Backdrop

Wow! Sorry for the long silence. They've been busy at the house, but most of the work isn't really 'photo-worthy'. Not to disparage all the hard work being done, but wires, pipes and vents are not going to win any excitement awards, as critical as they all are. The vents for the heating/air cond. were completed this week. It's funny that when you move into a completed house you sometimes think "now why would you put the vent there?" What I'm learning is that sometimes you don't have a lot of choice as to where stuff ends up. It depends on how the house was framed, where utility room is located relative to the rest of the house, where the utility companies are willing to put their hook-ups and whether a vent or pipe is exactly where you wanted to put your lights!! Of course, most options can be worked out, but many of them will cost more! So....sometimes you just shrug and say, "I can live with that."

With respect to the HVAC vents we lucked out a little in the basement as most of the vents that fell below the joists are in the guest bedroom so we'll have full 9' ceilings in the rec room part of the basement except for this one small area near the stairs (see left) where they needed to run a vent from the microhood. In the bedroom, we dropped the whole ceiling to 8' to cover up the vents rather than try to piece around them. It's a cleaner look.

Most of the plumbing is in. There's still a cache of very valuable copper piping in the basement, but the house is all locked up and has a temporary security system in place so it's pretty well protected. The plumber should finish up by early next week. Dux, the security/stereo guru, is done until they close up the walls. The picture below is all the wires for the security and entertainment systems. We prewired several rooms for future stereo speakers so we can live in the house for awhile before we decide if we need/want speakers everywhere.

The electrician has been working like a madman, but there are a lot of wires still to run. We went over the basement and exterior layouts with him on Tuesday so there's a plan, it just takes a lot of time. I finally went up to the lighting place this morning and think I have all the lighting picked out. We're doing a lot of recessed lights so there weren't as many fixtures to pick out as there might have been and Judy was really helpful. Once I get Brian's ok, I'll try and post some pictures. The exterior fixtures are black and very much in keeping with the Arts & Crafts style of the house. The rest are more of the style that Brian likes to call "What Alison Likes!"