Today our lead contractor, Chris Miksic, came over at 3:00 to discuss house plans with Greg.  Chris is a dear friend who has seen us through many times, both hard and joyous.  He built us a beautiful deck, which we christened with a party at the end of the summer in 1999. That December, our house burned to the ground.  We still have pictures of the deck, the party, ourselves sunning on the deck. After the last bit of work was done, just before he started packing up his tools, he said to me,  “So -- you happy?”  And I cried, “Oh, yes!” and gave him a big hug.

Chris was in charge of the crew that worked on the construction of our new house after the timberframe was erected.  I won’t say “finishing,” because we didn’t have the money to finish it.  Twelve years later, it’s still unfinished. But it’s coming along.  It was a long and complicated process, mostly because we didn’t have enough money to do it all at once, so it had to be done in chunks, with lots of interruptions. I can’t imagine anyone but Chris having enough patience to see it through.

View of the central post of our house (the "V-post") and our masonry stove from the rear.  

Due to lack of funds, our house looked like this for a long time...lots of light coming in, as we had plastic walls for two years.

Today, we finished the specs for the excavation, landscaping, driveway, and backfilling. We talked about the foundation insulation supplier and the foams available for insulating the foundation...and their densities.  We went over the assembly of the foundation, including the insulating foam that encapsulates it, the radon/vapor barrier, and the foundation itself. We still have details to work out to safely wrap and seal the foundation with plastic.

There are many green options in concrete, sealants, construction adhesives -- for example, including fly ash in the concrete helps to offset its carbon footprint.  There are low-VOC sealants, glues and adhesives. We’ll be using these, and using cellulose instead of foams wherever we can. This is the first building any of us knows of that will be using only cellulose for the outside walls & roof insulation, without using any plywood, OSB or foam to cover it.

Montpelier Construction plans on investing a few thousand dollars in new equipment for this project. Chris is asking an industry expert about dense-packing cellulose in 16” by 3’ wide by 18’ tall cavities, which are super-huge. He’ll be consulting with a technical expert from Foursevenfive.com about special smart membranes for air barriers for the building envelope. We’re also going to be talking to Efficiency Vermont about our air and vapor barriers. And we’re trying to avoid thermal bridging in the window mounting, so lots of conversation about the window mounting detail.

It was a four hour meeting. I listened. I got tired of rearranging my studio (I'm a jewelry designer/maker) and settled down to lay out some necklaces. The light had started to wane by the time he left. I lose track of the time, now that it’s staying light until 7:00. It’s a pleasant feeling.