Surprise! Building is Underway!

(Note:  I began this post over the weekend.  It's a few days behind...oops)

Last Monday I touched base with our contractor to confirm that we were a go to start next week.  He confirmed this and surprised me a bit when he said that rather than starting with floors and door he wanted to start with electrical.  He had to touch base with his electrician but wanted to schedule a meeting for Wednesday at 8.  Now, next week is our fall break at school and I have an appointment at 7:15 nearby, so I thought it would be ideal that Scott would have our daughter and we could rendezvous at the garage and have a meeting when I was finished.  Then, Wednesday of this week (Sept 30) I get a call at 8:08 asking if Scott and I were going to be there.  I admitted that I got the week mixed up, informed him that Scott wouldn't be coming (which was a shame because he knows way more about the specifics of what needs to happen), and immediately changed into my clothes to fight the rush hour traffic to get there late.  I didn't even give my daughter time to get dressed- luckily she doesn't mind going out in public in her pajamas one bit.  When we got there I gave it the good old college try talking to these electricians about what needed to be done and what should go where.

When the meeting was supposed to be this coming week we thought we had the weekend to get over there and mark out where we wanted all our plugs and switches to go.  I felt like I was having to think about and cover everything on the fly.  Luckily, they were really nice and took pity on me and told me that they had several days worth of demo and basic wiring that they could get started on without knowing exactly where each thing needs to be placed at this point.  

One thing that became crystal clear during this discussion was how valuable it would've been to have a builder involved at the very beginning.  The electricians had way better knowledge of the codes and knew things such as an outlet has to be positioned within 18" of the sink.  I planned to have the beautiful windows go straight to the counter, but it may turn out that I need a backsplash to accommodate this now.  I also was completely unaware of the structural elements of the garage and how the wiring and piping would need room around windows and doors.  We tried to have a builder and it didn't work out, so now it's requiring us to be flexible about things.  I'm sure in the end it'll work out.  

This past weekend we were able to get over to label all the lights and plugs in the space. Monday morning we met with the electricians to talk about the plans and answer any questions or discuss any issues that may arise.  Today (Tuesday) we were at the garage and ran into the electricians again.  There was some more clarification of issues.  I think that we're definitely on the right track and hope that they'll be able to finish up by the end of the week.