This ⇒ ⇐ Close

We had our "pre-final" inspection on Thursday afternoon. Close, but not quite, as expected. The list of issues is very short - only 3 things:

1) The stair railing needed to be completed (they were installing the rods when the inspector showed up)
2) The deck railing needed a gap-closure piece in one spot (now done)
and
3) We need a letter of compliance from our structural engineer saying that we built it to his specifications.

Fred says that the (fair-but-thorough) inspector did a really complete walkthrough and tested everything. So unless they decide to hen-peck us with other issues, we should be able to get the final-final this week, maybe as early as tomorrow.

The railing is quite stunning (as is the whole place) and came out great - Adrian and his crew (Adrian Burns Fabrication, by the way, if anyone wants to give him some work) pulled it off. See for yourself:



From the entry:



And the kitchen is nearly done (I still need to make the fridge pulls, the metal arrived today):



I spent the weekend crawling around under the house, again, pulling the last of the smurf tubing and a lot of the network/phone wiring. Wow, that was not much fun, but the worst is over, I think. Here's where it all ends up - in the wiring/datacenter under the stairs:



I also spent some time chopping holes in walls in the family room for the 7.1 surround sound speakers. For those who have been following along, this is what a lot of that wiring was about back in January/February.



Off the top, I think I have about 1200 feet of speaker wire in the house, with, I think, wire drops for something like 26 speakers. I figure we'll only use about half of that, but at least the wires are in the walls (and floors, and ceilings) if I ever need them. If I can only remember where they all are...

Cathy had her own painful experience - hanging the infinite number of crystal strands on the girls bedroom light fixtures. Cathy got them off Overstock.com for about $100 each. They come "all assembly required" - in fact, I had to modify them to make them work close to the ceiling (they normally hang on long rods) - but Cathy got the fun job of hanging 494 strands of crystal.

Here she is, having all the fun:

More slides of the stairs:

and here's a quick walkthrough I did with the video on the digicam (not HD, so it's pretty grainy):

(still working on this...check back soon)

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And, if you like, if you click this icon, you should be able to see a map showing the location of other folks who are following this blog - and there are quite a few that I know of - in fact, at some point I'd like to get a list just to see...