Made our weekly trip and the drywall is all up so I have a HUGE update, 5 posts total. =)

Garage ceiling light fixture and garage opener outlet.

Garage hose bib and emergency access to the sewer drain. They drywall over this one since there is one right outside of the garage.

Downstairs nook.

Stairs up from front door.

Looking up into the family room.

Stairs up to bedrooms.

Kitchen/dining shared wall.

Kitchen and island.

Laundry closet.

Kitchen lights.

Powder room.

Outside utility closet.

Another of laundry closet.

Inside of kitchen island.

Upstairs landing.

Master bathroom, shower.

Sinks.

16 buckets of joint compound. :laugh:

Small master closet.

Box ceiling.

Wife’s walk-in closet.

Attic access.

2 bedrooms and hall bath.

Hall bath.

Left bedroom.

Right bedroom.

Right bedroom.

I got a kick out of this when I saw it.

That’s it for this week.

We spent 2 hours this morning with the construction manager for the pre-drywall inspection. I pointed out some things that need attention we asked a bunch of questions and he was real thorough. As you’ll see insulation is just about done. On Tuesday they are going to start drywall and the following Thursday they are going to pour in the Gyp-Crete on our main floor. He’s expecing about a week to get the drywall up then the siding will be hung.

The pics are going to be backwards this week, we started in the master bath and worked our way down.

Master Bath

Master Bedroom

Attic access in master bedroom walk-in closet.

When the drywall is done they will come in and spray in the attic insulation, 12-14″ worth of the stuff. The piece of drywall they use to fill the access hole will have a sheet of the standard insulation glued to the back of it. The attic is not meant for storage, but he went on to say to use your best judgement if you really must store stuff like empty boxes or luggage up there.

Hall bath.

Upstairs hallway. The steel box is for the smoke detectors, the blue is the hall light.

Left bedroom ceiling.

I took this picture to illustrate the 1″ gap that is to accomodate the Gyp-Crete that is going to be poured onto the entire floor of the main level.

The 100mm carpet pad will go on top of the Gyp-Crete, then the carpet. In the kitchen and family room a rubber mat will go down on the Gyp-Crete then the tile will go on top of that.

Once the drywall is all hung they bring in an acoustic engineer who does sound testing throughout each unit. He uses sound emitting and recording equipment to test decibal levels both to hear sound coming from other units and to hear sound coming out of the unit. The construction manager explained all the testing equipment that is brought in, it was pretty impressive. If a unit fails the tests they have to rip out the drywall and re-do all the insulation and sound dampening materials.

Shared wall in living room.

Opposite shared wall.

Living/Dining room, Kitchen on other side of wall.

Kitchen ceiling. There wasn’t supposed to be insulation in the ceiling on our main floor but the trades put it in accidently. Oops. It’s not going to be pulled back out unless they need it to finish another unit.

Another of the extra insulation. The blue cable is my data lines.

Corner of the family room, powder room and furnace closet are on the other side. That return is one of two in the house, I will have filters at each. The other is at the top of the stairs on the level above…which is going to make filter changes very interesting.

Another of the kitchen. There are 5 recessed lights total, the 1 light above the sink is on it’s own switch.

This is the spray-in insulation in the ceiling of our front porch. This should all be closed in and close to done by the end of next week.

This is the back wall of the garage.

The steel furring strips are how what they use to attach the drywall. By screwing the drywall into these strips the noise from the walls is not transferred into the studs where it would vibrate through the structure. Also, they hang the walls first, then put the ceilings in. This is another step to help reduce vibration from above. essentially the drywall is hanging off of the structure of the house. Pretty neat stuff.

Garage ceiling.

Outlet for the garage door opener and the light fixture.

I took a few more pics of the ceiling in the garage because something the construction manager pointed out was to make sure that whoever installs the garage opener doesn’t follow the screw holes from the drywall to mount the motor because the screws follow the furring strips and not the studs. With the pictures I shouldn’t have a problem showing the studs for whoever installs it.

We’re still on schedule for a December delivery and the crew is pretty happy with themselves because they’ve been doing real well with the county inspections which is great. That’s it for now.

Did our Sunday ritual at the house this past weekend and there wasn’t anything to update. I did schedule our pre-drywall inspections for Thursday so I should have something to post about then.

Not much to update. Even though the milestone for this phase is done it looks like they still have a few things to do, namely finish running the Trexx pest system up on our two living floors.

The green portions are perforated and the bug chemicals come out within the walls. There is a small outlet next to your garage door that the bug guy jacks into to dispense the poison.

They’ve put some type of metal strapping in our downstairs hallway, the garage and up the stair cases to our main floor.

They have also put our structured wiring cabinet in.

I got a pic of the module they install in the cabinet, here is a pic from the office’s closet.

But the best news came today. We’ve been hoping and hoping that FiOS will be available when we move but it was starting to look like Verizon wasn’t going to get to it for a while. From the construction standpoint all the cabling was proper and ready, but Verizon had to come out and plug all their junk in. Well, today we’re talking to our sales lady and she said the other day a Verizon tech was out there and told her that three buildings are being hooked up immediately for FiOS and one of them is ours. So it will be ready as soon as we move in! I hope this is really the case because I’m dreading have to sign up with Comcast.

The 9th saw another completed milestone, #5.

This means that we should be receiving our call for the pre-drywall inspection soon.

I didn’t have an update last week because we went on the Thursday and not much was done between then and the following Sunday.  I’ll have the usual update later today with our weekly trip.

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.