response 1 of 191:

Jan 26 22:07 UTC 2013

My partner Jim and I started building a 960 sq ft (no basement) very insulated
house in 1986 and the city gave me six months to finish it (May 28 2013). 
Jim refuses to come here because he was assaulted twice by some awful new
neighbors and I am building with help from two friends.  
Today the architect friend and I are putting skim coat white thinset mortar
on the exterior downstairs walls.  This is very sticky stuff (polymer added)
that we mix up by hand (5 lb powder, 1 pint clean water), apply with a trowel
(making sure to cover all screws and taped joints), then she uses a special
Japanese trowel to smooth it as flat as possible.  Maybe two more days of
these.  The cement board is Hardibacker, 3x5' sheets .40 inches thick, 40 lb
per sheet, and was a challenge to put on the walls over resilient channel
(metal channel) without bending the channel or puncturing the foil over bubble
wrap vapor barrier.  Two weeks of cement board (370 sq ft) and now about the
same of skim coat, two people working together.  Two more days to go?  

After this 9" deep window jambs and a second set of windows (inswinging sash,
designed by Jim and to be made by the company that made our outswinging
windows).  They will close like doors, with standard window latches and
hinges.

We are taking off early today (5 pm) to get my friend some more used work
pants at Value World.  My other friend is off fixing things for other people
and we will continue wiring tomorrow afternoon.  The first friend is in
charge of the HRV (heat recovery ventilator) and an accessible bathroom
floor.

We need to do plumbing, wiring, ventilation, interior walls.  The wiring
includes lights (we finished exterior lights and outlets) and space heaters.
Lights will probably be $10 fixtures from Ikea that come with 3x35W halogen
bulbs and can be used with 3 3 to 9W LED bulbs from CHina ($1-2.50 each
includes shipping).  THe space heaters will be hydronic electric baseboard,
probably 500-1000W each.  I need 2200W total to heat from 0 to 70.,  Right
now the heat is at 50F because I turned up the space heater from its low of
43 so the mortar would cure better.  I am heating with one space heater set
on low (1500 watts rarely one), on dehumidifer (660W when dehumidifier,
purchased new locally for ebay matching price), and five double fluorescent
light fixtures (we turned those on one day before the dehumidifier when it
got down to 40 downstairs).  When the sun shines no other heat should be
needed once the two south porches are glazed in.  Or if I cook wastefully or
take hot showers every day I should not need to add more heat.

The architect friend is building her own house and I promised her two weeks
help stuccoing in June.

I am learning how wiring works, and service panels, and 4-way switches, and
double motion sensors (it actually works - one outside and one inside the
porch so the porch light goes on if someone approaches or leaves the house,
to light the stairs).  We have lighted mercury switches which light when in
the off position and are not lighted when on, unless you put them sideways
in which case they don't work at all and are always lighted.

We are leaving - more another time.  Is anyone else here building a house?

response 3 of 191:

Jan 27 01:21 UTC 2013

The Habitat Re-store in Ann Arbor has some really nice stuff.

response 5 of 191:

Jan 27 03:56 UTC 2013

Are the neighbors really assholes, or are they just upset that there's been
this hole next to them for the last 27 years, thus driving down their own
property values?  Things like houses don't exist or have value solely on their
own merits, they hold value because of what's around them as well.  It doesn't
seem unreasonable to me for someone to be angry that someone else in the
neighborhood isn't pulling their share of the weight, particularly given the
economic downturn.

Try to see things from somebody else's perspective every once in a while,
Sindi.  It will do you some good.

response 7 of 191:

Jan 27 05:40 UTC 2013

I can vouch for tsty's indoor wiring experience.  He's pulled entire houses.

response 9 of 191:

Jan 27 13:20 UTC 2013

I think it is wise to push off things like the motion sensors. Work now to 
get the house to a point where you can get occupancy. Then pull a permit 
for renovation. :)

response 11 of 191:

Jan 27 18:51 UTC 2013

I'm glad to see code is still considering the technology that's actually
useful today, and not some future time.  LED can be useful for some
people, but most require more lighting.  LED has certainly gotten a lot
better in the past year or two, but I still don't think it's quite there
yet, and not affordable enough for the required light to meet the needs
that existed for incandescents.

