Exterior Panels

First off, here is an article that I LOVE that someone shared on Facebook about a guy who lived in LA and NYC and moved out to the West Texas desert to live a self-sufficient lifestyle. It's so inspiring to see people who live in the desert succeeding.

I'm so excited!!! We finished drying in the house this past weekend minus the front door and plastic covered windows. We'll start buying those in a couple of weeks. In the meantime, this weekend we bought some exterior insulation for the house that will eventually be covered by metal siding. We also got gable vents for the attic, a breaker box for the electrical, electrical sockets, and a chain saw so Tony can spend this coming weekend cutting down trees for the electric company so they can run their lines. In case of rain I wanted to make sure that we didn't lose any more time, so now we have interior projects we can fall back on with the interior electrical and plumbing equipment.

On Saturday, Bubba helped us finish the last couple of rows of insulated panels on the roof and put on a roof cap. Here's the roof cap and roof. Next step will be to get the green metal roof panels. Not sure how soon we'll do that.

Here are the other insulated panels we got for the walls. We decided not to go with the same panels we used on the roof because it takes so much time to put them up and they are fiberglass which is a pain to cut. We itched so badly the past couple of weeks from them. Cost wise they worked out about the same, they just don't have the same structural benefit the SIPs (structural insulated panels) as what we used on the roof. The house is structrually sound though so we figured we didn't really need the extra "stability".

A close up of the panel, it's just a thick foam with the company logo sheeting on one side and aluminum foil on the other. If you are doing a brick or stone exterior the foil side is placed facing out to reflect the heat that the brick and stone absorb. For other exteriors the foil is placed facing inward to reflect the heat or air conditioning back inside depending upon the time of year.

We also got the 2nd living room window put up. These windows make me happy. I'm estimating that just from the windows and sinks that Tony's mom and step-dad have given us that they salvaged from past home improvements and real estate remodels they've saved us at least $1k.

Gable vents installed on each side of the house and gables sealed off.

Putting up the exterior wall insulation. In the distance you can also see all the smoke from the grass fires that broke out all over Oklahoma between Friday and Sunday. This was on Sunday before it started raining that night.