Upstairs looks great! Good choice on grout color. Is there a projected final finish date yet?

 

I honestly have no clue about a completion date. They have not given me an estimated completion date and when I seem to push for one they seem to point to the septic tank issue as the hold up and why they can't give me a solution. I pushed my neighbor who is basically mentoring this builder about the information the other guy is supposed to be sending me on all that like every other day and I have not gotten anything yet. That has to be done before the driveway can go in. The driveway needs to be in before the paver work in the breezeway and that connects to the rear deck stairs can go in.

Interior wise, once the tile is done the upstairs cabinets can go in, then the granite counter can be templated and cut. When bathroom tile is done the vanity and toilet can go in and they can come hook up the plumbing at that point. Hopefully, that means the interior goes together rather quickly. I could see the exterior still taking into the new year, unfortunately. I should have the last of the electrical I am doing wrapped up this weekend which means either early next week before the holiday or the first week of December the electricians can come back and turn on all the other circuits.

 

The tile and deck guys were both back over the weekend.

The bathroom grout was done. I might have went a hair light on the color in here. I just wanted a minor difference from the tile.


The stair railing is finally figured out but one of the new brackets came cracked of course. I think the deck guy is getting rather annoyed with this companies QC at this point.




I spent Saturday and Sunday buttoning up a lot electrical outlets. My two twist locks for the shop showed up finally. I also was able to get all the exterior outlets in as well as the ones for the wet bar fridges. Besides the two outlets that go in the wet bar cabinets I believe I have finished all the outlets now.


Installed the box for the garage TV. The box is only designed to mount on a stud on one side of the box. With where I wanted it this meant I had to use the old work part of it instead. I wanted the opening for low voltage on the left as that is where my two pieces of conduit terminated in the wall.


Got the access box for the in wall vac installed. Hopefully I can get that fully installed and up and running next weekend.

 

Looks awesome. Love the railing style you picked for the deck. Unfortunately we wouldn't be able to have that at our house...

That grout looks great though!

 

I assume you are referring to it not being kid friendly since it looks like a ladder? Several people brought up that concern for sure. I would honestly rather have a gate at the bottom than switch railing types.

 

^ Yup, exactly. We don't even have stairs on our deck at this point but the rest of our railing has vertical balusters.

 

I think the grout looks perfect with that tile

 

Oh it looks great for sure. The darker comment was with with in a garage and how quickly will that grout color get dirty. I honestly though it was much darker than it came out.

 

Man, I'm excited for you, looking really, really good Jason.

 

Looks great!

 

Hopefully, we have now resolved the last of the water intrusion issues. They did the tile work before fixing the water issue at the door which annoyed me. They tried to install a piece of flashing acting like it would fix the issue but it never did. Every attempt was just a bandaid on the real issue is that the door was installed without a sill pan and the the flashing job under it was poor at best if not horrible. It leaves a lot of questions about the windows and the other doors on the slab but those at least are all covered from direct rain.

After the tile was in and we had a rain it never let the grout dry as water was getting in by wicking under the sill


Since it no longer had a place to go and soak into the sub floor it now soaked into the trim and caused it to pull away from the wall. Zero surprise on my part here.


We finally got to the point where I had asked for several months ago (at least 6 but who is counting) and removed the door




Left the door out and sealed up the opening and ran the heat for 2 days to dry things out.


The heat plus a fan allowed things to dry out


Sill pan going in this time


I unfortunately was heading out town for the holiday week but asked the builder to please take pictures for me. He did as he was doing the work himself to correct this.










Door back in and hopefully with all of this done this way there should be no more leaks.


Today has actually been the first test since this work was done last week. We had .7in of rain this morning and are supposed to get 1.25in tomorrow. So far there is no leak whoing so hopefully this is in the rear view now.

 

The week after we got back from visiting family in PA we got some snow which is rare here. It was gone before noon but at least I got a few pictures. Might be a long time till it happens again.






This weekend though I was able to get onto some of my own work in the garage again which was nice. I started with mounting the network rack. I figured out how to remove the hinge pins so I could mount just the back at first vs trying to lift the entire cabinet into place.





I had installed blocking in the walls for this cabinet before.


Two bolts in so I can mark the rest of them first. I used 3/8in 2in lag bolts which would allow for 1.5in of threaded contact with the wood. Based on specs each 1in of thread contact gives 272lbs of hold so 408lbs per 1.5in. Multiply that by 8 lag bolts for 3264lbs. The cabinet is only rated for 250lbs but I was concerned still about the fact the cabinet is 2ft deep.


