Went over all the doors, door finishes and door hardware for the house today… I never knew there were so many options for door. Glad that’s over.

The foundation/slab was (finally) poured for the house today, so I figure I’ll post another time lapse video (it ends this afternoon).

Sorry the quality is lame and it’s little, YouTube downsamples the video, not me… To give you an idea of how the “real” video looks, this is the last frame of the video:

It’s hard to see, since this is just one area, and it’s all buried anyway, but there is lots and lots of conduit under the house (the grey pipes). That way you can run wires or whatever else to different locations in the house as needed in the future (for example maybe you need some super-duper fiber-optic cable to run your holographic TV in 15 years). Just feed the wire to the pipe that goes to the family room TV area, and you are done (no ripping up walls or floors). 🙂

BTW, it looks like we will be (finally) pouring the slab/foundation for the main house on Tuesday.

I picked appliances for the house a few weeks ago, and I ended up with a pretty cool stove (I ended up with the 6 burner, 22″ griddle configuration).

The best part about it is this:

Huh? Must be a Jewish/kosher thing I’m thinking… {shrug}

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This will be great because I should be able to cook up some bad ass Top Ramen with this thing.

This is a live webcam shot (well live as of this posting) of my basement. The only reason I think it’s cool is because the three important sides are backfilled now, so we can finally start digging the footings for the main house (the front side isn’t backfilled yet because the dirt from the footings will be put in there, and there’s nothing above it, so there’s no slab there).

I met with my interior designer today and I actually got *all* the plumbing fixtures picked out for the house. Faucets, shower stuff, toilets, sinks, bathtubs, etc.

There’s a lot of sinks… so it’s not as easy as it sounds. Just glad that’s over.

I threw together a time lapse of the basement being built. The end of it is today, when they took all the forms off the basement walls and we actually have freestanding concrete walls. Now for the waterproofing of the walls… 🙂

The movie runs through 4 hours per second. The resolution is a bit lame, but hey… can’t keep YouTube from down sampling it.

There ended up being about 750 tons of concrete poured/sprayed today at the construction site for the basement walls and pool.

That’s a lot of concrete… So much that you could give yourself a hernia trying to lift the pool or basement…

Today we are getting concrete poured in the basement walls as well as concrete sprayed into the pool. I’m guessing it’s pretty much just going to be a zillion concrete trucks coming and going all day (it looks like they do 4 trucks at a time… 2 for basement and 2 for pool).

Shot from web cam:

I didn’t realize how tall 12 foot ceilings are until I walked around the guest house today (since it now has trusses it’s easy to gauge). They are pretty high up there.

The nice thing about it is we can setup some interesting stuff indoors… like a climbing wall, base jumping, hang gliding indoors, etc.

It doesn’t work so well inside a dome at night with the infrared illuminator on. 🙂

If 2Wire’s crappy router would let me remotely configure it, maybe I could open up the ports on the firewall so I could get into the camera configuration…. but no, I have to drive there. So dumb.

The webcam at the job site is now live… After spending about 2 hours wrestling with 2Wire’s lameness (I need to screw around with it more to see if I can get it configured better).

It’s mounted on a pole, it’s had Internet connectivity to the site since Thursday, it’s been plugged in since Friday and I was planning on hooking up the Ethernet cable and configuring it on Friday, but I was too tore up to leave my home.

Figuring I would do it today, I went to the site and wired up the Ethernet cable and all that. Then I realized I forgot the stupid little $0.05 connector that connects 2 RJ-45 ends together. How dandy! 🙂 I guess another trip tomorrow is in order now.

BTW, it looks like the roof trusses were delivered this morning for the guest house and attached garage.

My new place has fiber to the door, so there’s some bad news, and some great news to go along with that. The bad news is that I can’t get DSL. The great news is I can get something way better and cheaper (6Mbit connectivity over fiber for $27/month).

If all goes well, we should have Internet out on the job site on Thursday. Yay!

