week 25: color! baseboard concepts! sealing!

We have color on the house! It's not completely painted (they left the inner walls of the front porch area unpainted for some reason), but most of it is, and it looks great:

We're really liking the gray we chose. There's something excitingly dull about it. Gunmetal gray?A wee bit of steely blue to it, for sure. Overcast weekend, so we'll see how it looks in the sun, but so far, so good.

They also ran the underground utility from the house to the garage:

And they graded the lot and started setting forms for the driveway and walk to the front of the house:

The builder said we need to get some concrete down so we don't continue to track mud into the house. We're all for that!

Inside, they put in insulation around and about the bathrooms for sound control:

We wound up spending the weekend (I was there for 17 hours...) sealing between boards on outer walls and touching up the spray foam insulation. There were parts of the house where I could see daylight between the boards (admittedly up into the space above the outside eaves). Not good. So a-sealing we went.

 Lots and lots of silicon and lots and lots of spray foam later, our house is much better sealed. Would be better if we had one more weekend for additional touch-ups (which is possible depending on when baseboards and drywall go up), but it is much better now. Not passivhaus better, mind you, but much better. (And I have a nasty full-index-finger-tip blister now as proof. Ouch.)

It blew like Moby Dick last night as a front passed through. I hoped the winds would keep up so we could better assess our sealing job. But alas, the air was dead much of the day. Sent the bride to a head shop for incense so we could use the smoke to detect leaks, but couldn't tell one way or the other.

Oh yeah, the baseboards! If you recall, we were planning on using a notched board as our baseboard. The only problem? The baseboards are thicker than the drywall, so the notch winds up being flush with the drywall. The trim dude and the builder experimented with some other notches, but there appeared to be too much variation for them to look good. However, the look of a minor bump-out on the trim does look good, so we are going to go forward with un-notched baseboards that have a quarter-inch-ish bump out. Sealed and painted all white, it will look good. Saw a house on the tour last week that had a similar look, and it looked good.