Burton Family Adventures

It’s been a bit crazy since Christmas. We decided last minute to move in just before Christmas on 12/22. Praise the Lord that we just missed the crazy drop in temperature on 12/23. We woke up the next day after moving in at around 40 degrees and by dinner time we were at -4. With a completely off grid home that was not yet up to temperature we had to battle the outside temperature as well as trying to heat up an already cold home that hadn’t been lived in yet. This of course all during the lowest solar month of the year.

How did it go you might ask. Well, it wasn’t easy. We had to run the generator daily and also had to conserve power consumption. Lights, heat and coffee were what we lived on. We did cook some hot breakfasts, but no oven, no washer or dryer, and most certainly we didn’t have enough power to heat water for showers. Praise the Lord that 3 miles down the road our other house had free gas and plenty of hot water.

It was a sprint to get a bunch of things done before we moved in, but now that we are in, the work hasn’t stopped. We have a bunch of “moved in” pictures that we will post later, but here are some more of the finished parts of the house before we moved in.

The vanities took a bit more time as I made them all from scratch. The I purchased the oak rough-sawn and thankfully I was able to get some kiln dried, which allowed me to go straight to planing.

The treads will be large pieces of hickory that I still need to make as well as some beautiful railing that will follow after I finish the treads.

There has been lots of door trim, baseboard, pantry shelving and such all worked on over the past couple weeks, but it’s hard to post about everything at once. I’ll provide more details in the coming days and weeks as we get all the hot water going with the recent sunshine, build out the rest of closets, complete all the trim and finish work and move towards the kitchen islands.

So much more to come. Bye for now.

So much happening right now. This is also my first mobile post, let’s see if I can get through it all.

• Kitchen counter & sink install
• Door install and staining
• New washer and dryer
• Front porch started

Well, lots of other touch-up work has been going on, but hard to share pictures of that. It has been bringing us so much joy to see things coming together towards the end.

Not a great mobile publishing experience…photo uploads were a pain. I like the convenience, but will need to figure out how to upload photos smoothly.

I just reviewed our start date and can’t believe we have been pressing on now for 61 weeks. This week will start week 62 which has some very exciting activities planned, but let’s not get too far ahead.

Here is what has been happening lately.

• Kitchen south wall cabinet bases constructed (including double oven)
• Poured and polished our first concrete kitchen countertops
• Spiral stairs are in, yeah!!!
• All recessed lights installed in the apartment
• House half-bath finished

There is a lot more happening, so more updates soon.

Well, with so much transitioning to us for house work, I just haven’t made the time to document. Not how I wanted it, but just how it has been. Anyway, let’s get into some updates.

The first bathroom is DONE!!! Okay, so indoor plumbing has been a “thing” for a long time now, but when you don’t have it for months, then you finally do again…let’s just say you appreciate it.

Baseboard install has started.

Concrete slabs finished

Siding looks beautiful…but not done yet.

“Wait, did you know those are different colors guys?” Yes indeed, and we did that on purpose. We are alternating between the building (roof lines) with the two colors. A-wing -> Toupe, B-wing -> Red, C-wing garage -> Red, C-wing apartment -> Toupe.

This is why we love hickory (it’s just so beautiful)!

It seems like the construction hasn’t made major strides as the crew continues to install the last of the exterior insulation on the C-wing, but so many other pieces have been progressing. I wish I had pictures for everything, but some things just don’t work well without being there…you’ll see what I mean when you read the list.

• Commissioning of our ERV, this was a huge accomplishment that started many months ago. This unit is our whole house fresh air ventilation system that couldn’t be completed until the major dust creating tasks were completed (and all the missing parts were delivered). we now have 24×7 fresh air being brought into the house and stale air being removed, yeah!
• Water pump plumbing and wiring is now complete.
• Water tank storage sensors installed.
• The apartment concrete floor has finally been sealed.
• We have HOT water! Once we had enough solar panels installed and the heat diversion wiring all setup, we were able to send excess power to the water heating elements everything worked as expected.

