On Friday, my wife and I took a break from work to expose ourselves to.. hard labor. What fun!

Actually, what we were doing is disassembling and moving a custom made steel bookcase that we heard about through the grapevine, so to speak. The owners of a condo unit were renovating and no longer had any room for a custom made unit, with rolling ladder, that was currently in the space. I managed to talk him down to $1,000 for the whole thing and we set to work on Friday to take it apart. Luckily for us it broke down quite easily. But steel is heavy! Particularly when the gable ends were 10 feet tall by 18 inches wide.

Steel shelving as it originally looked in the old space (not my camera work).

Don't let the picture fool you. That unit is 10 feet tall and 15 feet wide! The rolling ladder was cool bonus. After I inspected the shelving, on my scouting visit, it became clear it would be a perfect fit for our large back room, but it was too tall. A bit of consultation with a resident metal guru and I decided to jump in and grab it because shortening it should be pretty easy.

Detail of the shelves, just before they came down.

The gable end after shortening from 120" to 99".

For a wood guy, I think I did ok with cutting the metal. I won't win any awards for straight cutting, but it was -9 C outside, with a wind, and that was the first time I had cut metal with a cutoff wheel and angle grinder. The good news is all my cuts were de-burred (I learned that lesson many years ago) and they will be on the top, so no one will see them.

Now all I need to do is put the shelves back together and figure out a nicer way to brace them in the back because huge long sheets of sheet metal are:

1. Scary to work with
2. Really don't look that good

Wish us luck.

For those that missed it, here is what the house looks like on TV. Cheers!

I considered this at the start of the project, but we never got far with deciding. My open question is: should we name our house?

It is quite common, particularly for those building new and interesting homes to give the actual house a name. I test drove a few, but they never really stuck. During the whole project we always referred to the house as "Northview House," in reference to the location. Not bad, but kind of dull.

I liked "Lightbox," but I don't think my wife cares for it too much.

Any ideas?

We finally got the news (thanks to my wife's dedicated research) that our house will be featured on Home and Garden Television on the show "Worlds Greenest Homes." The time is 8:30 pm ET, on Friday January 22nd 2010.

For those in the US, you can catch the episode on Planet Green this weekend.

The episode is titled: "Arts & Crafts House" which refers to the first featured house. We have pretty good intelligence that ours is the last or "closer" house. Hopefully we won't look like dorks!

As we approach our second winter in the house, we are just preparing for the final treatments on the concrete of the main floor. We have grown very fond of our floors, though we were initially a bit skeptical. We chose, instead of a thick epoxy treatment for the floor, a rather more subtle finish. The product is thinner and absorbs into the concrete making it water resistant. What we loved about it was the feel of the floor was like a finely honed marble and was surprisingly comfortable to walk on in bare feet (particularly when the weather was cool and the floor was warm). The down side to the finish was the concrete was not completely cured (not a surprise, takes over a year to do properly) and with all the salts and dust coming off the floor, the treatment was looking a bit worn. So, after a good cleaning, and a very fine sanding, the floor gets a new coat of treatment over the next two days. We are looking forward to it!

In other news, something that we have noticed that we were absolutely not expecting about our new house. Sound transmission!

It seems the combination of materials (concrete floors, spray foam insulation, exterior treatments) has made the house quite permeable to sound. So, if you are planning a new house and using spray foam insulation, something to keep in mind is considering sound resistant drywall in areas that border on exterior spaces prone to noise. Not that it is a big issue for us, but with the house so very quiet, we notice it more than we ever did before.

It just shows how some decisions can have some un-related and unexpected affects!

I just had to make a quick post, not particularly house related, about my new pet piece of "eco-flare". It could be green washing, and it could be unnecessary, but it actually works fabulously and I love raising eyebrows when I use it in public.

I picked up a new coffee mug from a small design store here in Toronto in a community called Leslieville. I had seen it before (and it is actually available in many larger stores) but since it was a small shop and a sale, I could not resist.

