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Well again it has been too long between posts. I can’t believe how hard it is to stay on top of this from week to week. There have been a lot of exciting advancements in the house since the last post. We have since insulated, got all the sheet rock hung, taped and mudded as well the mason’s are vigorously working on getting the brick done.

Insulation
When we started this project, we agreed that we didn’t want to completely blow the budget on stupid things that didn’t matter like extravagant light fixtures or high prices flooring rather if we were going to go over, we wanted it to be on things that would have a payback. These things included any efficiency upgrades in the house appliances and house heating and cooling. Any house that is going to be efficient is going to have a tight wrap and a good insulation r-value. One of the many things that goes into insulating a house is the wall insulation. There are a number of choice to go with here but the most debated right now is whether or not to spend the extra money and get spray foam insulation or the more standard and less expensive fiberglass. The main difference between the two are cost and air dissipation. It is common sense that the way to make an efficient house is to keep the warm air inside in the winter and the cool air out and vice versa in the summer. Air dissipation is the enemy to efficiency. Spray foam tends to eliminate this because it can be sprayed in liquid form to seal all the holes and leaks in walls to the outside. It bonds to the wall and expands in every direction. Fiberglass insulation cannot seal the holes as well as foam can. It just simply doesn’t expand into the crevasses like spray foam will. Now, with that said, you can still achieve the same r-value with fiberglass as with foam, you just have to put more or thicker fiberglass insulation in the walls. There is also a theory that you can make a house too tight and it won’t be able to breath allowing for proper ventilation and circulation. The flip side to this decision is of course cost. You will be spending thousands more to do the entire house in spray foam insulation over traditional fiberglass. With that said, you need to compute your pay back period, or how long it will take you to pay back that extra cost with the saving you will realize in lower utility bills. In the end, the cost was too much for me. Conservative calculations place this payback period somewhere between 15 and 20 years. It would have cost approximately $2500 more to do spray foam insulation than fiberglass in our house. Even with a savings of $20 a month in utilities, which is a pretty high estimate, it would be around 10 years to pay that back. That is a pretty long payback period and ultimately was too  much for me. What we did opt to do was insulate the ceiling of the basement. This wasn’t too much more to do and it essentially separates the two levels and slows the dissipation of heat from the bottom level to the top. What that means is more of the heat stays in the basement when it is heating and the furnace doesn’t have to heat the basement near as much. I believe this was a good investment.

So without further delay, here are some pictures of the insulation.

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So the last few weeks have been really busy. The framing is done and we have moved on to the electrical and plumbing. This is the part of the project that I’m most excited by because I get to do the structured wiring for the house. This consists of all the phone, data and television cable runs. I chose to do a central wiring because not only does it allow for extreme flexibility but also allows you to plan for the future and what you might want to put in your house 5 or 10 years for now.

Our subdivision is wired for AT&T U-Verse. Basically, that means that all our media (TV, internet and phone) will come over fiber optic lines into the house. This is one of the first subdivisions in my area to get this. I’m so stoked to be able to get fiber optic speeds at my house. So, I wanted to make sure that I wired the house right and by doing it myself, I also saved a little bit of money. Every room in the house gets a phone, data and TV wire with some rooms, like the living areas and the master bedroom, getting multiple runs. This “future proofs” the house because there are extra cables run in the main living areas and you can take advantage of this when new technology is released. In short, I’m a technology nerd and I wanted to make sure my house was equally as “techy”. On top of that, there is going to be a media room in the basement (you knew this if you’ve read the previous posts) and I wanted to make sure I had this room wired for 7.1 surround sound and a projector.

I’ve spent the last few weekends wiring the house for all this stuff and I’m pretty proud of the way it has turned out. I started out with 2000ft of quad shield coaxial cable for all the TV runs and 2000ft of cat5e cable for the phone and data runs. I also used some if the cat5e cable to run an in house intercom system that we are going to get. This will not only be an intercom system but also act a whole house sound system. Lastly, I ran some 16/2 speaker wire in the media room for the 7.1 surround and some speaker wire outside so that we could have music on the patio if we ever choose.

On top of me doing all that, we had the electricians, plumbers, and HVAC guys running all their stuff. The electricians did all their stuff in about 2 days. The only thing that we had to decide about that was lighting and we got a lot of can lights. We added them in each room as well as in the bathrooms rather than having the typical Vegas lights in the bathroom. Also, we had them wire a generator plug by the breaker box in case we ever have another ice storm like the one we had a few years ago. If that happens, we simply shut off the main power, and plug in a generator and can power a few rooms in the house on top of all the appliances. That will be great if we ever have to use that.

The plumbers were pretty straight forward as well. The only thing we did additional to the plumbing is asked for a sink to be put in the garage. I think that will be really handy to have one of those large deep sinks in there to wash up after working outside.

For the HVAC system, we had a much harder decision. The standard HVAC system that many builders put in the houses equivalent to ours these days are 80% efficient gas furnaces and 13 seer 3 ton air conditioners. Basically, that means that for every $1 in gas you use for heating, 80 cents of that goes directly to heating and then 20 cents is lost to waste. For the air conditioner, the seer rating is the efficiency rating and the tonnage is the capacity. As of next year, 13 seer is lowest efficiency rating that will be allowed. We were faced with using the standard system, which will do a decent job of heating and cooling the house, or getting some upgrades which would be costly, but might pay off in the long run. For this decision, it is simply all about pay off period. If you spend $1000 more dollars on your HVAC system up front, but it saves you $20 a month on your heating and cooling bills (over the standard system), that is a payoff period of a little over 4 years. That would be a good investment. With that said, $1000 in upgrades for the HVAC system is just the starting point. Seriously, we had people quote us stuff that was $6000 over the base system. That stuff had a high payback period of around 15-20 years. Now, if you plan to live in your house a long time, that might not sound too bad, but if you think that the average life of an HVAC system is 10-15 years, that doesn’t make much sense. We decided to upgrade to a 90% efficient 100,000 BTU gas furnace and a 14 seer 4 ton heat pump. Now without going into a large explanation of what a heat pump is, it is basically an air conditioner with the ability to switch over to a heater in the winter. It only uses electricity rather than gas so it is a lot cheaper. The only caveat to that is it really only works when it is above freezing in the winter. So there will be a few months that you might have to use the gas furnace, but the other months the heat pump will save you a lot of money. So with all that said, we got a few upgrades to the HVAC system and I think it will be a really good investment to lower our monthly heating and cooling costs.

