Our Bad News Turned Into Good News!

Our bad news turned into good news over night!

First I will tell you the bad news as if I hadn't heard the good news yet, so you can get the full effect:

We got a ceiling fan rough-in in our beautiful morning room cathedral ceiling.  Here's a picture of the ceiling fan in the model home's morning room:

Gorgeous (well, maybe not the actual fan, but the idea of it).

Here is where we found the electrical box for our ceiling fan rough-in at our meeting yesterday:

The black circle is where our ceiling fan rough-in will be.

WHATTTT?!?!?  It's about 18" off-center!  PM says that's the way it needs to be in order to be able to properly drywall in the peak of the ceiling there.  I am sure I would have noticed if the model home's fan were that far off center, so we took a walk over to the model home to check it out and lo and behold, that one is centered.  See the small box at the base of the fan where it's connected to the ceiling?:

PM says yesterday that to get this box would be a non-standard request to RH and we'd most likely have to pay extra for it.  The other option (which is actually how the plans specify it) would be to make about a 6" flat area along the whole length of the cathedral ceiling.  So just about where those two blue lines are in the picture below, it would be flat, instead of peaked all the way across.

I call false advertising!!!  How can they show it one way in the model home and not tell you that yours will be different and/or you'll have to pay extra to get it that way?!?!  PM says he will call the "powers that be" and see how much it would be to get it the way it is in the model home.  Otherwise, he wants to know if we'd rather have it off-center the way it is now, or center it and make the top of our peak flat.  I was at a loss because that cathedral ceiling is one of my favorite parts of the house so I didn't want to mess with that.  But how the heck would it look to have a fan more than a foot off-center?  The problem was that I couldn't picture how either would look and which one would be worse.  I'm not even sure if I ever answered him on that yesterday, but...

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PM called today and they are going to do it the way the model home is at no cost!  Yippeee!

AND...

We can get the intake pipe for the heater for $180.00.  Done!  I can stop worrying now (for the moment :)).  

Good news all around and in a timely fashion.  Thank you PM!

Side note: I didn't even notice the off-centered ceiling fan when we walked through (neither did Greg).  My dad picked that up (thanks Dad!!).  Moral of the story is bring as many eyes as you can to your inspection meetings!

Pre-Drywall Meeting Results

We had our pre-drywall meeting yesterday morning.  I got all of my questions answered and got some good news and some bad news.  First the good news... PM thinks we will be able to settle the week of Sept 17th!  This is earlier than we thought and it will allow us to lock in our rate soon! 

The contractors were busy working while we were there.  The well and septic were being installed at the same time (well in back yard, septic in front) and a third crew was starting to put the siding on.  Here's a few pictures of the guys (and one girl!) in action:

Drill rig for the well.

Guys drilling the well.

Laying out the drain-field units for the septic system.

Siding is going on!

Scaffolding for the siding... that does not look too sturdy!

Now on to the answers to my questions:

1. HVAC - Will we get intake pipe from outside? (see previous post for further explanation).

Intake pipe from outside is only required with a finished basement (since they'd be walling off the furnace area).  Since we plan on finishing the basement in the near future, we'd really like to have it.  Our PM basically explained the same thing my "expert" told us, that the house is designed to intake air through cracks in the walls, etc (seems to be the opposite of "energy efficient" to me).  PM said he would ask if we can have the pipe installed, but warned us that RH doesn't typically like to do extra things that are not required by code (even though we said we'd pay for it... it can't be more than $100 or so).  He tried to give us some BS about the contractor having to come back out, when two minutes earlier he pointed out that the vent pipe was not yet hooked up, so they'd be coming back out to do that anyway.  I hope he can get this for us because it will make our lives much easier when we go to finish the basement in the future.

2. Attic Access – Should be in master bedroom closet, not spare bedroom ceiling.

Before I even asked the question, PM said we would have two ceiling access panels: one in the location it's framed out now in the spare bedroom and one in the master closet.  He said there's a code requirement that when you have an open area like our 2-story foyer, you need attic access points on both sides.  Apparently there's another crazy person out there writing codes who also worries about people falling through the ceiling :).

3. Height to bottom of cabinets above fridge. 68"

4. Ask to put off seeding until a week or two after closing so we can install sprinkler system? How deep will septic system and other pipes be? 

I actually did some research on this the night before our meeting and apparently it's much trickier to do an irrigation system with a well vs a public system and you can actually ruin you pump if you do it wrong (= lots o' $$$).  So I think we're going to stick with the traditional sprinklers for the first year and take our time to do our irrigation system right.  We did speak to the the PM about it though, and he actually suggested drilling another well that would be exclusively for the irrigation system.  That way we can design it from scratch and not have to use up our "house" water pressure or risk messing with our pump.  The other option is to tap into the line somewhere between the well and the pump.  I'm kind of leaning toward a second well though as long as it's not a ridiculous amount of money.  I would just feel better if we didn't have to mess with our drinking water at all.  I'll have to do some more research on that.

5. Water pressure estimate for irrigation system design.  N/A.  See above.

6. Check if second floor windows have the latches you can open to clean outside of windows.  

Yes!  (Like I'm ever actually going to clean the outside of the windows :))

After the meeting I took pictures of all of the walls that had pipes or anything else we want to avoid drilling into in the future (my dad has been known to mistake studs for water pipes in the past :)).  Here's what I came up with (if you enlarge you can read the tiny labels on each):

The length of this post got away from me, so I'm going to save the "bad news" from our meeting for tomorrow.  Stay tuned!