Category: RIVER HOUSE (Page 3 of 20)

We went to the house on Thursday to go rowing (more later). Outside they are working on the gutters. In the last post, I showed you a picture of the mounting blocks used for the gutters. Then crew then adds brackets to those blocks as you can see below.

And then the crew mounts the gutter in those brackets as you can see here.

Inside insulation is proceeding at a rapid pace. They appear to be done with the second floor. Here are some progress pictures from the first floor. First the living room wall.

Next the master bedroom ceiling (which is under the roof). The white board is added as an extra layer of insulation since the rafters did not support enough foam.

And here is the ceiling of the kitchen area (which is under the second floor so rockwool is used).

Insulation should be finished tomorrow except for the ceiling of the basement, which will be done later. The builder said that they will start hanging wall board inside the house this Saturday.

Meanwhile, the electricians are continuing to work in the garage wiring up the garage doors.

As far as rowing is concerned, we went out for two and a half hours, following the same path upstream as our last trip. It was quite windy which made the first half challenging as we rowed into the wind, and the second half challenging since the wind made it hard to keep the boat straight as it pushed us downstream.

In my previous posts, I had pictures and talked about how the insulation under the roof and in the exterior walls was closed cell spray foam. Well, they have finished with all that work and now the team is adding rockwool insulation to the interior walls, where we want sound isolation, and under the floors. Here is all the rockwool waiting to be installed (Daphne for scale).

And here is rockwool installed in the wall between the guest bedroom and the family room (second floor).

And here is the backside of that same wall, where you can also see the closed cell spray foam in the exterior wall.

Here is the team installing the rockwool in the front bedroom (second floor).

The basement walls are insulated with a rigid panel product (Thermax), and that work has now finished. The ceiling of the basement will be insulated with rockwool after the rest of the house is done. We decided to leave the walls shiny and not paint them since it reflects light and makes the basement brighter.

On the outside, they have been putting up small pieces of wood product on which the gutters will be mounted. Here is a section from the garage roof.

This week, we discussed the product that will be used for the deck railing, and also the railing in the porch. Here is a sample modeled by our architect. That little wire sticking out halfway down is a sample of the wire that goes between the posts and comprises the majority of the railing.

We also talked about installing screens to hide the condensers that make up the HVAC system. Next week Daphne, the architect and builder will use plywood panels to decide where to put screens.

Things remain on the new schedule for now, but past behavior is no guarantee of future performance.

Current estimated occupancy date: July 31, 2026 (no change).

These got installed today. Of course, without handles or a remote control, I have no way of going into the garage right now, but I assume that it will get worked out. These look much better than the blue tarps we were using.

I thought the garage was supposed to have its wall board installed this coming week, but it actually happened last week. Here are some pictures.

The wall board installation in the house will probably have to wait for the insulation application to be finished.

They have been installing the insulation all week. It feels to me that they probably just have a few more days of work.

The second floor and under the roof has been finished. Here is a picture from the second floor family room.

The first floor is part done. Here is a picture from the dining room wall.

In the basement, they insulated near the floor. Then they started installing the wall board that will insulate the basement.

This week they will start installing wall board, starting in the garage.

Inside the house they are blowing in the insulation. I can not go into the house while they are doing this, but I have this picture of the hose running in the front door and up to the second floor.

Outside the house they are getting ready to install the gutters. Here is a pile of gutters on the deck waiting to be installed.

And today we had a new row boat delivered. Since the boat cover needs to be shipped separately, the boat has been parked under the porch for now. This weekend we will try it out on the river.

We went for a hike on the Fairhaven Trail today and when we were across the river from our house, I took this picture. The siding is done, but the basement still needs stucco, the porch needs screens, the deck needs a railing, and we need to remove all those stickers and protective films.

Inside the house, they have finished insulating the garage and have started insulating in the guest bedroom on the second floor.

Also, because I did not post a picture of this yet, here is the front door. The have sided and trimmed the overhang, but nothing else. The door itself (what is shown is not the real front door), was delivered with a bent frame so it was sent back for repair or replacement. The posts are temporary. The real posts will be added once the stoop is added. The stoop is being cut at a quarry in Vermont and may arrive in a few weeks.

Update from our EMF consultant: The measurement fluctuations on the loop reading were due to drift using an 18 inch loop ammeter to measure a thin conductor at low levels of amperes. When we switched to a more appropriate clamp meter (The Ideal Ammeter), the net current equaled zero. This confirmed that [electrician] and his team successfully identified and fixed the final net current issue and [the builder] can confidently resume his work knowing that the magnetic fields have been remediated.

I have updated my previous post and we are now clear to put up the walls.

Also, I forgot to mention earlier that the team has finally finished the siding, although there is still some touch up painting to be done on the trim. Gutter installation should be starting the week after next. After that, the deck flooring will be installed.

This past weekend, we went to the house to document every wall and ceiling before they get insulated and plastered. This way, we will know inside every wall, where the studs are, where the wires run and where the pipes run.

Daphne and I together took 283 pictures. Here is one example.

Having done that, the builder can proceed with the installation of insulation. We are having a blown-in foam insulation in the walls and under the roof. It is very effective and easy to install, especially when there are a lot of wires in the walls that would normally make it harder to install rockwool or fiberglass.

Work is starting in the garage. Here is the truck.

I held the camera inside the plastic sheeting (without going in myself) and captured this picture of the insulation that was put in place yesterday and today.

This work will continue for a week or two. During the work, the house will be off limits (to me at least) because of the fumes. Once it is done, then they will start to install the plaster board, walls and ceilings.

I will have no videos of the insulation installation since it would likely screw up the camera lens. But we will try to take some interior videos once the walls start to go up.

Current estimated occupancy date: July 31, 2026 (no change).

Probably. Our last two houses have certainly had problems. To explain, let me tell you what is going on in our house.

We are trying to build a house that is electrically and magnetically quiet. Quiet enough so we could do radio astronomy from our living room, if we wanted to. To achieve this, we are paying an EMF consultant to help design and test our electrical system. This consultant usually works on commercial projects — for example, hospitals and labs where excess EMF (electric-magnetic frequencies) would be a problem for the equipment. Our electrician was given guidelines on how to wire the house to reduce EMF, and he did a good job following those instructions (delaying the project by a month or two). Then, once the wiring was done, our consultant drove in from New York to test the results.

As I have earlier written, it was good but not perfect. There was over an amp of current leakage somewhere in the system, which causes excess magnetic fields, and which needed to be tracked down and fixed. As of today, the electrician reports that two of the electrical panels now show 0 amps of leakage and the last panel is down to 0.07 amps of leakage (20x better than before). As of end of day Wednesday, we now have 0 amps of leakage on all three subpanels inside the house. Woo hoo!

What caused these problems? In our case its caused by a connection between neutral and ground or a connection between two neutral wires on different circuits. Tracking it down is a time consuming process, since you have to work circuit by circuit, testing and then inspecting the wiring. There is a call with the consultant today to determine whether our current measurement is low enough, but I suspect that it is not.

Anyway, why do I think your house has problems? Well, your electrician and builder never went to these extremes. In fact, our electrician did not even have the right meters needed to detect the problems. I am sure that if you did test your house, you would find similar problems, and miswired plugs, and other issues that do not normally show up as issues in everyday use. In other words, its “good enough” for most electricians. We are trying to do better. In fact, I would argue that the whole impetus for building a custom house from scratch was to have an electrically and magnetically quiet house.

That said, at this point I do not believe that the electrical issues are delaying moving forward with interior finishing work, so that’s good.