I am trying to figure out what to say about the windows and doors. It should be easy, they are like nothing I have used before. Triple glazed European tilt/turns, the small ones are startlingly heavy, the large ones are so heavy that moving them requires much conversation and several people to make sure no one is hurt and nothing is broken. They close and seal so completely they feel like a door on an old refrigerator, the ones that still had latches. The doors close effortlessly and with the multipoint locks engaged are secure and airtight. I guess that’s about it, they work, well, and are pleasant to use.
There are a couple of places in the house where the operation of the windows is a little awkward. Every window opens and since they swing in an open window can stick into the room a bit. The largest windows are in the bays and open against the side walls of the bay where they are neatly tucked out-of-the-way. For the rest of them, if they are going to be in the way, we can just tilt them instead of swinging them in. This function allows the window to be hinged at the bottom and open inward at the top about 6″. So the window can vent without encroaching into the space. It has been brutally hot recently and every window in the house is open to catch whatever breeze is available and people in the house have automatically gone to using the tilt for windows that would be in the way if they were swung open.
TPO
After a very long wait the roofing arrived. A huge relief and a necessary step to move forward on interior finishing. The roof is on two different levels, the upper roof spills onto the lower roof. The upper roof will be covered in concrete pavers, the lower roof will be planted as a roof garden, but beneath both is an 80 mil TPO membrane. The roof deck framing is level, the pitch for the roof membrane is created with tapered pieces of foam screwed to the roof deck. 80 mil TPO sheets, a plastic roof membrane, are fastened through the foam to the roof deck and all of the seams are heat welded to form a continuous drainage plane.
And now with that done water no longer comes into the house, I sleep at night when it is raining, and we can start finishing the inside and building the roof garden.
First Step Inside: Concrete Slab
We have had a couple different ideas for the second level floor. Back when one of the goals for the house involved a budget, I had conceived of the second level floor as sanded plywood. Mary was good with that, but offered up concrete as a possibility, briefly we considered cork. In the end what settled out was concrete, however using concrete as the finish floor surface on the second level of a wood frame structure is not the same dual purpose money-saving choice it is on the foundation level. On the other hand we do have significant southern glazing on the second level and the 2″ of concrete provides a nice heat sink for the solar gain of bright winter days. Additionally, and this is a benefit I didn’t anticipate, the concrete blocks a lot of the sound transfer through the floor. With the joists open below had the floor only been the plywood, every footstep, the murmur of conversations, and just about any sound would have transferred readily through the floor. Very little though is clearly audible directly through the 2″ of concrete, and it does look good.
We put 15 pound felt on the plywood, and formed around the stairwell so the concrete edge would serve as the finished nosing at the floor edge. A 2″ strip of 1/2″ plywood was nailed around the perimeter as a form for the concrete at the walls. Getting the concrete up to the second level required a conveyor truck and a careful operator to direct the belt through the porch door, from there we used wheelbarrows to distribute it throughout the floor. Not so bad for only 2 yards on a level surface. I chose to use a lightweight aggregate in the mix to reduce the load by about 20%. It is the first time I have ever used this type of mix and it was an odd thing. The stone is light enough that it floats in the concrete, a property that confounds much of the finishing process. I used a vibrator to consolidate the edges at the stairwell, but agitating the concrete would cause the stone to rise instead of lock into the other concrete components. In the end it proved difficult to get the surface flat, but the finishers worked hard to keep it looking good.
While we were lifting concrete to the second level we poured the screened porch floor as well. This is something I really like. The porch floor is supported at two places, it rests on a steel angle bolted to the wall of the house and 6 feet from the house the porch slab passes over a 4×8 steel tube and then extends a bit more than a foot further. Other than that it is a self-supporting 4″ slab, 5/8″ rebar placed on a one foot grid provides the reenforcement.
In the picture above the side forms are not in place yet. The plywood bottom is 3/4″ MDO, a concrete forming plywood with a smooth skin on one side to provide a smooth finished concrete surface. On the top of the beam on the left the steel headed studs that will lock the slab into the beam are clearly visible. There are also studs welded to the steel angle on the house to lock the slab to the angle.
Under the plywood there was an extensive forest of support to keep everything in place untill the concrete was cured enough to support itself. When the concrete was placed we made a concerted effort to vibrate every surface (since they all would be removed and expose the concrete on the other side) to remove any air bubble against the forms. After a week we pulled the forms saw how we did.
P.S.
My daughters are home for the summer and Lois had recently been doing wood block carving in a printmaking class and had done some wood carving during a Maymester study abroad in Bali, so I asked if she would be interested in carving into the plywood form, which would produce a relief on the exposed bottom surface of the slab. She agreed, and made this:
p.s. in the photo looking down from the roof at the porch forms you can make out Lois’ carving in the lower left corner.
small house small lot 