the hardwood flooring until I got to the row that would continue through into the bedroom area.

I decided to stop there, as I still have to complete installing the vapour barrier in the bedroom, and there are a bunch of construction materials piled up in there, that I needed to get cleared away.  In an effort to reduce clutter, I figured I could finish more of the master bathroom, and that would clear away some of the materials and give me the space necessary to .  To start getting the kitchen in shape, now that the hardwood floor is down, I started getting some of the cabinets in place, so we can really start getting a better sense of the space.

While we had originally planned to tile our shower walls, in an effort to move things forward more quickly, we picked up an acrylic shower wall kit and installed that, and then laid down the porcelain tile on the bathroom floor, and got it grouted.  We laid down Ditra XL over the subfloor (the tile goes on top of it) as it provides a pretty waterproof uncoupling layer and should ensure the tiles don’t crack over time.  We chose Ditra XL, instead of regular Ditra, as it will match up well with our 3/4″ hardwood floor so we have a smooth transition from the hardwood to the tile.

Now that we’ve got that squared away, we can finish installing the bathtub, the toilet, and our vanity, and once those are complete the bedroom should be clear out enough to finish off the vapour barrier in there.  Finally, we’ll take care of the drywall and flooring in there, and be much closer to a finished home.

Sorry for the delay in posting, but hopefully all the pictures make up for it!

We have slowly been plugging away over here, and enjoying the milder weather compared to the bitterly cold February we just had.  After the last post I pressure tested the hot and cold water lines to the shower, and found a small leak in the cold water supply, so I fixed that up and also installed the “drop ear” fitting for the shower head.  I had to screw in a piece of 3/4″ plywood to mount the fitting onto, to get it set at the right depth for the finished wall.

As regards to flooring, we had a really hard time deciding what type of flooring to use.  The “best” kind of flooring to use over a radiant heat floor, is tile, but we found tile to be quite expensive and also it is a little hard on the feet.  We also looked at cork, bamboo, laminate, and other engineered floors, but we used some of this in our previous house (kitchen remodel) and were not happy with it’s durability.  We finally ended up deciding to go with solid hardwood, but pricing for pre-finished hardwood is still quite expensive ($4/sq.ft.), and we didn’t want to pay a premium for a floor we will probably wreck and need to refinish anyway.  After doing some inquiring and research, we ended up special ordering some “cabin grade” red oak flooring at our local Home Hardware, which is an unfinished solid oak flooring, for only $2.80/sq.ft.

The flooring comes from a sustainable tree farm up in Quebec and is basically their “factory seconds” so there are a lot of short boards and boards with some small defects, but it’s still a solid floor and no doubt will still look great when we finish it out.

Our current plan is to finish the flooring in the living room/kitchen area, so we can finish the drywall in there and get the kitchen cabinets set up, then we can focus on completing the master bedroom to get that squared away.  After that we will have to add a few more electrical outlets in the basement, and drywall down there (all the pink xps foam insulation needs to be covered), and we will be well on our way to getting our certificate of occupancy!

Thanks for reading and hope you enjoyed the pictures!

I got out today and picked up the plumbing fittings I had ordered, which let me get the hot water heater connected up.  If you look close at the following picture, you can see the cold water line continues on and stops at a ball valve.  This is going to be the cold water supply line into the second hot water heater, that will run our radiant heating system.  You can also see that I wedge in some rockwool insulation between the exhaust pipe and the cold/hot water lines (better safe than sorry!)

Also included with that batch of fittings, was the stuff I needed to rough-in the shower for the master bath, here are the steps I took to get it done:

Step 1: Fasten your shower valve to some 2×4″ blocking in the wall, at a comfortable height.  The instructions that come with the valve will tell you how far to set it back, to ensure that everything will be flush with the finished wall.  We used a Delta multi-choice/shower only valve.

Step 2: Apply pipe dope to the male threads on the valve.  On this valve, because it’s a shower only, there are only three connections (hot & cold supply lines, and the showerhead).  If you had a bathtub faucet there would be a fourth connection on the bottom.

Step 3: Tighten the 1/2″ PEX to threaded fittings onto the connections that you just applied the pipe dope onto.

Step 4: Stub out a couple sections of PEX with 90 degree fittings.  Convention with water is always, cold on the right, hot on the left.

Step 5: Connect cold and hot water supply lines to the 90 degree fittings, and another line up for the shower head.

From here I have to pressure test the system to make sure there are no leaks,  and finally attach one last fitting that the showerhead will screw into, and we’ll be ready to close in the walls completely!

Hope you enjoyed the pictures, tomorrow will try to fire up the hot water heater and see what happens!

First off, let me apologize for the delay in making this post – it has, as usual, been a very busy time since we last posted, and we of course had some delays relating to the problems with the spray foam insulation that was used in our house.

