Flatrock Passive House: A Passive House in Newfoundland

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 leak. (Photo 1-1).   After verifying t

Ensuring that a building is air tight involves some planning...well, actually, a lot of planning!  I've learned that the barrier needs to be defined incrementally as stages of construction are being completed.  With a cross section of your building you should be able to start at some point on the buildings interior (if the air barrier is defined there) and follow around the floor, walls, fenestrations, ceilings and eventually back to the point where you began.  From there you really need to think about how to deal with changes in planarity of the building in order to make the transition with your air barrier. One of those areas is the windows.  The windows themselves become part of the air tight barrier.  However, they need some way to tie into the air barrier of the building.  For this building, the air barrier will be defined at the interior:  OSB with acoustical sealant at joins and further sealed with 3M8067 tape.  The window bucks will be tape sealed to the OSB.   This chang

It has been not quite two weeks since our last progress report.  As usual things are moving along.  We are seeing changes every day.  Here are some pictures showing incremental changes from the point of view of the North Elevation (Photo 1-1 to 1-3) and the South elevation (Photo 1-1 to 1-4) of the house.  All of the deep window bucks have been complete and we continue to work upwards to the roof system.  The wall system has proven to be fairly easy to implement but it does involve splitting the work into different tasks as we build upwards.  We work upwards at one full sheet of foam (True wall from NL styro, custom ordered with 2x4 slots) at a time then stop at the nearest sheet dimension to complete framing tasks above.   In photo 2-4 you will see that the trusses have an 18" heel.   This heel allows us to add more insulation.  You can see that the foam on photo 1-3 is just below the heel on the north wall.  The foam will extend up beyond the eave and cover the heel.  With cellu

In the previous post  I showed some pictures of the posts and beams to be used for the front verandah and inside the house.  Those timbers are now on site!  (Photo 1-1).  They were delivered the day before the lift so we could prepare jack posts in the walls to support the beam.   The hemlock beam for the living room sits on a jack post which will penetrate through the interior OSB air barrier.  Beams check and split and can open up into the cavity from the main living space.  They can be a large source of air leakage.  The key is to wrap the beam in tape...alot of it! (Photo 1-2).  The tape will be air sealed to the interior OSB with more tape and acoustical sealant. Photo 2-1 and 2-2 shows the timber beam being lifted by the boom truck and maneuvered into place.  It was finally dropped into the prepared wall pockets and secured (Photo 2-3) after which the framers started joisting the second floor.    As soon as the joists were completed the framers started sheathing the floor above.