One year wrapup: yard and landscaping

Heh - this will be a short post, because basically we haven't yet DONE any landscaping or other yard work. Too busy with other stuff and also don't feel like spending any real money on cosmetics when we live way out here in the woods. But I do want to comment on a few things.

As you may recall, our yard was left as bare dirt with just a protective covering of straw around the perimeter of the house. That straw has worked great and has lasted much longer than I would have expected - I should get more. The rest of the yard has degenerated into a mess of tiny tree sprouts, moss, and weeds :(. We made a brief effort last fall to weed some of the yard and quickly gave it up as a back-killing effort. More advanced methods are called for, methinks. I don't want to get deep into it though until we finalize a full-up landscaping plan, which we're not ready to do just yet.

Our driveway developed some deep rutted areas after several months of use. Some were deep enough that low-slung cars might have bottomed out. We hired a local contractor to come in to grade\level the driveway and add recycled asphalt. Wow, huge difference! :)

Both Paul (our general contractor) and Brad (the clearing\grading guy) warned me not to landscape too soon, since the earth would need time to settle and this might disrupt any landscaping efforts. This was good advice, there have developed several low areas in the yard which tend to collect water during rainfalls. The driveway immediately in front of the garage also drains very poorly. I have begun to research French drains and am thinking of a summer project to install a system of them around the house to drain everything away to the low end (southwest corner).

With all of the damp areas around this house, bugs have been a bit of a problem. Sitting out on the back porch when it gets dark, on warm nights, is not a good idea. I researched around for bug control products and found a couple of basic ideas: bug zapper lights, and propane-powered bug traps. I went with a Blue Rhino SV 5100 mosquito trap and hooked it up directly to the house propane (no need to refill bottles :)). You can read about them on Amazon and other places, but basically they need to run continuously for weeks and weeks in order to cut into the population and birth rate of the bugs. Mine has only been running for a couple of weeks. So we will see how this thing does - the trap is full of tiny mosquitos, but I suspect\hope it will do better when the weather warms up.

Living in the forest, it's a good idea to be prepared for fallen trees as a result of windstorms. This past winter was no exception - a couple of trees over by the well were pushed over (nearly hit my son's car). Fortunately I bought myself a Stihl MS-290 Farm Boss chainsaw last fall. I've never had one of these before, but you better believe I'm careful with it. It came in handy for the two downed trees, and I've also been using it clear some other small areas. I gotta say, swinging a chainsaw is hard work for this poor desk jockey - a few hours of that and my arms want to fall off. :)

One year wrapup: contractor work items

You might expect this to be a negative post given the title, but I actually don't mean it that way. :) Our contractor Paul had naturally moved on to other jobs, but he did ask me after we moved in to send him our punchlist. I didn't mind this since it would give us a little bit of time to get familiar with the house which would make it easier to detect issues. I think we took about six weeks or so and ended up with a list of ~30 items. All of them were final-finish type items; here's a few for example:

1. Master bathroom door casing needs to be replaced with one piece (currently it is split and made of two pieces)
2. Casing for garage man-doors needs to be finished
3. Finish trim-out on front porch support posts
4. Shorten depth of bottom drawer under cooktop so it closes all the way (currently it hits the gas supply line)

(etc, etc - but you see what I mean, just finish type stuff)

I had all of these in a spreadsheet, to make it easy to keep track both for myself and for Paul. After I sent him the spreadsheet, he got his guys back out on a regular basis (one or two at a time, depending on what other jobs they had going on) and they slowly worked through the entire list until it was all done. It was nice - I didn't once feel like we had been forgotten :).

Finally, some of you may remember my ceiling mishap back in January 2010. At the time I felt sick about it, thinking I'd have to pay for a drywall repair after not even being here a month, but Paul went ahead and arranged for it to be fixed - and I didn't have to pay anything! Perhaps he felt bad that the subfloor in the attic had been left in an unsafe condition like that - but whatever his reasons I really, really appreciated it.