We ended up getting an independent engineers report on how to best resolve the issue with the insulation, they recommended applying a vapour barrier per Ontario Building Code standards, so we had to get that completed before we could start drywalling the exterior walls.  At this point, we have the vapour barrier applied, and correctly sealed with acoustical sealant, on all exterior walls except our master bedroom, and have been approved by our building inspector to continue installing that and then go ahead with the drywall.

One of the issues we had to solve in applying the vapour barrier, was how to correctly seal around all the electrical boxes in those walls.  The building inspector recommended removing the boxes, wrapping them in plastic (same material used for the vapour barrier, 6mil poly sheeting), and sealing that to the vapour barrier.  We tried this approach on a couple of boxes and it was pretty labour intensive to get it done right.  We ended up also speaking to the electrical inspector about this, and he recommended just digging out the spray foam from around the boxes, and spraying in “Great Stuff” canned spray foam, as that is a vapour barrier…we were happy that our building inspector accepted this alternate plan as it was a lot easier to do and did not require disturbing all the electrical boxes.

In the midst of all this, I started working on roughing in the shower in our master bath, but need a few more plumbing fittings before I can finish that off.  Also, I realized I needed to add another 2×4″ in one of the walls, to support the glass shower wall/door, so I will have to get that done before I can finish out those walls.  You’ll notice in the pictures, that the drywall in the bathroom is green – this is a special mold-resistant drywall intended for use in bathrooms.  It’s about as easy to work with as regular drywall, just more expensive.  You’ll also notice  that on the lower part of the wall in the master bathroom, we have used cement board instead of the mold resistant drywall.  Cement board is just as it sounds – a 4×8′, 1/2″ sheet of reinforced cement.  It’s really heavy compared to drywall and quite difficult to work with compared to drywall, but it’s what you are supposed to use if you plan on tiling the walls (we plan to tile behind the tub and the shower walls), as drywall cannot really support the extra weight of tiles.

Finally, I plumbed up the main water line to the central water distribution manifold, and started connected the cold water to the hot water tank – but of course realized I needed a few more plumbing fittings to complete this job, so it’s on hold until I pick those up this week.

Thanks for reading, hope you enjoy the pictures, and we’ll make an effort to post more often!  We are going to be ordering some unfinished hardwood flooring to put down, before we start installing the kitchen cabinets, hopefully we can get that underway soon.

Since the last update, things have been reasonably slow going over here, but there is a good reason for it (albeit a shitty one).

It turns out, that the spray foam that the contractor used in our house, does not meet Ontario Building Code standards, and as such our building inspector has given the contractor an “Order to Comply”, to correct the issues (by Jan 31st).  We are not holding our breath – it seems for the first time that we have encountered an unscrupulous contractor, and if they do not comply with the order, they will apparently get fined/taken to court by the building inspector, so we will see where this all goes.  It’s quite frustrating and disappointing to have had such good contractors so far in the process only to be ripped off at this point.

In the meantime, I managed to complete the installation of the vapour barrier on the ceiling, and sealed it all up good with acoustical sealant (which is nasty stuff to work with, if you ever have to use it I suggest having some rubber gloves as if it gets on you, it’s hard to get off).  On that front, we were inspected again and approved by the building inspector to at least start the drywalling of the ceiling, and the interior walls.  I picked up 30 sheets of drywall and got right to work.  Here’s a few pictures:

Thanks for reading, we’ll be sure to give an update soon with how things are going!

We expected the spray foam contractor to show up yesterday and insulate the main floor of the house, and the basement wall headers/rim joists, but unfortunately in the bad snow we had yesterday – their truck slid off the road and they needed to be towed.

Today they arrived without incident and got right to work, and by the end of the day they had pretty much wrapped up, here’s a couple pictures to show how it looks now:

In the meantime, we are just barely getting by up here.  As Murphy’s Law seems to dictate, anything that can go wrong, will go wrong, and it seems like we’re getting it back-to-back these days.  Most recently, the furnace in the RV packed it in, so now we are heating the RV with a small propane heater (thank god we have CO detectors in here, or this would be pretty unsafe on the scale of things), but it’s really not quite sufficient, and on cold mornings like today (-26C, feels like -33C), it’s very chilly in here.  A consequence of this is, of course, that the RV water systems have now all since frozen up – so we are really roughing it up here now.

Hopefully now that the insulation is in, we can start making steps towards moving in there and out of the RV, to give us some better shelter from this winter weather.

As always, thanks for reading, and hope you enjoyed the pictures!

Yesterday I was able to finish putting up the rest of the vapour barrier, and decided that if we are going to have to heat up the place to get the spray-foam insulation done, it might be best to insulate the attic space, at least partially to keep some of the heat in!