Ok, so that is what we have been doing for the last few weeks. And without further delay, here are the latest pictures.

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So that is all for now. In the next few weeks, we will be getting the rough in inspection done and after that is approved we will start insulation, drywall and bricking. When that starts happening, this thing will be done in no time. Check back soon!

p.s. Here is a picture of me so stoked that we are finally done with wiring the house.

OK, I know, its about time I made another post. I’ve heard the cries of most of you all screaming desperately for another house update. I started this blog mainly for myself to catalog and keep track of the whole process, and I had no idea I would attract this much attention.

It has been about 3 weeks since I made my last post and there has been a lot go on over those past 3 weeks. We have been framing for the last few weeks and I’ll have to say although we now have something that looks like a house, the framing part takes a lot of patience. Framing is one of the longest, if not the longest, parts of building a house. Once it is done, it is amazing to be able to see the structure and form of the entire house, but it just takes so long. On the flip side of that, I’m thankful for framers that take a little more time on the front side and do things right rather than speed through it and do something wrong.

There isn’t much to framing. You just have to make sure that your blue prints are exactly what you want to a T and you’re set. I mean, the framers, or at least our framers, framed everything exactly like it was on the plans. That means, the wall in the basement that divided the mechanical room from the other media room that we wanted and talked to our builder about…it didn’t get put in because it wasn’t on the plans. They will have to go back and add it. That also means, every ceiling tray, vault, window arch and more that you want that aren’t in the blue prints, won’t get built unless you specifically tell them and actually draw it on the floor or wall for them. I guess that makes sense, but it means if you aren’t out there every day, something will get missed.

I’m lucky that I work really close to our construction site because I usually try to get out there 3 or 4 times a week over lunch. I got out there one day and we went over all that. We got the ceiling trays hammered out, the entry way arches decided and everything so really the only thing that we had an issue with was a downstairs wall and then entry way between the kitchen and the living room. That had tot be changed because they originally framed it too narrow at 5ft. and it needed to be lengthened to 9ft.

Ok, so pictures pictures pictures. I know, I will try to post as many as I can in succession. I will start with the early frame of just the down stairs and work all the way through the entire roof joists and decking. Enjoy!

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Well, that is about it. We are close to being done with the framing. They are putting the finishing touches on today and tomorrow. Next will be the shingles and the windows, which will more than likely be next week. They will also be wrapping the house in Tyvex and then comes the the wiring and plumbing. This is my favorite part as I will be doing most of the house’s structured wiring. Check back in a week and I’ll show you the windows.

The next phase in the construction of our house is pouring the basement and garage floor slabs. This is pretty self explanatory but there are a few things that go along with this phase that you have to plan and make the final decisions on. These mainly consist of plumbing decisions. The basement plumbing actually is laid before the slab is poured. The concrete is poured over the plumbing and if you don’t have all your drains in place, it is too late to add more.

One thing that was an addition and an unexpected cost was the lift pump. A lift pump is designed to lift the sewage up into the main sewer line. This is only needed if the sewer line comes in higher than where the drain pipes are that run throughout the basement. Obviously, the drains up stairs will have the benefit of letting gravity do its job and carry the sewage down to the sewer line, but the basement drainage might not have that luxury. We did not know how this would work out because you don’t know how deep the sewer line is actually buried until you dig it up and since you don’t dig the sewer line up until you need to, you can’t really plan for this.

If you take a look at the following picture, you’ll see a pipe hole in the footer of the foundation. This was pre-drilled so that if the sewer line was that deep, we could just come in through that and then not have to worry about a lift pump because the sewer line would actually be lower than what the basement drains would be, hence all the sewage would flow down with the aid of gravity.

That isn’t exactly the way it worked out. In this picture, you’ll see that the actual sewer line was  only buried about 5 ft. below ground level making the entrance into the house have to be much higher. Actually, it had to come into the foundation wall about 3 ft. higher than the footer hold we drilled.

So, since that didn’t work out, we had to get a lift pump. Simply put, this pumps that crap upward into the sewer line from the basement. It would have been better had the sewer line come in lower. Not only would it have saved us money, but now if the electricity ever goes out, we cannot use the basement facilities very much because the lift pump is electrical, and if it isn’t working, then nothing gets pumped up and out into the sewer. So, that is just one thing that I learned during this phase that I didn’t ever think of before. The good thing is, all the rest of the bids we have coming in are actually lower than anticipated so that will offset the extra expense of the lift pump. Take a look at some more pictures of the basement and the garage concrete slabs being poured.

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If you look real close, you can see the beginning of the basement frame going up. They started framing last Thursday and man are they moving fast. They already have the entire basement framed and are starting on the top level. They are estimating to be done in 3 weeks if we continue to have good weather. I’m so excited to see this thing framed and roofed. Then you’ll be able to see what it is going to look like inside. Check back in a week or so as I’m going to make a post about the framing and how that is going. Here is a teaser picture of what the basement looks like as I’m posting this today.