Things I'd do differently next time:

1. Nothing :)

One year wrapup: water

I look back now at all those posts I wrote when our well was getting drilled and just have to laugh at myself. I sure was having fun though. Our well and water system is overall doing fine, meaning we keep getting water whenever we open a tap. The taste of the water was overall just fine IMO, even though we were previously used to city tap water. My wife still prefers the water that goes through the refrigerator's builtin water filter.

After several months of living here however, I started to notice that:

1. We were getting some tan-colored scale buildup on several fixtures (not a lot, but definitely noticeable).
2. Toilet bowls were getting stained more quickly than we were used to.
3. When my wife used the bathtub in our master bath, the water showed a definite yellow-ish tinge, and left a ring after being drained (No I did NOT blame this on her...what you think I'm crazy??)

As it turns out one of my new neighbors owns a water filtration company (Clean Water Systems NW), so I asked him to come over and take a look. On his visit he checked out the ph of the water (fine), and did quick some iron and manganese tests using portable test equipment, and took away some samples for further testing. Bottom line after the results came in was that we had low-to-moderate hard water, plus some ferric iron, plus some manganese in our water.

He recommended a system that included:

1. A pre-filter for larger solids
2. An iron\manganese filter, with automatic backflushing, based on Pyrolox filter media.
3. A Scale Blaster for reducing hardness.

After my usual thorough (IMO) research, I decided to take his recommendations. The Scale Blaster product looked like snake oil at first, but they have a lot of testimonials to suggest otherwise; also a different neighbor has it installed with good results.

We did run into an issue on where to locate the iron\manganese filter. I didn't have room in the "mechanical alcove" in the garage, and I didn't want to lose any more floor space in the garage, so in the end I decided to put it up in the garage attic. (Before next winter I will need to insulate the piping a bit more to be safe, but I think it will be okay.)

The installation went smooth and easy. When the installer cut into the copper supply pipe (just downstream from the pressure tank), he showed me the inside of the pipe - wow was there a ton of sediment in there! Made me glad we decided to get this system - I don't want all of that dirt in our water, appliances, water heater, etc!

This is my garage attic, after fifteen months of living here:

I extended the lighting circuit to add the two new bulbs at the far end - huge improvement, it was such a cave before. Note, you can't see the new water system stuff in the above picture (it's behind the scaffolding supports). This isn't the best picture, but here it is:

The oval-shaped white thing is an automatic water-shutoff valve, hooked up a sensor "puck" sitting below the equipment on the subfloor. The Scale Blaster is the white box screwed into the board underneath the rafters. The computer-looking thing above the blue filter bottle is what controls the periodic backflushing (once per week) to keep the filter media clean and efficient.

After a few weeks the system seems to be working well (just took a few days for the dark tinge from the new filter media to flush out, as the installer warned us). The taste of the raw tap water has improved according to my palate, but my wife is still sticking to the fridge water :). When we fill up the bathtub now, the water is much, much clearer. Those are subjective opinions of course, so I decided to get some independent testing done at Edge Analytical, the same place that tested our initial well water quality (for permit purposes). (I know that lots of folks never bother getting their water tested, but I prefer to be conservative when it comes to our water supply. Plus getting periodic testing will help me identify changes that occur over time.) I dropped off the samples this morning and will followup with another post to record the results.

Things I'd do differently next time:
1. Have a dedicated mechanical room for all of the water and HVAC stuff.
2. Install a water filter system during construction (or at least reserve space for it).

One year wrapup: heating and cooling

In general we love the radiant floor heating system, and the Warmboard definitely seems to be living up to its promises. The tile surfaces are especially consistently comfortable and toasty, while the hardwood areas seem "okay" due to the feeling that the floor temps in those areas have larger temperature swings. I knew beforehand that this was might be an issue, but wanted 3/4" hardwood flooring anyway, and would not change it now even if I could. The hardwood floors and their finish have so far stood up well - I had heard some horror stories about radiant heating ruining the finish.

