The last three months were tough. Things just seemed to be dragging. The holidays didn’t help. We also had a 2-3 day freeze that made work inside the open house difficult. Bottom line, our electrical sub-contractor was extremely slow and took almost exactly 3 month to get all the rough-in electrical done for an electrical inspection. We’ve been frustrated, our project manager has been frustrated, and we’re thinking even the electrician is frustrated. On the plus side, we’ve passed that milestone - but do have more electrical to deal with in the future.
Since the last update, the electrical work has been the main event. We’ve ended up spending a bunch of time at the house marking locations of lights, checking their work and answering questions. Travis had developed a “robust” electrical plan and we don’t think the electrician quite realized what he’d gotten himself into. On top of that, Doug had developed an equally elaborate smart switch plan. Because we have several 4-way switches and the smart switches have some specific wiring instructions, Travis introduced a tagging system he’d utilized in his real job during project turnarounds. We’re using two different tags - yellow and red (think soccer). In the 6 or 8 locations where there was some specialty wiring requirements, Travis would create a yellow tag indicating what was happening there, what the wires coming in were for (and their source) and what the outgoing wires were doing. The electrician ultimately liked this system and supposedly has started using it at other job sites as it allows him to provide direction for his workers and not have to be there all the time. He even added an improvement to the system in that he had his folks clip off a corner of the tag when they were complete so he (and us) could see they’d competed that and we could check before removing the tag. Red tags are used to indicate a problem. For example, we have a lot of “can” lights. We found early on that they were putting the junction boxes for those lights too low and they were going to interfere with the light itself when they were added after sheetrock. When we’d see something like that, Travis would create a red tag indicating a correction needed to happen. You can imagine how much they enjoyed seeing us show up at the house. 😁
The garage with way too many red tags!
We are using the same tagging system for the builder also. Glen swears he also likes it as more eyes on things is always good. We think he’s just being nice.
Sometime in January, we finally received skylights we’d been expecting for some time. We’re not sure they’d actually been ordered. Regardless - we finally had the two skylights. They’re not what we’d specified, but are actually a bit nicer in that they open to vent air. They were also slightly a different size but that didn’t end up causing any major issue. They have solar panels to power the open/close feature and to open/close the blinds. Each of them comes with two absurdly large remotes (one to open and one for blinds). Luckily we won’t need to uses those generally as we should be able to control them with Alexa.
The Kitchen skylights.
With all the time we’ve been spending over there doing things, Travis got tired of always needing thing and put together a work uniform. It’s basically a fishing vest with lots of pockets where he stashes everything he needs to carry. Doug might suggest there are too many pockets as sometimes Travis has trouble finding the item he’s looking for. Here’s a video of Travis modeling and describing his “uniform” features.
Last week, we got attic stairs installed. While I don’t think they’re special, they’re nicer than any attic stairs either of us has ever had. We have two sets - one for front half of the house and one for the back half of the house. Despite the nice stairs, the attics are very tight (especially the one in the front). Working on HVAC is not going to be fun at all.
The attic stairs in workshop for the back half of the house
Finally, in preparation for the framing inspection before closing in walls, the plumber installed shower liners, the “canyon” in the middle of the living room that was used for in floor electrical was cemented in, and temporary exterior doors where installed in a 3 places (you can see one of them behind the attic stairs in the picture above.
Shower liner holding water in primary bath
The filled in “canyon”. This actually went across a good chunk of the living room. This is all subfloor. Above this will be tar, some wood screeds, plywood subfloor, vapor barrier and then hardwood floors. All in all the final floor will be about 3 inches higher than this floor.
Finally, we bought a cheapish 360 degree camera so that we could photograph all of the rooms before insulation/sheetrock so we’d know exactly where electrical, plumbing, etc. were. You end up with an image that you can scroll in 360 degrees to see any part of the room. If you go to this link, you can see a layout of the house with locations marked where we did a 360 video (see copy of image below). We did a ton of them (clearly more than anyone other than us will want to see). Once you click on a pushpin, you can get back to the floor plan by clicking on the icon in bottom right that looks like a floor plan.
Click on link in the paragraph above to go to the website with all the 360 photos