There were many parts for this project and the complexity wasn’t well understood until the install really began. To give you an idea, the pump turns on automatically and powered completely by solar. There is a system of floats inside the cistern and storage tanks that determine when the pump should turn off, i.e. no water in the cistern or the storage is full. We also had a valve that opens to drain the line to the storage tanks when the pump turns off so the line won’t freeze in winter.

These were a bit tricky as I developed them almost 2 years ago in anticipation for our off-grid water system. I have since found reasonable water tank level sensors in the market, but not really what I was looking for. With a micro controller, some resistors, and little code and an industrial depth sensor, we now have two wifi connected tank sensors that report our water depth in each tank. Why do I so often take pictures before I finish? This picture shows about 75% complete, but it’s actually finished.

This was a long time coming as there was a massive clean-up effort after construction and painting was completed. The whole family had their hands in sweeping, mopping, and scrubbing the floor until it was clean enough to treat with a pre-sealer and finally the sealing. we also tried something fun and used colored epoxy to fill pits and cracks. It turned out really well.

The last solar panels are finally installed!!! It’s nice to cross something off the list as this one has been hanging on for a while due to missing some brackets and mounting nuts. One mistake was my miscalculations after adding some more panels to the design and the other was the shipper forgot some parts on the order. After all that, we ran out of wire. That’s all behind us now as they have all been installed and wired on the roof.

The past few days we’ve also seen our water pump get installed and configured as well as the water mains in the house get turned on and tested. We did find a small leak and will have to replace a small part, but not a big deal. Here is a video of the water being pumped to our storage for the first time.

Our plumbers were able to meet all of our requirements: Spin down filter, carbon filter, filter bypass valves, pressure gauge, thermostatic mixing valve, temperature gauge …AND a recirculating pump in the house due to the long-distance hot water run. Yeah, that’s a lot of stuff, so that helps explain some of the chaos in the pictures.

Don’t worry about the electrical wiring above, that will be put into conduit before we run any electricity through it. I just wanted to get wire length cut to finish that task as I didn’t have conduit at that time. Complete design to follow soon.

Until next time.

We (mostly Stephanie) has been painting like crazy. Priming and ceiling paint are both done and now the focus turns to the walls. It’s nice to see some color on the walls as everything has been white for a couple weeks. Here are the updates recently.

• Soffit and fascia on house, complete
• Water pump installed…YEAH!!!
• Coats of paint being applied to the upstairs

The water pump was a bit tricky, but it’s installed. The sun was going down just as we were getting things hooked up, so no solar power to get it up and running yesterday. We will try to finalize things today and get some water up to our storage today.

As you see above, we have a full tank and can’t wait to get it moved to storage. I’ll update on how that goes.

That’s it for now.

The hands-on work has been making some great progress, but I keep forgetting to take pictures…especially when my hands are covered in paint / primer. After looking at my last post, I realized that I should make the posts shorter and more frequent, so that will be my goal for a while.

• Priming, done
• Painting, just getting started
• Exterior insulation, nearly complete
• Solar diversion design, nearly complete
• Soffit and down spouts, house complete

What can’t be seen is the fact that we were hoping that we finished priming after the first coat, but after further examination, we really needed a second coat in most places. Back out to Sherwin Williams to purchase more primer and get back it. The second coat was put on with far more confidence as the skills with the sprayer were improved for both of us. Stephanie has really taken to it and has nearly completed the second coat single handedly with sanding in between the two coats.

Most ceilings have also now been painted, but that process is hard to document as it looks the same as priming…but it feels different when you are doing it, knowing that it’s the final step for that surface. We both can’t wait for the colors to start to appear, but realize that we should wait a bit as there is still some minor corrections needed and lots of interior work still yet to do, so we don’t want the final finished surface just yet.

The gutter and down spouts were installed just in time as the rain came and in one day we completely filled our 2300-gallon cistern. We hope to get the pump installed next week to get the water to our storage tanks and start feeding water to the house.