Based on alignment though I still wouldn't have any lags into the studs which concerned me so I drilled some holes in it. I would use three 4in 5/16 lags for this. It would net me 2.5in of thread contact with these at 200lbs per inch. Bringing the total to 4764lbs. Sucker isn't going anywhere. Yes, it is overkill but that is how I do things.




The next phase was to pull the fiber cable from under the stairs to the bathroom network rack. I didn't expect to have any issues with this but it was even easier than I expected. First time I had used smurf tube.


I first had to install a piece of sheeting and put insulation in the last section of wall under the stairs. Then it was on to mounting the enclosure for the fiber box and the future termination point to connect the house alarm to the garage.


Fiber connected and alarm wires passthrough installed. I had also installed an electrical box for the termination of the future water heater circuit. The electricians had just left a piece of 10/2 romex hanging lose with no box. I figure this way I can use MC cable and a 90 out of the faceplate knockout to hook up the hot water heater.


All buttoned up


I am hoping to get the fiber run that connects the garage to the house this coming weekend. After that I can figure out when I can get the network moved to its new home then.

 

What did you use to mount that box inside the fiber enclosure? We have something just like it in our basement and I'd love to mount my router and modem inside of it.

 

So the box had screw holes that lines up with the push clip holes. However, since I had wood behind it I just used two screws.

What you want to look up though is structured media enclosure clips and brackets. You can find plenty of little shelves and plates that you can then use velcro straps to attach stuff too.

Here are two.

 

NTD over the weekend. I have known for a while I needed one of these at some point of this project. I forgot to look for one on black Friday though but managed to find a good sale still last week.

I had looked at a few from Huepar for a while. It is funny they make a ton of different models and really the battery and the design of the mounts really seems to be most of the difference. This particular one was one I wanted but the first day I found it it wasn't on sale. Then all of a sudden it was 35% off a few days later.



I like that it has a AA battery adapter in case I forget to charge the included battery when I go to use it.




I got to put it to use last night to start mounting my lumber racks. I needed to get at least one up so I can get the leftover lumber from the wood walls off the floor so they can come get the floors cleaned in the next week or two.


Unfortunately, one of the arms was bent so I couldn't install all of them.

 

^ I have that same lumber rack and love it. Word of advice though, put some plywood sheets between the prongs so you can put up pieces smaller than the gap between supports.

Laser level looks awesome. They are definitely a game changer for making work easy. I like that yours mounts on a piece of wood, mine has to get clamped to something. I also don't have the 360 one, just one that sends out a vertical and horizontal line in one direction.

 

I will have to do that on the lower ones. I do wish height-wise they were further apart. I was only able to get 7 boards on the inner rungs. Left more room at the top so I was able to get 10. I have 2 more sets of 4 coming so I will have 9 slots worth at least.

I figure between the shelves, the garage cabinets, and the 18 - 4ft led lights I need to install it should come in handy. The laser level bracket is magnetic and came with a metal plate you can mount with screws to things so I just stuck a 2x4 between the wall and that door. It also can mount on a tripod.

 

Damn, that Huepar is badass

 

Where did you find that level and how much?

 

Level is from Amazon. It was on super sale when I bought it. It is normally around $235 or so it seems. Most of the time it has a $35 coupon though to go with that price. I managed to catch it on a sale somehow after black Friday where it was cheaper but still had coupon and another 10% off coupon code as well so I got it for $167. I likely wouldn't have bought it had it not been that cheap. I had been looking at a 3x laser before that for like $120 and was having trouble splurging for the rest to get to that one before the sale.

 

Was able to get a few more things done the past two days.



Loaded the first wood rack with the leftover wood from the walls and then sorted the leftover smaller pieces by size. The other two should be here today. I also plan to build two smaller rolling wood carts. One for pieces 4ft or less to stand vertically that I can easily go through and then another for more long-term less frequent use stuff that will just have two shelves.





I also plan to build two smaller rolling wood carts out of the 2x4s from the temporary garage doors walls. One for pieces 4ft or less to stand vertically that I can easily go through and then another for more long-term less frequent use stuff that will just have two shelves. Hopefully I can get those knocked out this weekend.









Yesterday they came to install the cabinets for the loft wetbar. Waiting on my sink and faucets to show up and then I can get the granite company in to do the template.









Last night I got to play with the laser level again and put the two lights in the storage room. I think 10k lumens should be enough in there.





