Lots of activity now

I didn't post last week because we were out of town for a quick mini-vacation before the return to school. Since my last post, the foundation and garage floors have been poured and the framing begun. The basement level is nicely framed now and they're working on the main level. They've also poured concrete on the ceiling of the safe room. Seeing that made me realize we need to talk to our builder about air flow in there. The whole point of the safe room, of course, is to provide protection during tornadoes, but if the worst happens and the house falls around us, we'll certainly need to a supply of air, otherwise our concrete bunker would quickly become a tomb. Not good. I'm sure he's thought of it, but I'm going to ask the question just in case.

Patrick and I have decided to buy the inexpensive vinyl windows instead of the beautiful Marvin Ultimates. No, I'm not particularly thrilled about it, but we believes that it makes financial sense. Here's why. First, all of the windows in the neighborhood are vinyl, so it doesn't seem like it's much of an aesthetic issue for most people. Should we sell in the future, it's unlikely that Marvin windows would be appreciated (or perhaps even noticed), making it hard to recoup our costs.

Second, in discussions with our builder to "green" the house, we have decided that it's worth the additional money to install a geothermal system and think our construction dollars are better spent here. The federal government is still offering significant incentives for installation and with the projected savings on the monthly electricity bill, we should achieve payoff in about three short years. The change in system should take our a/c from 13 SEER to 32 SEER, a tremendous jump in efficiency!

BTW-as an update on the insulation issue, I was grossly mistaken on our wall R-value according to plan. Although we had discussed adding insulation with our builder, not much had come of it and he had only bumped the attic insulation from R-29 to R-34, but the walls were still rated R-15. We sat down and talked last Monday and have now ensured that the attic will be R-46 and the walls R-19. Luckily, we addressed this before framing began, negating the need for costly change orders. For the walls, we had to plan for 2x6 walls to provide room for the added insulation.

We are also discussing adding Solatubes (http://www.solatube.com/) to some spaces on the main level. For those of you unfamiliar, Solatubes are similar to skylights, but have minimal heat gain and are shaped like a tube, rather than a flat rectangle or square. The cost of Solatubes is minimal (I believe it's something like $65 each), but installation can be tricky. I've only seen them on commercial facilities, but our builder recently installed some on a nearby home so he's given us the address to drive by and take a look.

With all of these efficiency improvements, we thought it seemed best to let the Marvin Ultimates go--particularly because so few people seem to really care about having nice windows. It's a mystery to me, but this is--after all--an investment and ROI and not exploding our budget are both critical to its success.