This is an exciting week coming up: insulation and drywall.
Over the past month or two we’ve been running like dogs to keep ahead of our renovation todo list. We’re both “the Boss” and “grunt slave labor” on this project, working with our contractor and subs to keep the project somewhat resembling on schedule and minimize the inevitable budget overages.
Since the demo phase we’ve had no walls to speak of, which allows easy access to all the things we’re putting in said walls. Since that ends this week, we’ve been scrambling to get all the in wall stuff in and ready for insulation and even more so, drywall. After that adding things that go through walls becomes a lot less convenient.
That’s included 2000ft of CAT6 for phone and data, mostly because you always pull two cables to have a spare, and since it’s my profession generally speaking, I wasn’t going to do it halfway. (Well, I did use to run cable back in the day, now I’m higher in the networking food chain and let others have that fun).
Other cabling included:
~500Ft of RG6 Coax for cable TV (with a run for the future to the studio coiled under the house, have to trench for that…)
~1000Ft of speaker wire (two per room really eats up cable, especially to the back of the house)
-And the doorbell. We’re keeping the original button, replacing the chime, and I have a nefarious plan to have it notify me via twitter or something equally over-the-top-geeky, mostly just because I can. And after pulling all this cable I should have some fun.
Money saving hint: 12-2 landscape lighting low voltage wire is exactly the same as good speaker wire and a lot cheaper because it’s not labeled “speaker wire”. There’s a lot of marketing crap out there, but all that really counts is that it’s stranded copper and heavy gauge for longer runs (of which I had many). Audiophiles get what my mother calls “all Nth-degree about it”, and a market has popped up to take advantage of this. If they could figure out how to polish electrons and call them special “audio-transduction-electro-magnetic-wave-packets” and charge extra for them, they would. But I digress.
I think I drilled about 200 holes for pathways for all this plus all of the electrical. Walter our “German Master Electrician” was great to work with, and only had to drill a bit here and there, rather than spending hours of his valuable (expensive) time on it.
I probably removed ten pounds of wood just by drilling, but added back about 150 pounds of copper just in the cables (speaker cable is heavy!). After tidying up a few things (edit- done!) we’ll be hands off for a while during insulation and drywall.
It’s time for a break while we consider our next priorities, mostly the master bath details, that kinda has to be done before we move back in… Fortunately most of those details have been settled, there’s just some design work I have to finish (and Lois has to like) before we complete that phase.
It’s going to be great. I tell myself this often lately, sung to the tune of “I think I can…”
