House Building 101

The meeting went well this morning, we gave our mortgage guy all our latest paperwork so we’re good to go.  We drove down to the house to take some pics, all they’ve done is install the structured wiring and they added a drop that we didn’t pay for.  Oops.  :p

They haven’t put the wiring box in yet, but the cable is all there.

Drop in the living room, multimedia tap (1 RG6 and 1 Cat5e terminated).

Family room, telephone tap (1 Cat5e terminated for phone).

Master bedroom, multimedia tap (1 RG6 and 1 Cat5e terminated for phone).

Left bedroom, telephone tap (1 Cat5e terminated for phone).

Right bedroom, telephone tap (1 Cat5e terminated for phone).

The freebie, a second tap in the family room.

This is the company that’s doing the structured wiring.

Each of the blue cables carries 2xCat5e and 2xRG6 in that sheathing.  The builder is only terminating what I specified above, but if I want to terminate the rest I just open the wall plate and terminate the rest myself.

Tomorrow morning we are meeting with our loan guy to sign off on our mortgage.  We are still about 4 months from completion of the house but we have to have our mortgage approved and in by the October 1st deadline to ensure that we get all the money that Centex has promised us.  Come October it will be illegal for Centex to give more than $7500 in buyer incentives - which would completely screw us.  So, our mortgage guy is making sure that our paper work is all in by the Sept 15th to ensure that we’re taken care of.

Wish us luck!

This is probably the weakest update so far, just gas lines, sprinkler lines and the bath tubs. Some of the other homes had their tel/data lines run but no data cabinet yet. I’m guessing we’ll have ours run by next weekend.

New breaker.

Looks like the power cable for the networking cabinet.

Drywall under the bottom set of stairs.

One of the sprinkler outlets.

More sprinkler pipes.

Gas line coming up through the kitchen wall from below.

Utility closet doors are in.

Gas for the water heater.

Hall bath tub.

Master bath tub.

Master shower tray.

Master bath.

Hall bath.

Sprinklers in front bedrooms.

Gas hookup for range.

Gas hookup for furnace.

Ceiling fan rough-ins checked off.

Gas line for range checked off.

While we were there I went ahead and measured the windows and doors for window treatments. We really want to go with wood stained plantation shutters. We went to Next Day Blinds and the people were super helpful and stayed past closing, without rushing us to make sure we had all the info we needed. Ideally we want shutters on all the windows except the master bath, that’s 16 windows total. Full price…$7500. The girl we were dealing with (the assistant manager) knocked off $750 then her manager came over and knocked off another $750. So after it was all done it’s going to run us $6k installed. Basically the $1500 they took off covers the installation charges. We talked about putting blinds in the two smaller bedrooms to help bring the price down another $1500…but the blinds for that room will run around $500 which means that for *only* $1000 more we can have we really want. My wife talked to her mother and they paid $6k for all 28 windows in their house but they went with vinyl shutters and they don’t offer stained colors…just white and ivory which we don’t want. The girl promised us the price whenever we come back, she recommended that we put our order in around November to get the dates scheduled for their free measuring and then the install. I guess we’ll see what happens.

Test post from my iPod touch.

We’ve got tons of pics from yesterday, major changes were the addition of all the electrical wiring and the fresh water piping.

The wiring for the stoop lights and sensors are in.

The railings are in.

All the mounting can things for the recessed lights are in.

Hall light and, I think, another for the smoke detector.

The garage.

The load center in the garage.

Lots of wires.

Garage ceiling.

Cabling from the meter outside to the load center.

The furnace is the only thing that’s wired up so I assume this is the breaker for it.

Outlet and switchbox in the garage.

Hosebib in the garage.

Garage back wall.

I forgot where this is…must be in the downstairs hallway.

Foyer light.

Stairwell light. There are 2 more…no point in posting them all.

Living/dining room. Centex puts outlets everywhere…I meant to count but forgot but it’s something like 1 every 6′.

Efficiency stickers on the tall windows in the living room.

Shared kitchen/living room wall.

Outlets at stairwell railing.

Stairs to bedrooms and opening to kitchen.

Powder room, fresh water pipes added.

Furnace label.

Furnace installer.

The cover was off, I guess they’re still wiring it up.

Back wall in kitchen, laundry on the left.

Fresh water for the fridge.

Kitchen island.

Left inside wall of laundry closet.

Top of last pic.

Water taps for the washing machine. For the past 6 years we’ve had our washing machine on the left and the dryer on the right…they are flipped in this house.

Wall between the french doors.

Family room wall shared with powder room and furnace closet.

Utility closet on deck.

Outlet and lights on deck.

Starwell light up to top level.

Ceiling fan outlet in master. There is one each in each bedroom, the family room and the living room as well.

