Drywall

Once the insulation goes up on the exterior walls you can begin to see the rooms take shape however you can still see between the interior walls so its still sort of hard to determine what each room actually looks and feels like. Once the drywall goes up the house seems to take a turn from a construction site to a home. You start to get a pretty good idea of exactly how big (or small) each room is and you begin to envision where the furniture is going to go and how functional each area would be. Some rooms start to look larger than you imagined, partly because of the white walls, while others look smaller now that they are closed in. Either way, the house is really starting to take shape and we are getting very excited to see real progress. This week we expect exterior stucco, drywall completion, and possibly garage and interior doors. Interior and exterior paint, and driveway and sidewalk should follow shortly thereafter. Our project manager told us way back during our pre-construction meeting that he plans to give us a weekly update to let us know what has been completed in the past week as well as what he expects to have completed in the week ahead however that has yet to happen. Not a big deal since I am able to make it out there at least 4-5 times a week, if not more. Also because our house is the last in a group of 5 I can usually tell what to expect based on what is going on with the others.

Insulation

Went by the house today and all of the insulation has been installed. They started over the weekend and I snapped a pic before they were done. I don't know much about insulation but I see they used R-13 for all the bag insulation which according to Home Depot is about as low as you would want to go for a wall framed in 2x4. I'm willing to bet that they will also blow in the minimum for this zone as well (R-30). I sort of forgot that they have to insulate over the garage since there is going to be a bedroom above there. I hope this means the garage won't get as hot (or cold LOL) as weather changes. Also with the hybrid water heater it should help with it not being so hot all the time. I only snapped one pic of their progress about halfway through.

Pre-Drywall Meeting

Well it's been a while since I've posted an update but a lot has happened since the last post. Framing has been completed and several vendors have been in doing their respective work. The framers have put up all of the walls, plumbers ran the rough-ins and put in the actual bath tubs and filled them with water (to test for leaks), HVAC duct work was run, electrical outlets and fixtures were pre-wired, and low-voltage cabling was installed. They even delivered the drywall before all of that was done. Oh and by the way, the drywall folks broke a window. I told the PM about it but he told me they won't replace it until the very end for two reasons: 1) it is only a crack in the window and does not allow any water to penetrate and 2) replacing it now could end up being costly if it gets broken again. After all of the above vendors were doing we were scheduled for our pre-drywall meeting with the project manager. Based on our own research we had decided to hire out own outside inspector as this is the only opportunity we would have to get the "bones" of the house inspected to make sure everything was built correctly. This inspection was one day before our pre-drywall meeting and he reviewed the blueprints to ensure that everything that was called for by the blueprints was in place and also that the house was structurally sound. Once it was all said and done, we realized that this inspection was a bit of a waste. We've read a lot of blogs where people explained how the project manager works for the builder, and not for you which is true however, our inspector did not find anything that the project manager and/or the city inspector would not have found. He mainly was looking to see if the house was built according the the blueprints (right size bolts, screws vs nails, etc.). Although it is important to make sure the actual work that is done is of quality, something that I learned is that it is more important to make sure the plans have been reviewed by a building engineer.

But back to the lessons learned....I realized as I was walking around the house one day that I wanted to get an exterior flood light installed on one of the back corners of the house. It made sense to just have the electrician do it while he was there. I asked him if he would do it even if I paid him directly and he refused without a thought. I know some people on other blogs have said how they were able to get the guys to do add-ons by paying them under the table. Well I tried this but he wouldn't bite at all. It makes no sense why something as small as this cannot be accommodated but again I hope someone else can take this as a lesson learned and decide everything they want beforehand. I also tried the same thing with the rep from Guardian (low-voltage). I wanted him to install a cable outlet in two additional bedrooms. I left it off originally because it is the kid's bedrooms and I never plan to put TVs in there but then later on I thought about resale and how it would make sense to at least have the connections there even if they go unused for years to come. Nevertheless this is something else I would have to add later on...not a big deal, just an inconvenience.

Okay now THIS I forgot to mention and I honestly didn't even think about it until I was looking back through the pictures. So one of the master closets was supposed to be a little larger than the other due to the option of the double doors that we selected. Well I was quite surprised to see that the HVAC guys ended up running the air return duct for the downstairs AC through that closet. I didn't know where this was supposed to go, but I know it wasn't here. We were expecting a nice size closet but instead there is this big ass air duct running in the corner of the closet. I ran it by the home inspector we had to come out and he said it wasn't on the blueprints.Come to find out, this is one of the only floor plans in the community that has two AC units and because of this, they don't come across the issue of where to run the return vent for downstairs. We asked the PM to look into what can be done to have it moved although we had a feeling that this was the only option based on the way the house is laid out. As an alternative, we asked if they could frame out an additional closet somewhere else  since we are losing some closet space here. As it turns out, about a day and a few phone calls later we were told that his management approved to build an additional closet in the downstairs study, making it into a bedroom. While this isn't always an option, they understood that we were very upset to find out that the closet we had been shown on both the floor plan and in the model (Cypress Garden, similar layout) was not what we were getting. All in all it worked out well and in terms of resale purposes, we got an extra bedroom but we are still stuck with a smaller closet than we had  hoped for.