Plumbing

Today was a busy day of getting things done.  Our plumber showed up today to rough in sewer and water for the house, this actually all happened really quickly in just an afternoon.  In addition to that, foundation drains went in.  All of this is then ready for inspection tomorrow.  If we pass, all the ditches around the sides of our house get backfilled on Wednesday so that our basement will sit in the ground like it will when the whole thing is done.

Windows

We finally have windows ordered today…  Some very expensive windows that we are fortunately able to afford thanks to our waiver of system development charges from PDC making room in our budget.  They’re Loewen triple pane units that give us U-values of 0.17 for fixed panes and 0.2 for awnings that should do quite a bit to help us keep our heating down to almost nothing.  Even with this, windows dominate our heat loss…  from some kind of rough calculations, these windows make up just about half of our heat loss, but its still half of the loss that we would get from a standard double pane system.

It may seem a little early to be getting windows squared away, but right now they are actually our main critical path element.  They’re wood windows that are going to take a good six plus weeks to manufacture, plus a week of travel from  Manitoba.  That puts us into the second week of October for delivery.  The SIPs on the other hand will be here three weeks from finalizing our order (as soon as we get our next construction draw), giving us a solid month to put our panels in place.

LEED

Our initial energy modeling came back from Earth Advantage.  It looks like we’re pretty solid for gold and as long as we’re on top of things we should squeak into platinum with the current point score, but I’m pretty sure there’s more that we can do.  Our energy efficiency actually came up kind of low, but they were using default values for infiltration, and thats one place where SIPs really shine and should be able to keep our air changes way low.

Mailbox

The last part of the busy day was a meeting with Kari of Merkled who will be working on a custom mailbox and house numbers for us.