Electric and concrete

We are getting much closer to move-in date. Electrical final work has been done at the house, the shop is almost done being wired, and best of all the house got siding and concrete slabs everywhere!



Here are some pics of the fun:

The framers installed our siding in about two days!

The trim carpenters and electricians worked together to prepare the beams in the family room for the chandeliers we bought

Here are the chandeliers after hanging, as well as our vent hood being installed

another chandelier pic

We got a lovely water heater...but there's something you really can't see in this pic.

Let's look a little closer...
Oh look - it's another copperhead! Only this one's in the garage mechanical closet...

In case you are keeping score, it's Ian - 3, Copperheads - 0
Nice to see they are growing bigger...

The back patio slab

The front porch - this will get some real columns soon, and the gable will get some shutters

Another front porch shot:

The shop all sided, with garage doors and driveway slab

Our new sidewalk as seen from the driveway

The sidewalk is curvy...


The other major undertaking is pouring the front entrance to the property. This involves a lot of coordination because no one will be able to get to the house for a few days while this sets up. The original plan was to pour it Wednesday but it didn't work out. In fact, everything got all messed up with the timing but that's a whole other story.

Prepping the entrance for concrete means scraping all of the gravel off and framing in the concrete space. Per city code, the concrete has to be six inches thick from the street to a distance of 12 feet of easement. The other several feet are poured four inches thick, and are poured first. But before the six inch part is poured, we have to get the area inspected by the city to verify that it's up to code at six inches thick!

So there's a lot of waiting around for inspectors involved, which of course never works out. Let's just look at some pics, shall we?
Prepping for the entrance:

As seen from the street:

The entrance after pouring:

Again from the street

Note the big six inch deep, twelve foot wide pit waiting for inspection...this area never got poured before the weekend so now we have to pour it and wait at least two days during the week before everyone else can get into the property to finish the house. YAAAAY MORE DELAYS!! WE LOVE DELAYS!!

closeup of the entrance


Well, we have maybe one to two more weeks left. Hopefully this long journey will soon be at an end and we can use the house we have painstakingly watched being built bit by bit. We are ready to move in now!

More Electrical and Inspections

Hola Amigos. I know it's been a long time since I rapped at ya.
Things have really slowed down as we work with the electricians and wait for permits and inspections so we can move on.

This upcoming week we should pass final inspection on the frame of the house, which is what we need to continue with exterior wall insulation and begin to put up drywall and keep going on the house.

Here are some pics of the last of the wiring rough-in. We have to do some minor remodeling at the top of the steps to the bonus room to bring the available headroom to code (requires 6'8" of space at the top of the steps and because of our bonus room sloped ceiling we have to turn the last 2-3 steps 90 degrees to the middle of the room for clearance). Pics of the remodeling should be forthcoming this week.

We have two 200-amp breaker boxes, a meter box, and one 100-amp box to connect to a backup power generator! Also visible in the shot: future satellite TV wire and gas line.


Cables organized and ready to punch down to the breakers:


Above the family room fireplace, we've run center speaker wire and have a tube through which we can pull audio/video cables to the future TV location. This tube opens to the attic.


The breaker box/meter panels and conduit for power cables installed.


Just a day later the wires are through to the breaker boxes through the wall and nicely done.


Closeup of wire run through wall to breaker boxes:


Shot into attic of power wires, data cables, geothermal plumbing, etc.


It looks like it snowed in the attic!


They had to cut a hole in the foam walls above both patios to run power and speaker wire (this will get a door installed and re-insulated):


The electricians made quick work of wiring the shop! Three 220V lines for lift, compressor and future needs (welder?...), and switched outlets for lots of lights.


The shop gets its own breaker box, meter, permit, and address (like a 1/2 address)! That's big time y'all.


Final shot: the framers came back and zip-taped the seams of all of the green boards on the house. Bonus points for spotting the "Wild African Coop" exploring nearby.


A lot should happen this week including final framing, pass frame inspection (fingers crossed), shop permit, the rest of the foam (must pass frame inspection), and start of drywall (ditto).

