This week things have picked up again. Our current building theme is closing the house to the outside. The Tyvek weather barrier is (mostly) up and windows and doors are here! Unfortunately, they’ve had a rough journey – one door arrived in pieces, one window is missing and one has some damage. In retrospect, it may have been best to get them on site and inspected ASAP as now we’ll be waiting on replacements, though they should be on the next shipment to Canada. Thank goodness for warranties. So far, I am pleased with those that have arrived. Installation has started and most of the south-facing glazing is in. 

We bought our windows and exterior house doors from Klearwall, an American company that imports them from Ireland. The windows are certified for use in passive houses (they’re from the PassiV Futureproof UPVC line, as are the doors). Some of the features that make the windows high performance include:

• Insulated frames with little compartments inside to reduce heat transfer (i.e., thermally broken)
• Triple glazing with argon gas between panes
• Low-emissivity coating to reflect heat, helping keep heat in the house in winter and out of the house in summer
• Airtightness

The tilt and turn feature is neat and something we’re looking forward to; it allows the windows to be tilted open at the top or turned inward hinging on the side. One downside is that they don’t come with screens, which are apparently not common in Europe (I’m not sure why), so we’ll have to either get those specially made or hope there’s a This Old House video to show us how. Klearwall sent us clips to attach screens to the outside.

We had looked at windows from a few local companies, but the quotes we got for anything comparable in performance were at least twice as high. In fact, I regret that we didn’t order the garage window from Klearwall as well, which we left out thinking we’d save some money buying a standard double pane window locally. That turned out to be a poor assumption realized too late, as the Klearwall windows had a 6-month lead time. 

Our roof installation also started this week, but I haven’t been able to see it yet, as it was immediately covered in snow. I suppose we’re getting our money’s worth by putting it to use already. We chose a metal roof because we wanted something low maintenance with a long lifespan as we intend to install solar panels on top.

Roof, window, and door installation will continue this week and our house will begin to close in. Feeling industrious, I decided to begin moving the outdoors back out of the house. With recent mild temperatures, the caked-on mud on the floors has thawed and dried, so I did some (actually, a lot) of sweeping. You can almost see the floor again!