The walls are now finished, and they have started on flooring. We chose an easy-to-maintain luxury vinyl floor for the main room and the bedrooms, and tile for the bathrooms.

It’s the glue-down kind: after spreading glue directly on the concrete, they carefully lay down the floor plank by plank.

After our last blower door test, the builder found and fixed a significant leak hidden behind one of the beams. Hopefully, that was the last one, as the airtight membrane is now inaccessible behind the drywall (gypsum board, sheetrock) in the ceiling.

Before mounting the drywall on the straw panels, the wood beams are furred out a bit so that any straw sticking out doesn’t cause the boards to warp. We’re also using 5/8" drywall everywhere to keep it as straight as possible (also improves sound proofing).

We ran a second blower door test after sealing up a bunch of leaks. The result was a lot better: we got down to 1.1 ACH50 (air changes per hour at 50 pascals): a big improvement from 1.6, but not up to the passive house standard of 0.6.

Before the test

We sealed off all the drains with plastic sheeting and duct tape.