Week_15
Blog Post Week 15: Interior Updates and Facade Installation
Cold and wet weather hits us...
11/27/2018 - Day 23
Tuesday, November 27th was a cold and wet day, the ground was extremely muddy and this made it difficult to move tools, to and from the storage container located on the other side of the property. Lucky for us, the general contractor had plenty of work to be done inside. And while he gave us the option of working on the new unit next door, most of us were just fine staying inside were it was warm. One especially nice development was the radiant floor heating was turned on, this was extremely nice and worked very well.
Today saw a lot of work fixing problems that had just been covered up. What I mean by this is we have seen on this project a lot of things that were never addressed or finished, this could be because the contractor felt rushed to meet deadlines or maybe items were just overlooked. This led to some difficult repairs. Today’s fix was a drain pipe for a mini split that was never installed (keep in mind that this is a new building). In order to fix this, we started by pulling out the storage cabinets in the living room. These are large full height cabinets that sit underneath a soffit, on the face of the soffit sits the mini split. Once the cabinets were removed, we had to cut into the finished sheet rock and drill holes though the stud wall. Drilling though the studs was especially difficult seeing as we did not have appreciate drill bits, luckily, we were able to find a new set of hole saws that belonged to the general contractor.
It was decided that it would be too difficult to run PVC pipe though the soffit, down the interior of the wall, then out the other side into the mechanical room and to the drain on the floor. So instead we decided to use a flexible electrical conduit that is also water tight. Unfortunately, we were out of the conduit so it will have to wait till Thursday.
- David Zimmerman
11/29/2018 - Day 24
Today, we worked on the exterior cement board on the south side of the Units. Most of us spent the morning putting trim pieces on (they took a few weeks to order in) and cutting cement board. I think most of us are now pretty comfortable with the process of putting cement board on and we have definitely become more efficient. It is still a very long and tedious process to cover the house with it, but at least we sort of know what we are doing. David worked on some electrical fixture installations and had help from Zach and Joe.
Before lunch we had an explanation from Prof. Ruegemer about how the internal chambers of the ERV system functioned. It was interesting to see how it works and I think it would a great system to implement in future projects.
- Christopher Thompson