Extra layers

We came back today from a 10-day trip to Texas and found that our new house has a few extra layers, both inside and out.

One of the new layers is siding. Blake took this photo of the siding going up. We chose HardiePlank, which is a concrete fiber lap siding.

Here's a close-up of our window trim. We chose to have the top piece of the window and door trim extend several inches beyond the edge of both sides of the windows and doors. We saw this feature on another Craftsman-style home and fell in love with it. This feature will be repeated on the window and door frames inside the home.

One of the green building certifications we hope to get in addition to Passive House is Earth Advantage. This certification measures energy efficiency, indoor air quality and overall environmental impact. www.earthadvantage.com

This large piece of construction equipment sitting in the yard is a mystery... I'm sure Blake will tell us soon what it's for.

Here's our new inside layer: drywall. Many of the upstairs ceilings and walls are now covered in a layer of drywall. This completely transforms the rooms. Now we have a real sense of the size of each room, and we can no longer look through or into the walls. We have to actually use the doorways now to go from room to room, rather than walking through the walls.

The laundry room.

Here's something that Stuart is excited about. This is the hub in our office where our ethernet and fiber optic cables meet. The orange cable is the fiber optic cable, which is a high capacity way of transferring data. This is not something we'll be using now because the equipment is too expensive, but we'll be ready to use it in the future.