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.
Estimated days until completion: 150 days
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