Attempting to Stay Out of the Heat

Temperatures this last week have been brutal along with the humidity. Highs for the entire week made it into the 90’s with one day topping out at 100 degrees with a dew point of 79.

Because of the heat, I decided to do a wall on the northwest side of the house. At least I had shade until around 1 p.m. and then shade from a big cottonwood at about 5 p.m. So for the four midday hours I either sawed wood or sawed wood (caught a few zzzz’s).

Besides working on the house, the truck got a new set of tires this week and the truck’s air conditioning system was tested and a dye added to find the small leak that’s been plaguing me as of late. Even my 1/2″ drill used to slurry paper didn’t want to work anymore, so it was an expensive week.

On the brighter side of things (I’ll stop whining now) I was able to finish the eleventh wall on Saturday morning. This is a solid wall with no windows so it was a pretty busy week to say the least.

There’s nothing better than a hot afternoon with thousands of gnats flying by like snow flakes. Kind of reminds me of winter.

Speaking of windows, I’ve been watching the sun’s trek across the sky and have made a few changes to the upper story window layout. The original plan was to have all windows from the south side of the house all the way around to the northwest sides of the house. The window layout was designed for solar gain and esthetic reasons. But after observing the sun’s path, I realized that from about 2 p.m. to 6 p.m. in the afternoon the sun’s rays would be streaming into the kitchen area during the summer. To make matters worse, during the winter months these windows would not provide any warmth from the sun at all and would do nothing but make the house more energy inefficient. So the plans are to take two of the windows planned for the northwest side and place them on the second floor in the work/computer area. I originally wanted solid walls for this area to keep the light level down a bit and to allow the placement of a few desks along the wall, but it really makes more sense to have the windows in this area. The walls face the south-southeast and south sides of the house and will allow sun in the windows during the winter and shaded by the roof’s overhang in the summer. I may even keep one of the windows out completely. I need to do a bit more reviewing of the morning sun before I make any final decisions.

This does bring up a good point though. Even though it looks good on paper, (or the computer’s monitor) the only way to know for sure how things will play out is to view the house and it’s surrounding environment with the frame already built. This is one of the advantages to building the frame first. If we had not built a frame first, we would have been stuck with the design as is. But, with the house frame up first, we’ve had an opportunity to change the wall design before the walls go up.