Thursday, March 6, 2008

January 25th

Coolness....

We drove up earlier in the day and there was a guy putting styrofoam on the outside of the house and attaching the wire. There were actually more guys but they were on the other side of the house. When we came back later the house looked like this.

Ready for stucco

The morning before I met with the Project Manager from Fulton (Paul) and the guys from Guardian. This was the company that provides low voltage services to Fulton Homes home buyers.

They claimed we had ordered more wiring than they usually see. I agreed that it was probably more than they normally see (but it wasn't that much to me). The problem I faced at the Design Center was that I would not be allowed to run wiring myself. So I had to decide how much wiring I wanted and where I wanted it within a very short period. After working out some numbers in my head I sat with the Guardian representative in the Design Center and we started working out the placement of the data lines and cable.

It got so cluttered that he gave up on the idea of figuring it out now. "You know, I think we should just meet on site when it's time to install the cable so we can determine the exact placement." Which is sales talk for, "You crazy."

So, months later, we met and walked through everything. By that time I had planned to sneak in and run some wire on my own without Fulton's knowledge. (that's a story for later) As a result I decided to trade a couple of wiring bundles for two speaker pre-wire runs and an additional wiring cabinet. Guardian actually made more money on the cabinet than normal, and I got some extra space for future expansion.

Lots of Wire

White=Security, Grey=Speaker, Blue=Data

Next up.... Shades...

Monday, March 3, 2008

January 19th

This was a cool day. Electrical was completed. We had come by a couple of nights before to see how far they had come with the electrical but the electrician team was still there at 7 pm listening to crazy music and running wire. We left them alone lest we interrupt some sort of ritual.









The AquaPex and the natural gas lines were in as well. Why does code require them to be cast iron? Because when it explodes it causes more shrapnel, that's why.







The roof was loaded with tile. They add the weight of the tile to the roof to help the house settle. I guess it's less spooky that way at night. While I was taking pictures this homeless person wandered in the view and wouldn't leave.






We will be installing a Lutron RadioRa lighting system and we'll need to have additional space in the gang boxes to install some of the master controllers. How would we know where the controllers would go? We had to design the system and figure out which lights were going to be controlled by which switches and in which areas you'd want to be able to control more than one light at a time and so on. Lutron provides a cool tool for just this purpose and after you are done with the layout you can print out wiring instruction sheets for the electricians so they run each light load to the right switch.

I met with the electricians and they liked the idea and so we stapled them to the framing next to the gang locations. You can see one of them in this picture.

As we were walking around we saw our lot sign. For some reason this made it "official" for us. The signatures, contracts, agreements, and the actual building didn't actually make it official. We needed to have this sign or the deal was off.






In the end.... even with all the excitement...


Homeless