I can say that my wife and I bought property about 2 years ago now for a
house we intend on building.  I certainly hope we're not still working
on this house 27 years from now. :/  I'd like to start building it
sometime this year, but I need to complete the plans, go to get the
building permits, and then get started on it.  I figure it'll take us a
couple of years, and it'll certainly be larger than 960 sq ft, but it
should be interesting to complete.  Maybe there are some people here who
can give me some pointers.  I really need to figure out what the hell
I'm doing for putting in the basement/foundation, and then framing it. 
Once I've got that done and it's got a roof and frame, windows, and
siding (if I go with siding), going inside and building room by room
shouldn't be a horrible deal.  Time consuming, but at least sheltered
from the elements and can be cooled/heated as necessary without being
rained/snowed on. :)

I do definitely think you'll find it better to plan for too little load
than too much.  The house I'm in now was built by Pulte, who I'm fairly
certain has never had someone living in a home they've built actually
working for them.  I've got most of the lighting/outlets on a single
outlet, that stretches from the kitchen downstairs through the bedrooms
upstairs.  I pretty frequently blow breakers because I just have too
much on the circuits.  Replacing wiring without tearing down walls is
kind of a bitch.  I may need to enlist TSTY's help if he's pulled whole
houses.  Maybe he can figure out a way to run a new circuit to my office
where much of the electric usage on that circuit now resides since I
have a lot of electronics there for work.

I've done a lot of wiring work myself in the past couple of years.  I
wired most of my basement when I remodeled it 5 years ago, and I also
wired the garage of the cottage my parents own up north 5 years ago. 
That was a real job, because I had to run 200' of wire from the main
cottage out to the garage to bring up the new breaker box we put out
there.  I also replaced the fuse panel with a breaker box there last
year, as their insurance company informed them they could save several
hundred dollars a year on their premiums by doing that.  I found
interesting things doing that job, and replaced some 50+ year old wiring
in the process that I was pretty happy to get rid of.  The people that
did that wiring clearly had no idea what they were doing, but it worked
for a long time.  I think it was a fire hazard, so I'm glad it broke
when I was replacing the box and I could replace it then rather than
having the place burn down when we weren't up there.

response 13 of 191:

Jan 27 21:05 UTC 2013

heh it might be worth trying that in my kitchen.  The switch gets crazy
hot with the bulbs I've had in there lately.

response 15 of 191:

Jan 27 23:59 UTC 2013

Sindi, how much do you have to do to be allowed to occupy the house, so
you can meet this court ordered deadline?  Just the basics, please.

response 17 of 191:

Jan 28 03:34 UTC 2013

The tubes are expensive because they have lots of LEDs in them.  The bulbs
I might buy have 3 LEDs of 1W or more.

To get a certificate of occupancy I was required to:

Remove the rainbarrels (which another dept of the city wants me to have)
Remove the protective plastic on the porches (which were designed to be
enclosed)
Bring the porches up to code in December including making them pretty - so
we put on low walls, used aluminum siding, used screens and a screen door 6"
too short and 4" too wide for the opening, and plastic hidden behind the
screening upstairs to keep out the rain.  Downstairs the screening keeps out
most of the snow and less of the rain and I mop a lot.

Now we need to do plumbing, wiring, ventilation (it is required), interior
doors between downstairs and upstairs (but apparently not bathroom doors),
walls and ceilings.  I am allowed to finish just the upstairs, but in order
to put on downstairs ceilings I need to do most of the upstairs plumbing (get
it above the floor) and get the wiring to the second floor (plan it all out
- which takes most of the time).  I also need to put in window jambs between
the windows on the exterior and the walls 9" to the interior, and maybe a
second set of windows on the interior unless they let me do that later.