I Am Not a Paper Cup

What I love about this cup:

• It is double wall porcelain, so it keeps your drink hot or cold.
• The lid is silicon and dishwasher and microwave safe.
• It looks exactly like a paper coffee cup, so it fools the coffee vendors, until you hand it to them.
• The makers of the product are super nice and replaced my lid, free of charge, when it ripped due to a manufacturing defect.

It also has an added bonus of being smaller than my other coffee travel mug, therefore less coffee in my system in the morning, which is a good thing overall.

Cheers!

I forgot to mention that the reason I know our relative temperatures, inside and out, is that I was finally able to install the wireless (and solar powered) mini weather station on the roof of the house. I now get rainfall, wind speed/direction, humidity, barometric pressure, and both inside and outside temperatures. It is not an expensive system and fairly limited (I wish I had bought one that had a PC interface). At any rate, it is nice to see the trends and check actual outside temperatures.

It has been, for the most part, a cooler summer than usual in Toronto, but this weekend past we officially had our second real heat wave. Luckily we were camping for most of the weekend, but Sunday and Monday we were experiencing front and centre how hot it can be (and humid, of course).

The house does well in the short term, but it doesn't take more than a day for the whole place to heat up. Even with great air flow, hot outside eventually means hot inside. It was getting up to 29 C in the house Monday night. The main problem being that the heat difference in the house verses outside wasn't enough to really get the passive cooling working. The ceiling fans in the upstairs rooms are a god send, but it is still a lot hotter than most people find comfortable.

But all was not lost. Yesterday I found a product that has worked out pretty well to help with the heat. Cyclone, the company that made our fume hood in the kitchen, also makes a Booster Fan for floor heating/cooling registers. Though it has a thermostat to detect when a furnace or AC is on, we simply turned them on and let them pull the air through our passive cooling system into the two upstairs bed rooms. It wasn't like having air conditioning, but it was very much appreciated to have the coolest of the night air being blown into each of the bedrooms. They fans were not exactly silent, but no louder than modern in-window AC fan. I believe they generally reduced the temperature in the rooms by about a degree or so. Not a big difference, but with the ceiling fans, made it that much more comfortable.

I think, in the end, we are just getting more used to living without air conditioning and for the handful of days it is really a problem, we always have cool showers, the sprinkler and the basement to retreat to.

Cyclone Booster Fan Plus

Recently we had a civic workers strike in Toronto, which included the outside workers that perform garbage collection. For six weeks there was no garbage collection and you might have thought it had been months judging by the mountains of garbage that were stashed, abandoned and dropped off at temporary dumps that sprang up all over the city in parks and parking lots. My wife and I were adamant that we would not drop off garbage at any temporary site. We made one trip during the strike to drop off one green bin worth of wet compost to my Mother-in-law's that we couldn't compost ourselves (meat, bones, milk products), but apart from that we had only one full garbage bin of garbage and one full recycling bin of recycling when we finally got our service back this week.

It is amazing what can be achieved by not buying your products with lot's of packaging!

Now, I do have to admit that we had a lot of construction waste in the back yard that I paid our landscaper to remove. The difference is I don't mind paying to remove this kind of garbage. Every time I need to do it it makes me more conscious of the amount of waste we generate and we can always generate less.

Ok, back to regular blogging.... Enjoy a real summer weekend, everyone!

I owed some pictures after we cleared out one of the two old sheds out of the back yard. With it all cleaned up we are starting to realize that our back yard is pretty big. When the big shed comes out, which it will eventually, maybe we can truely enjoy a big new space.

Our plans are to put a wide, but thinner shed on the back fence so we can maximize our space.

The big fluffy thing left in the centre of the yard is a native black-eyed susan that grew in the construction debris and we didn't have the heart to remove until it has flowered and reseeded. I know better than to move them as they vastly prefer the back yard to anywhere else.

Back yard from the deck

A view from the driveway