I’ll get some pictures and go over the solar energy diversion in detail in the future for those techie types out there.

Praise the Lord for our continued progress.

Wow, it’s been nearly a month since the last post. The project has transitioned from watching and documenting to hands on, getting thoroughly involved. Finding it much harder to document in the midst of working. Here are the updates:

• Roof is done
• Drywall, done
• Solar panel install, nearly done
• Exterior insulation, started
• HVAC, nearly done
• Garage staircase, done

Let’s run through the pictures we did get.

The photo above shows the roof minus the last piece on the West (left) side of the A-wing. This is all done, but I forgot to get the photos off of my drone, sorry.

I have a bunch of drywall photos for documentation purposes, but I’ll show just a bit of the sheet install and the finishing.

Next we were really excited from the dirt that was brought up around the house as things are now level enough to install the pads for the mini-split compressors (AC / Heat).

The C-wing compressor is now hooked up and operational, and wow does it get the place cooled down in a hurry. This unit is impressive.

The house compressor was missing a small part, so we weren’t able to get things fully operational, but we were just informed that the part is in and we should be up and rolling this week. Next question for me was, how are they going to be powered? On to the solar install update.

The utility room is fully functioning with batteries, inverters, but no solar power. I did climb on the roof and get the first row installed to keep the batteries going for construction, but solar panel mounting is NOT a solo task. After the first row was installed my brother-in-law’s came to help me install nearly all of the panels.

I added a total of six panels and this kept us going for a couple weeks. This past weekend we went from only 6 panels installed to having 42 out of the total 54 needed.

The solar install task completed on Saturday afternoon after resources (wire and plugs) were depleted, but we felt good about what we were able to accomplish. These panels have not yet been connected to our battery array, so no power yet. This will be completed next week.

I did list the garage stairs being completed, but that is a bit deceptive. I do need to rebuild them since some mistakes were made, but I will leave what I did in place for now as they are needed to access the garage loft and there are other priorities. The concept was to have the stairs be collapsible, but there was an alignment / measurement mistake made, so they are stationary for now.

Last update is the exterior insulation. This is what Rockwool looks like on the exterior of our house.

The vertical boards have long screws all the way through to the framing (6 inches) and act as both rain screen and insulation support. The horizontal boards are to support the mounting of the vertical siding.

This shows a better view of the window flashing and install of the insulation. We love this effect on the windows as they sit mid-wall, between the interior and exterior providing ~6 inches of sill on the inside and outside.

That does it for this time around. We praise the Lord for his rich blessing on our lives through this adventure and look forward to each step forward that we make. The finish line is coming ever nearer. We are racing the end of the summer to get things finished, but continue to work hard and trust God’s timing.

This past week we’ve had a variety of changes:

• 2300-gallon water cistern install
• All house and garage eaves and roof insulation completed
• Dirt leveled around the house and garage
• Utility room finished and power system moved in
• Septic covered

So, let’s get into it. The 2300-gallon cistern is used for the initial rainwater capture from the roof. The rainwater is prefiltered using a gravity filter system called a Wisy Vortex. The US company we worked with to get this unit was Rain Brothers. You will see the unit right next to the cistern below.

Missing completed shots of the eaves and top-soil, but I’ll follow up more later. Here is the completed utility room and power system.

Here is the covered septic with some of the dirt moved. I couldn’t believe how nice things look (you have to look beyond the equipment).

As you can see from the picture below, the eaves are done on all buildings AND the dirt is 2 feet higher and level with the buildings…that has been very exciting.

You can also see a huge pile of steel in front of the garage…preview of the work for next week on the roof 🙂

I know a panorama isn’t going to do the back yard justice, but it was fun to make, so here you go.

I finally got my flash drive out of the drone and have a bunch of pictures to share of the land and house progress, so here is a collage of what I’ve been capturing from the air for the past couple months.

I’ll try to get some additional video content out, but for now, here is the latest drone flight from last week.