Plaster complete

The Plaster guys have finished and I have also finished most of the electrical work.
We also ordered the flooring (Mirage: Lock and fold 4" Natural Oak)

Blueboard complete!

What would have taken me about two months to do as a weekend warior took these guys less than 7 hours.

Wallboard is ready and waiting

The wall board arrived today.

The wallboard hanger dudes will hang it tomorrow.

Destruction

This morning I removed the door between the addition and the original house. You can see the destruction in this picture (and the sawzall on the floor in the middle of it all).

After it was all cleaned up it is looking pretty good here.

Here is a shot from the addition looking into the original house.

The wall board is being delivered on Tuesday!

Insulation Complete

I just scheduled the insulation inspection for tomorrow. Once that is complete I will be removing the door and starting to frame in the tub so the wallboard guys can come in!

Now to remove this!

The next step (before the plasterers come in) will be to remove this door!

Demo work! Now I can use my Sawzall!

Insulation Pics

Here are some pictures of the addition with most of the insulation finished. We are getting very close to having walls. Oh, and I've been heating the space now!

Looking East.

And south

South (into the bathroom).

looking south west (into the family room). That wall will be where the TV goes.

Spray Foam!

I got spray in foam from tigerfoam.com and this is what it looks like between the rafters.

Close up. I'll cover this with fiberglass insulation.

Here is teh laundry room. There are two strips that I still haven't put fiberglass insulation over the foam because I ran out.

Spray in foam done.

Well, I purchased some spray in foam from tigerfoam.com and I managed to get a hour free to spray this stuff up there. So here's the story. First of all you need to get this stuff to about 80 degrees. So I set up a shelf over a space heater and left it there for a while. I used my pipe theremometers (taped to the outside of the tanks) to tell if I was getting close to 80 degrees. Then I cleared out the space under the cathedral cieling area that I am spraying. You can only stop for a couple seconds at a time without getting a new nossle so I planned to go right through without stopping. After everything was set I started spraying and realized I forgot to put gloves on... I HIGHLY recomend remembering to put on gloves. I also recomend that you not use the "wide agle" nosle. The wide angle nosle made the stuff go everywhere! Including my hands that had no gloves because I didn't want to stop! Anyway, I eventually did stop to get gloves and change nosles and I tried the "cone" nosle - much better. It takes longer to cover an area, but it is easier to control where the stuff goes. I would take some pictures, but the camera is nowhere to be found so I'll probably be covering it all up tomorrow. I did temporaroly install the thermostat and the addition is now officially heated.

Insulation update

Well, hopefully this fall will see lots of changes to the addition. As of today, all the rough plumbing is finished and inspected, all the electrical is finished and inspected, and the framing was also inspected. So this means that I can start insulating! There is a lot more to this than I originally thought though and it makes me wish we had asked for 2x6 construction. OH well.

So there are four areas that I need to insulate:

1) The second floor ceiling. The ceiling is made with 2X8 lumber so R30 fiberglass bat insulation is bigger than the joists, but I don't really care. I'm going to put in R30 fiberglass bat insulation and then R30 on top of that!

2) The "cathedral" ceilings on the second floor are made with 2x6 lumber so the only way to get close to R30 is to use spray in foam or the Styrofoam boards that they sell. I thought that I would have to put ventilation behind the insulation on the cathedral ceiling but the inspector told me that if I used spray in foam (closed cell) that I could skip it. That's good because it means one more inch of insulation in there!

3) Second floor walls. R13.

4) Garage ceiling. Well, this is also 2X8 joists so I can't go with R30 fiberglass bat insulation. This is where the radiant heat is so it needs a lot of insulation. First I put the reflective paper up (today) and then I'll get R30C. That is made for cathedral ceilings - it fits in a 2x10 space so it will be compressed a bit, but the building inspector told me to go with it so it better pass.

Once this is done we need one last inspection before we can tear down the door, put up the walls, and start finishing the thing up!!

Rough framing inspection done!

I was worried a little about the rough framing inspection because I wasn't sure I had drilled the holes for the radiant floor perfectly, but I guess it was good enough.

OK, well, only one more inspection (insulation) to go before we can close it all up and start the finish work.

Electrical Inspection Complete!

Well, I finally had to hire an electrician to come in and look at my work and tell me what I did wrong. They then came back after I had fixed the issues and pulled the permit in their name. But all that matters is that the inspector came and it all passed! Yippeeee. Anyway, now I can worry about the rough framing inspection.

Where two attics connect

While wiring the addition I had to cut a small hole that I could crawl through to get from the original attic to the new attic.I don't think that the original attic soffit vents exist so this hole will hopefully help the original attic vent a bit better.

Here I am crawling from the old attic into the new one. Thanks to Ethan for taking this picture.

Here is a look at the new attic space with only one layer of insulation. More to come!

And here is a peak at what the old attic looks like - not many people have seen this and lived to write about it.

Adding the radiant loop

To continue with the plumbing work I needed to connect all the piping from the pex tubing, through another pump and into the heat exchanger.

OK, now we are rockin'. The loop for the pex tubing is installed. The thing with the tag on it is a mixing valve that mixes the cooler water returning from the loop with the hot water coming out of the heat exchanger and that water goes up tat diagonal pipe to heat the pex loop.

Here is the same angle but from a little farther away.

And another from a different angle. Maybe this stuff is boring to some people but how cool are all those pipes!

Plumbing - Tieing into the boiler

Now this is cool stuff! To get hot water into the pex tubing first you have to get hot water from the boiler and force it through a heat exchanger. This heats up the heat exchanger and then there be another loop that feeds through the heat exchanger. First things first: Tapping into the boiler water is the tough part. While I'm working on that we won't have any heat or hot water....so I'll start after the kids go to bed and ... we'll see how long it takes me.

Here you can see the tee in the bottom left hand side of the picture. The red pump in the middle will pump water from left to right. The water will be pumped out of the boiler (on the right), through the tee, and up and through the red pump.

Here you can see the same red pump from a different angle. The water is pumped toward the camera and then into the heat exchanger on the right. It comes out the bottom and then back through the tee on the bottom left and back into the boiler. You can see the two ports on the heat exchanger that will be connected to the pex loop... that's next. Oh, and I finished at 1:30am

Aluminum

Once all the pieces of tubing have been pulled through the joist bays I needed to fasten the tubing to the ceiling. This is done with pieces of aluminum that have been precut and shaped specifically for this task.

These are the pieces of aluminum that I purchased from www.radiantec.com

This is a shot of the aluminum stapled to the first run of tubing.Each piece of aluminum has about 12 staples.

I like this shot - between the joists looking down one of the runs.

And here is a shot of the very necessary staple gun. I bought this one at home depot, but it turned out to not be powerfull enough. I brought it back and got the next size up. I don't think that going through aluminum is tough, but that plywood is tough stuff!

The Pex tubing needs to run up and down each joist bay. The kit I bought had two 300 foot pieces of tubing. I snaked the tubing through the joist bay at the furthest end of the garage and started working backward.

Here is the end of the tubing...the other end is out in the back yard. It was tough keeping the tubing from getting twisted while so much of it is laying in a big pile in the back yard.

Here is a close up of the first joist bay. One of the ends goes all the way back to the basement and the other end needs to go down and back each of the joist bays. Lot of fun!

Here is the tubing going down toward the basement.

And finally. The first section of tubing is finished. Now I will move on to the next section that goes under the bathroom.