Exterior porch slabs poured

The concrete flatwork guys (Brian from Concrete Reality) were back out today pouring the exterior concrete areas. We have the front porch, rear porch, side-garage patio, and the slab for the chiller and generator. Paul had previously prepared the rebar reinforcements, like so:

It's hard to see in the above picture, but all of the rebar that touches\connects to the foundation wall, has been inserted into pre-drilled holes in the foundation. This helps to "lock" the porch slab to the foundation and prevent settling - a nice touch, I would not have thought of that.

A pumper truck was on-site in the morning to place concrete underneath the rear porch roof, but I wasn't around for that; everything else was poured directly from the chute on the truck:

The small slab to the right in the above picture will be where the chiller and generator sit.

Here's the side door porch:

Looking at this now, I kinda wish we had moved the door more to the center of the opening, or perhaps even more toward the right. It is an outward opening door and it looks like it will be a bit awkward to stand in front of the door and open it at the same time. Ah well, if this is the worst mistake we find I won't kick myself too hard. :)

The front porch looks simply awesome:

And finally, the rear porch:

This next picture is of our nearly-completed electric panels:

I know it's not porch or concrete related, but it just looks so darn cool I couldn't resist . At my last count, we have something like ~55 circuits in this house...

Low voltage and central vacuum rough-in

The low-voltage wiring rough-in is pretty much done; here are the two "cans" in my wife's closet:

The can on the left is for cable\satellite and phone; the one on the right is for networking and the intercom system. The blue "smurf tubes" go from the bottom of each can down into the crawl space, but both are empty: they're there for future extensibility only.

The camera wiring is in my closet; I'm not using a "can" for these, since I expect the PoE networking switches to generate quite a bit of heat:

Looks like a lot of cameras, huh? I am pre-wired for about eight exterior cameras, and a ton more of interior cameras. The exterior cameras require two wires, since most exterior cameras require a heated housing (or else they'd just fog up and be useless). After some of the contractors saw all of this wiring, I started hearing jokes like "where do you want us to cut the holes for the machine-gun ports?" Ha-ha. :-) I don't plan to hook all of these up, that might get a bit Orwellian, but I did want the ability to capture video of key spots like doors, garage, etc.

There are two 2" smurf tubes leading from attic crawl in the main part of the house, and another one in the kitchen part of the house. I am really glad these are in, it will make future wiring much more painless:

That round hole in the wall, to the left of the orange smurf tube, is for an exterior electrical receptacle. There are several of those around the house, unfortunately the building code does not allow us to use the black-painted trim blocks like for the lights; it has to be a specially-made, exterior-rated, electrical receptacle. Which won't look as nice as the trim blocks, but the code needs to be followed.

This next picture is of a ceiling corner in the game room:

Obviously there is a ton of low-voltage wiring, but you can also see the insulated (silver-wrapped) high-velocity A/C tube, and the yellow-capped, orange PVC piping for the sprinkler system. There are a specifically calculated number of A/C outlets (the specific # depends on heat loss calculations) and sprinkler heads (the specific # depends on requiring complete coverage of the floor) in each room; as an example, the game room has six A/C outlets and four sprinkler heads. Each type will be covered with a reasonably nice-looking trim ring after final installation.

This picture is of the downstairs closet underneath the stairs; you can see that there is a receptacle box and a low-voltage mud-ring up high on the wall:

I plan to put a shelf under that spot so I can plug in a wireless network access point. The guest bedroom closet upstairs has similar provisions.

Talking to the propane tank company rep on Friday (ordered the tank, more on that below) gave me a lot of good info, mainly about the need to properly size the interior gas supply lines for the needs of the various appliances. Well, we won't have any gas-fired appliances other than the generator, but he advised me to look carefully into the btu\hour requirements of whatever appliances I thought I might want to add in the future. He also suggested that I up-size the supply line from the tank from 1/2" to 3/4", just on the basis of the generator needs alone (the line from the tank to the house is under high pressure, so 1/2" to 3/4" is quite a jump; a regulator controls the supply at the point where the line enters the house).

