Building Our Modern Home in Atlanta: Trade Week

We may actually be setting a record on our house for the longest amount of time spent framing a house this size. The good news is that we've had so many schedule slips that I'm numb to them at this point. The bad news is that along with those slips have come numerous budget overages and we've entered the compromise phase. To help combat those compromises I've taken to deal searching on a daily basis. I've also started doing some things myself. I'll get more into that in later posts - first, a status update.

Framing has been 97% done for a few weeks now. The framing punch list has been painfully slow and is still not complete. Hopefully, the outstanding items will get resolved this week.
Plumbing rough-in has started and is probably two-thirds of the way done.
The roof is on, but not entirely adhered.
The stone has been chosen and the backerboard is going up on the exterior this week.
HVAC just started

Plumbing is worthy of a few comments. The first quote came back way over our budget. I tried to figure out what happened and the builder's estimate magically missed a number of fixtures and didn't take into account some of the bells and whistles we wanted. Originally, I was throwing around a few ideas for plumbing: PEX manifold system, recirculating hot water pump, prep the shower for a steam unit, veggie sink in the kitchen, dual shower heads in the master, and insulated hot water pipes.

The quote we got was for copper piping. Having them switch this to PEX saved about $1200. A lot of people out there are fearful of PEX, but I did a lot of research and the pros far outweigh the cons to me. My biggest concern was using a plastic for water supply, but PEX has been in use for over 30 years and there is nothing to indicate chemicals are leaching into the water. I orginally wanted a home run manifold system but this added about $600 in cost and the plumber explained that this takes up a lot space in the floor joists for running all that pipe. It also makes it very difficult to have a recirculating pump in an effective manner that serves the whole house. So we opted for PEX in a trunk and branch configuration (what's done with copper) and we got the recirculation pump with the hot water supply lines insulated. Another way we saved money was by seeking out plumbers on our own. The builder wasn't coming through with competitive bids so sent out the job to a couple of other plumbers. One came back about $1000 less than the builder's plumber, but they decided to match the price. Score!

The roof is one area of relief for us. This came in $2k under budget which was a much needed break for us. The roof is a TPO membrane roof installed on top of 2-4" of rigid fiberglass foam. The membrane is white so our cooling bills should be much less and the foam used to slope the roof slight will give us added R-value up top.

One of my wishlist items is to have the house insulated with spay-in foam. The cost is about $10k to do our whole house. This was 4 times our insulation budget so we've decided to foam the second floor ceiling and put fiberglass batts in the walls. To achieve the air-tight seal of foam everywhere else, I decided to start doing some work myself. I'm going to dedicate a post to that soon so stay tuned for more info.

I title this post "Trade Week" because we should have at least 4 or 5 trades on the job this week. It's about time! I may finally have a reason to update this blog on a weekly basis.