Here’s a quick update on what’s happened at the house in August
Outlet & Switch Work
We worked throughout the house to wrap up low voltage outlets. These include things like ethernet, coax, telephone, audio (speaker) and video (HDMI) cables. We have these in a number of rooms and they all have slightly specialized outlet covers. Now that paint is done, we’ve installed all of these.
At the same time we went through and installed all the switch plates that Doug laser engraved. Almost every switch has a switch plate indicating what it controls. While doing this, there were a number of places where the boxes weren’t completely level so we had to make adjustments so they were level to our satisfaction (apparently we’re a bit pickier than the electricians).
We also put plate covers on all the electrical outlet boxes throughout the house. Unfortunately, we’d made a stupid error. Travis picked the outlet for the electrician to use and we purchased them. He selected them because they are pretty easy to wire up and have a lot of nice features. Unfortunately, what we didn’t realize is that the outlet has tabs at the top and bottom (above the screws that screw into the outlet box) that provide more stability against the wall. These tabs are optional and can be cut off. For our outlet covers, they needed to be cut off. Had we realized this, we could have had the electricians do this while installing. Instead, we had to unscrew each outlet and cut the two tabs off. It was slightly painful and time consuming - although Travis got into a rhythm and found a good process to do it as quickly as possible while Doug followed behind installing outlet covers
Example of a laser engraved switch plate - this one is for the dining room
Travis using electronic level to test level on a switch box
Travis trimming bathroom vanity electrical outlets with sheet metal shears - he’s having as much fun as you’d expect
Hardwood Floors
While we expected that August was going to start with tile floor installs, tile wasn’t available and they ended up doing all the hardwood floor install instead. We’ve gone with 2 1/4“ white oak “select” floors (a fairly typical choice for the timeframe of the house).
The crew got them installed really quickly except for a few places near doors where they had to do some work to remove excess subfloor material (mostly just a bunch of sanding). After that, they did two rounds of sanding. With that complete, they are done until just before we move in when they’ll do a third sanding with very-fine sand-paper and then stain & finish. The floors look great already and we’re really happy with our choice there (although we still have to pick a stain color!).
Unfortunately, they confirmed they’ll have to raise our front door somewhere between 1/8 and 1/4” as clearance is really too tight.
Main room floors after two sandings.
Electrical Monitors
We spent 3 or 4 hours one weekend installing electrical monitoring equipment in our 3 electrical service panels. These things basically have sensors that you connect to any individual breaker you want to monitor. Between the 3 service panel, we installed sensors on 24 breakers. We have an app that allows us to monitor usage at whatever granularity you’re interested in seeing it.
Our plan (who are we kidding - it’s Travis’ plan) is to use this to help determine what exactly we can keep running during outages (in our case with solar backup batteries - but you could also use to help manage generator loads).
Report showing last week usage - keeping in mind the only things running in house are ACs and lights
Patio Ceiling
The last week of August, Carlos (does a lot of carpentry work and will be doing the tile) installed the pine ceiling on the larger of the two backyard patios. This ceiling is vaulted in two different direction and also has a small flat section. We didn’t envy him. He’s having to coordinate with plumber on one of the gas connections for a patio heater but the picture below gives you an idea of what it looks like before stain (which we’ve not selected).
Patio Ceiling in progress
Gas Line
In our next step to try to get a gas meter, the plumber (Andy) had to install the underground gas line that connects the front of the house to the back of the house. He had elected not to run this through the small space in the living room ceiling. Basically they just dug an 18” deep trench from the back to the front and buried a flexible gas line (along with a wire that allows the utility marker folks to locate it). Of course it rained for several days while they were doing this work so that made it just that much more fun.
Gas line trench
With that completed we passed our gas inspection but Andy still needs to connect the hot water heater (and perhaps a few other things?) before we request the meter.
Garage & Workshop Epoxy Floors
From day one, we’d planned on doing epoxy floors in at least the garage, and probably the workshop. The garage had quite a few cracks in it and also had a bunch of built up glue that had held a ramp up to the kitchen door in place. We’ve both done the epoxy DIY kits in our houses with mixed results. It’s hard to do as much prep as you’d really like and we’ve found that long term results haven’t been fantastic.
