They say here that a man needs his toys and the only limiting factor is his wife 😉
Gary is happy and ready for working on our land, in winter it will move the snow of the driveway. With this we were able to put the gravel around the house in just an afternoon, saved our backs and no use for the wheel barrel…
Close to getting finished. The siding is on, there needs to be some finishing work done. And the roof sides, soffits (under the roof) need to be finished. Then in spring time the ground needs to be leveled so that the house bottom edge and concrete are no longer exposed. What a journey and so happy with how it has turned out. You see a little of the storm that is out there with blue skies. Inside it is cosy, outside you get blasted, got to love forces of nature, sun, wind, snow we’ll take it all. We feel we live in our own visitor’s center in a National Park. Believe, search, plan and do that is how we ended up here! Every day the view and weather changes, loving it!!!
We have concrete floors with in-floor radiant heat (water). We like the look a lot, it is very easy to maintain with the sand, dog etc. and the pour and polish was very smooth. If you remember there was a lot of rebar in the floor as well. So until today we haven’t noticed a big crack yet. We decided just to have the floor sealed and waxed. No stain was applied. We love the look it turned out very smooth and beautiful. It goes well with the wood and OSB finishes.
We have decided on a metal roof and metal siding. For durability and for protection against the elements. One of the hardest things (and dangerous) is to put these up in windy conditions. We found we are in a very windy spot 🙂 Everytime it starts out nice and quiet in the morning. Or there will be no wind in town but at our location it can be gusty, gusty windy and that has delayed some work on the roof… and then on the siding. The siding is called bonderized, 7/8″ corrugated. We liked it on the Salida Highschool and like that it changes in the light making it less of a metal look than painted metal. On the roof we do have painted sheets of dark bronze because bonderized is less protecting than painted. Bonderized is treated to be painted but not painted. This is from Recla Metals in Montrose.
The biggest difference between building in the Netherlands and the USA as you might have noticed is that the build continues here even at below 0 freezing temparatures. No snow or icedays “vorstvallet here”…
Let’s keep this short… The garage door was placed end of January just in time for the real cold to come in. And just before the installations of the pump, the boiler and the in-floor heat where put in. the mechanical room is in the garage. Again high R value to keep the temperature as constant as possible, windows for the light we are east facing with the garage for weather purposes (wind, snow, sun). That was already proven this winter to be a good choice.
We have two bathrooms. One, the main is with a shower and steam-shower. The other is a toilet with ‘farm / utility’ sink and has the option of being used as a wet shower. Here people are not so used to use as much tile as we have. And the pattern was a new thing as well ;-D. As the person who laid it out and made it said “it grows on you”. I had laid it out in Mosa tile calculator. We did use American tile, Daltile for availability. We did use Grohe faucets because of the ease of use (not that easy to install) and looks. The steam shower needs to be fully tiled, including the ceiling so that it is completely sealed. Take a look…
Update last 2 months 🙂 After doing all the electrical work inside everything needed to be hooked up from the outside. The water well pump, the in-floor heat, the septic system, electric in general. Since Christmas there has been quite a bit of snow and ice on our property and the north side of the house. We are protected by a big snow drift on the West side. It is unbelievable how hard the wind blows. It comes over Cottonwood pass and is like we are in Alaska or something. That is why we have to have our house designed with 120 mph winds. On top of that the temperatures have been -16 degrees Celsius for a prolonged period of time. This means our drive way snowed in several times and many people have gotten stuck, including Gary. Got to love neighbors with tractors and snow blowers as they have rescued us and others that weren’t able to get out. And kept our drive clean.
The house is warm and quiet but in front of the windows it is a movie scene (too hard to capture with a picture) On the North side of the house is where we have the connection to the electrical line to the barn. We had help getting everything connected correctly. We have the solar hooked up since mid January and have gained about 1,100 Watt to date 3/1/2019. Gary reorganized some of the work and in February we received final sign off on the electrical work. It is a miracle to see that what we put in with the wiring is actually working. It is quite shocking when it doesn’t all work the first time, but knowing so well what went where made troubleshooting easy. So nice to be so involved that we know what went where and what could be wrong.
We decided to cover the walls with plywood and Oriented Strand Board (OSB). We like this much better than the standard drywall here (sorry I find it ugly…) And it has the advantage that you can always take down a wall if you need to get in. Which we did because there was a leak behind the bathroom wall… Okay Pictures
We got busy during the holidays it was quite a challenge to pull the wiring in the SIPs. There is 1 inch conduit in the panels these are not always perfectly connected and this makes it hard to put the fish tape in and to pull the wire. There were also quite some angles connecting roof to wall and corners. Sometimes at ridiculous angles which made it hard to connect or reach in to guide the cable around the corners but we did all of the house, most of outdoor lights and receptacles. We decided to run conduit on most of the garage walls and not mess with the difficult connections. The temperatures outside have been minus 10 Fahrenheit / -20 Celsius and the house unheated most of the time has held perfectly around 49 Fahrenheit or so. When we are there working we use a little space heater, there is no garage door yet. There are gaps in the panels near the beams that need to be filled and we still keep a very decent temperature.
December 22nd just before Christmas the windows were put in. Just in time for the freezing temparatures of Christmas and the snow during New Years. We needed to be dried in to do the electricity during the holidays.
Big Mountain 