The Rock: Part Eight
So, as Julie just wrote, she and Rog have been inundated
with decisions about things which most of us don’t think about or take for
granted—location of lights and switches, which way should the door swing,
etc. We were asking questions to avoid
the “oops” moments later.
For instance: what
are you doing for a vanity mirror? Julie wanted two mirrors, both centered over
their respective sinks. Lighting was
going to be two sconces on either side of each mirror. Following the plan, we would have ended up
with room for three and a half sconces in order to maintain the centering and
spacing. Solution was to plan on moving the vanities down the wall a bit, and
building the wall a few inches longer to accommodate the move, not a big deal
at all right now, but virtually impossible later. I think Bruce caught that
one, but brainstorming leaves us all exhausted and wondering where the solution
came from.
Probably the hardest thing for both Julie and Roger was to
deal with the myriad of decisions Jason, our electrician from WER Electric
(shameless plug), needed to fully customize each room for their particular
needs—a difficult task considering they’ve never lived in the house. “Is the couch going here…or here? ‘Cause I
need to put a floor outlet in, and then there’s the lighting…and did you want
one or two switches controlling these lights?
I can separate them, y’know. Or
did you want a remote, I can put it here…”
They both looked over at Bruce and I several times, and we just giggled,
and shrugged.
We are officially in the rough-in stage, and we should be
done with the framing, but we are not, so each trade can only go so far until
we rush over, stick a wall up then sprint to the next place. There were lots of time-consuming details
associated with the structural beams, and have been playing catch up ever
since. I think today, the 15th,
we’ll have all the walls up and done.
The plumbers look to be done having located a new drain for the kitchen
and completely new everything in the bathroom.
Jason’s guys have pulled more than 5000 feet of new wire in replacing
everything upstairs and adding what I just head counted as 40 recessed cans—I’m
probably off b y a few. The mechanical guys have a few details to complete,
but…
We’re hoping to call for inspections tomorrow, but it’s
snowing like crazy out there, so it’s hard to say who will show up and when.
NOTE: Inspections have been called for today, the 17th
BUT we were looking at the drywall in the bedroom and thought it a good idea to
remove it—there were cracks and holes and hey, let’s just start off anew, do a
little prep for the drywall sub, etc. We
immediately found the reason for the cracks: whoever installed the bay windows
(and I’m going to hunt you down) decided that headers weren’t that important, so they cut part of the
original 2 x 12 header at the door and cobbled in a 2 x 6 header across the
window. Then they “forgot” to nail it to
a stud, so there’s essentially nothing holding up a five foot section of
ceiling and roof except drywall. And, I
guess if you’re going to go to that kind of trouble, you should bury a junction
box in the wall by taping it over and pretending it was never there.
We’ll try to fix that this morning, before the inspector
shows up—it’s a gray area for the inspector as it’s nothing we’ve touched or
done, and therefore not subject to his review, but it’s not right and we all
know it. And it’ll give us a chance to dismember the other bird’s nest right
next to the framing gaffe. It’s a big
one!
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