We had a big snow fall this last weekend in the Boston area. The builder brought in a small plow and is clearing the area around the house.
Meanwhile, outside the house the construction crew are adding more framing around the windows. They also put in the ceiling for the porch and under the living room awning. I have pictures here:
Inside the house, electrical work continues. Here is the south wall of the living room where the entertainment system will be. You can see lots of Ethernet boxes and electrical outlet boxes. Some of the outlets are on a switch and some are not.
The view of the front yard after the snow, then after plowing, then with the vans parked there is nothing to look at. So instead, here is a view of the river from the living room window.
The electrician has asked that we move the EMF inspection out a week and a half. Since this is on the critical path, the schedule has slipped 10 days, although 7 days has passed since my last update, so …
Estimated days until completion: 146 days (late June)
We will have around 30 Ethernet ports in the new house. This is because there will be no WiFi (except for a low power access point in the garage, which will normally be turned off). That means that we need lots of Ethernet cables — specifically shielded cat 6a.
Here is a picture of the some of the Ethernet cables that will terminate in the wiring closet in the basement.
We will have a pair of switches in the basement wiring closet to handle all these cables. We will also have one switch in the attic space on the second floor. Here is a picture of the east end of that attic space where we have the vent and fan from the master bathroom under a protective board. The second floor Ethernet switch will be mounted on top of that board.
We were going to run fiber optics from the basement to the second floor switch, but today we changed our mind and will just run a pair of cat 6a cables (one is a spare) from the basement to the second floor switch. That said, we will have unused wiring channels in the walls for later expansion including one that runs up to the second floor attic area.
The electrician is also starting to wire for the lights. Here is a place where we hit a snag:
This is the center of the three lights over the dish washing area. Unfortunately, the light we selected cannot be mounted under a beam like that. Therefore, we decided to change from three lights to four lights to keep them equally spaced. This area of the kitchen will be very well lit (I will be able to see any dirt left on the dishes).
Speaking of lighting, Daphne has worked out where she wants the strip lighting for the slats in the living room ceiling. Here is picture of the plan. The top is east (towards the river), and the right is the wall where the TV is mounted. The dotted lines (eight in total) are the strip lighting which sits between the slats.
The head carpenter also created a mockup of the living room cove lighting. Here is a picture. He used painted white wood, while Daphne had originally thought to use cherry wood for the part that sticks out from the wall. This weekend we will have another look and maybe we will decide to stick with the white. This is just a small section, but will actually be all around the living room except where the slats meet the wall.
Outside the house, while we wait for more siding mounting hardware, the construction crew has been doing two things. First, they have been putting in the trim around the windows, vents, and under the soffits. Here is a picture of the back of the garage showing the siding and trim (all black). We seem to still be missing the piece of trim at the top of the window. I do not know why that was not done yet.
The second things the construction crew is working on are the slats that hide the area under the porch and under the deck. Here are pictures of that work in progress. The opening under the porch will remain an opening (to get boats in and out). The opening under the deck (through which you can see snow) will have a door made up of the same slats, so it will normally hide that area but can be opened for access.
Today we decided on the position of the doorbells. We are using a Ubiquity brand doorbell camera, which includes a camera that faces down to see packages. We will mount it at normal doorbell height, which will see the faces of guests as long as they are not too close against the door. The electrician needed to know the location because he runs an Ethernet wire to the back of the doorbells.
Finally, the security installers showed up today (a day early) to start wiring the smoke detectors and door sensors. They did not come with shielded wiring and we were not sure whether shielded wiring would really be needed for the low voltage smoke detectors. I left before they resolved that issue.
There was no adjustment to the schedule today, and one week has passed, so …
Its Saturday, so back to the house for a visit. We are past the invasive plant removal season, but we still want to check the house every week. We also had to inspect the proposed ironing board (which we rejected) and plan the spacing for the house numbers (which we did).
While I was there, I grabbed the construction camera memory card and stitched together the following video of the last few weeks of siding installation. The siding is not done, but it installation has paused until more mounting hardware arrives. As with the previous siding video, this video is sped up a lot to keep it brief. Some of the work was on the north side of the house so while you can see the cherry picker, you can’t see the panels in the video.
Now that you have watched the video, here is the end result, showing the current siding on the east (river) side and north side.
In the second picture, you can see the start of the vertical slats that will hide the area under the deck. The crew will work on installing those while they wait for the siding mounting hardware. I moved the construction camera to better focus on this work.
Meanwhile, inside the house electrical work continues. Here the the current electrical room where you can see all the new wires that have been installed and await connections to the sub-panel.
Hopefully, the exterior doors show up early next week and can get installed quickly. (The current doors are all temporary).
The construction crew has run out of the mounting hardware needed to install the siding so siding installation is on pause again. Today they were working on the living room wall (see picture below), but after today, the crew will switch away from doing siding installation and start to work on the vertical slats below the deck and below the porch. Meanwhile, the extra mounting hardware will be ordered and will take a few weeks to arrive.
