Week 4 - more MEP, more ice!

Week 4 continued "MEP" on the schedule, plus a bit of continued framing. Plus another day off for icy roads, for good measure (who ever would have thought Houston would have 2 bad weather stay-off-the-road kind of days within 5 days?!?).

We spent that entire Sunday (1/26)  installing low voltage "boxes" throughout the house and running coaxial and cat6 cabling between our structured media panel in the hall closet and each drop: 8 drops for a total of 15 lines run. The contractor offered to do it, but any hard bends in the wire could ruin the cat6, so we chose to do it ourselves (after we removed the cat5e that we had run back in a very hot July 2001). That was a long day and I'm thankful that Roy was willing to walk around an attic with only joists for support, to staple up the wires. We still need to run new wires to the back of the house, but with the big pile of dirt in the master bedroom closet (from excavating the bathroom drain area), we decided to wait. But it turns out it was a good thing we got most of the lines run on Sunday, as they installed HVAC ductwork on Monday, which leads us to....

We did our standard mini walk-through that Monday night. There were still some electrical things out of place, but they had corrected some others. Our walk revealed that they had finally moved our whole house air cleaner, a Trion Air Bear that we had had for almost a decade - a single 5-inch pleated filter that serviced all of the return air ducts instead of having individual thin filters at each grille, and only had to be changed once a year. So we looked over to where it should be installed, between the heater and the return air ducts, and nope, it wasn't there. They had installed a return air plenum and sealed that up.

Well, that didn't bode very well, so we went outside to the dumpster, climbed up on the outside of it, and dug around the inside until we found what we knew we would find - our Trion Air Bear bent up and discarded like so much trash!!

Needless to say, that generated an e-mail to LCI. It was actually the 3rd email before 7am on Tuesday morning. The 1st concerned securing the new, full water pipes against damaging freezes, and the 2nd was yet more arguments about the electrical system and what they (electrical sub) think they get to bill us for as additional work. About the only thing I like about our architect is that his standard project specification includes clauses like, and I quote: "Verify the capacity of the existing electrical service to the house. Additional panel space is available but adequate capacity should be determined prior to submitting a bid." So for them (electrical sub) to decide now, 4 weeks into the project that we need a new panel is a "fine, but we're not paying for it" talk (yet to be held). It is, amusingly, the exact same amount that he wanted to charge us to rewire the entire house and we hadn't agreed when they were full steam ahead ripping everything out, so that became their cost to bear, not ours. (The resolution on this did wind up us paying for a sub-panel. Yes, the contract really does cover us, and yes, they really didn't bid accurately. But, sometimes you just give a little bit for goodwill. Current NEC is ridiculous in many areas.)

But the fact that they discarded the Air Bear was simply insane. Dan had addressed some of the other pieces of email (plumbing and electrical), but when he got to the HVAC, I can imagine that he used words, under his breath if nothing else, that they are not allowed to use. Here's his response to us: "WOW- I am almost speechless here.  I have no idea why it would have been tossed as we discussed placement of it yesterday.  I certainly assure you it will be replaced.  Let me investigate." It was replaced and they did have to rework the plenum, too.

We wonder how much more profit could be made by the subs and/or the contractor if they weren't constantly doing work that had to be ripped out and done again, correctly!