Category Archives: Construction

Quote of the Day Great things are not done by impulse, but by a series of small things brought together. — Vincent van Gogh Introduction I recently went into a home center and was shocked to see a 2‑in x … Continue reading →

Minnesotan's have endured a cold winter with relatively little snow, a situation that causes the ground to freeze deeper than expected. In northern Minnesota, we plan for 60 inches of frost depth, but this year the frost has gone much deeper. For those cabins with condensing furnaces, this extra frost depth has resulted in many frozen septic lines. This winter, I have frozen both my cabin and garage septic lines. Continue reading →

As I have mentioned in other posts, I am building a large garage in northern Minnesota (Figure 1). I would show you some pictures of the interior, but I have promised my son that I will not post anything that could ruin his surprise when he sees it in April.  As part of this construction effort, I am using quite a bit of electrical conduit. Conduit consists of metal pipes (often called EMT) through which the wires pass and it must be bent to go around any barriers it encounters. Conduit is a very efficient way to wire a working area because it directly attaches to the wall and does requires opening holes in drywall and  repairing the damage. Conduit can also be updated and modified easily by running new/additional wires through it. Continue reading →

My wife and I are about half-way through the construction of a 2100 square foot home in northern Minnesota. This weekend, my neighbors and I were talking about the area of houses being built today, and no one in the conversation had any data. I grabbed my computer, jumped on the Internet, and very quickly found data from the Census Department that answered my question. Like most census information, the data is in the form of screwy tables that need to be parsed to get into a form that can easily be plotted. This exercise gave me another excellent example to use when I train staff on the use of Excel's Get and Transform tool. Figure 1 was the result of my search. For those who are interested, my workbook is here. Continue reading →

I have had a number of discussions with coworkers about the different types of wall insulation – some of these discussions have been documented in previous blog posts (e.g. here , here, here). There exists wide cost and performance disparities between the different wall insulation technologies. With respect to cost, I view fiberglass batts as a low-cost insulation option and the spray foams (open and closed cell) as high-cost options. All the options have their advantages and disadvantages. Fine Homebuilding Magazine (August/September 2017) has an excellent article by Martin Holladay provides an excellent spreadsheet-like analysis that illustrates the trade-offs between open and closed-cell foam nicely. My goal in this post is to go through the computational details of his analysis and to discuss his approach to choosing the best insulation for your application. Continue reading →