Building Our Modern Home in Atlanta: Slow June, Productive July

June was fraught with frustration, foul ups, and delays. Things finally picked up near the end of June and we've come along way since. The exterior is probably 90% complete. The stucco is finished minus a few punch list items, the wood has been stained, and the lot has been graded. On the inside, the doors were hung, the drywall is up, primer is on, and most of the tile has been installed.

The exterior wood stain has been a big disappointment. The painter who performed this completely screwed it up. The are runs, uneven patches, and he didn't even bother to sand the pencil marks off. Luckily, he hasn't been paid yet and he wants an opportunity to fix it. I'm skeptical. Tell me what you think of this:

The stucco looks nice, but we plan on knocking it off the edge of the cantilevered porch. The edge is too rough so we plan on grinding the concrete so it's smooth.

The windows are awesome but they've been a very big pain in the ass. The framer charged us extra since all the rough openings weren't big enough for the windows even though the window manufacturer signed off on the openings. To make matters worse, we have 13 broken windows. Four of them are obvious breakages that happened during the install. The other 9 broke after installation and not from any impact. There's still a big debate happening right now over this issue. The window company is attempting to help, but it has not been a pleasant experience and we're still out more money than we should be. I'll go into detail in other post. I want everyone to know about this window company and how this went down so they can make an informed decision if they ever consider this manufacturer. For now, I have to keep quite so I don't piss them off too badly. I still need them!

The electrical rough-in took longer than expected. Part of that was due to my laundry list of requirements. I wired things to the hilt! The 120v wiring wasn't too over the top. We tried to keep it reasonable because this gets expensive quickly. We did manage to wind up with two 200A panels which is a little much for a house of this size, but it does leave us room for more circuits when we finish the basement. I had additional wire run to places where we might want future lights which added up due to labor and the cost of copper, but I think it will be worth it later on down the road.

Low-voltage is where I went crazy. I designed all the low-voltage and the alarm system. I couldn't afford everything I wanted so I ended up doing some of it myself. I ran speaker wires to every room as well as some A/V wires to allow for flexibility of equipment locations in the living room. For networking, CAT6A is wired to every room and in some cases to more than one location in a room. The CAT6A was 30% more than CAT5e, but it can handle much higher speeds when consumer devices go beyond 1Gbps network connections. I don't think this will happen anytime soon, but I wanted some amount of future-proofing. The coax used is Belden 7915A which goes up to 3Ghz. This can be used for cable or satellite and the higher speed should be able to handle any new technologies that use coax. Every TV location got 2 coax runs and 3 CAT6A runs. I went with three network runs so I can run HDMI over CAT6 and then still have a network connection for a TV or set-top box. Due the amount of wiring, I couldn't afford all of this. So I'm not going to have the electrician terminate any of the connections. I can do that myself and only do it for wires as they get used.

The speaker wire was fairly easy to install. I think it took it me a couple of days. On the first floor, I purchased speaker back boxes and installed those to keep sound from traveling up the second floor. Speaker back boxes are not cheap. I went EccoBox which are made out of recycled blue jeans: http://www.cascadeaudio.com/commercial_residential/speaker_and_lighting_enclosures.htm. These were about $40 a piece, but easy to install. Here's some of my handy work with the speaker wires.

Speaker wires running down into the basement wiring closet

Speaker back box

HDMI, Component, Cat6A, RCA, TOS...pretty much everything!

Central Vac Plumbing

We will have a few window treatments that will be difficult to access. I had the electrician run some wiring for motorized shades as well. The wiring is cheap but installing those is not. It's another DIY project that I plan to integrate with the home automation system. The cost of installing central vacuum plumbing was much either so we had that installed. We'll worry about the unit itself later on down the road.

Moving on from electrical, the doors had to go in before drywall which is not the norm. We won't have any casement around our doors. Instead, we are using an aluminum z-channel which creates a 1/2" reveal between the door and the drywall. This reveal will also be between the baseboards and the drywall. Since I can't stand shoe molding, the flooring is going in before the trim and will go as close as possible to the stud walls. This will allow the baseboards to act as the shoe molding.

Here are some interior shots post dry-wall. Also the upstairs tile was done last week. It's not grouted yet, but it looks very good.