Flatrock Passive House: A Passive House in Newfoundland

It has been some time since my last post.  Things have been so busy that I just haven't had time to document things as much as what I would have liked.  This being said, I figured I would provide a quick update on the exterior progress....It is now complete!  Keocan General Contracting completed the siding job.  It is well done and the house looks great! Earlier in the blog series I pointed out that the clapboard and trim were obtained from Cottle's lumber and wood products.  After working with it myself, I can say that it is a great local product.  Several cladding options including pre-finished siding could have been an option but at up to $1.89/lf those options were expensive.  If you're willing to finish the siding yourself, wood cladding can be an option.  Installation will be more expensive than vinyl but that cost can be somewhat offset by the cost of prepping the siding yourself.  We used Benjamin Moore Arborcoat exterior water based stain.  The color swatches for

Now that I have had time to assess what was left by the first siding contractor, I have found many issues.  Some had to be fixed, others will never be noticed and none of the issues will be detrimental to the building, so I opted to save materials rather than waste them.  The project basically halted for about 6 weeks with the exception of a few interior things. Things are moving quickly now that Keocan General Contracting Inc. are on site.  They have completed about 75% of the siding and are now working on completing the remainder of the soffit and fascia amongst other things.    This is the good news.  The bad news can be seen in Photo 1-1.  The previous siding company installed the siding courses at odd intervals.  I specified 4 1/2" but they are all over the place.  This being said the install looked fine since 1/8" here an there isn't really noticible.  However, I knew moving forward that carrying these errors around the whole building would be impossible.  Pat and

The last big change inside the garage was when I added the attic baffles.  That was in august.  Little has changed since.  That changed today!  With interior framing on the house underway, I really wanted to make some headway with attic insulation in the garage so I could continue some framing details in parallel with the framers.   The insulation needed to be installed before adding the interior OSB to the underside of the trusses and tying the internal air barrier to the external one. I mentioned in a previous post that my garage will be a workshop.  I want it to be fairly energy efficient so I opted to add 3" of exterior foam on the outside of the building to prevent thermal bridging.  I also want it to be as air tight as possible...which is probably not that possible with a leaky garage door but we'll see.  A typical wall section is composed of  3" EPS, OSB, 2x6 stud wall, then drywall.  The exterior OSB joins were caulked with acoustical sealant and further sealed