June Update
A lot has been happening over the last month!
Electrical
Once we got our electric meter installed and permanent service running, electrician 3 (E3) got on the job and pretty quickly had everything in place for ACs. Once they’d done that, they moved on to installing outlets and switches throughout the house. We’d like to say that went smoothly, but…
Having a different electrician do final wiring from the rough-in work isn’t ideal. By the time E3 started, drywall was in place so he never really got to see what was behind the walls. This means they they often spent time second guessing what had happened before. On top of that, we have quite a few “smart” switches in the house. In some cases those are in settings where we have multiple switches controlling the same lights. E3 was very confident that he knew how to wire these, but clearly that wasn’t the case (and apparently isn’t willing to read the very clear instructions that can with them). This first came to light when they were trying to do the first pair of these. They were convinced there were wiring issues involved. They spent hours trying to track down the problem. Finally they gave up for the day and since we were there waiting for the AC guys to leave, Travis decided to take a look. We undid all the wiring for those two switches and redid using the instructions. They worked perfectly. The next day was Saturday so we ended up fixing several more of the smart switches that weren’t working. When we left for the day, we had these signs in places for their arrival on Monday morning.
One of the signs Travis put up after we wired the living/dining/kitchen lights for E3
On the plus side, there was only one major issue from the work E2 did. We had one location where there was no “hot” wire leading to a light switch. After a bunch of trouble shooting, they ultimately figured out the issue and had to cut out a small portion of drywall and foam insulation to run another line. Other than that, there were a few places where E3 and helper had to tighten wiring nuts, but nothing major.
Site of our missing “hot” wire.
Air Conditioning
The AC guys started installing the two central units and one mini-split unit (in the Workshop) as soon as they had working electricity. They got the main units installed pretty quickly. (which was the priority) and the mini-split about a week later. We still need to get them out as we feel the larger unit has a vibration or something that’s making a bit of a high-pitched noise that’s pretty noticeable in the guest bath/bedroom. We also think they may need to adjust some dampers to increase flow in the guest bedroom. We’ll be putting some temperature trackers throughout the house to see how things are in each room. Mostly it’s just nice to walk into a cool house!
Oh - and we think we may have the sturdiest concrete pads for ACs we’ve ever seen. The builder installed them - they definitely aren’t going anywhere!
Our ACs with over-engineered pads
The workshop mini-split
One of our hanging temperature sensors. We will have data!
Exterior Paint
The guys finished the rest of the exterior paint over the last couple of weeks (except for the front door). All of it looks great. The only major exterior thing in builder scope that needs to happen now is to finish the ceiling of the large patio. It’s going to be stained pine and should happen in the next couple of weeks.
Outdoor Lighting
Most of the exterior lights were installed in the last two weeks. We have sconces in the back yard and then we have a new front porch light and eave lighting on all four sides of the house. E3 and team installed the sconces but we ended up adjusting 3 of those to get them a bit straighter. Travis installed the front porch light (think he wanted something to do while waiting for E3). We both installed the 19 eave lights, as we’d pre-configured them (they are smart lights) and knew they had to go in specific locations. If you recall, way back in time we discussed going over to the house at night to measure where the eave lights should be for best illumination of walls. We feel that really paid off. The lights look great. These will generally be a warm white color but they are color lights and each light can be any color so we may do things like red/white/blue for 4th of July. Here’s a picture of the front of the house with the lights set to a warm white.
Eave lights and Front Porch light (taken before we added the last light between garage door and window)
Close-up of the front porch light.
Back-yard sconces and patio lights. Luckily not so bright that you can see how bad the yard looks.
Masonry
The masons had finished their work but then we had the “Derecho” storm last month. We’d showed a picture of our fence falling over. What we didn’t realize at the time was when that happened, it ended up putting a crack down our patio post that it hit. As a result the brick guys were out last week fixing the bricks on one side of that post. All brick work is now done and hopefully the excess bricks will go away in the coming week.
Interior Doors
The interior doors were installed a week or so ago. This includes regular doors for the room entrances, by-pass closet doors in three bedrooms and pocket doors leading into the office and guest suite. We’re happy with our selection.
Both sets of pocket doors seem to be warped for some reason and the distributor is coming out Monday to take a look. Presume they’ll end up being replaced.
This is one of the sets of closet doors. We have the same style door throughout the house, but this is the only picture we took. These obviously haven’t been painted.
Interior Cabinets
We met with the carpenter a month or so ago and he’s been off building cabinets for the kitchen, living room entertainment center, dining room, and utility room. All of the cabinets in the main room are walnut while utility room will be “raw” stain quality plywood. He’s apparently making great progress and has a bunch of it in storage. Hopefully by the time the floors are done, he’ll be ready to install everything.
Hot Water Heater
The plumber was out this month to install the tankless hot water heater to try to wrap up activity in the attic. With that done, he’s now just got one more gas line to run (from back half of house to front half of house) and then all the finish plumbing (faucet/shower trim, toilets, tubs, etc.). Those will happen towards the end of things.
Insulation
Once everything was theoretically finished in the attic, the builder had the insulation guys come out and finish insulation work (they had previously done spray foam in the exterior walls and insulation batts on interior walls (for sound) and in ceilings where there was no attic access. The last step was doing blow-in insulation for the rest of the attic. That was done this last week so we are now fully insulated finally.
Interior Millwork
This last week, the guys have been installing baseboards and door trim. They are currently doing prep work on all that (filling nail holes, seams, etc.) and should be ready to start interior paint by middle of next week. At that point we’ll know if we did a really bad job selecting colors. 😀
Gas Service
We’ve put in a request for a gas meter. It’s been sent to the same sub-contractor that they used to remove the original meter. We’ve been told 4 weeks, but that’s what they said last time and that ended up being six weeks and perhaps only happened when builder had one of their other clients intercede (he works in gas operations for CenterPoint). We’ll see what happens.
Garage Doors
Our replacement garage door panel arrived and was installed. Unfortunately, the workers had gotten the door catty-wampus at some point and we had to have the installers come out a number of times to get things aligned correctly.
We also ended up using wall mounted garage door openers which we’re really pleased with. They are quite, since they don’t have belts/or cables. We’d not known about them before looking at openers this time, although they’ve been around for years.
Wall mounted garage door opener, which turns the door shaft directly rather than using a belt or chain to lift the door.
Tools
It’s possible that Travis wanted to remodel a house so that he had a good reason to buy lots of new tools. This month we’ve utilized the following new items
Gyroscopic Screwdriver - this thing is amazing! Basically you just twist your hand slightly in the direction you want the screwdriver to turn and it does it! The more you slightly move a direction, the faster it turns. You can adjust the torque and it can also be converted to a pistol grip. We both love it!
Best Tool ever!
Electronic Angle Finder - On the sloped ceilings, we have adjustable can lights that allow you to turn the light lens so it’s parallel to the floor. We used this small tool to check angles to make sure they were as level as possible
Doug using the angle finder on a light
Thermal Camara - this is an add-on for a phone that allows you to do thermal images of whatever you point it at. We used it to test how well our insulation was working and whether they’d missed any spots.
Circuit Tracer - Travis used this with E3 to identify specific wires. It ended up saving a lot of time. Travis may end up helping the builder with one of their other projects on Monday as they have one circuit in a concrete wall they can’t find (they took over this project when the couple became unhappy with the first builder).