Sun! Hooray!

I'm sitting at the dining room table, looking at a very welcome sight. It's 7:30 pm, and dark out. The lights are off. From here, looking out the window, I can see the corner of the addition...which, for the first time, is glowing gently from the two recessed fixtures that have bulbs installed.

That's right: we have juice.

So as you might have guessed, Terry the electrician was here today. He put all the outlet and switch covers on, and installed the smoke and carbon monoxide detectors. In other good news, because it was sunny today, Michael and Gary were able to get to the deck again.

They filled the rest of the sonatubes with concrete.

Plus, added bonus, the heat exchanger guys from Montpelier arrived and installed the heat exchanger.

And here it is. This is in the crawlspace under the office. Behind it - as yet unphotographed - are two vents directly to the outside, about six feet apart. One of them is the intake: it sucks in fresh air that ultimately gets distributed all over the house. The other vent is where stale air from indoors is released back outside. Both air streams come into close (but not direct) contact with one another inside the heat exchanger. In cold weather, the stale air warms up the fresh air, thus giving us the benefit of continuous fresh air, without the expense of heating it from freezing temperatures. In the summer, we get the opposite benefit. The reason for all of this is that with this super-well insulated house, it's a good way to get fresh air circulating.

As part of the installation process, the HVAC guys ran ductwork from the addition into the existing house through the attic, and added some vents to the bathroom and kitchen for stale air to make its way outside.

This is over the fridge. See that little round thing on the left? That's new. You can also see, at right, the scummy outline of the old 6" recessed fixture, which Terry replaced with newer 5" ones several weeks ago. Yet one more reason to have the popcorn finish scraped off this winter.

As for our regular gang: Steve got busy with the stairs - notice the new maple treads...

...as well as the lovely mitered corners.

The door to the bedroom was cut in half, as desired.

Here's Jonathan, sanding it down.

By the end of the day, it was resting up near its eventual destination. We decided to stain the door jambs the same as the windowsills, but leave the doors themselves alone (aside from a protective coat of polyurethane).

Mike got busy with staining baseboards and shelves for the bookcases that will go under the windowsills.

The vanity is officially in place, and we're now playing phone tag with the stonework folks. This picture kinda captures the silliness of this bathroom. It was never intended to be a huge bathroom - when we first started out, we thought we'd have a small shower here, and a hot tub out on the deck. But one thing led to another, and we decided to go with the soaking tub. We cut into the space available for the closet as much as we could. And wound up with this: a tiny bathroom, with a simply enormous tub, and a pretty big vanity. You can see the edge of the tub at left, nearly in line with the door frame. (And by the way, that's a narrow door - 2'8"). And you can see how the vanity nearly comes into line with the door frame as well.