Super stud to the rescue!

21 Jan

Hooray as we pass the half-way point in the renovation! (Famous last words).

Over the last couple of weeks the electricians have been busy running the lights and outlet boxes throughout the house. It’s amazing to see what will be behind the walls once the sheetrock goes up.

Wires on the parlor floor

The plumbers have also been busy getting ready for the first plumbing inspection. They are concentrating on the bathrooms which will allow us to start tiling shortly (the tile starts arriving next week). Having enjoyed Manhattan water pressure for so long we have made every effort to ensure we get good water pressure throughout the house. We are most excited about the dedicated lines running to separate shower heads in the master bath. Like our previous renovation we’ve ordered shower heads from the creatively named highpressureshowerheads.com.

One set of pipes for the master shower.

The plumbers also finished off work in the laundry. Since the laundry is on the top floor (with the bedrooms) they’ll installed some extra safeguards in case the machine overflows. We have a drain and an additional system that detects when water hits a certain level on the floor and automatically shuts off the water. Hopefully these two will combine to protect us against any flooding in the house.

System to protect laundry from flooding.

The guys running the internet cables arrived on Friday to start work. I met with them to go over our requests and they were kind enough to indulge us with our specific requests (at last count we’ll have 34 data ports in the house). We had them upgrade their cable as well for faster speeds throughout the house. While our current internet (Time Warner – boo – hiss) doesn’t support the fast speeds we are hoping that one day someone will and given this is our only chance we want to do everything we can to prepare.

Placeholder for data cable.

The HVAC guys are coming on Monday (we hope!) to start their work. They were supposed to come a couple of weeks ago but haven’t showed up (much to our frustration). They are the last steps before we can start sheet rocking the non-bathroom rooms. With temperatures dropping well below freezing later in the week let’s hope they can work fast and provide the workers some heat. The heating guys will also be working on the venting for the hood over the stove and the make-up air system (which we’ll try and write about in another post).

Sheetrock waiting for the heating guys

Last but not least the skylights in the top floor bathrooms have been marked out. There were some last minute changes as we were concerned that the skylight in the master would not provide much light since the house next door is one floor higher. After some back and forth with the architect (there’s a building code requiring a 6 foot clearance on the roof from the front of the house to the back) we were able to relocate the skylights to a better location.