Went up to the site today to see what’s been going on in the last 2 weeks (since I’ve been gone), and it looks like lots of stuff has been happening…

• Guest house/garage has it’s concrete slab poured
• Basement looks like it’s just about ready to have it’s slab poured
• Framing of the guest house has started (2 walls were standing, and the rest of the walls looked like they were about to be put up)
• Pool is completely dug out
• Underground pool equipment room is dug out
• Transformer and temporary power has been installed
• Temporary phone lines have been installed (it’s wired to the trailer at least, I couldn’t see into the temp phone box if fiber was pulled through the conduit or not yet)

It’s starting to look like a real construction site now with loads of wood and crap strewn all around. hah

I’ll find out tomorrow for certain on the phone line… if we can get Internet soon, maybe I’ll finally get my camera installed up there.

Got word from Mike today that we officially have power at the site now. Someone must have read my plea. 🙂

Check this bed out… it’s pretty pimp. 🙂

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So I was checking out some of the stuff that should be installed soon at the construction site (most notably electricity). I guess SDG&E is going to be putting in a digital electric meter vs. the “old school” mechanical type.

I Googled around a bit to find out what’s up with them… I guess they are going to be taking measurements hourly and make that data available to consumers. Maybe I’ll cobble together an API for it so I can generate my own charts for the data or something. {shrug}

Speaking of SDG&E, if you are reading this Todd, make it happen! 😉

So it looks like the basement is more or less dug out now… ended up being about 1000 cubic yards of dirt. They should start hauling the dirt away later this week.

To get a general scale, Stephanie is standing over there, and she’s not a little kid like the picture makes her look. You can’t really tell how big the hole in the ground is from that angle, but it’s pretty big. The basement is about the size of a 3 bedroom apartment. 🙂

Went up to the site yesterday, and there’s lots of digging going on now. 3 tractors up there (a normal backhoe, a little one for doing foundation footings and then a bit excavator one for digging the basement). It’s hard to tell how much dirt was pulled out, but check out the picture of the excavator (the cab where the dude sits is enclosed on the left side of it). I figure the basement and pool will probably generate ~650 cubic yards of dirt that will need to be hauled away.

I’m not sure what this trench is for (I guess one end of the pool maybe?), but there is now a pretty deep trench (like 12 or 13 feet deep) where the edge of the pool is going to be…

So had the “pre-construction” meeting today with the HOA. Everything looks a-okay, and we are cleared (finally) for full blown construction.

I meandered up to the site after the meeting, and the half ditch is now a full ditch, with conduit pipes and gas lines in it even. The more interesting part is the basement digging should be underway on Monday, and the basement should be completely dug by the middle of next week.

Speaking of all that crap, I finally got around to ordering the network camera that I’m going to install at the site. I also ordered a dome for it (which arrived today, but the package was missing the transformers… nice). I made a PHP class/API for the camera (to control it and all that), so maybe later I’ll post it here once I’ve had some time with it to test it in real life. Now we just need electricity at the site (which should be soon).

Shawn, myself and Allison went to take a peek at my property today and there’s half a ditch now (about 150′, with another 150′ to go). It’s so SDG&E can install a transformer. I guess that means construction started… sorta.

Guess what? We have building permits as of today… Which means we can actually break ground on the house. 🙂 (it’s about time!)

There is a pre-construction meeting with the home owners association next Thursday.

The only thing that could should have held us up today as far as being issued building permits was the Waste Discharge Identification Number (see this post). But the county of San Diego agreed that we weren’t disturbing more than 1 acre, because landscaping isn’t a land disturbance (only the foundation, pool and driveway square footage count towards the 1 acre threshold).

So what does that mean? Well, it *should* have meant that we have building permits now, but instead… the county couldn’t find the permit number for the existing retaining wall that’s already on the site (they ended up finding it after a few hours of looking, but they didn’t find it until 5 minutes before they closed). So hopefully when Mike goes back to county tomorrow they will still know where it is and issue us permits.

Guess what? The fire department gave their stamp of approval without any changes needed. So now we go back to the city on Monday and get the last 8 things checked off (over the counter). One of the eight items has not been completed yet (we need a Waste Discharge Identification Number (WDID) obtained from the State Water Resources Control Board since the area of land disturbance is more than 1 acre. This basically just tells the state that there might be a lot of water usage in the storm drainage system during construction I guess. {shrug}

We should have the WDID number in 10 days or so… so we’ll know Monday if the city will be nice and give us permits without it (yet) or if we just need to sit and wait another 10 days for the WDID number.