The person who was handling our account at the truss manufacturer left the company and somehow took our designs with him. We’ll have to wait a week or so for them to re-engineer our roof.

You’d think by now I’d have learned. Unfortunately my foolish patience has wasted another few weeks while we waited for the Mechanical Engineering drawings.

There was some miscommunication about what was to happen next and somehow the radiant-floor guys didn’t know they were to proceed with providing the mechanical designs for the house. They’re “getting right on it.”

In another bold move akin to the change from stick-frame to ICF walls, we’re going to be changing from a forced-air system to radiant floors.

The bad news is, putting a radiant flooring system throughout the house costs about 4x that of a forced-air system. But we made the change because of its high efficiency, extreme comfort (according to several sources who raved about their radiant floors), and ability to easily take advantage of solar heating, when we’re ready.

It’s also the kind of thing you really want to invest in at the time of construction, not after the house (and floors) are already in place.

Speaking of floors, that was one item we quickly struck off our list when trying to figure out how to rebalance the budget. Instead we’ll just live with the concrete/gypcrete floors until our finances can tolerate a little more debt.

The system we selected includes the Triangle Tube Prestige Excellence Combi Boiler within a 14 gallon internal indirect tank to provide the household hot water.

Since the house is air tight, we’ll also be adding an HRV (Heat Reclamation Ventilator) with an electric coil to moderately heat the air as it comes in to avoid the feeling of drafts.

We’ve asked the flooring people to provide the Mechanical designs that will be required to obtain a building permit. The Mechanical design should cost around $900-1200 for our project.

There were some tree removal guys on our street the other day and so we asked them for a quote to remove our trees for us. They seemed like nice, honest folks and that certainly came through in their sales pitch:

“It’s still winter and we’re desperate for any work you can give us. We’ll cut you a deal that’s a fraction of what you’d pay otherwise. If you wait until spring we’ll be busy, but we can do it now for a song.”

Indeed their price seemed to be about half of what I had been quoted earlier. Fortunately we already have our removal permit in place from last year so they’ll be coming tomorrow to take them down.

They also gave me a great tip regarding the stumps: If you build a flower box over them you’ll remember to water the soil in the flower box regularly. A wet-soil-covered stump will rot to pulp all on its own in about 3 months. (If one leaves the fresh-cut stump in the sun to dry out, it will stick around for decades.)

Today the architect and Project Manager (PM) had a conference call to discuss the design changes that will be required to move to an ICF system for framing the house.

The PM performed a quick estimate indicating the cost of stick-frame materials and labour would probably be about equal to the materials for ICF. The labour for installing ICF walls for the entire foundation and house came in around $20,000, making it quite reasonable considering it will leave us with around an R50 wall!

Note: The ICFs will frame the house as a ‘box’ only. It seems using ICF for the gables would have involved quite a bit of additional labour so a different wall system will be used for the entire roof area of the house.

The architect has someone redesigning the plans as I type and hopes to have them ready by early next week.

After another round of interviews with prospective builders our selection has been made!

To maximize our flexibility in dealing with changes as they arise, we’ve opted for a variation on a “structured management” arrangement with our builder. Technically, we will act as the General Contractor and they will take care of managing all the details, with the exception of signing cheques. (This nicely avoids that nightmare situation where one pays the General Contractor, but the General Contractor doesn’t pay the trades, who then lien the property.)

Another interesting aspect of our arrangement is that the exact fee paid to our ‘project managers’ increases as the total project budget decreases (and vice versa). This provides them with a financial incentive to keep expenses down for us.

But the most important aspect of selecting our builder was a strong sense of trust we have in working with them. All the final candidates seemed like people we could work with but our “warmest, fuzziest” feeling was with our selected builder.

Today Lumahai Zephyr Iseman Foster (Zeph) was born at home (about where the dining room table will be) at 6:31pm.

Yes that’s right: We’re building and have a newborn to take care of. Apparently we like a challenge.

I had previously noted that in order to put power onto the grid, one had to be registered as an official Ontario Power Generator at a cost of $800 up front, and $800 per year.

This fee has since been amended to a one-time fee of just $100! In coming weeks I’ll be putting together a new comparison contrasting traditional power, green power, common solar power, and Nanosolar power.

Should be intersting!

The sharp minds as Sharp are developing a battery system designed just for home power generators. While some mentioned in this article seem to feel most will not have any interest in the batteries, I think they are underestimating how much people like the idea of living off the grid, and sustaining themselves as much as possible.

In addition (and as mentioned here previously) the power inversion process of converting solar DC power to AC for the grid absorbs about 20-25% of the power generated. By keeping the power at home, one has the option of installing DC power appliances and light fixtures (though some AC conversion would obviously still be needed periodically until the marketplace gets used to people having DC power in the home).

A new option has presented itself to us for the framing of the house.

We had initially planned on using Insulating Concrete Forms (ICFs) for the foundation walls of the house, but it has been suggested by a number of people that we may want to consider using ICFs for the entire shell. Some of the benefits include

• Longer lasting and more durable than wood-frame construction
• Fire resistant
• Termite proof
• Improved sound resistance
• Highly insulative
• Extremely low thermal bridging

We’re still working out what the cost of switching from the high-efficiency wall design we have now to an ICF would be, but we think it’s an excellent candidate.

We recognize there may be added embodied energy from using so much concrete, but if the house will stand for 1000 (?) years instead of 100-200 years for a wood-frame house, that seems worthwhile.

Our current ICF of choice would be Durisol, since they use recycled materials instead of styrofoam to structure the wall, and additional insulation is provided by mineral wool (Roxul).