The house is complete! It’s been a busy time, a lot to catch up on. Here’s how it looks today: I’ll be posting more pictures soon. But in this post, let’s dive into the guts of the house. Final blower door test The preliminary blower door tests came in at 1.6 ACH and 1.1 ACH, not low enough for certification as passive house (0.6) or low energy building (1.0). The builder found and fixed a significant leak after the second test, so we hoped to get a better result at the final blower door test.

It’s been a year since I last revised the floor plan. With construction almost complete, it’s time to see how it held up to reality. Let’s start with the outside. This is what the site looked like a year ago. You can see what our 3D model looked like in the Back on Track post; below is an image where I tried to match angle and date/time to last week’s reality.

The muddy mess in front of the garage has been replaced by a driveway. With the fascia now painted black and a dark stain on the column, this is pretty close to the final look of the house (rain gutters and rain chains still to come). Local building regulations require a minimum 2-ft-wide concrete strip around the whole house. (I think the idea is to keep water away from the foundation; that should be less of an issue with our generous roof overhangs.