Also on Friday, I finalized the interior gas piping stub-out plans:

• Boiler (backup heat source for chiller on very cold days)
• Water heater
• Cooktop
• Oven
• Downstairs laundry room (for dryer)
• Upstairs laundry room (ditto)
• Future fireplace stub-out
• Rear porch BBQ grill supply
• Generator

Only the generator and the BBQ will actually be run off of propane when we initially move in; the rest of the stub-outs are for future expandability. The generator specs say that a 1 1/4" supply line will be required, and same for a high-draw (200k btu\hour) tankless water heater (obviously that would be a peak-load figure for the water heater). The rest of the appliances seem to need much less.

Speaking of the generator...I decided after more thought, that I just wasn't willing to only have one of my two electrical panels be generator-enabled. So I've asked Joe our electrician to remove the current non-generator panel and replace it with a generator-enabled model. This will be costly, but I decided I didn't want to take the risk of kicking myself down the road for not doing it now. Fortunately Joe had not yet started wiring the panels. In conjunction with this decision, I ordered a Kohler 17kw generator which should be more than sufficient for our needs even in the middle of a dark, cold, power-less winter.

The final part of this decision chain was that once I decided to up-size the generator, I then decided to upgrade to a large, 1000 gallon underground propane tank, which also got ordered on Friday. The rough-in hole for this monster is huge: 5' wide by 6' deep by 18' long (!). Delivery\installation is scheduled for Wednesday September 30th, I will definitely try to be on hand for that event. (And even if we never need to run on generator - a chance I'm not willing to take - we'll have enough propane to run the BBQ for the rest of our lives. :)

The A/C guys have so far been working upstairs. I didn't have a ladder handy so I didn't get up into the attic space, so these pictures are all from below. This is the A/C return duct for upstairs:

Pretty big, huh? Well, bigger is better so that the "whooshing" sound is minimized. The A\C guys are also installing the exhaust fans; I heard one refer to them as "fart fans" - made me laugh when I heard that. I'll be sure to use that jargon from now on. As previously mentioned, all of these will be super-quiet Panasonic units; here's the guest bedroom exhaust fan:

Here's a view of the "mechanical corner" in the garage:

The white box next to the blue water pressure tank is a laundry tub. To the right of the door, behind the roll of tubing, is our new reverse-cycle chiller, waiting for its concrete pad to be poured so it can be bolted down. The chiller was smaller than I expected - tall but relatively narrow.

In the same picture above, if you look carefully at the plastic water tank to the right of the blue tank, you can see that it's almost full of water; I wasn't around for this, apparently the guys were doing some testing of the pipes by hooking up the well pump to temporary power. It is a busy little corner of the garage but it is looking pretty well organized, so I am happy.

For the central vacuum system, we ended up with two outlets upstairs, three downstairs, and two "toe-kick" panels underneath cabinets. This is what the roughed-in outlets look like:

The septic field work was delayed a bit, since the track hoe that Brad was using suffered some cracks on its bucket arms (both sides); someone must have come out and welded some temporary repair plates over the cracks:

Finally, the siding progress continues, here it's on the western side of the house:

That's all I got for now.

Septic field started

The septic field will be located to the northwest of the house. Works for me - it's out of the way in that location (unlikely to be driven over by vehicles), and is tucked nicely against the northern property boundary (so I'm not losing access to much of the property). In this picture, I'm standing on the rear porch roof looking northwest to where Brad cleared out the drain field area:

The mound of dirt in the foreground (hiding the view of the track hoe) was piled up months ago by Brad, saving it so it can later be piled over the top of the drain field. Do you see that tree still standing, seemingly in the middle of the drain field, behind the cab of the track hoe? I asked Brad why it hadn't been cleared out, and he said the rule is that any trees (or stumps) with a trunk diameter greater than 18" must be left in place. Removal of such large trees and their root systems has been deemed dangerous to the operation of the drain field, since the trenches need to be dug/laid in non-disturbed soil.

