Another busy week on the house as the Structural FX team tackled a lot of details on the systems - electrical, plumbing, HVAC and communications - while finishing up various remaining framing, stairs and trim work around the windows. It's not as dramatic a change as before but that's to be expected as there is a lot of detail covered here. Everywhere you look inside the house, something has changed a little.
I'm really pleased with the clean electrical work throughout. We are wired up the wazoo in the house - dual CAT5s to every corner for Internet and PBX, coax cable, speaker wire and alarm sensors. They also ran HDMI cable in the wall behind the HD TV.
I had a little trouble finding the right wall plate terminator to clean up the speaker wire but this site had a nice product that will cover all my zones upstairs (ChannelPlus WPW-D7.1)
http://www.channelplus.com/product_detail.php?productId=133
I also sourced the alarm contacts we'll use on the windows and door - Aleph DC-1651W magnetic recessed type. See www.Aleph-usa.com
Brian and John even prepared the house for fiber optic, running fiber lines from our utility room to the media room and two offices. I figured we might as well and that's where we'd need them most. Awesome! We're ready for SBC/AT&T when they get their act together running fiber to our house. If I ever start another hi tech business in our basement, we're ready! We'd even be ready to hatch the next Google in a shed out back if we wanted to.
The plumbing is just about done. All thanks to O'Reilly plumbing and owner Ciaron O'Reilly and Candice who have been putting in countless hours. They will be testing it out loading it with compressed air next week. In fact, the plumbing, electrical and HVAC should all be done early next week and tested in time for a City inspection next Wednesday. Our HVAC is being done by John Pane HVAC with Mark as the foreman on site working diligently through all the ducting challenges.
After that inspection, there will be a flurry of activity on the insulation and sheet rock. Brian says the sheetrock will be up over Friday, Saturday and Monday with a big crew he's outsourcing this to. More on this subcontractor later when I see their work.
Brian also lined up another subcontractor to do our driveway paver work, which should start next week. While the sheetrock goes in the Structural FX crew will tackle the garden walls we wanted put in the back and the pavers for our patio there.
Fortunately, we lined up a surveyor to mark all the property lines properly, something that had never been done on our property. It was a little expensive but we think worth it to avoid any question of where the property starts and ends. We're using Michael Mahoney of Professional Land Services who so far has been just great. This work should be ready in time to re-do all the fences on the property lines.
The trim around the windows is just about done, a couple of days work. It really makes the house look distinguished. We won't order our garage doors for another few weeks as these will need to be installed after the painting is done.
Our solar frames should be here early next week from Ready Solar. I hope they can be put up in a few days so we can start generating some power to sell back to the grid.
We also had some landscape work done on the side of the house to level the dirt and bring in some gravel surfacing. All in another day's work with a small rented Bobcat.
The City sent an inspector out this week to do a check on all heights, sizes etc per the plans. Everything passed with flying colors.
Last but not least on the list was getting all the rooms measured for carpet. I'm now ready to place our order in Georgia for the carpet to get here first week of December.