They have framed in the boxed ceiling in the master.

Master bath.

Upstairs hallway.

Hall bath.

Shared wall between the 2 small bedrooms.

Left bedroom, the guest room.

Right bedroom, study/den.

One of the 3-way switches, all bedrooms have it for lights and ceiling fan.

That’s it for this week. Hopefully next week we’ll see the telecommunications wiring put in.

Flickr hasn’t really been fufilling my needs, I have a free account which is limited to only 100MB of uploads a month. I have only 20MB of upload remaining this month and Sunday alone I took 100MB of pictures and I really wanted to upload them all. My options were to spend $25 for a pro account which is good for one year and removes all account limitations or just suck it up and host my own gallery. So, I installed gallery here on my hosting space. A link is also on the right. Since I have a ton of space with my webhost that I rarely ever use I have been able to upload some pictures that I couldn’t previously due to the constraints of the flickr account.

I took a ton of pics yesterday.  Not much changed on the outside, but we saw a lot of work done on the inside.

Front door installed.

Master bedroom balcony door and some type of radiator in the utility closet installed.

Water pipes are put in.

Central air ducting was all put in.

One of the windows had a bunch of paper taped to it. It showed the location of all our optioned additions and the list of all our upgrades.

Here is the picture that really hit home that this is OUR house.

The floorplan with the locations for our phone/internet/tv jacks and ceiling fan outlet installations.

Here is all the ducting, this is in the ceiling of our bottom floor. All the registers for the main floor are in the ceiling and the walls, for the upstairs they are all in the floor.

This pipe is in the back kitchen wall.

Laundry closet.

Here is the furnace, it’s in a closet in the powder room.

Powder room plumbing.

Powder room exhaust fan.

More pipes and ducting in the main floor ceiling.

Pipes in the family room wall.

Ducting over the family room.

Dryer exhaust.

Outside utility closet…I have no clue what that thing is.

Pipes and ducting over the kitchen.

Large vent in the family room. The furnace is on the other side of this wall.

Water pipe for the island.

And now up to the top floor.

Ducting up to the top floor.

Pipes for hall bath.

Pipes for double sinks in master bath.

Master bath tub drain.

Shower and toilet drains in master bath.

Really bad pic of the door to the balcony in the master.

They’ve started putting in drywall in the master, maybe to rough in the tray ceiling.

Pipes for the hall bath.

Since all the registers on the top level are in the floor they covered them all, I’m guessing so debris does not fall into the ducting. There is one in each smaller bedroom, and two in the master.

That’s all for now.

Lots of progress, but not a lot of pics.  This weekend the fourth milestone on the house was completed, framing.

 

We arrived at the house to find that they have finished with the brick.

 

And they have put some kind of copper flashing above the top-most windows.  You can barely make it out here.

 

Our front door.

 

The back of the building.

 

Our unit.

 

This week they started putting all the ducting in for the HVAC system, here is the materials sitting in the garage.

 

They have also started putting insulation, here in the garage…

 

and here in the furnace closet.

 

The two french doors are in.

 

and some insulated hose for the outside ac unit.

 

That’s about it for now, hopefully next week our sliding door in the master and our ducting will be in.

Here are the pics from this past Monday, the windows are in and they should be finishing up our doors this week.

Our two sets of french doors, waiting to be installed in the kitchen/family room.

The railings for the balcony and deck.

Our front door…not painted yet.

Not sure what these posts are for…

Interior garage door installed.

Rounded windows!

That little wall in the middle of the room is for the kitchen island where our sink and dishwasher are.

They applied some type of spray-on surface to the balcony floor.

A closer look at our two uninstalled french doors.

The window in our master bath.

That’s it for now.  The brick was delivered while we were there so hopefully when we go back this weekend we’ll see a finished roof, installed doors and a good portion of brick put up.

We just got back from vacation and due to uploading limits on my free Flickr account I was unable to post new pictures until the first of the month.  So, here are the pictures from July 25th:

This is the kitchen from the family room.  The laundry closet on the left and the doorway to the living/dining room is on the right.  You can barely make out the doorway to the powder room on the right edge.

Still having issues with the flickr plug-in.  The updated version of the plug-in doesn’t work as well as the old version and is a bit of a pain in the butt to use…

This is the powder room from the kitchen, the door on the left is to the living/dining room.

Here is a pic of the hallway bathroom from the stairs.  The master bedroom is to the left and the two spare bedrooms are to the right.

Here is the master bath.

Enclosure for the tub in the master bath.

This is the shower, with the seat.

My “small” closet in the master bedroom.

Melissa’s walk-in closet in the master.

And here is some crazy green stuff they sprayed on the lower walls in the garage.

I’ll follow up with another post with pics from this past Monday.