Finally, an Update! Foaming at the Roof...

Sorry it's been a while since there's been an update. Between being out of town and the weather being completely uncooperative, there was not much photogenic progress on the house until this last week.

The main thing that happened in mid-late February was getting insulation in the rafters. Primarily for energy savings (but also providing heat protection and general convenience in attic access) we went with a ventless attic and foam insulation on the rafters. This means that instead of blown-in puffs of material or "pink stuff" fiberglass in the attic floor (which happens after drywall is placed on the ceilings) we opted for a sprayed-in foam. This foam is sprayed from a compressed air paint-gun-type apparatus and comes out as a liquid, but then quickly expands and dries into a solid. This is like the spray-foam cans you can buy at the hardware store for fixing small leaks or plugging leaks around door/window installations.

So after the whole attic roof area is covered in this foam, the wiring and plumbing for the house is still exposed and easy to get to, and no itchy pink stuff. Not to mention the insulative properties of the foam: the attic should be less than 10 degrees warmer than the living areas during the summer. This lets you do away with vents in the attic as well (obviously vents would actually mess up the benefits of insulation and climate of the attic).

Here are some pics of foam in the bonus room as well as where they started in the attic. You can see in a finished room like the bonus room where they need to install drywall, they scrape along the rafters so that the foam is not protruding where it would interfere with the drywall laid flat on the rafters. In the attic though they just let the foam expand completely and don't have to trim it.






Another issue we ran into in February was a torrential two days of rain, which exposed some weak spots in our gravel road. We knew this would be an issue eventually because the ground where we originally built parts of the road had a natural runoff area that turned into a small creek when it rained. We were lucky for months as the rains we got were pretty mild and didn't make too many ruts in the road. But then we got two days of rain, with the worst being a couple of inches of rain in one night. This kind of volume flooded the road and created huge ruts and valleys as the water rushed downhill. So it forced our hand and we added a drain pipe across the road to force the water to the other side under the road instead of flowing over it.
This stainless steel pipe (commonly called a "tin horn") is 40 feet long, and we just called up the man who did our road and house pad and he came out and his crew trenched the road and placed the tin horn, and then he re-graded all of the gravel so you could never tell anything had ever happened!




Good as new!


Finally in late February we had two other major developments: electricians hooked up a temporary power pole and meter to the transformer, and we got a water well dug!
Since these pictures they have connected the power pole to the well pump for fresh water and have run a line all the way to the house for some electicity in the house.


The well doesn't look like much but it's 300 feet deep and flows >40 gallons a minute!


This past week in early March there was much activity again as the electicians went to work and plumbers finished their work on the faucet valves and gas lines. We've done a few walkthroughs already, picking final locations and amounts of plugs, switches, and lighting spots. This is tedious and somewhat nerve-wracking as you always feel like you're forgetting something and you know when all is done you will realize you forgot to add a plug, switch or light somewhere. But you've got to try and get it as close as possible! The contractors go around with permanent markers and draw locations of things directly onto the framing wood or cement slab. Then they go nuts pulling wire everywhere!

Preliminary gas and electrical wiring in the kitchen:

Switchboxes at the patio door:

Master bathroom shower valves. Note the metal plates on the framing studs to prevent the next installers (drywall) from putting nails through electrical or plumbing lines:

Tons of wires all run to the area where they will install the breakers and meter. The lone orange wire is 220V for the dryer:


Gas inlet elbow into the house. The gas (propane) is run through a flexible metal pipe coated in plastic (the yellow pipe) to the fireplaces and cooktop.


Vivi's bathtub is already installed:


For the shop, we only drew cold water to it from the house. We're going to wire an electrical outlet to the space above the bathroom and install a small 6-7 gallon electric water heater. So the black insulated line runs up above the bathroom to connect to the heater once installed and then back to the hot water faucet on the tub sink to be installed.


So next week the electricians continue their installations including working on the shop installing 220V connectors for various toys ;-)
Also the low-voltage wiring should be done next week (ethernet and alarm).

More pics as things develop!