I went with warmboard over a gypcrete-based solution mainly due to a lot of discussions I saw on the Internet regarding where do you want to store your buffer of heat. With gypcrete-based designs, you store a lot of that heat in the floor; some people advertise this as a good thing but my position is that it's better to keep that heat in your water reservoir until needed (or better yet, forego heating that water at all). Which leads to my next comment which is that our floors & heating system do respond quite rapidly to changes in the thermostat temperatures. Based on subjective feeling, I can sense the changes within ~15 minutes of turning the heat up or down. This was one of the key promises of Warmboard which has been fulfilled imo.

The zone heating is also more effective than I had dared to hope for - I love keeping our master bathroom at ~74-75 deg F, and the master bedroom itself at ~70 deg F - makes nightime bathroom trips quite comfortable. Despite this being "radiant heating", a lot of heat goes up the stairwell and I have only turned on the upstairs heat about three times in the past year (when visiting family came to stay with us). Makes me shake my head - I have a ton of money invested in that upstairs warmboard and the associated radiant plumbing system, and it's hardly getting used! :) Ah well, I still say better safe than sorry.

I have a lingering concern as to whether or not the Unico reverse-cycle chiller is really as economical as advertised - my monthly electric bills have been much higher than expected in cold months. (This may be because I was accustomed to our old house which was 1) smaller and 2) heated with natural gas.) In addition, although quiet the drone of the chiller can get annoying after awhile - a propane-fired primary boiler would have been 100% silent; I also wonder even if we keep the chiller, if a propane-fired backup boiler would have recovered heat more quickly than the electric backup we went with. (As I recall, I wanted to go electric for the most part to obviate the need for periodic propane tank refills.) Finally, I remember the heating company guys saying our chiller was going to be very efficient because it's just barely big enough for the job (3.5 tons). This was supposedly a good thin, but I wonder if that's why it runs so often when it's cold out. At some point I need to figure out how to do an exact cost analysis on my monthly costs.

Still - I'm not going to change out any of these heating system components anytime soon. I am thinking of swapping out the thermostats with some programmable units (normally folks don't bother with those with radiant heating, but I think they would work well with the fast-responding Warmboard).

The system works "pretty well" in air-conditioning mode. There is a huge amount of south-facing wall on this house that acts as a heat sink, and the system operates near continuously on hot summer days. On the hottest days I would have to say that the system is slightly overwhelmed. I think we could improve this by opening some upstairs windows late in the afternoon, to help the system remove much of hot air in the house. An attic-based whole-house fan looks appealing for that same purpose as well.

In retrospect I would have:
1. Located the chiller way over by the garage and far away from living spaces
2. Installed a whole-house attic fan.

3. Gotten more detailed about the system-sizing data to convince myself that the proposed system could handle the heating & cooling load with ease.

After one year (or so...)

So we've been living here in our new house for a little over a year. I wanted to comment on what's working well and what's not, now that we've had some time to settle in.

Overall our experience with the house has been wonderful. Everything is nice and shiny new, the appliances and mechanicals generally all work well, and there's no roof leaks (which was an issue with my old house - that improvement alone was a nice incentive to move), and there's lots more space.

My commute time has on average gotten worse by about five minutes. That seems bad, but the quality of the commute is so much better that I don't even notice. Nowadays, I spend ~7-8 minutes driving through the woods before I even hit blacktop. And I don't have to spend any time on I405 (a very, very busy/jammed North-South Seattle freeway for those not familiar with the area)! Yay!

Adjustment to rural life has been actually not too bad. Most shops are a bit far away, so there is always a moment of "do I really need that" before deciding to go out. We like the local pizza place and the mexican place down in Carnation. Carnation is a small town, but is now scheduled to get its first traffic light - we're moving up in the world! :)

Living life near rivers has turned out to be fun - every time we get several days of rain, I become keenly attuned to the flood state of the local Tolt and Snoqualmie rivers. So far it has not been too bad - I have about four or five ways to get home from work, and so far only three of them have been closed at a given time. If it got really bad, I'd just stay home from work.

Here's a picture of the house last November, looking from the driveway, when we got our first real snow:

Anyway - I plan to follow up with a few more posts about our experiences, plus some "what I'd do differently" type stuff.