Construction week 32 — plumbing and ventilation runs
First family picnic on our rooftop patio. Shared it with some friendly pigeons who decided our new home was also their new home.
Hope you enjoyed last week’s videos. I sure did. Gave me a break from writing. Writer, I am not. Here goes again:
It’s been a couple weeks since my last construction update. We sent the Cornelis Grey crew away last week. We’ll be bringing them back in a few weeks, once we have more work for them. In the meantime, our plumber Nathan from Ackland plumbing, has begun his rough-in work. He's installing a manifold system? It's cool, or so I am told. And Mark, as you may have seen via Periscope, has begun our ventilation layout.
We walked through the house with our electrician, Yves from Portage Electric, to get a feel for our electrical plan in real life. Wow. When you’re lucky enough to be in a position to decide where to put a switch, and what turns on what, you realize what great ‘power’ you have. And what a massive effect the electrical details potentially have on the user experience and enjoyment of a space. It would really suck to be searching around for a switch that was un-intuitively placed. Or if an unsightly 6-switch was in the middle of a feature wall. What makes sense on paper does not always translate when you’re physically walking through a space.
It also forced us to consider what sort of ‘smart’ lighting/electrical systems we might want to consider. I love the idea of walking into a space and having the lights automagically turn themselves on. Imagine no wall switches? Or lights that learn our behaviour. Will these technologies date our house vs. a tried-and-true analog wall switch? As a happy, budget-friendly medium, we’re looking into Lutron’s Caséta system.
And do we need “cat 5” cable for our internet? If we want to watch Netflix really really fast? I was under the assumption that regular ol’ wifi would suffice for our entire home, but now that the question has been raised, do I want it? Do I need “cat 6” to future-proof? Our neighbours building up the street included some empty PVC pipe behind their walls, for easy wiring access, should they require something they forgot or doesn’t exist yet. I’m going to lean towards less wires = good, whether or not that’s proves to be true. Time will tell.
There are a lot of moving parts that need to come together over the next few weeks, starting with the plumbing, which will carry on for much of this week. Then ventilation followed by electrical. Yves helped us to understand that his job becomes much simpler if he can reuse or follow some of the previous installs. The bigs rocks go in first, then it's easier to fill the gaps with the sand. Or something like that...Once those inside jobs are all finished, we get to cover up those walls with drywall. We’re flying Mark’s brother in from Nelson BC to help us out with the drywalling. He’s a pro, and a Rosen, so it’s bound to be good :) Only 3 weeks away!
We're still placing orders and making decisions on the back-end. We are so frustratingly close to ordering our kitchen. There have been quite a few back-and-forths to nail it down. All of our siding material has been ordered and work is set to begin next week. Really looking forward to that getting under way.
Mark’s sporadically giving tours of the house to various groups. He loves doing them, even though it’s a time-suck. We’ll be setting up another public tour some time in the next couple weeks, likely on a weekend. You’ll be able to see what’s running through our walls before we cover them up. We will post the time and date later this week.
One last thing: it’s spring! With the warmer weather, it now feels relatively cooler when I walk inside the house. Neat-o. Same principles apply to cool our house as it does to heat it. We enjoyed our first picnic of the season out on our rooftop deck. Fealt great.
A tour of students from Algonquin College studying architectural technology. And a view of our messy post-winter construction front yard.
My wee ones staring out the sitting window #milwaukee