So we went out last night to finish up our log moving and take a look at the electrical that has been done in the last few days. It was one of the more milder evenings that we were going to have for a while and we haven’t had a ton of rain so we figured the log moving would take no more than 2 hours. We also had to run our first small appliance out to the house! One of the first things you have to provide is a dehumidifier for the basement once the concrete was poured. Our FM also has 3 fans going in the basement to help the concrete dry/cure quicker.
When we got there the first thing we saw was all the wires! Wires, wires everywhere!
Here’s some of the wiring being done outside the house.
The beginnings of the plugs in the lower eaves on the front of the house for Christmas lights. We decided not to put them in the upper eaves because realistically, we are not going to put lights up there under normal circumstances.
The outside electrical outlets are much nicer than the ones at our old house that were just metal and stuck out like a sore thumb.
And some other stuff inside. Floor outlets in the great room.
And the craft room.
One of the peak boxes for the ceiling fans in vaulted ceiling rooms.
Can lights and ceiling fan box in the great room.
Can lights in the kitchen.
Here is where all of our ethernet is terminating. We have chosen the downstairs walk in coat closet to be the location of our network. We’ll be purchasing a rack to house the hub as well as things like our router, security camera base station, etc. It seems they went ahead and labeled each line (thank you!) and will be putting up mud rings at each of the exits for the ethernet. They split the cables into 2, so they won’t all get bunch up in one small box. The phone line will also go here and we will have electric plugs for all of our peripherals.
We got downstairs and hooked up the dehumidifier and the hose so it could empty directly into the sump pump. The humidity started out at 55% which we didn’t think was bad considering the house is still open, but we set it to the lowest setting and verified it was still running before we left at the end of the day. I purchased a pretty large, heavy duty unit that I researched through consumer reports and general public reviews. I couldn’t get it locally though so I had to buy it off of Wayfair.com.
Here’s a photo of some of the concrete done in the basement and one of the concrete porch.
They also had done more HVAC type work and hooked up the venting of the fireplace.
So onto the logs. We had about 3-4 piles left to go, with one being a very large pile and one having some fairly large base pieces. Here are some original pictures after the trees were first cut. As you can see there were logs everywhere…some in piles, some just scattered about.
And after:
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Many piles of logs and stacks of logs around the perimeter. We hope we have given the excavator plenty of room because we have no desire to move these any more! We will probably move them to a more permanent home sometime this fall/early winter when the snakes are hibernating, the foliage is down and we can fully see where we’re walking.
We’re hoping this one doesn’t get broken (we need to move it from where it is) as we both think we’d like to make some slices of this one. I’d love to do some wood burning of our names or something and then shellac it so it can be hung up in the house. There’s a couple other big pieces that could be useful for decor or other purposes.
And finally, I took a couple pictures to describe my issue with the door coming in from the garage. As you can see it has to open inward (which is towards the kitchen, i.e. the way you have to walk into the house) and the light switches are not accessible until you have the door almost completely open, with the door somewhat in the way. Once the door knobs are on the door it’s going to be a tight walk going through this opening when you first get in the house unless you walk into the pantry (across from the door to the garage) or backwards into the laundry. I couldn’t figure out how I missed this issue on the blueprints and assumed it couldn’t open towards the laundry room because it might hit the laundry room door….
So I went back to the blueprints and saw that on the original floor plan the door swung the opposite way! So now we need to talk to the FM to see what happened that it was hung the other way and if there is some reason it can’t be the way it was listed on our blueprints.
I realize the door could potentially bang into the laundry room door, but that is the way it is in the original layout as well before we made the change from a regular door to a pocket door on the laundry. Ideally the door would open up into the garage on an outward swing instead of an inward swing, but I don’t even know if that’s able to pass building code to have a technically ‘outside’ door swing outward. Either way I think the framing for this door will need to be redone because having it swing towards the kitchen is just so impractical for real life considering we will be using this door and bringing items in and out of this door all the time.
I think I am finally all caught up on our last week’s worth of house adventures. Electrical should be done today, inspection hopefully Friday, siding will start on Monday weather permitting with another inspection after that (I don’t know if that includes the stonework being done on the front of the house) and then insulation hopefully by the end of the week. We are going out this weekend to run a few HDMI cables and do the rest of the inscriptions on the studs before insulation. If the insulation gets going we will be out there working the following weekend as well. Wayne Homes drywalls the entire garage, but only insulates the walls that are common to the house so we decided we are going to do the insulation on the rest of the garage walls ourselves before drywall. Should be a piece of cake, right? ??
Thanks for reading!
