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.

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