During our weekly meeting, we finalized some of the exterior touches for the porch. For example, while we will use the siding at the corners of the porch, the narrower vertical sections between the windows will just be covered in black trim (using boral ash).
The south side of the porch was going to have the same lighter accent panels at the top (see recent pictures of the front of the house), but we have run out of those panels, so we will just use the normal siding instead. No one sees that side of the house anyway. (It faces our neighbor’s garage wall.)
Inside the house we spend quite a bit of time approving corrected placements for lights. Daphne had come up with a plan for where all the lights in the house would be located, but when the electrician started to installed the electrical boxes for each light, we discovered that some of the placements did not work because there was a joist in the way.
For example, here is the ceiling of the master bathroom. That electrical box nailed to the joist was moved over to the left from its original planned location. This move has to be approved since it could have, instead, have been moved to the right (the other side of the joist).
The longest discussion revolved around the four main lights for the living room. Here is the sketch of the living room ceiling again. Notice that there are four ceiling lights (only one of which is labeled). The lights had to be moved because of the floor joists.
Our goal was to make sure that the lights on the left and right were the same distance from the edges of the slats. This turned out to require a lot of measuring. Here you can see the current position of two of the electrical boxes for the lights, the left picture is by the windows and the right picture is by the center of the house.
The boxes as positioned now do not work since they will end up being different distances from the corresponding edge of the slats. So we measured, and remeasured. They can not be positioned relative to the walls because there is more space between the slats and the right-side wall, than between the slats and the wall with the windows. However, the slats are positioned directly at the edges of the two doors, so we could measure from the center of the doors.
I swear that this process took almost 30 minutes and while we ended up with positions that were close, there will still be a 1/4″ difference between the two sides. I hope no one notices.
This weekend, we will visit the house to approve the location for the ironing board in the laundry room. We will also approve the position for the house numbers on the siding on the garage. The house numbers are challenging because it is a variable width font and because the widest numbers are wider than would fit between two (fake) seems in the siding.
Walls are no longer moving so I will start a new tradition. I will occasionally update you with the current estimated completion date. Late last fall, the builder was estimating completion in April, based on closing up the walls in mid-January. Right now, it looks like the EMF inspection of the electrical work (which has to happen before the insulation and then walls), will be the first week in March. This allows me to roughly estimate completion.
There has been some more work on the siding but nothing significant enough to take a picture of. There has been a lot of electrical work, but to be honest it looks just the previous pictures. Therefore, I will just show you the current front of the house and river view.
We had our regular Wednesday weekly meeting and it was busy. We had the electrician, the A/V consultant, the heating installer and someone from the construction crew all here to ask questions and update status.
First up, the siding installation progress. Here are pictures of recently installed siding. This is the south side of the game room, where they extended the siding since my last update.
Here is the east side of the dining room, where they have installed the siding on the second floor. The black strip (between floors) is where the awning will be mounted.
On the north side of the dining room and kitchen, they are still working on adding the siding.
And just before I left the site, I noticed that they have finally put siding on the front of the garage.
Inside the house, work continues on installing the electrical wiring. This work is likely to extend into February. In the first picture you can see that some of the boxes now have wires running into them (this is from the second floor kitchenette area).
And in the kitchen they have started placing the mounting hardware for the ceiling lights. Here are two lights over the dish washing area.
The construction crew and electrician assembled a section of the ceiling slats with lights for our inspection. If you do not remember what this was about, we are planning on a wood slat accent in the living room, dining room and front hall. The slats in the living room will have embedded lights. Here is a sketch of the living room design showing the slats.
And here is the sample, which has two different lights installed (for comparison).
The light strip on the left is more recessed and disappears better when it is turned off. That is one we will be using. We will not be turning a corner with the lights (the current mock-up is a little ugly in the corner).
We had some long discussions with our A/V consultant. He has talked Daphne into using volume controls mounted in the wall for the gaming room and kitchen speakers. So those will get added to the plan and will be wired up by the electrician. We also decide to use shielded speaker wiring even if it is not strictly needed. And we will be using shielded fiber optic cable — we only use fiber to wire from the town internet connection to our two Ethernet switches. We will not wire fiber to the computers or TV (it can be added later if we want).
We have to drop the ceiling of the closet at the top of the stairs by a few inches to run a drain for the second floor. No one should even notice. There was some other discussion about routing some more vents that I will not bother to document. At the same time, we decided to put up wall and ceiling boards in the crawlspace on the second floor that is over the alcove and master closet and reached using a hidden door at the top of the stairs. This area will be for storage, just in case we overflow the basement.
Now for the bad news. There is no way the project will finish in April. The electrical work is more complex that typical, and we have to fit in a visit from our EMF consultant before the walls can be sealed up. I anticipate a month and a half delay.
The kitchen cabinets did show up before the end of the year, a few days before the tariffs got delayed. Sigh. Now the cabinets will need to be stored at the showroom (for $500 a week) until installation, which may be in April.
That’s all for this update. No construction video this week.