I need a washable kitchen floor (painted subfloor should work) and a washable
wall next to the bathtub or shower and  a washable bathroom floor.  The
quickest way to have that in the bathroom is to put in linoleum, put in the
fixtures, then remove all the fixtures and replace with tile when I have time,
which is ridiculous.  I want tile above the sink but if I don't have time,
I need to put in the wiring and sink now, then remove them to put the tile
on later.  

The walls are cement board over resilient metal channel for sound control.
It took two of us two weeks to put on the boards on the exterior downstairs
wall.  It is hard to cut, hard to get screws through, and the channel bends
and we were inventing various ways to clamp it and cut it and predrill and
countersink and it was exhausting work.  I would like to do the upstairs walls
and put jambs and windows on both floors at the same time but will probably
have to do it in an illogical order.  40F is the right temperature for this
sort of work.  It is also another two weeks to skim coat the surface with
thinset mortar.  I am skim coating where there will probably be tile, which
is unnecessary under tile but quicker than putting the tile on.

We need to paint the jambs and windows which we cannot do in this weather.
The tile would go on after the jambs and the wiring preferably after the tile.
It would make far more sense to use the cold weather to put on the rest of
the cement board and the warm weather to paint and tile.

In two months we have decorated the porch (with materials which all need to
come off again to enclose it which will waste another week), put up about half
the downstairs walls, skim coated most of those, done the lighting and wiring
of attic, cellar, crawlspace, and two downstairs porches (except for motion
sensors on one) but not the two upstairs porches, put in the downstairs
circuits for outlets that go on interior walls (but the outlets need to come
off so we can put the walls on, then go back on), and started on the
downstairs lighting.   In addition to outlets and lights, there is electric
heat, doorbell, other low-voltage wiring (Jim wants an electronic door latch
on one porch and a system to show that all the locks are locked), a smoke
alarm in every room but bathroom even the cellar and hall all wired together
on the lighting circuit with battery backup (photoelectric), and a complicated
heat recovery ventilation system.  Phone and ethernet.  

We were required to have two outdoor outlets with weatherproof boxes, weather
resistant tamper proof, with special covers that let people leave things
plugged in with the cover on (I need to tape over the holes this leaves in
the bottom to keep bugs out - I can't imagine every using these outlets). 
On the porches (because they are not enclosed) we needed the same boxes and
outlets but different covers (they are weather proof only when closed, and
make it very difficult to plug anything in and will be removed when the
porches are enclosed).  The motion sensors were supposed to be in outdoor
boxes but we did not do that for the one on the porch which is not exposed
to the weather (unless there is a tornado which blows the screens off).
The porch railings need to be 36" high.  

The wiring could be done within a month, plumbing another month, ventilation
who knows how long, and I might beg for permission to tile before the surface
wiring and the plumbing fixtures.  

Today my friend who is helplping wired two 3-way switches, ran cable to two
more switches, put some cable in conduit but did not wire that switch because
we needed a 3/4" plastic screw-on bushing, and we spent a lot of time
discussing what height to put the switches next to the kitchen door so as not
to interfere with the outlets next to them, while letting us screw the boxes
to sound channel (or not) and how to run 14-2 and 14-3 unswitched power to two
bathroom switches and one light, and where to put the bathroom light and three
kitchen lights, and how to get a light in the ceiling of another room without
messing up the structure (we decided to put that light on a wall) and how to
go from junction box to the ceiling (through wall not floor) and whether to
use the 3-way switches with or without ground screws.
y
DO we use green ground screws or green ground clips?  (Clips tend to drift
away).  Should we combine outlets or switches from two circuits in one square
box or use two handiboxes or gang boxes.  Handiboxes go on the surface and
gang boxes go in the wall.  Jim carved spots for them in the posts instead.
On the square boxes do we use plain metal cover plates, or use mud adaptors
(?) that take regular switch plates which stick out beyond the boxes meaning
we would need to put wood around the boxes.  We went with the plain metal,
what my friend calls 'industrial chick'.   When running outlets in conduit
do we put them vertically up, vertically down, or horizontal (which tends to
make wall worts fall off but looks better).  Should we use flat cable which
pulls through holes better, or try to use up the round stuff that we had.
Is the cable so dirty that it cannot be washed and will look used?  Is it
actually used and not so safe to reuse?  Does that tiny black on black print
say 14-2 or 14-3 AWG?  14-3 contains an extra non-ground wire and is used with
switches, or smoke alarms, or two circuits together on the porch so we don't
need to pull two cables through a small hole in the columns from crawlspace.

