Infrastructure

The rest of this month is going to be dedicated to finishing out the infrastructure of the home. The HVAC is done with the exception of the basement furnace and the boiler for the radiant heat. Most of the rough plumbing is done and the electrical system is being built now. That leaves us down to interior framing around some of the mechanicals, finishing out the electric, and laying down the basis for the walls to be closed up.


The two pictures above are of the foyer ceiling. In and effort to define some of the space in the home; I decided to bring the ceiling in the foyer down 12" from the rest of the first floor ceiling height. When I originally thought of it I just wanted to create a differentiation between the foyer and the living room adjacent to the space. I came to find out from the architects that this is a method Frank Lloyd Wright employed several times in his spaces. In certain cases he brought the ceiling down so low in the foyer that it was uncomfortable. The idea is to compress the entrant to the point that no matter how much higher the ceilings got when you walked into the rest of the house, there entrant felt a sense of the home "opening" up to them as the walked into the house. Once I was told this by the architects I felt like it could be a great way to help further reinforce the open floor plan on the first floor.



This the "accent" wall where the fireplace used to be. We ended up making it about 10" thick as a result of having to run some plumbing related items (one stack and three supply lines) through the space to keep the soffiting to a minimum. When this is done it could be the feature of the entire first floor. However, I am going to keep the treatment of the wall under wraps for now...could be awesome.


When the plumbing, electrical, and HVAC are laid out in this template its nice to see all of the clean finished work. After looking at beat up, old (sometimes 100yrs old), and deteriorating infrastructure for the last two years, its nice to see the new infrastructure taking its place. This is really nothing more then a little bit of plumbing, but its nice and straight with the clean finished angles on the copper pipe.


This is the finished second floor HVAC unit. As I mentioned before, we decided to put two furnaces in the house to isolate the spaces and try to control the temperature of the home a little better. With the whole house being insulated with the spray foam insulation, the house should theoretically be one temperature. This means we are going to be using this furnace for not only our bedrooms, but also for the attic. It is going to be very important to make sure we heat/cool that space the same way as the bedrooms as it will all be one unit.

Carpenter will be there to work on the decks and interior frame out. Electricians are on today as well - I think they are the ones who will be most frustrated with me when we are done, lots of changes going on here.

Siding should start tomorrow (trim supposed to be delivered in the morning - crossing fingers)

ADT and Finish carpenter are coming tomorrow as well.

Should be a great week for progress