Green Building

As I've written about before, we're trying to make the addition and remodel as 'green' as possible. Better for the environment, better for us living in it. There's an interesting column over at SFGate about how some of the aspects of green building make for happier, healthier, smarter people, from grade schools to office buildings to hospitals. Relying on natural light and where possible, natural ventilation, makes sense for yet another set of reasons. Go Green!

Rockin'

Regular readers of DIY Insanity will not be surprised to hear that I haven't been making as rapid of progress as I'd hoped. I'm almost done with the sheetrock on the walls, but I'll still need to tape and mud the seams after that. My sister-in-law Emmie was kind enough to come help again, and brought her youngest daughter, Kristina. They both came on the Mexico Mission trip this year, along with Emmie's middle daughter. I knew from the trip that Kristina is a hard worker, and listens well (at least for this kind of stuff). I certainly didn't do those things at age 11.

With their help we got the smaller loft sheetrocked, a bunch more sheetrock moved down from the carport, and various other pieces done as well. Thanks, Emmie and Kristina!

Although it will be a while before I can install it, I went ahead and bought the ceiling fan that Katarina and had picked out. I'm glad I did, because in reading the instructions, I found out it expects a single power line, not separate ones for the light vs. the fan. So I took out the 3-gang box that had space for a dimmer switch for the fan, and replaced it with a 2-gang box and rewired the switches. Most of the functionality is controlled via a remote control.

Everything seems to have remotes these days. Katarina listened to a presentation by the ergonomics people at Google, where she works. And in talking to her afterwards, I realized that some of my occasional back and shoulder pains, not to mention my carpal tunnel syndrome, are in large part due to my mouse being too far to the right because of the arrow keys and numeric keypad at the right side of the keyboard. So today I looked at a keyboard that has a separate numeric keypad so my mouse can sit further left and I don't reach so far right. The keypad is separate, and the whole thing is wireless besides. And the numeric keypad? It has a little LCD display at the top, and can be used as a remote for playing music on your PC.

Insulation

I received an email from an old friend in Switzerland who's been reading DIY Insanity. Which reminded me I haven't posted in a while. Not for lack of progress to report on, though. Besides getting the plumbing (successfully) reinspected and finishing up odds and ends, I brought home a large load of insulation. The Golf has faithfully brought home large loads of stuff, but this would have been several trips worth in it. And given the price of gas these days, delivery prices are pretty high. So I rented a U-Haul truck (with much less drama than last time), and Edis and I unloaded the insulation then loaded up the truck and moved to Beverly...er...loaded up the truck with waste from the construction and took it to the dump. There isn't that much, but again more than the Golf would take in several trips.

Alas, the faithful Golf wasn't so faithful today. Kat was driving home and it died in the middle of an intersection. It's now at a repair shop waiting for them to open.

I have most of the insulation installed (R-19 in the walls, except the 4" west wall, which has R-13; R-50 in the attic). I'll be hanging drywall on the walls this week, and barring too many interruptions, probably painting next week. Wahoo!

Drywall

One of the latest fads in forums are userbars. They're nothing more than little graphics to stick in people's signatures to show things they're interested in, from music to cars to games they play. They look pretty, but they're almost completely useless. So of course they're spreading like wildfire.

Besides working on the minor bits of plumbing and changing the bedroom door, I had Edis work with me on the ceiling drywall. Not only is drywall on the ceiling in a more awkward spot for lifting and fastening, it's also normally 5/8" thick instead of 1/2" thick, and so is that much heavier. But one splurge I made in purchases for the addition was a drywall lift. It's mechanically a pretty simple thing, but it makes life much, much easier than trying to apply drywall to a ceiling by brute force as I've done countless times at Habitat. When I'm done with the drywall lift, I plan to donate it to East Bay Habitat. Or if they don't want to accept it for some reason, keep it and take it with me any times I work with drywall when volunteering there in the future. After using it for a day, I'm never going back to the old way.

Two Out of Three Ain't Bad

Well, I passed two out of the three inspections today: electrical and framing. For plumbing, I need to cover the corners of the shower threshold, and cover any staples in the top of the threshold. But the bigger thing is that the vent for the sink drain needs to be higher...at least 6" above the level of the sink before it goes horizontal. It's doable to change, but it'll be some work. I remember reading about that somewhere, but obviously didn't remember that when I was installing the DWV pipes.

The more significant but easier change is that we probably won't be able to have the pocket door on the steps. Even though the door doesn't swing, the building code seems to say that we'd need a 36" landing on either side. Moving it back a little would get the hallway side OK, but that plus 36" on the other side doesn't work. It will be easy enough to put a swinging door at the top. And the inspector wasn't 100% sure as the code doesn't talk about a pocket door in this case, and said I could talk with the code check people and see if they'd OK it as-is. It's my fault for not re-doing the plans completely when I changed the bathroom to the bedroom level -- it probably would have been caught during code check before if I had. And better it's caught now than in a month when everything has drywall.

But everything else is OK, and I can put drywall on the ceiling, which means I can move forward with insulation. And more research is needed on the door. I need to follow the building code, but it'd be nice to have the pocket door as planned.