The big cover up (Feb 23rd)

We drove up to see a big pile of sand in our front yard. This had to mean stucco was coming soon. Very exciting.

What was more exciting was that the rooms suddenly were a lot like rooms. Up until this point we really had only a vague sense of what the inside spaces were like. The insulation helped define some of the rooms but the drywall changed that a lot.

The place was a mess but it was cool to see ceilings and interior walls. Even the stairs to the basement became suddenly really cool stairs to the basement.

One odd thing...

We found three or four propane containers next to empy Coke cans. To this day I don't know what this was all about.

Actually, there was one more odd thing...

I can't explain this either.

Earlier in the week we got a phone call from the design center. It was time to select our granite slabs. We left the house pretty excited about the developments there and headed to Arizona Tile.

Stay tuned...

Insulae Chavez (Feb 15)

Although the winters in Arizona are great, the summer requires that we isolate the interior of our house from the outside. In order to make the inside insular, we need to insulate.



If only it could be that easy with neighbors.

One of the options we had available to us was Blown Cellulose Insulation. I had been seeing a lot of it on some home shows and we really liked the idea.





You take a bunch of newspaper, chop it up into tiny little pieces, then blow it out of a big tube into spaces between the wall studs. Just as the newspaper leaves the blower, you spray it with an adhesive to help it stick to the vertical surfaces.


Come back later and shave it down with a brush and then, as Burt Munro used to say, "Bob's your uncle."

Our house has about 120 years of newspaper in it.



Lots of cool environmental things about blown cellulose insulation. Uses 90% less energy to manufacture, it bio-degrades, is 80% recycled and blah blah blah. But really, if they made it out of the freshly opened eyes of a thousand Snow Leopard kittens, we probably would have still gone through with it.




Ok, Snow Leopards are pretty cool, so if that was the only way we'd get the blown insulation we'd have gone with fiberglass batt insulation, but if they would have offered us some baby harp seal insulation...

The really cool thing about this stuff is that it does NOT contain any minuscule fibers that lodge themselves in your skin when you are crawling around in your attic wiring up the motion sensors for your house.

One thing you'll notice, the "non-livable" areas were insulated with regular fiberglass batt. I would have liked all of it to have been cellulose but not enough to try to pay some extra for it.

If you can deal with Bob Villa you can see it being applied here. My favorite quote, "...isn't it all lumpy?"

If there is a downside to this stuff it would have been the huge mess it made inside the house. It looked like an Ororo Monroe fight scene.


They cleaned up when they were done and we started walking around.

I found a couple of areas where the spaces weren't filled in all the way and called Paul to see what he thought. He agreed they were thin and called the company back to fix. Right about that time we saw that the shade cables were sticking out of the insulation. We had rolled it up into a donut shape that would fit between the studs but the twist on the cables had it actually twisted 90 degrees from where it needed to eventually be.



The insulation guys didn't bother to twist it to it's final position before applying the insulation, they just insulated right over it as if there was going to be a huge lump in our wall right there.


I hammered in some staples into the studs, zip-tied the shade cable into it's proper place and Paul was going to have them cover it up. As you can see it actually came out pretty well.


This was a very inexpensive upgrade and will be more than worth it during the summer.

There's going to be like a foot of this stuff in the ceiling. They install that after the drywall is in.




More on that later...

Wiring complete

Here's the end result at the cabinets. We also added some conduit so we can run more cable later if we need to. The conduit is the blue tube you see below.

Seventh Circle of Basement (Data Cable-3 Feb 02)

It was time for lunch and we all found some step or 2x4 to lean on for lunch. Spicy Chicken Sandwiches all around.

There were some tricky areas to climb around because of the plumbing and electrical and in hindsight, it is impressive that we didn't damage anything. We had some tricky moves to make climbing up and down as we only had one ladder that reached the ceiling.

The area over the kitchen is pretty crazy.

The upstairs was pretty much complete, it was getting dark and we moved down to the basement.

As we had been pulling wires all day long some of the attention to detail was starting to slip. One thing we did notice, Guardian totally screwed up the 5.1 audio set up in the basement. They wired for ceiling speakers instead of wall speakers, ran an audio connection from the cabinets in the garage to a random wall in the basement closet, ran a data line to the speaker connections box and completely missed a data jack in the closet.

This was a disaster and we had to fix it ourselves.

Why not just leave it and have Guardian fix it? You’ll remember we had already wired the upstairs. You’ll also remember that our entire operation relied on stealth. If Guardian discovered what we did, not only would they complain to Fulton and complicate my life, but they would likely not warranty any of their wiring.

Their retarded wiring was partly repairable by just moving things around, but we had to buy additional wire and a wall box to cover the rest. This was pretty disappointing but the silver lining here was that if Guardian complained about any of the wiring I did, I could take them to task for this huge blunder.

Barb had to make the run for wiring and came back with donuts.

Pull some cable, pull some more, eat a donut, cut some cable, tie it up, eat a donut, pull it down to the jack hide the cable, eat a donut. Repeat as necessary.

We fixed their problem and finished measuring and cutting our cable. We gathered it all up at the same hole that we used for the shade cables and pulled it through. There was a section where we pulled a lot more than what was needed so we cut this on the basement end and moved upstairs to finish pulling this run across the ceiling and down to the cabinets.

It was now about 10PM and we wanted to just get this wiring done. We weren’t going to be able to really make it neat tonight. We’d have to come back on Superbowl Sunday to finish things in the morning.

Remember the cable that was way too long in the basement and we decided to cut it? Yeah, that was a bad idea. When we got done pulling the cable across the ceiling we realized that we had missed something downstairs and didn’t pull that section the same distance as the rest before cutting them.