Here it is a day later; a load of smooth rock has obviously been dumped for use in the trenches:

This is one of the trenches in progress:

I was expecting to see pre-perforated PVC pipe, but Brad says it's better to use non-perforated pipe and then drill it on-site every foot or so with a 1/8" hole....that way apparently, the entire system stays fairly "pressurized" and doesn't leak all of the, um, stuff, into the ground in the first few feet of pipe.

Clearly I am NOT an expert on septic systems, but I've been told that our site was approved for a nice, simple system as these things go in today's world. The sewage will flow from the house via gravity into a septic tank (located to the west of the house); from there, a septic pump will push the fluids over\up to the drain field. Pure gravity-fed septic systems (ie, that are gravity-fed all the way out to the drain field) are rarely approved anymore, or so Brad said. A pressure-system (what we will have) is however pretty simple and not too costly to install; if our site had poor soil drainage (this is what soils engineers test for when they do a "perc test"), the septic engineer would have been forced to design a more ornate system, eg a "sand mound" system where they bring in umpteen truckloads of sand to create an artificially well-drained area for the drain field. That would have been much more costly, I'm glad we didn't have to do that.

In this picture, I'm standing in the middle of the drain field looking back toward the house (obv):

See that fern in the left foreground? It's sitting right behind a hole (it's hard to see), which is about 2' in diameter and about 2-3' deep, and is also marked with an orange flag. That hole is a soil drainage test hole - basically our septic engineer (Dean) dug the hole (many, many months ago), filled it with water (not sure how high), then used a stop watch to time how long it took to drain. Again, this is also known as a "perc test" ("perc" is short for "percolate"). There are several such holes in the drain field area, and Brad says he is required to leave them untouched so that the inspector knows for sure that the septic field was actually built in the approved location.

While he had his equipment back on site, we also decided to have Brad clear more space in front of the house (I mentioned this idea in a previous post). This isn't the best picture, but you can get an idea here of how much additional clearing was done (off to the right):

See the new dirt driveway emerging from the trees? We decided to leave a little "island" of trees to the left of that, since the transformer sits next to that location already, and it will also make a nice spot to camoflage the visible dome of the propane tank after it is installed.

The air-conditioning guys are on-site doing their things, and the electrician and plumber are doing final details...progress on the mechanical systems has been great and I'll have another post over the weekend to show details.

Weekend details

We visited the house this morning, not much has changed but I'll post anyway just so I'm caught up. The rough-framing for the master bathroom tub is in place:

The toilet area\enclosure is to the right of the tub, and the shower is to the left. Despite this being a healthy-sized bathroom, there wasn't much room left for the tub and it will be dropped in with little room to spare.

I ventured briefly into the crawlspace, which is busier than it used to be:

A small hole has been dug next to the house foundation, for drilling a through-hole for the drain to the septic tank. Speaking of which, our septic field permit should be released by the county very, very soon, and Brad the excavator will start clearing the septic field area and digging it out.

Not surprisingly, the garage has turned into a staging area for materials as well a nice spot for cutting materials. It's a bit messy right now:

You can see that the "mechanical corner" has been drywalled in, mainly because the plumber will be hooking up the big water tanks soon, which makes them immovable. I was out on Saturday right before they did the drywall; this is how the water supply line from the well is routed (this is a cell phone pic):

The water heater requires a lot of plumbing (it comes down out of the ceiling, directly above the water heater location in the garage):

The only other item of importance, is that we've decided to have tile flooring throughout the kitchen area, instead of the hardwood flooring we originally planned on. Hardwood (oak) flooring is beautiful, but the fear of messing it up with dropped food, grease spatter from fry pans, etc, scares us both - so we're taking the safer route with tile. A bit harder on the feet, but at least it will be warm!

