(Update: I forgot to include the pictures. Doh!)
It’s been a while since I’ve posted–too busy working on the house to write much about it!
The stucco crew was out last week and got the house wrapped and lathed. (And incidentally gave me a *ton* of things to do in order to minimize future water damage. Great advice, things that needed to be done, but it burned up a lot of the time I had planned to use for wiring.) We got dinged for $800 for re-flashing all the windows. Turns out that the flashing along the bottom of the window was supposed to be left loose/flapping, i.e. only peel the top inch or two from the adhesive, so that the waterproof paper could be slipped under the flashing. So the stucco guys put new flashing along the bottom of all the windows while they were wrapping the house, and because of that they had to also flash the sides and top of the windows. (It’s just like the roof, you have to work from the bottom to the top.) Here’s a picture of the shop, without paper, to show the original window flashing:
I got most of the wiring done while I was on “vacation” last week, so we called for our rough frame inspection last Friday. And we finally failed an inspection. 🙁 It was Chris, our regular inspector (yay!), but he busted me righteously for not having all of my grounding wires tied together. (I thought we could just leave the wires in the boxes and make up *all* the connections after drywall. I was wrong.) He also nailed the contractor for omitting sheetrock nailing blocks around the bathtub and lack of insulation “dams” at the eave vents. (According to the contractor, the insulation people usually put these in before they start blowing in the insulation.)
The contractor sent out a couple of guys to take care of the insulation dams and the bathtub framing issues yesterday, and I spent the weekend and yesterday afternoon/evening tying all my ground wires together and generally making the wiring look neat and tidy. We’ll get a re-inspection sometime today, and hopefully we’ll pass this time around!
Assuming that we *do* pass, insulation is scheduled for tomorrow, and drywall will be installed Thursday and Friday. Taping and texturing will take up all of next week (Nov 6-10). Cabinets will be installed on the following Monday. Countertop tile installation will begin that evening or the next day and should be completed by Nov 17, and we’ll work around the tile guy to install our appliances. I doubt that we’ll be able to get our tile flooring in before Thanksgiving (Nov 22), but I’ll let the tile installer make that decision when the time comes. But it looks like our kitchen will be functional for Thanksgiving this year!