Now it wouldn’t reach at all. Disaster again.

We moved some stuff around, altered our route for that section, and managed to make it work. We were tired, Mark had a long drive home, Alex had left hours earlier and we were out of donuts. We’d fix and finalize the rest on Sunday before the game.

For the record, even though Alex agreed to work all day for 20 bucks, we gave him a few multiples of the agreed to price as I really felt he had negotiated poorly, didn’t have a good understanding of what his time was worth, and really helped out a lot.

This is what we ended up with at almost every jack. The Guardian wire and two of ours looped up and hidden.

Wire day (Data Cable-2 Feb 02)

The big day was Saturday. The day before the Superbowl. I had one day, maybe a day and a half to get the cable installed.









There were three main runs, one bundle ended near the master bedroom, one on the west side of the house, and one in the basement. I only had time to pull the upstairs cable, the basement run would have to be pulled on site.

Once again I acquired cheap labor from my friend Mark and my loving, patient wife. The logistics of this work required many people doing light work instead of few working hard. I hinted around at work.

“Hey, Network guys!! Remember that time we wired up that closet for that new hospital tower? Man that was fun. Boy I wish we had something else to wire! Say, you know what would be fun…?”
“Hey there, Project Managers, I know you guys like projects ha ha…”


















I suppose it wasn’t surprising that nobody jumped at the chance to drive an hour on their day off to work for free. Not all was lost, however. A coworker’s son, Alex was looking for work and was willing to strap a ladder to the top of his car, drive an hour and a half to help for about 20 bucks.

So we started pulling cable. Things were going well. Some interesting notes for the day:

• Mark’s not a fan of heights.
• Alex, a hard worker, likes to pass the time talking.
• Make sure you haven’t threaded your cable through some impossible path accidentally.
• Toward the end of a 10 hour day, chocolate covered hostess donuts are good, but the donettes are outstanding. One bite = much chocolaty goodness.
  

Hiding the cables was tricky, we pulled the cables beyond the needed length and then loosely staple, them up inside the wall where they are out of view but within reach when we tried to grab them later. This actually was easier than it sounded and after some testing we were able to determine right length and tension for maximum stealth.












The main floor took most of the day and as the sun was starting to go down we moved down to the basement to run the cable down there. This wasn’t a complicated run but we did have to pull all of the lines individually, add 40 feet, then pull them up to the cabinets upstairs. Time consuming but not complicated.



We also drilled holes for the shades for all of the window shade cables. Originally we had tucked these cables behind the wall studs, but the more I thought about it, I thought it would be a huge pain to recover these unless I had drilled holes for them.








For the most part things were running smoothly. We had a couple of instances where we had to back a run out and run it over or under some obstacle. There was one instance where we had pulled 30 or 40 feet, tied it up, and started neatening it when we realized we had run it under an electrical cable. Untieing it was really a depressing thought, it would be faster but a lot harder to do. We chose to completely dissasemble the electrical outlet and move it around the cable.


A minor setback and we moved on.

Big Preppin' (Data Cable-1 Feb 02)

Writing about pre-wiring the shades was taxing, actually doing the work wasn’t that bad.

It went so much better than I expected, I started thinking I should expand my wiring plan.

I had originally figured I’d add a wire or two to a few jacks and that would be it, but now the possibility of adding two data lines to every data location became very alluring. I knew it was going to be a lot of work so I set out to do as much prep as possible.

Pre-measuring, cutting, and bundling the wire for an easier pull through the house was the plan. First, I’d need wire.

Lots of it.


When I ordered the shade wire I also ordered some nice cat-5 cable and then I managed to get six boxes of lower quality cable that were slightly used but had close to 1000’ in each box.

Interestingly, the price of the wholesale cable was slightly higher than the same length at Home Depot. This bummed me out until I actually started to use it. The jacket of the “pro” stuff was higher quality and seemed sturdier during the pulls. We’ll see if that carries into the actual termination.

So there I was with about six thousand feet of cable. Now what?

While running the shade cable I realized a truth that had eluded me prior. Related to the “Hole Don’t Move” rule, this was much more inclusive and elegant. Like a unifying theory that ties together the rules for very big things and very small things, this truth was all-encompassing and absolute.

I call this the “House pretty much don’t change shape, size, or length or width” rule.

Armed with my newfound enlightenment I measured from a central spot to each jack once and then had all the information I needed for the rest of the job. Part of the problem was that it was still cold out, but the big monkey hanging from the ceiling was that I really wasn’t supposed to do any of this.

Guardian was going to come in after the walls were up and they would be ready to terminate one jack per box, but I was going to have at least three lines at each box. Even the dimmest of wiring guys would see that three was more than one.

He’d just sit there for a while, staring at the “not-one” cable trying to sort out what to do next.

This isn’t good, he’d think. This is definitely NOT one cable. Paperwork’s all wrong. "All wrong!!" he'd scream.

Then he’d hear the voice and shudder uncontrollably, “It puts the cable in the jack, or it gets the hose again…”

When he regained consciousness he’d phone the main office and tell them that there was a “situation” and they’d have to send Hank out. Hank would figure out what had happened, file a report and the Fulton police would raise the price of the house.

Well, perhaps not, but I’m sure they wouldn’t be pleased about it and Paul would catch some heat. Paul’s a really good guy and I didn’t want to complicate his life.

I’d have to figure out how to hide the wires, allow guardian to do their work, and retrieve the extra wires after the house closing. More on that later, for now, I had cable to measure.

Cable measured, cut, wrapped, categorized, and labled we set off to install.