Now that we are under roof, we’ve been concentrating on our interior framing.  First up was building the interior half of the double stud wall around the outside of the house.  It moved pretty fast except for continually having to shuffle things around to have room to build the walls.

Originally, our Passive House calculations called for a 3″ insulation gap between the two walls; however, that was with the triple pane Serious 525 doors.  Unfortunately, we found the doors to be not financially viable, so are instead using double pane Therma-Tru doors with triple point locking on all doors (more on this later).  To compensate for the slight loss in performance, we had to bump our separation to 4″, making the walls 11″ thick now.

As far as building them, it’s just a matter of copying the layout for the exterior wall.  We were able to add a little bit of value framing by not having to worry about exterior sheathing having to break every four feet and left out studs whenever a window was within two feet of that four foot layout.

These are definitely the straightest walls we’ve ever had as string-lining exterior walls still has a small amount of imprecision. In this case, we were able to chalk a straight line on the underside of the trusses all the way down and went ahead and attached the cap plate to this prior to lifting the wall up.

We can’t wait to get the windows installed and then jamb them out to really get a sense of the depth of the walls.