Week 13: Sept 21 - 25

Oh, Boy! Oh, Boy! Oh, Boy!!! The rough in electrical is complete and the state inspector is scheduled for this coming Monday. If it all passes, then the insulators and sheetrockers can move in and do their work. It has been a long month working on the electrical. Every evening after work and all day Saturdays have started to wear me down. Last night, Kevin hooked up some temporary power in order to test all of the receptacles to insure continuity throughout all of the electrical lines. There was power to all of them!



We also put a few light bulbs in which became the highlight of the month for me as I am finally seeing the "fruits" of our labors.


I also completed running all of the low-volt wiring in the home. I estimate around 2000 feet of the RG-6 and CAT-5 wiring throughout the house that will someday provide for TV, telephone, internet, a theater room, and an option for individual room controlled audio. With the low-volt wiring now run I estimate around 7000 feet of total wiring throughout the house. Ironically, as we were about to leave last night we realized we had not run a line out to the heat pump. Hopefully, I haven't forgotten too many other details.



Brick and siding work are moving along and looking great.





We have a driveway!

Week 12: Sept 14 - 18

Wow, what a busy week. When we started this building project I had a desire to contribute in some way to the contruction of the house. For some odd reason I chose to do the electrical. I made a gross underestimation of the time and effort it takes to complete the electrical portion of a home. Thank goodness for Kevin Layton, the electrician who is helping me, as I could not do this on my own. I feel like we are finally coming to the end of the project. This is good as I am already 2 - 3 weeks behind schedule. The only rooms left are the garage, a couple of appiances in the kitchen, the outside back lights, and the storage room. Then the fun of organizing the panels.

In the end, I will have run close to 4000 feet of electrical wire. That is almost a mile of wire in our house! I feel like I have created a large electro-magnet.



The exterior of the home continues to move forward. The siding guys have nearly comleted two sides of the home and the brick guy is steadily moving across the front of the house. I am liking the look of the red brick on the yellow and white siding.

Also this week, the curbing for our driveway was completed.

Week 11: Sept 7 - 11

After a week of working out at the house I am sore and tired. I am not used to 10 hours of manual labor. My fingers have blisters, blood blisters from hitting them with a hammer, slivers and small scapes of them that are amazingly painful. Last night I came home so tired that all I could do was take a shower and lay around. Thank goodness for Viki, who is taking care of all of the baby's needs.



This week the exterior doors were hung along with all of the windows. and the house was wrapped in a tarp like material that is suppose to help seal the house from all of the wind we get in Idaho.

Excavation has begun on the driveway and the garage floor was poored with cement. We are going with asphalt with a cement curb edge on the remainder of the driveway portion primarily because it costs less, but also because it doesn't crack and split as noticably as cement. The plumbers installed our new on-demand water heater and Viki's soaker tub.
We decided to go with the on-demand water heater for a variety of reasons. First, our roof line with the dormers over the garage made it such that in order to vent a regular water heater through the roof, and stay in compliance with code, we would have had to have a 10 - 12 foot exposed pipe running from the garage roof to a point above the house roof line. Aesthetically, that is not acceptable so our next option was to take some room out of the kitchen and upstairs living room to accomodate the pipes in the wall. I didn't want to loose any space, especially in the kitchen so we said no to that option. Next was a direct vent, basically a fan assisted venting, of the water heaters out the side of the house. Two regular water heaters direct vented ended up costing more than the on-demand system. Besides satisfying the particular design challenges of our house the primary selling points behind the on-demand, tankless water heater is that money is saved by not constantly having to heat a tank of water and that one can have limitless hot water. We will see! Between the mounds of laundry, dirty dishes, and dirty bodies in our house we use a lot of hot water

I started pulling wire for the electrical system. Tom, Viki's brother, has been helpful to come and assist me. Neither of us really know what we are doing and it shows - look at this confusing mess.>

Week 10: Aug 31 - Sept 4

We were in the lighting store yesterday and one of the workers walked up to me and asked if I was less stressed. I guess when we had been in the store previously I had behaved stressed out. Well, as it turns out, no I am not feeling less stressed. I worry that I have taken on more than I should with assuming the responsibility for the home wiring. We have all of the receptacles set but have not started pulling wire yet. Now that the plumbing and HVAC have been roughed in I am holding up further progress on the interior of the home. Fortunately, the builder is going to move the exterior of the home forward. Viki has all of the doors, windows, siding, and brick picked out. This should be going up over the next two weeks. viki has chosen out the style of lighting for the home. She has an amazing ability to make decisions very quickly. It took her an hour to make her decision and this was longer than it could have taken had I not been present. Something in me says that you have to grind out every decision until you have thought out every potential future experience surrounding whatever you are deciding about. We ended up agreeing on some oil bronze based lighting with tea stone glass.

This week I continued placing electrical receptacles and secured all of the can lights into place. The furnace was installed. All of the ducting is round. I guess this is uncommon for a residential home and more common in a commercial setting primarily because of space contraints between the floor joists. Because we went with some manufactured joists that look like trusses we had enough room to run the round ducting. Air supposedly flows more smoothly in round vs. square ducting so having the round helps me gain confidence in our system. I guess we will see come January how well it works to heat our home. I was a little nervous about the whole system because it was just a young kid installing the system so I had a good friend, Aaron Anglin, come and inspect the work. Aaron is a certified HVAC installer and someone I respect. I would have like him to install the system but his full-time job didn't provide enough time to do the work. He looked over the job and felt like the system had been installed very well and should do a great job for us. Yeah, one less thing to worry over.


Our electrician was unavailable this week so Landen and I took the afternoon and listened to BYU play and win OU in the opening football game of the season and built a go-cart out of scrap wood out at the house. It was fun to work on a project together with him. He thinks things through in detail and made smart decisions regarding how to secure and strengthen the cart.