We’re still in the long process of moving in… Mostly sorting and unpacking and wading through a sea of boxes. Of the work that is still underway, our closet was installed a couple days ago. Since this photo, we have filled everything, clothes hang in the center part. the left has shelves, and the right is a still unfinished medicine cabinet… There were some issues getting the mirror right which has kept us from installing the door.
Banks
We’re on our way to wrapping up paperwork with the bank. There’s a bunch of stuff that we need to get together that we didn’t really know about until maybe a week and a half ago. First off, we’re putting in our final draw request for the remainder of what we can take out, then beyond that there are several things that have to happen to verify that the building is done. The appraiser came out on Saturday to check back in, she wasn’t doing another appraisal she was preparing a “442″. I don’t know what 442 really stands for, but basically the bank wants to know that we built what we said we were going to build… So they send the same appraiser that looked at our house in the first place who checked everything over, took pictures, and asked a few questions about some changes that we made.
After that, there are a couple of basic things that need to be signed. Our contractor has to verify that everyone has been paid and there won’t be any liens placed on our house, and we have to sign a completion notice that the title company prepares and will get recorded with the county. This basically says that we affirm that we are done with all significant work on the house. We were going to take care of this on Friday, but realized that the paperwork we were given had the wrong property address on it. Hopefully this doesn’t mean that there’s something bigger wrong with our file, but the completion notice itself has been corrected and we should be able to wrap that up tomorrow.
Heat
We’ve been pretty thrilled about the performance of our house so far. We had to turn on the heat a little bit on our first couple of days in, but since then its been pretty stable and we haven’t had to run the heat for over a week… We even crack a window in our bedroom upstairs. The house does tend to lose a little heat at night and then gains it back during the day, we have been cycling between about 65 and 68.
Lemons!
Our contractor took a little vacation last week and came back with a gift, a lemon tree. We’re expecting that we’ll leave it out on the ecoroof during the summer and bring it in to our bedroom when it gets cold.
Congratulations! Very interesting house and site. I keep finding more pages, photos, comments.
Architecture is inhabited sculpture. — Constantin Brancusi
Harpoon house looks fantastic! I can’t wait to see it. Max and I plan to be in Oregon sometime this summer. I’ll keep you posted, as I will want the grand tour.
p.s. I wish I could have been there for the garden planting party. Dig the sedum. Congrats on your hard work and perseverance!
Love the house. Explain how you achieved such a high efficiency on the heating (or lack of). Please more pix! Want to see it all. What’s the root cellar like?
We definitely need more pictures up, its been occurring to us recently that we’re lacking in a solid suite of walk-through photos.
The efficiency comes from a combination of a few strategies. Windows are our primary source of heat loss, so we made sure we could find a way to make them as efficient as we could. We built with SIPs which makes it easy for us to control infiltration of cold air. And we built small which means we just have less house to heat. I don’t feel like there is any single aspect to the house that is particularly innovative by itself, our home’s efficiency is really more about our attitude of being honest with ourselves about energy use being a priority and doing our best to be responsible with how we built.