To that end today I ordered 33 bags of Roxul R-22 rockwool batts, that are designed to fit nicely between each of the ceiling joists.  I will need to put in a couple more layers eventually, to get the total R-value of the attic up to a minimum of R-50 (ideally more!), but this should at least get us started and hopefully prepare the house for the spray-foaming!  It arrived not long after I ordered it, and having just lugged it all up the stairs, I will spend the rest of the day installing it.

The only tough part about this, is getting the Roxul up the attic stairs, as the bags are too big to squeeze through the opening, so it’s endless trips up and down the stairs taking up a couple pieces at a time.  Cutting the batts is easily done with a standard kitchen (serrated) bread knife, which you need to do to fit them around plumbing, wiring, light boxes, and so forth.

I’ll get some more pictures as I get further along, though I am not sure they will come out much better than the photo above.

Thanks for reading and hope you enjoyed the pictures!

For the past couple of days I have been preparing to start installing the vapour barrier on the ceiling.  This 6mil poly sheeting is the same stuff we laid down under our basement slab, and the goal is to prevent any uncontrolled airflow in or out of the living area of the house.  Mostly my work has consisted of adding additional 2×4’s around the perimeter of the walls, to ensure that we have something to fasten the drywall to, and they also create a nice area to seal the edge of the vapour barrier with acoustical sealant (you use this stuff because it remains pliable forever and creates an airtight seal).

I also wired up an exterior plug (in a weather resistant housing), and we now power the RV from the off-grid system in the house, and recharge the batteries using the generator.  This is actually more economical than running the RV off the generator directly, as the generator produces more power than the RV consumes when it’s running – power that just goes to waste.  It’s really nice now because we only have to run the generator for a few hours every day and then can leave it off through the evening/night.  This is also giving us a good opportunity to charge/discharge the batteries repeatedly, which is an important part of commissioning the battery bank.

This morning I started putting up the actual vapour barrier on the ceiling, and managed to finish the main bathroom/laundry room, master bathroom, master bedroom, and part of the kitchen/dining/living room.  I’m confident I will get that wrapped up tomorrow, then I will work on taping up all the seams/over all the staples, and applying the acoustical sealant around the perimeter to create an airtight seal.

The insulation contractors are scheduled to be on-site to spray foam the main floor walls and the sills/rim joists next Monday, and I’ll be sure to get some pictures of that while it’s going on.  My biggest obstacle to overcome before then, is to find some way to heat up the house enough for them to do their work – ideally the house will be above zero degrees (celsius), and that’s going to be tough with the cold snap we are experiencing right now.  Perhaps we will get lucky and it will warm up by next week  🙂

As always, thanks for reading, all the best in 2015!

It’s been a while since the last post and for that I do apologize.  We have, surprisingly, not frozen to death and died up here in the snow, on the contrary, we are quite cozy in the RV – except we continue to battle with keeping the drain lines working in this cold weather.  I am not sure these RV’s were designed to handle the Canadian winters  – but for all we ask of it, it seems to do alright.

On the house front, I continue to plug away, and have been spending most of the past few weeks working hard on the electrical.  I had to wire up a 30A generator inlet plug, so we can push power from our generator into the off-grid inverter and start getting our batteries all charged up and commissioned.  This was quite a bit of an endeavour on it’s own but that is a story for another day.  I keep my “coles notes” of electrical code books handy, and must say you cannot refer to it too often.  They really specify every little detail with regards to how to run the wiring – which is great, if a little overwhelming at times.  I’ve made a few mistakes so far and had to undo, and redo a bunch of work, but I guess thats what happens when you are doing things for the first time.

A while back, I finally got up the energy to break through the frozen ground and dig a hole to bury our grounding electrode, so that is finally squared away and I can get to work running the ground wire into the electrical service panel inside the house.

We also got one of our two gas fireplaces, and I managed to fit it into the framed opening nicely, though the installation instructions certainly leave a lot to be desired.

Today, we had our electrical rough-in inspection (done by the ESA), which has to be passed before we can start insulating the house.  The inspector was here for about a half hour, checking various outlets and whether the cables were secured correctly, and finally reviewed our electrical service panel.  He recommended a few quite minor changes, but otherwise approved our rough-in work – very exciting news (even better to pass the inspection the first time out!)  So after a couple small fixes (less than a days work) we are good to have the spray foam experts out to start foaming in the walls.

In the meantime I will have to start installing the vapour barrier on the bottom of the attic joists, and sealing it all up with “acoustical sealant”, so we can install the ceiling drywall, then have the ceiling cavity insulated!  Very exciting times, and what better way to start 2015 with power in our house!

Take care all – best wishes to everyone in 2015, thanks for reading, and stay tuned for more updates!