In week 22 of the remodel, progress really slowed down in terms of dramatic, visible changes—enough so that Joe has stated his intention to reduce the frequency of his visits to the house to once every three or four weeks instead of every other week. Things will probably be more exciting again soon, particularly once the drywall starts going in, but for now, most of the changes are a little harder to see. This week, the focus was on electrical wiring and the plumbing for the sprinkler system.

It appears as though most of the wiring is complete, upstairs and down. Due to changes in the building code, it feels like there are outlets everywhere, and the recessed lighting will be a nice upgrade, including in the older parts of the house like the living room and office.

In the coming week, they’ll be finishing up the parts they didn’t get around to last week and working on low voltage wiring for speakers and networking. We had another meeting with the electrician, Jamie, on Monday to sort out some of the details and work out where we want connections for security cameras outside, and he’s hoping to have all that stuff in place by Friday.

Hopefully we won’t have too many more of these meetings with Jamie before the project is complete, because it seems like every time we get together we come up with new things to add. This time, we decided to put in smurf tube, or flexible conduit, for the network cabling upstairs to make it easier to repair or replace in the future: without it, the wiring would be extremely difficult to access, especially where it passes through the spray foam insulation in the exterior walls. We also elected to add an outdoor outlet upstairs on the side wall of Joe’s bedroom, to make it easier to put up Christmas lights next winter, and a can light directly above the kitchen sink, an omission that we somehow missed until my mother pointed it out just few days ago.

While the electricians were hard at work, another team was focused on putting in plumbing for the very expensive sprinkler system that we’re required by law to have because we exceeded a magical square footage threshold. This is one system we hope never to use, but it’s interesting to see the bright orange sprinkler lines running throughout the house.

Of course, the sprinkler system wouldn’t be much good if it only covered the new sections of the house, so one aspect of the work has been retrofitting older construction for sprinkler coverage. One of the more challenging areas to work in has been our master bedroom, where we have a vaulted ceiling without a great deal of depth to accommodate the plumbing and the sprinkler hardware. The team came up with a novel solution this problem: drilling into the decorative beams on the ceiling and mounting the sprinkler heads inside the resulting cavities. The result doesn’t look particularly nice right now, but the hope is that it will look better in the end than having the sprinkler heads installed out in the open.

One piece of work completed this past week that didn’t involve wires and tubes inside the walls was the installation of the new fireplace. It’s not much to look at just yet, but it’s a start. It seems almost out of place to have the fireplace installed while the rest of the living room is in complete disarray, but it had to be done before they close up the walls when this phase of the project is complete.

Finally, we spent a not insignificant amount of time over the last week trying to figure out what we’re doing to do with respect to floors. Our designer, Lesley, has shown us a number of samples highlighting different color choices. We initially expressed an interest in something similar in color and form to the hardwood we had in the living room before: we really liked the way the old floor picked up the warmth in the afternoon sun and complemented the yellow walls.

Lesley, on the other hand, felt that engineered laminate flooring along those lines would be too orange and wouldn’t work well with the color scheme we’re contemplating for the kitchen and great room, so she brought over a sample in warm shade to compare with the paler variation she prefers. I think she hoped that we would see what she sees and concur with her assessment, but our initial reaction was that we still preferred the warmer version: we even used a scrap of the old hardwood, pilfered from Joe’s former bedroom, to examine the samples in different light throughout the house.

I imagine Lesley was pretty surprised that her plan to lead us to the right decision had backfired, but in the end, we elected to trust her judgment and go with the less vibrant shade anyway. I think she was simply too nice to tell us directly that our tastes are dated and un-hip.

Gallery: Week 22: Sprinklers and More Wiring

Week 21 of the remodel was a busy one, as not only did the construction team continue to make steady progress, we were faced with making some key decisions that will impact the course of the project over the next several weeks.

The week started with a rare on-site meeting with Enzo and Jamie, the electrician on our project, to walk through the house and review the electrical plans we put together with Lakshmi last spring. As I gather is typical for projects like ours, Enzo and Jamie had a number of suggestions about ways to simplify the lighting configuration based on how the house is taking shape. In our case, this was probably for the best, as we ended up needing to tear out the wiring in the living room and office a few weeks ago, and replacing it was not in the scope of the original bid. Cutting back on a few lights in other parts of the house frees them up for use in those rooms.

