Editor’s note: David and Kayo Murakami Wood are building what they hope will be Ontario’s first certified Passive House on Wolfe Island, the largest of the Thousand Islands on the St. Lawrence River. They are documenting their work at their blog, Wolfe Island Passive House. For a list of earlier posts in this series, see the sidebar below.

Our plan for the cross-laminated timber (CLT) construction process was to do one floor a day. As days are short in December, and darkness comes soon after 4.30 p.m., we started as early as we could.

Wall panels are 110 mm thick (about 4 3/8 inches), to be insulated on the outside with rigid wood fiberboard. We started with the west wall, which had to be braced until other walls were put into place. Pieces were moved into position with a crane, and placement was crucial. Every millimeter counted, so the crane operator was a very important part of the team. [Note: See the images below for an abbreviated look at how the building was assembled. For a more extensive photo library, check the Wolfe Island Passive House blog.]

We had the wall and roof panels in a rack and stacked in piles. Keeping the process moving smoothly meant knowing where each one of them was located.

Each external wall and ceiling piece has a gasket on the edge so the structure will be airtight when complete. Each piece is joined to the others with 200 mm (about 7 3/4 inches) steel screws. By the end of the day we had done exactly what we had hoped and planned for: a complete first floor! (See Image #2, below.)

The second day of our build brought another overcast sky but, thankfully, no rain. And we got even more done than we had hoped for (see Image #4, below), so that on the third day we we would only have to install the roof panels (see Image #6), saving a significant amount of money on overtime (for the crane and operator, at least). More important, we will have managed to do what fully trained crews in Germany and Austria do in just about the same amount of time.

So, in two and a half days we completed the main CLT structure, and also tidied and rearranged the site to be ready for the next week’s work. Everyone did a fantastic job. A special thanks goes to Mike, the crane operator from C.A. Peters. He had to switch constantly between being bored for long periods of time and then having to do precision lifting. All the while he dealt with a whole lot of different people, not all of whom were experienced with big cranes and the signals needed for their operators.

A week of windows

The crew moved all of the windows into the house in preparation for the installation, and continued to build and install the 2×6 outer frames that would help support the windows in the insulation layer (see Image #7, below). Tomaz, a technician from Optiwin, the window manufacturer, flew in to train and supervise our crew.

The windows are placed at a point roughly midway through the wall. The windows themselves are fairly deep, with the outer pane about 1 1/2 inch beyond the bucks. We put the windows as far out as we could given their weight, and made the calculations in the Passive House Planning Package (PHPP) in terms of any differences in solar gain.

The total wall thickness is 17 inches: about 4 1/2 inches for the CLT, 11 inches for the insulation, and about 1 1/2 inch for the air gap and the siding. The outside of the windows are 10 1/2 inches from the inside of the wall structure.

We started with easily liftable windows to get the techniques right before moving on to the bigger windows. We left the really big ones for the following day (see Image #8, below).

It was a miserably wet night and the house was filling up with water. Despite protecting all the window openings and sealing many of the gaps, the areas where the walls join the roof and the floors had not been sealed, and rain was infiltrating everywhere.

We didn’t have time to do more than vacuum up the worst areas as we still had a lot of windows to install. The rain continued throughout the morning until it turned to misty drizzle by the afternoon, which was the best kind of weather for installing windows. But, working into the darkness, we got all of them done except the long window over the stairs and the big tilt-and-slide door.

The last day of window installation was much drier than the previous one! Our architect, Malcolm Isaacs, had been intending to take Tomaz back to Wakefield before heading down to Montreal Dorval Airport, but since we still had the big Motura tilt-and-slide door to do, they insisted on staying until they had it finished (see Image #11, below), and then headed directly to Dorval to get Tomaz on the plane.

And now for some heaving lifting

The delivery of our Wallnofer Walltherm stove, water tank, and solar thermal panels had been delayed by bad weather along the route from Nova Scotia, and we were not expecting them quite as soon as they arrived. We got just an hour’s notice at lunch that they would be arriving on the next ferry. It was barely enough time to get the backhoe/fork-lift.

With the three pallets off the delivery truck, we faced the difficult job of getting the very heavy water tank, and even heavier stove, into the house. Because of the shipping delay, the doors had already been installed, meaning that clearance was limited. Luckily, the water tank’s insulation is designed incredibly conveniently so it zipped off. The tank itself was still 190 kg. (419 lb.), and big, too, but four of us managed to pass it over the sill of the tilt-and-slide door and get it onto a flat trolley inside the house (see Image #12, below). We could then move it into the utility space.

The stove was smaller but, unbelievably, even heavier. We partly disassembled it, removing doors and as many of the fire bricks as we could, but we probably did not reduce its 300 kg. (661 lb.) by any more than 10%. To get it into the house and over the sill, Chris thought up an impromptu ramp and bridge. With two people pulling, two pushing, and all of us watching the balance of the stove, we managed it.