Sprinting to the Finish

We've moved in fully, so I wanted to give a tour of the finished product. There's some miscellaneous projects left to do, but for all intents and purposes, the interior of the ADU is complete. We've moved our stuff in, including furniture, decorations, and tons of other stuff.

Each time I move residences, I always groan at how much stuff I own, most of which I rarely use. This move was no exception. Except, this time, the limits of the small living space forced my partner and I to be more deliberate about deciding what items enter through these doors. Only the best of the best stuff gets through. Hopefully, we'll sell many of our remaining items this fall.

Part of the push to get fully moved in and decorated was in preparation for a news crew that used the ADU last week as their set. KATU, the local news station, came to film a short piece about the Build It Green Tour that will air on Tuesday, September 20th, at the 5 o'clock news hour. They said that they'd be posting the piece online afterwards; I'll link to it once it's posted.

KATU filmed a promotional piece for the Build It Green Tour

Here's a five minute walk through of the finished ADU. I am very happy at how everything is looking. It feels like a home now, and the most luxurious home in which I've ever dwelled. After a week, I can say that I love being in this space.



Meanwhile, I've decided to rent out the main house as a fully furnished, self-hosted, Bed and Breakfast on AirBNB. I am going to give this a try for a month or two to see whether it works better than a normal long term rental. It's a great house for groups of 4-10 who are coming to visit Portland and would prefer to stay in a sweet old house for less than staying in a hotel.

Heat Recovery Ventilator

Heat Recovery Ventilators are mechanical building components that serve several important functions for newly constructed, tight buildings.

As a quick attempt to summarize HRVs in writing, in air tight houses, it's important to have sufficient fresh air to breath. If there is not sufficient fresh air, the indoor air will eventually become stale, and increasingly full of carbon dioxide from human expiration and from residual toxins that are embedded in building materials that are used in the construction.

Air leaking through walls is an expression of the second law of thermodynamics

Mechanical ventilation is used to promote circulation of fresh air around the house. An HRV not only circulates fresh air, but balances air and vapor pressure inside and outside the house, mitigating the tendency for air or moisture to drive through a wall assembly.

This tendency is due to entropy (aka. the second law of thermodynamics), or the fact that high pressure systems migrate pressure towards low pressure systems. By reducing the difference between the air pressure inside the house and outside the house, there's less incentive for air to leak through the walls to equilibrate on either side of the wall assembly. When air and moisture pressure is equal on either side of a wall, less air will leak through the wall. This leak reduction, in turn, creates a more durable wall assembly over time. In addition to balancing pressure, HRV's also "recover heat" by passing the incoming and outgoing air through an aluminum core heat exchange where the conditioned air's heat is transferred to the incoming, unconditioned air.

My verbal explanations for the HRV in the attached videos are convoluted. The 2nd video explanation is a little better, but it's still a little bit technical. Anyhow, here's a video of the Fantech 1405R HRV upon its initial installation.



Here's a video of it now that the HRV has been fully installed.

Update on ADU Building Progress: Lighting Design and Electrical

Now that the building shell has gone up, the changes made each day are inside the building structure and don't look as significant. Two weeks ago, we did plumbing. This past week, we completed electrical and have started to install the Heat Recovery Ventilator (which I am going to cover in more depth in a future post.) Here is a little information about lighting design and the video below provides a general status update. 

Before beginning the electrical work, I thought through where the lighting should go, and what type of lighting was needed. Here is a diagram of the lighting plan that I put together with my architect and builder for the first floor.

Lighting design should take into account task lighting (eg. under cabinet lighting for cooking), accent lighting (for showcasing pieces of art etc), perimeter lighting (for helping to guide your eyes around a space), and ambient lighting (for general space lighting). Most of the lighting in the ADU is task and accent lighting. I de-emphasized the use of ambient lighting since most the ADU will be completely lit by daylighting during the day, and at night, the more focused task lighting will be better and prettier than ambient lighting. When the house is complete, I'll write a post about the lighting design and show off how it's been designed with the space in mind. 

Lighting plan for first floor

Here's the general update on the various things that are happening in the ADU.