May Catchup

So, I got way behind on house updates… because we’ve been overloaded with house stuff. This is up through the end of May.

The guys from Krause Electric hanging the dining room chandelier.

Shawn (Krause Media Solutions) installing a speaker.

How high should it go?  Marita (Kipling House), Bob (Hendel Homes), Krysta (Kipling House) and Shawn (Krause) discussing how high these sconces should be.

And another sconce to discuss.

The guys from Topo installing the drain system for the walkways.

Shawn connecting dimmers.

Packing our old kitchen.

Oops.

The chandelier in our master seems kind of close to the ceiling.

Interesting drawer in my vanity.

The apartment we are staying in between selling our old house and moving in to our new one has quite poor ventilation. CO2 levels above about 550 ppm affect both cognitive and physical functions and CO2 should never be higher than 700. 1348 is quite bad and was while we were cooking dinner one evening (we see similar readings nearly every time we cook). The problem is two-fold. First is that the range hood is a recirculating hood rather than exhausting effluent to the outside and second is that there is not nearly enough fresh outside air brought in. We frequently see levels above 700 (the yellow bars in the time graph) and over 1000 is not unusual. We had doors and windows open prior to this and while cooking which is the much better green bars just prior. These apartments were built in 2019 and should have had much better ventilation so this is really disappointing.

BTW, the IQAir is one of the better IAQ measurement devices available for an affordable price.

The first party at our new place! I had to camp out at the house to wait on Comcast (to not show up again). Matt, Olivia and Andrea came by to have lunch and some champagne to celebrate Matt’s birthday. A major influence on building this house and how it’s designed is being able to have these guys over so this whole Covid thing is putting a considerable damper on the excitement of finally moving in. Fortunately there are indications that it is weakening as it mutates so we may be able to begin getting back to normal sooner rather than later.

Comcast finally showed up to bury a cable. One step closer to having internet.

The guys from Topo doing the mudroom steps.

What I hope to have time to do sometime in the next few weeks.

Scullery!

Mudroom closet.

Bob taking notes.

Bob and Kevin installing one of the ERV air exchangers. They were supposed to run the fresh air supplies to the bedrooms but didn’t so installed slightly larger ERV’s to help make up for it. It’ll be interesting to see IAQ info for the first few weeks after we move in.

DMJ came by to prep for paving our driveway.

They did a good job of keeping the bikeway clear while they were working which was appreciated by a lot of people who rode by.

They used a paver to lay down the final layer of class 5 stone. I’d never seen this done before but is apparently not too unusual. If you look close you can see a slight crown in the middle of our drive. This is so that when snow melts it will flow off to the sides and hopefully leave us a clear non-icy path to ride bicycles down the middle. We ride our bicycles to local places all winter so this is important.

They did a great job with the class 5 and will be back in a few days to do the first lift of asphalt.