They are coming today and tomorrow to work on cleaning the garage floor so I got the rack installed on the frame last night as well. I think I might have gone a little too big here. I kind of regret going with the 26U rack over the 18U rack. Should have spent some more money on smaller gear so I could have gone with a smaller rack. Not often you hear a man mention a smaller rack. I could possibly still do it later on down the road but my lower blocking would be wrong so I would lose a bit of support.

 

my head is spinning.

 

Last week my network gear started rolling in. Still waiting on a second batch to makes its way here and then a few items to come off backorder as well but this first two batches should keep me busy for a while over the holiday.


Girlfriend had an extra day of vacation to burn for the year so we took a day trip to Asheville to hit up some breweries. Took the V and happened to park in front of a graffiti wall across the street from the one.


While I was gone they started cleaning the garage bay floors so that I can seal them over the holidays in preparation to my flooring install and cabinet install. Thankfully all the drywall mud and paint seems to have come off. Some of the clay staining hasn't come out from when the garage was leaking before the gutters went on. Hopefully since the surface is clean though it shouldn't impact the topical sealer I am using.


Installed a few remaining electrical outlets. Since the tile is done and had been cleaned I was able to do the floor outlets. With the cabinets in I was also able to get the kick panel outlet installed. I really don't want one but having to install outlets in different locations to meet code because of the glass walls.


The remaining two holes are for the rear surround speaker wire hookup boxes. Unfortunately, the speaker terminals seem to have been delayed in shipping.




The rest of the wood racks finally showed up on Saturday so I was able to get those up yesterday.

 

The actual scope of this project continues to blow my mind.
You think garage and you think 3 walls and a door...you basically hand built a new house.

 

Exactly. This whole build has been nothing but impressive. Career change in the coming future?

 

Indeed, wild build but I love it

 

Insanely well-done as always, Jason. This is top-notch!

 

He ain't changing careers. CEO of Overthink Enterprises is likely where he'll retire from.

 

This is the most amazing garage setup ever.

 

Decent bit to catch up on and finally can check some big things off the list as well.

Last week the last pieces of the deck railing replacement pieces showed up and they were able to get back and finally finish the last piece of rail. The deck is officially checked off now. Really happy with how it came out. I will need to add some stair lights with how many steps there are at some point but will need to research those first.


I don't want a pop-up outlet on my wet bar but I want power for a coffee setup on it. Came up with the idea to use a 2in counter grommet and put the outlet in the cabinet. It is far enough away from the sink that hopefully this isn't a code issue cause I have to say I didn't research it. The drawer just shuts. If it hits after they do final alignment I can always grind that side of the plate down a little.




My first batch of cameras showed up as well. This should help keep me busy for a good bit of the holiday.


This past weekend I took another trip up to PA for the Penn State playoff game and stayed with my brother. Always happy to see some snow when I am up there since we rarely get any in NC. This year being an exception.


I asked that the electricians not come while I was gone. Apparently, they don't check email. They came while I was gone and I was able to walk them through over the phone most of the remaining list of items.

Breezeway recessed lights installed. Glad I went with the larger of the two I was deciding on before. They actually still kind of look small.


Both breaker panels are full now so I can start on the smart switch installs now. Apparently, one electrician is happy with his hand writing. The other not so much as he labeled them on the outside on some painters tape and I will need to make labels for the inside. I am going to printer labels because my handwriting is not something I want to be reading when I need to find something.




While I was gone my order of SwissTrax showed up as well. Going to have to move this to the wood shop area though as I still do not have a coating down on the concrete which really want to do. I have decided to go with Ghostshield 4500/8510 combo to give me a little time to wipe up spills and also help the water bead and roll out the door better when washing inside.

 

Wondering about the stair railing on the deck. Our railing is similar, in that the posts rise up above the top of the railing. Our building code requires a seamless and continuous railing. Because of that, we were required to have a small inner railing. You can see what it looks like in some of the final pics in my porch build thread.

Drooling over the box of Ubiquiti goodies. I'm deciding now if I want to venture into that black hole myself. I'm at roughly $4,000 right now, and that doesn't include any cabling.

 

Oh that is interesting to know. I wanted a drink rail railing but it would have required an inner railing and I didn't want to lose that space going up the steps because with the inner stairs having a 90 I figure this wider rear stair case, 46in inside the facia mount posts, will be how we get furniture up into the loft. The deck guy and builder signed off on it. That doesn't mean much with some of the headaches we have had along the way but so far no building code violations. Now you have me a bit concerned.

