The Flatrock Passive House Gets a Firm Foundation.

After every day that goes by I realize more and more that this is actually happening. From grubbing, to excavation, to filling the hole, it has finally set in: this house is happening! Because of the way the foundation will be filled, it made sense to first fill the house footprint with blast rock. There are 12 loads so far! Each layer will be compacted with a roller and inspected by an engineer. Over the next two days we are expecting that this will be completed. By Thursday morning we'll have a firm base for the 4' frost wall. The stepped portion of the wall will have to be dug out again in order to have the 6' and 8' frost walls at the same height. Having this pad in place will provide access to the west of the lot where the septic system will be located and we'll begin rough work on the system before we start doing any foundation work. While this is happening I am hoping to bore the well. With the structural pad in place, the drillers will be able to get down on the pad and back into a small corner between the trees to start drilling.

You may notice a little girl dancing around...Yes she went right for the dirt! Not sure why they like dirt so much...I guess they just do.

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Building the Air Tight Barrier: Door Flashing Details.

It took us a while to wrap our heads around the door details on my plans. The main exterior wall is composed of 2x8s. The rough stud opening was substantially larger than the door. Because the walls are much deeper than a standard door frame for a 2x6 wall, the interior of the 2x8 opening was studded with double 2x4s. Outside of these 2x4s, there is 1.5" of foam and another 2x4 on face which brings the door frame opening flush to the exterior 3" of EPS foam. The brick mould of the door will sit against the exterior of the wall. The ganged 2x4s which define the opening will allow the door to open a little further than that of a 2x8 wall. With the door details finalized, I had to flash the opening as per the plan. I specified the size/shape for aluminum sill pans and CBS Eavestroughing made them for me. The sill pans have a kind of end dam to prevent water from entering under the under the stud opening should the door ever...

The Attic: A hatchway, A Landing and a Catwalk.

Attics are one of the neglected spaces in the our homes....an afterthought really. Many trusses are designed the same way they were years ago. There is no thought put into the lack of insulation above the top plate on exterior walls. Heeled trusses were developed as a solution to this problem (https://www.apawood.org/raised-heel-trusses). Adding a small heel enables deeper insulation over the top plate of exterior walls and helps prevent thermal short circuiting to and from the attic space. It seems that heel trusses may become a mainstay for the future since new code changes now required attics to be a minimum of R50. Large heels mean more blocking and higher baffles to combat the effects of wind washing on the thermal effectiveness of the attic insulation. The key here is to direct any wind (entering the attic through the soffit) far above the layer of insulation. The air contained in the insulation remains stagnant which ...

OSB, OSB, everywhere...

In the previous post we were installing the OSB air barrier on the 2x8 stud walls. The drawing specifies that OSB be installed on the interior of the 2x8 stud wall. Once all joins are caulked with acoustical sealant and then taped, the OSB will act as an air barrier and will also serve as a vapour retarder. Before attempting to install OSB on the ceilings we narrowed down our game plan. We quickly decided that lifting heavy sheets and attaching them to the ceiling using muscle power and a dead man support was out of the question. Our local Princess Auto had a drywall lift on sale so we bought it. We started in one corner of the building. One person on a ladder guiding the other where to push the drywall lift loaded with a sheet of OSB worked great. Our first sheet was cut so that the edge of the sheet could be nailed under the underside of the truss. Using a framing nailer armed with 2 3 /8" nails was the way to go for attaching the she...

Flatrock Passive House: A Passive House in Newfoundland

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