Movin’ on up
3 months later, I’m kinda still trying to process the fact that we built a house, and it’s where we live now. It’s by far the nicest house I’ve ever lived in and I’ve lived in a lot of places, though many of them could be charitably described as “habitable”. I still love the 100 year old Craftsman (?) that I grew up in for it’s timeless and well-maintained charm, but it doesn’t hold a candle to Ω. (I love that I can brag about this house because I didn’t design it; Kudos Dani and Amber!)
It’s an especially stark upgrade, because of where we moved from. No, not our tiny bungalow built as worker housing for Oscar Mayer in the depths of the Great Depression and remodeled by several generations of drunk forest creatures. But, also yes. Living in a camper, in a barn while we built Ω made the move into the finished* house seem like an episode of the Beverly Hillbilly’s, without the classist caricatures. We survived the winter (albeit a mild one) thanks to a couple space heaters, an InstaPot, and some snuggle-prone pups. Larry at Advanced Well and Pump set us up with a nifty temporary water system, where we could fill up jugs every couple days and then shut off power to the well and drain the tank so nothing could freeze and burst. A Starlink dish and router in the barn (since moved over to the house) took care of our internet needs.
I could do that part again if I had to, but I’m real glad I don’t. Having a Port-A-John as your only bathroom during a polar vortex is no fun, and that’s with no small amount of male privilege.
When we left the camper, it felt like moving into a goddamn palace. That being said, I’m actually very proud of Ω’s modesty. Not that 1500 sq ft is small per se, but it’s about half the size of the average custom home being built nowadays. Also, there’s no “wasted” space as far as I’m concerned. The 500 sq ft 2nd floor is a multi functional bedroom/office with a full bathroom. 500 sq ft of the 1st floor is a kitchen/living room/dining room combo, and the other 500 sq ft is an at grade, ADA accessible bedroom, bathroom and laundry room for if when myself, Dani, or someone we’re caring for can’t do stairs anymore.
There are some luxury decisions too. You could argue the walk out basement was one of those, though the slope of the site made it too perfect to pass up, and all the garden produce, firewood, tools and materials that’ll go through that door made it a no-brainer in my opinion. The basement also served as critical material storage and shop space during the build. Dunno where I’d have built the kitchen cabinets if we’d gone with a slab-on-grade. As far as I’m concerned, it’s already paid for itself.
The low voltage lighting and induction stove in the kitchen were also luxuries, but again, not without practical benefits. When we made the decision to build an all-electric rural house, a gas range was off the table and as the primary cook in the family, I’m not going to complain about not having to use an electric element stove top. Also, both the induction range and the low-voltage “Monorail” lighting use less energy than their conventional counterparts; not a lot, but also not nothing. We have a solar PV array (decidedly not a luxury purchase, don’t even start with me) but cooking is mostly done when the sun isn’t shining, so saving power is a huge plus.
Probably the biggest luxury expense was the Masonry Heater.
I’ve been heating with wood on and off for 15 years, and I’d never even heard of these until we started designing this house. A Masonry Heater, AKA Masonry Mass Stove, is a revolutionary new wood heating technique that also happens to be centuries old. Open fireplaces are an aesthetic flex, not a practical heating method, sorry. Cast iron stoves are great, but they lack any storage capacity—when the fire goes out, they stop heating almost instantly. As such, you either feed the fire every 20 minutes, day and night, or you slow it down by smothering it. This leads to a slow but inefficient burn, leaving the majority of the combustible gases that wood is made of uncombusted and free to add particulate pollution to the air and creosote to the chimney flue liner.
A masonry heater burns hot, combusting those troublesome gases, and extracting that extra heat energy out of the wood. Then it sends the smoke through a maze of several thousand pounds of brick and stone, which absorb and store that massive amount of heat, and slowly radiate it out into the living space, over the course of the day and/or night. Also, they tend to be absolutely gorgeous, look em up.
I’ll talk more about it when I finally get around to building the damn thing. Hasn’t really been a priority what with the “winter” we’ve been having.
I guess in a way I started building it a year ago. That’s when I framed out the opening in the ceiling where the MMS chimney would later pass into the attic and out the roof. There are several rules to obey when it comes to chimneys. First is building codes which are concerned with chimneys causing things to burn that ideally wouldn’t. Proper clearance around the chimney as it runs through walls, floors, and attics, ensure that heat can’t build up and ignite construction materials. We’re using a “close clearance”, insulated, stainless-steel chimney, that only requires 2” between chimney and lumber. As far as the total hieght of the chimney, it has to be at least 3’ taller then the roof where it exits the attic, and at least 2’ higher than the tallest point within a 10’ radius. In our case the peak of the roof is within 10’ of the chimney, therefore the chimney sits a little more than 2’ higher than the peak of the roof.
Then there’s the physical rules of a chimney. Chimneys operate because of warm air rising, and also the principle of “stack effect” which I’m barely smart enough to comprehend, let alone explain. Suffice to say, differences in air density and air pressure cause air to move up a chimney, which creates a safe exhaust path of smoke and brings fresh air into the fire, feeding it with oxygen. A chimney helps power the fire and vent the fire, so having an effective chimney is important. An effective chimney will be the following 3 things:
As long as possible
As vertical as possible,
As warm as possible (i.e. running through warm interior rather than cold exterior space).
The more a chimney is those three things, the better it will be at helping to power and vent the fire.
In our case, we couldn’t do all three of those things. The MMS sits in the middle of our kitchen/dining/living room, which does not have a 2nd story over it, but is close enough to the 2nd story that the chimney would still have to be taller than the 2nd story peak. This would mean the chimney would be about half and half interior/exterior and would run right into (or through) the 2nd story eaves. Awkward, no matter how you slice it. BUT! The MMS room shares a wall with the 2nd story, and has a vaulted ceiling that peaks above the 2nd story floor. Therefore, we could still run the chimney through the 2nd story by breaking the 2nd Chimney Rule and using an “offset” elbow system to “move” the chimney laterally.
Once I found the center point of where the chimney would start on the 1st floor, I was able to find (using a plumb bob and a lot of math) the center point of where the chimney would pass through the 2nd floor ceiling into the attic. Then I framed a 2x10 box, 4” wider than the chimney diameter (2” clearance all around, remember?) in the attic, to help maintain our air sealed ceiling and shield the chimney from the loose fill cellulose insulation that’d be going up there.
I ended up doing the same thing for our 2nd floor bath fan as well. We installed a “smart vapor barrier” called “Mem-Brain”, (see what they did there?) over the entire 2nd story ceiling which serves as the upper border of our continuous air barrier. I figured we’d get a way better air seal caulking/taping the Mem-Brain to a piece of 2x than to try and tape it to the metal bath fan housing itself. Plus, then we wouldn’t be relying on the fan housing to be a part of our air barrier.
At that point I was at a crossroads:
I couldn’t lift the interior “partition” walls until the Mem-Brain was up. But, I couldn’t put the ceiling plastic up until the plumber had run the stink pipe through the attic and outside. But he couldn’t run the stink pipe until the interior walls were up.
Uh-oh.
My solution was to cut strips of Mem-Brain that sat on top of the partition wall top plates and draped over the sides like a veil. That left the attic accessible to the plumber, and when I went to hang the rest of the Mem-Brain, I was able to seal the large pieces to those strips, creating a continuous air barrier.
All this air-sealing business was gonna be put to the test when we performed our first “blower door test” at the beginning of April. But we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. First we had to run a half mile of electrical wire, all the supply and drain plumbing, and get our mini-splits installed. Oh, I haven’t even geeked out on the mini-splits yet! Oh, this next post is gonna be fun…