What size ground bar kit do we add to the electric panels?  We finally decided
on 12, but nobody sells it so we got 15 after returning the 15s for one 23
and considering 6s with two wires per hole.  

Can we legally put 6 wires into one grey wire nut?  (Yes, but you need a
deeper box to do it in so we stacked them).  Can you put two NM (romex) cables
into 1/2" or three into 3/4" conduit?  Yes, if one end is open.  How far above
counters can outlets be (18") and how far must you be from an outlet (2' above
counters, 6' elsewhere).  You need two 20A circuits in the kitchen and all
outlets within 6' of a sink must be GFCI (I bought GFCI circuit breakers) -
this includes the one required bathroom outlet and the one require laundry
outlet.  Refrigerators don't work well on GFCI outlets.  Refrigerators in
kitchens can be non-GFCI.  All outlets within 5' of the ground must be tamper
proof.  We put one non-GFCI fridge outlet 5.5' above ground.  All outside or
below-grade outlets GFCI.  Bedroom outlets but not lights AFCI (or AFIC and
GFIC).  I bought three GFCI and one AFCI breaker instead - they are huge and
hard to get into the panel.  Stairway lights must be 3-way switched or motion
sensor.  Egress lights can be switched or motion sensor (ours are both). 
Kitchen and bath require switched lights, other rooms switched outlets.

My friend is amazingly good at wiring up 4-way switches and double motion
sensors and they mostly work on the first try.  He likes challenges.
We need to switch two switches on the porch so the near switch does the nearer
light.  

response 19 of 191:

Jan 28 13:51 UTC 2013

I have four more months and it is highly unlikely that if most of it is done
they will demolish it.  They could give me another 6 months extension if I
am making steady progress.  I unfortunately need to spend a fair amount of
time preparing to go to court so that it will be safe for me to live there
and for Jim to visit and maybe even help build if we get to court in time.
Today I need to spend time talking to police records dept about how to get
records of the fraudulent calls made by my neighbors before we get back to
work on kitchen and bathroom lighting (or if it is not raining, adding a bit
more aluminum to the porch to block the rest of the snow and rain).  

I could pay a builder to do the plumbing and tiling if necessary but the
wiring is very non-standard and we have to do it ourselves.  
Same for the walls, which interact with the wiring.  
We already removed the rainbarrels and decorated the porches.
I will probably pay a builder to do the window jambs and doors - he has an
indoor shop to make and paint them and we don't even have a working table saw.
We managed to get five saw tables out of the shed (returned four to Jim) and
found a saw base in the crawlspace and five motors and are waiting for the
manufacturer to provide a wiring diagram of one of the motors and for my
friend to cut the proper size plywood base for the saw itself.  He wanted to
make the jambs but would first have to make the saw.  

Before starting to build, I spent two months emptying stuff out of the house
which had collected itself over the years including tools and materials we
had used for cement work and painting, etc.  Jim is so busy doing drawings
that it has all ended up in his living room and kitchen, along with four dead
dehumidifiers that he has no time to try to fix and no interest in giving up
on.  I bought a new one - the house was 80% humid and is now down to 68%. 
Mortar gives off water when curing.  Everything took longer because I could
not go there myself.  I never realized how many good friends we have until
now.

response 21 of 191:

Jan 28 19:45 UTC 2013

The turtle that took 27 years to get to the finish line wins! 
Winning!

response 23 of 191:

Jan 28 22:31 UTC 2013

re #22
 You cannot possibly be accusing me of laziness, tod.

On the contrary, I was comparing your positive attitude to the defeatist
one of jep in the response prior to yours.  Prepare for failure and doom
and all that just doesn't seem helpful.