Travis did some research and got some quotes and we quickly realized it probably made sense to have it done professionally. While certainly a bit more expensive than DIY, they offer a much higher quality product than the DIY kits. They also have the right tools to properly prepare the floors.
We hired a company and they installed in both the garage and workshop over two days. The first day was doing prep (cleaning, grinding, patching cracks, etc.) and installing the epoxy coat and colored flecks). The 2nd day they do clean-up from the flecks (they install a ton of them and so there are a lot of leftover flakes to scrape up) and then install a clear polyaspartic coat, along with anti-slip material. The first day took them about 2 hours and the 2nd day they spent less than 90 minutes. There were 3 guys and they hustled!
The floors look fantastic. There is no sign of any old cracks.
Our only complaint was that when we were installing garage cabinets, we found that any screw we dropped got lost on the floor due to the colors we selected. Still worth it!
During prep. They’ve done grinding at this point but haven’t patched things (you can see a chip in the middle of the driveway “lip”.
Completed garage
Workshop just before top-coat.
Other Garage Activities
You may remember that the bottom panel of our garage door had the wrong size glass. They had re-ordered and replaced that quite some time ago, but we had noticed that the glass on the replacement wasn’t quite the same. At first, we hoped that it was just that the others were dirty. Ultimately we decided that wasn’t the case and asked the company to send a replacement. They did that this month but when the guy was at the house to install, he realized that the old one was installed backwards in the door at the factory (they are double pane windows and only one side is frosted). You had to look really close to notice it was backwards, but it did impact the “color” of the window slightly. Once he flipped it so it was the same as the others, all was good.
Last week, we installed cabinets in the garage. These are Ikea kitchen cabinets so we had the joy of putting them together! We still need to get a few cabinet doors that were out of stock and we need to add trim at bottom to hide the top of the feet (we elected to install them slightly higher than typical kitchen cabinets. We will be making the counter-top for the larger section of cabinets using the original hardwood floors from the house (we saved some amount of that). We’ll use quartz remnants for the section with a utility sink. We hope to start wood counter-top build next week. We’ll also be installing a couple of wall cabinets that will fit behind the door from utility room.
Larger section that we will have the home-made countertop. You can also see the under cabinet lights in this photo - more details on that below
The sink section of cabinets is toward back near the door to utility room
Lighting
We are planning to install LED strip lights in a number of places in the house:
Under vanities in primary and guest baths
Under cabinets in garage and dining room bar cabinets
In the shelving in the living room
Above the soffits in the living room and kitchen
Since the soffit work is complete and they’ve been painted, we decided to go ahead and install the LED lights there. These will mostly just be decorative and will provide a “wall wash” of light along the wall above the soffits. We’d done a bunch of testing much earlier so we mostly had things ready to go and this ended up being pretty simple other than having to do some of it at night to get best light “color” and appropriate dimming level. Unfortunately, when taking a photo, it always looks much brighter than it is in person (we can’t figure out why).
Travis working on soffit lighting
Finished lights which look too bright in this photo
Cabinets
Last week the carpenter started delivering cabinets he’s been working on (after we left to come up to lake). We’ve included a few pictures below but we’ve not seen any of this in person and so far it’s all just “boxes” without doors/drawers. We’re excited to see them Saturday when we head back to Houston.
Base cabinets in the living room. These will have shelves above them. The yellow is just highlighting Glen our builder had used to highlight a question he had - it isn’t there in real life.
This cabinet in middle ie either for the wall oven or microwave
Neither of us can figure out for sure what this cabinet is for. The lighter color one in the back is for the utility room
Upcoming Work
Cabinet install is currently in progress and we expect tile floors to start soon. Presume once cabinets are in place, they’ll be ordering quartz for countertops in kitchen and bathrooms.
We’ve ordered closet systems and those will be delivered in about a week. We’ll be installing those ourselves (not in builders scope).