We also talked about our plans for low voltage wiring—networking, mostly—which wasn’t explicitly spelled out in the construction plans we sent to the city. There’s a fixed allowance for this stuff in the bid, but I strongly suspect we’ll be exceeding that amount, as our ambitions in this area might be a bit outside the norm. We’re looking at about seventeen network runs, covering all the living spaces in the house as well as the doors, where we’re planning to install security cameras. All of these runs will come back to the closet in the office, where they’ll terminate in a patch panel in a small, wall-mounted rack.

Work on the wiring in the walls was expected to take a couple weeks, so we should be about halfway through as of this weekend. Later, after the drywall has been installed, we’ll circle back and take care of actual switches, outlets, and network connectors during the trim phase of the project.

From the outside of the house, the most notable change this week was the installation of shingles and siding on the second floor gables, along with window trim. The color of the unpainted surfaces isn’t great—they’re a sickly greenish yellow—but when we’re finished, they’ll be painted to match the existing stucco. Joe has been very worried about whether the finished house will fit into the neighborhood for the last few weeks—there are some examples on our street of rebuilt homes that really stick out—but seeing some of the finishes in place has helped to reassure us that we’re not too far into the weeds.

The other concern we’ve been wrestling with this week is the selection of cabinets: Enzo let us know that he was going to need to know where we were headed shortly, so we’ve been working late into the night poring over different options in an effort to figure out what we’re going to do. Based on feedback from Lesley, the designer we’ve been working with, we’re leaning towards custom cabinets in the kitchen, where we’re trying to satisfy a broad range of different requirements. With that in mind, we’re hoping to save a bit of money in the laundry room and upstairs bathrooms by going with stock, off-the-shelf units.

The bathrooms should be pretty straightforward, as we’re not doing anything unusual there. The laundry room is a bit more complicated, as we’re looking to have storage under the sink and over the laundry machines, and we’re also looking to install a pantry and additional cabinets on the opposite wall, along with coat hooks and a launch pad for the kids’ backpacks and school supplies. We considered throwing together pieces from different sources to fill these needs: wall cabinets from Home Depot, a pantry from Ikea, and under-sink cabinets from somewhere else, but it quickly became clear that the room would look sloppy and unfinished with so many mis-matched parts. As a result, we’re looking for a single supplier who can provide all the pieces we need, hopefully giving us a more consistent, coherent look. We put together some sketches illustrating what we’re hoping for, and we’re counting on Enzo to come up with some good options.

Gallery: Week 21: Siding and Wiring

Although week 20 of the remodel brought a number of significant changes, as you’ll see in this week’s gallery, progress from week to week is getting a bit harder to see from the street, as more of the work moves indoors to the infrastructure and mechanical systems of the house.

Two things you can see from the outside are work on the roof and exterior trim. There was a team installing shingles on the second floor roof while we were at the house on Saturday—hence, we all work masks during our visit. And earlier in the week, the crew had begun preparing the exterior walls for the application of stucco, though none had been applied as of Saturday.

The Saturday roofing work led to a bit of drama: in San José, residential construction is not allowed on weekends, so the roofers’ presence led to some noise complaints from our neighbors. I’m not sure whether there was any fallout from the city—or even if roofing technically qualifies as construction—but the roofers haven’t been back on the weekend since.

This week also brought the installation of furnaces, upstairs and down, along with ducts running to various parts of the house. It’s still something of an open question as to what challenges having these units in the attic and crawlspace, respectively, will present, but we weren’t left with many good options that didn’t eat up a big chunk of storage.

Finally, we were very excited to see that our new patio doors were installed during the week. Better access to the backyard is a key component of the new layout: Julie has long lamented that our backyard has been under-utilized because having to go through our (admittedly very messy) garage was a pain, so seeing those doors in place felt like a big step. We actually picked out the specific model we went with all the way back in June of 2018, so this moment has been a very long time coming.

Gallery: Week 20: Shingles, Ducts, and Doors