House is almost ready for interior walls

As promised, a little bit of status on the new house in Falmouth. This picture was taken about 2 weeks ago when we were their for the 4th of July. As you can see, the roof and sidewall shingling has been completed. So you get a good feel for the texture of outside of the house.

If you look closely, you see that wires are hanging out of the light blocks on the garage. At this time, all the interior rough electrical is complete which is to say that all the ceiling lights, outlet boxes, switch boxes, etc. are installed and wire pulled to them. Tim (our electrician) also pulled data, video and speaker wire to various places we wanted, and gave me a nice set of empty conduits from the basement to the attic (we have a low ceiling attic over most of the upstairs) so that I can easily add stuff to the second floor in the future and connect it to all our infrastructure in the basement.

The heating/cooling folks finished up their rough work last week. That means all the duct work and the air handlers to drive it was installed. We are using a "hydro-air" that leverages a central boiler (in the basement) and delivers that hot water to remote units that use the water to heat the air. In our case, the second floor has two of these units and there is a third in the basement for the first floor. These air handlers also have A/C coils in them to cool the air in the summer and slightly fancy air filters.

Yesterday, the plumbing crew came in. We are using PEX for all the supply lines in the house and traditional PVC waste pipe. I am looking forward to the PEX since you run it like wire back to a central distribution panel (which has a cool, central system, nerd quality for me), it installs very quickly and it costs much less that copper. The two guys working the plumbing will most likely finish all the rough work (pipes to every location) in 3-4 days.

Once the plumbers are done, we should be ready for the framing, rough electrical and rough plumbing inspections. This is an important milestone because it means that the walls and ceilings can get insulated and covered with wallboard (in MA, we use "blue board" with "skim coat plaster" over the entire surface rather than drywall and seaming with joint compound). Once the walls are up, we will really get a feel for the space.

The one thing that has changed fairly significantly from the original plan is the covered part of the deck on the back. Everyone had a little bit of contribution to this change, but Dennis (our framer) had the main idea to reshape the roof over the screened area and extend the deck to create more usable space. As a bonus, the new roof line improves the look of the back of the house a lot. Melissa and I are really looking forward to enjoying that space. I will make sure to include pictures next time.

We have been making the final decisions on a lot of the interior bits. The kitchen and bathroom cabinets were just ordered. We have picked out the tile and wood flooring products for the first floor. The second floor will be wall-to-wall carpet except for the bathrooms. We expect to be back there sometime in late August to install flooring, install the kitchen cabinets, paint the walls in most of the rooms, etc.

People keep asking "When are you going to move?" and we are starting to sort that out. I expect we will be there by Thanksgiving and maybe as early as Halloween. But, we should get a better feel once the walls go up and we know the lead time on the interior elements (cabinets, trim, floors, etc.).