Mike and Jeff's New House

This week we finalized the contracts for Stucco, Wallboard and Insulation after two months of wheeling and dealing.....Hurricane Katrina has caused the price of wallboard to go up quickly...Our price on wallboard went up $1,000 in a week....... The doors and windows are slated to be installed on October 10th and 11th... Scaffolding should start going up next week so the roofers can start and so that the gutters can be hung.... Momentum......It's a GOOD THING....

We are going to be doing the installation for a central vacumn cleaning system and have found a couple of really good websites for info....We bought the pipes and fittings last week and have started to drill holes for the outlets, there will be a total of four hose outlets, one on each floor plus one in the garage. Yes, we'll be dragging our hose from floor to floor..... Check out the vacs here: http://builtinvacuum.com/products_home.html http://www.centralvacuumstores.com/ We are also pulling structured wiring throughout the house. The bedrooms and offices and Living Room and Kitchen will all have 2+2 outlets. (2 Cat5e and 2 Coaxial wires are bundled together and pulled together.) Check out this excellent website for more info: http://www.hometech.com/ Since we'll have 3 stories to navigate when the door bell rings, we have decided to install a camera/intercom to monitor front door visitors. The company we are using has a deep line of products, we found one that will be flush ...

About 10 years ago Jeff was up on our roof cleaning the wood shakes and gutters....He slipped and then fell off and broke his hip....When Jeff told me that he was going to save a little money and install the rigid foam insulation on the portion of the roof over the living room, I felt suddenly nervous....Luckily our friend David teaches rock climbing and just happened to have his climbing belt handy. Yosemite is now beckoning......Hopefully we won't have to install insulation on Half Dome.. http://www.nps.gov/yose/wilderness/climbing.htm

Jeff was concerned about what the house would look like if it was ringed by 3 story high drainpipes, so he decided to hide them in the walls like they do in commercial construction. He spent Saturday drilling holes in neatly aligned runs from floor to floor.. There are 6 runs, 3 on each side. We'll run PVC drain pipe through the holes and drain water from the gutters through these internal drainpipes.....

If cleanliness is next to godliness,the master bath in our new house will be a center for spiritual cleansing...It will feature dual showerheads, a separate hand-held shower plus a built in bench for relaxing while enjoying the effects of the steam generator. http://www.plumbingsupply.com/steam.html On Oct. 3rd the hot mop guys are coming by to put in the goop that will keep our showers leak free....Speaking of hot mopping....Did you know that this service is listed in the yellow pages under `Waterproofing' ? We found a great website to help with estimating and answering questions about the process: http://www.sacshowerpans.com/

Those of you familiar with the show `Little Shop of Horrors' will understand why we have named our air exchanger `Seymour'.... It just keeps growing and changing every day.... Actually it is a rather sophisticated system developed at the Davis Energy Group. Check it out here: http://www.davisenergy.com/nb_page.htm The coolest feature will be a large fan that is activated by indoor/outdoor thermostats. During the summer, when the temp outside drops to 5 degrees lower than indoors, a large vent will open and the system will automatically start to send cool air throughout the house.

We'll have a thermostat on each floor, if one floor is calling for heat or cold but the other two zones are OK, the variable speed fan on the blower will only need to run at one third the normal speed. There are dampers in all 6 of the ducts that leave the blower (2 per floor). The system will shut the dampers on the ducts that go to floors that are not calling for hot or cold air.... This system costs more to install but should cost a lot less to operate on an annual basis.

Robbie the electrician showed up a couple of days last week....He's pulled all the wire for the third floor and most of the second floor.....Light cans and switch and outlet plates are installed throughout....By the end of this week we expect to see this bank of switches bulging with wire...

For anyone who has built a house before, the picture below is not a big deal. It shows the ceiling in our kitchen just above the island. Visible on this picture are air ducts, kitchen fan ducts, water pipes, thermostat wires, electrical wires, drain pipes and gas pipes. For a first time home-builder, it has been really cool to watch how our subcontractors are able to fit numerous wires, tubes, ducts, and pipes through the spaces behind the walls and ceilings.... We will have a total of 3 remote fans to pull air from the house. One will pull air through the kitchen vent shown below. The other two will pull air from the 4 bathrooms. All of the motors will be up on the third floor in the attic space so that one will not have to hear the roar of fans when using the bathroom or kitchen... Learn more here: http://www.fantech.net/exhaust.htm