Another Wednesday and another site meeting. The most important news from this week’s meeting is that the electrician thinks he has finished laying wire in the walls. He has not wired up any of the subpanels, or put in any switches or outlets, but he should be finished drilling holes in the framing studs.
Why is this important? Well, now we can get the house inspected by the structural engineer. This inspection had to wait until the electrical (and HVAC installers and plumbers) were finished drilling holes that might impact the house’s structural integrity. Now that they are finished, we can go ahead with the inspection, which is necessary before any more insulation is added.
The architect has taken pictures of every wall showing its wiring, but I have picked out three pictures to give you an idea. The first picture is the basement ceiling outside of the utility rooms. There are a lot of wires passing under the hallway, all shield and spaced out.
This next picture is the east wall of the front bedroom on the second floor.
And this last picture is the most interesting. This is the west wall of the second floor family room where we will be installing a computer that will drive the upstairs TV. The blue tube is call “smurf tube”. It is a conduit for snaking wires. The tube that curves to the left will hold two HDMI cables that run from the computer to the TV. The other smurf tubes are for future use if we need to snake more wires on to the second floor.
Meanwhile, the construction crew has put in the flooring for the porch. It is mostly covered with protection (brown mat), but you can see it at the edges in the following picture. This is the same color schema that will be used for the deck.
The front door has arrived on site and the builder will try to get it installed by next Tuesday. That means on Wednesday, we can measure downwards from the door sill so we can figure out the example placement for the front stoop. The goal is to raise the ground to keep water from collecting near the front door. This will mean we have one 7″ step up from the front walk to the front stoop, and one 7″ step up from the front stoop into the house. The front stoop itself will be a 9′ x 3 1/5′ x 8″ piece of blue mist granite. We will order it from the quarry on April 1st when they open for the season. (It has to be custom cut).
They were installing the side door to the garage today and once the front door is installed, they will install the basement door. The panty door will not be installed until later so that entrance can be used by the construction crew.
The breezeway trim has been finished, but we have ten more days until we get the missing pieces for finishing the siding installation, which mostly is around the porch.
We had a discussion with the landscaping team lead. Among other things, they do all the earth moving. We can not start work on fixing the locations for the downspout drains or leveling the ground until it thaws. It has been a cold winter and the ground is still frozen solid.
I checked with the builder again about the date. He is still hopefully for end of June, but is sounding a little more pessimistic. That said, I will optimistically not change the end date, yet.
Estimated days until completion: 125 days (late June)
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