So I don’t really have pictures from this day, but a few small updates. Richard was going to run a check out to the electrician this day (Monday) because I didn’t think about taking my checkbook with me to the electrical walkthrough on Friday. It was good however to have that weekend to process everything we talked about with the electrician because we realized we wanted to make a few changes.
Near the end of the 2 hour conversation with the electrician, I let him talk me into a couple things that I realized later I was not happy about. One of those things was the location of a floor jack in the great room. He thought it better to put in under the couch because he said some tables go all the way to the floor and there’s no clearance to put plugs under them. I’ve never had an end table go all the way to the floor and it would be worse to have to move the couch every time I needed to use the jack. And my current couch DOES go all the way to floor. It would have been useless.
The other thing was the under cabinet lighting. One cabinet we have is a smaller cabinet because we have a doorway right next to it. With all the other cabinets being one standard size and that cabinet being smaller and beside a doorway, he convinced me to put the lighting only under the standard size cabinets. The more I thought about it, the more I knew that one area not being lit was going to bug me. In our old house we had lots of things we wondered, “why did the original buyer do THAT?” This would have been that thing that would drive me nutty in the new house.
As we sat and talked we also found a few other things we wanted clarification on, so Richard ran the check out with a list of questions and a few changes. Thankfully they had only cut a small hole for the cable to run through on the floor jack change we wanted and it won’t be a big deal. We were going to end up paying another $50 for the additional cabinet light but they decided to just eat the change (I don’t think they wanted to make another invoice and have Richard run out another check for the difference).
We spent a LOT of time going through everything in the house, how we would use everything in the house and therefore what we needed as far as electrical and switches. We took with us a 4 page document I had typed up in Microsoft Word with each room listed that needed extra things or locations of ethernet or (possibly) additional wall jacks. We poured over blogs and really had a handle on what we wanted. We did not going into this blind by any means and I am not someone who lets myself get talked into or out of things. I can’t stand sales people for this reason, the tactics are obvious to me and just annoy me and I am pretty unaffected by peer pressure, but I digress. The bottom line is, if I have done my research and know what I want, I still to my guns. But 2 hours into it, I let myself get talked into a few things I didn’t like…there’s still a couple of things that don’t sit well with me but they aren’t big enough issues for me to bother changing.
I say this to remind any future homeowner who is reading my blog to get tips or understand the timeline (like we did), that remember this is YOUR house. Stick to what you know you want based on how you live your life, but be flexible when warranted. Do your research ahead of time so you know the options, but know the costs will most likely be more than you think. Think about aesthetics and how things will look. Do you really want an outlet in your stonework? I did not, but code said we had to have one on our stone half wall because code doesn’t care what it looks like, just that there’s an outlet every so many feet. We solved that problem by putting an outlet in the floor that is close enough to the stone wall that the electrician thinks it should pass inspection.
Will not having all of something done, bug you, like with my under cabinet lighting situation? I sometimes feel like we don’t have a lot of control over some of these things because we are not the builder, we are not the contractors and we are not the ones doing the work so it feels like we’re at the mercy of what other people think is best. But ultimately this IS our house. Fight for what you want, don’t let anyone talk you out of it.
Thanks for reading!