More siding and stuff

Woof - we've had our hands full lately trying to watch the house progress, plan ahead for upcoming decisions, and make I-need-to-know-right-now decisions. The house is full of subcontractors, all doing their thing - it's a very busy time.

We went out to the site last Saturday morning, and Paul was there putting in some weekend time. Generally speaking the crew does a cleanup job on the house each Friday afternoon before they leave, but apparently not that Friday; so Paul was starting to sweep up the house. We jumped in and volunteered to do that, so he could something more directly useful to the house. It took us over two hours to get everything cleaned up (granted, we only had a couple of crappy brooms to work with) - the subs had been doing a lot of drilling so dust and shavings were everywhere. The point of this little story? Sweeping out a 3900 square foot house by hand has solidified our decision to get a central vacuum system installed. :-)

Anyway....the siding continues to crawl up the sides of the house:

This is some nice trim work under the eaves; the gaps will all get caulked prior to painting:

The can lights are almost all roughed in, and wires are dangling all over waiting to be hooked up:

The plumbing guy ("Robinson Plumbing" is the company, no link sorry) is nearly all done with his rough-in; this is what our exterior hose bibs will look like:

This is obviously a laundry room washer hookup:

Paul is also getting ready to pour the remaining exterior concrete areas (porches, side entrance, etc). Rather than pour a solid 2-3' thick slab, he saves some money by piling dirt up in the area and compacting it:

This made me worry about potential future settling of the concrete, so I asked him about it; the answer was that before they pour, he will have his guys build a rebar grid that gets drilled and tied into the foundation.

Yesterday we met with a rep from the cabinet company to go over final choices on the cabinets, which actually went very smoothly.

We went through the house today with Joe the electrician and selected outlets for the central vacuum system. There will be three outlets on the ground floor, two on the upper floor, and two toe-kick ports (one in the downstairs laundry room, the other in the kitchen).

We also met with David from Symmetric Electric to do final selection of all of the low-voltage stuff. I tried to restrain myself but essentially failed - I can tell you now, we're going to have a large number of phone\CAT6\RG6 drops throughout this house. Critical areas like my office :-) will get two RG6 at each drop (for watching a show and recording one at the same time). Living room will be wired for 7.1 surround sound, and we will also have two outside speakers on the rear porch. The upstairs game room will be wired in two corners for TV, and will also have four speakers in the ceiling (think "football game" here, not "audio-phile sound"). I also found a really cool intercom system made by OnQ - you can use any panel to either talk to all panels (e.g., "hey everyone, it's dinner time!"), or to talk to any other individual panel (e.g., "Zachary, time for your nap!"), or you can even use a panel in a child's room as a baby monitor (not an issue for us, actually); also, special outside panels can be used for door bell purposes. It took a few hours but we went through the entire house and selected locations for phone+data+video drops, plus intercom drops. Oh yeah, plus locations for flat panel TV screens so they can be plugged in with no cords dangling underneath them (because, that's simply so critical to have these days, ya know :).

We also did a walkthrough today with Rob from Mitchell Mechanical, to do final selection on the high velocity A/C ducts. This high velocity A/C system is supposed to do a spectacular job of keeping the house consistently cool, with no "whooshing" sounds as with normal A\C. Part of the quietness comes from having multiple ducts per room (each duct is about 3" round), as many as four ducts in sunny-side-facing areas. There are computer programs which take into account square footage, house orientation to the sun, air flow from room to room, air flow from floor to floor, etc; the final result is a table which shows the heat gain for each room, which then details how many ducts are needed to counteract that heat. Normal A/C systems can have this done too, but this high-velocity stuff appears to be more flexible in design. Well, I don't want to over-sell this system until I get a chance to actually experience how it works - let's hope it lives up to the advertisements.

Well that was a lot of details, but not too much new in the way of pictures. Next week should have some more visually significant progress to detail.