It is definitely a black hole. I think my current home setup is about $1k or so. I will be at least another $4-5k into it once all this is wrapped up. Still have a few more cameras to pickup but they were out of stock and if you wait for everything you need to be in stock from Ubiquiti at one time you likely will never be able to order anything.

 

For cameras, I'm considering:
AI Pro @ $499
AI Turret @ $399
G5 Pro @ $379
G5 Turret x2 @ $129

WAPs
U7 Pro x2 @ $189

Then for infrastructure:
Dream Machine SE @ $499
NVR @ $299
Drives x 4 @ $200
Switch - undecided

Still need a rack, and I'll want something that can house the network gear plus AV gear, and I still need to run cabling.

Is it overkill for what I need, probably yes. Would it be nice to have, also yes.

 

Is that the total number of cameras you plan to do? Would you not be better off with the UDM Pro Max that is dual drive bay slots and then just do a mirror set of 16TB drives? Five cameras is not a lot. I am currently running 4 cameras right now, 3 -2k, and 1 HD. Using an old 2TB drive I had around for the time being will I get my NVR Pro setup and it still gives me 18days worth of continuous footage. I also see you don't have a G4 Doorbell so you might as well add that to the list if you are going to go Ubiquite.

I really love the G5 Turrets I have so far and they are the basic of my entire system going forward. Likely end up with one AI Pro and two AI Turrets to round out the setup.

 

Merry Christmas everyone! Been busy the last two days now that the power has been turned on.



I have been installing lots of switches. Finally nice to be able to just walk in an turn on lights in each room. Still waiting on a few straggler very back ordered switches though..



For those into home automation, I have moved onto two different brands of Zwave switches for the garage as opposed to the house. In the past, I have used GE/Jasco/UltraPro which are all really the same brand.



In the garage, I am using Zooz and Innovelli. The later I had never heard of until I decided to do black switches in the garage and realized they were the only one that could do 3 ways with dimming on both ends and handle more than 150w of LEDs. The Innovelli by design works exactly like the GE/Jasco/UltraPro but has Edge drivers and more advanced options. They also have a light bar on the front that can be used for notifications as well as show the dimming level. The only issue with them is they are extremely pricey. For this reason, I am only using them where I have to and using Zooz everywhere else.







The storage room was the first light I wired up as it doesn't have a smart switch so it was quick an easy. That said, I think I turned the light on and off like 10x just cause it felt like we had moved past another milestone. Pretty impressed with these Cree LS copies I found. They cost almost 1/4 the price. They are not color true but not needed in this space.





I was finally able to get the rest of the garage door lights wired up so now I can see them all on at the same time. The electrician ran a wire through the breezeway during construction so that I could make this circuit a 3 way that could be turned on at the house or the garage and that all 3 lights come on at the same time. The only issue I can see with this now is the person door light for the house is still connected to house power in the same box. Now you have two circuits in one box that I have to remember. Probably make a not on the panel doors about it.





With power to the outlets I unboxed the mini fridges so I could test them for temp during their return period and also have them in place when they come back to do the final cabinet fitting to see what size trim piece to cut for above them.

 

That's it for cameras "for now". I could see adding a 2-3 more sometime in the future. I want to have 30 days of recordings on hand and setup my storage as a RAID 10, so I'm looking at 4 x 16TB drives and the UNVR. $300 for the NVR vs. $100 upsell from the SE to the Pro Max, I figure the extra $200 gives me a longer future.

I did pick up the doorbell last week when it was on sale (impulse buy), which means I either get more Ubiquiti stuff now, or return the doorbell. My biggest concern, because I wasn't paying attention, is the doorbell's weather rating and the fact that I don't have a covered entry. If I go through with all of this, I guess I'll just cross my fingers.

My biggest worry is running cables. Fortunately, the basement where everything will terminate, is unfinished. But I still have to run cable to a couple of different soffit spots and I'm not looking forward to that.

 

I just wired up 3 more cameras today while still on my 2TB on my UDM Pro for now till I get the equipment moved to the garage rack and then get the NVR Pro online. Still then I will only be running raid with 2TB drives and expect it to be enough to get 30 days. Only doing 2TB drives though as I have a plethora of them from a retired client NAS system that was going to the dump.

If your soffits are showing age you could have them replaced and rip them all off yourself while running the wire in there. Otherwise surface mounted conduit painted the color of the house works as well.

 

Badass!

 

Hope everyone had a good Christmas and New Year's. I have been keeping busy with the garage and lots of college football as well.

Been going strong on the electrical side. I have all the lights on the first floor on switches now finally. I have, however, run into a rather large issue. The electricians were given the light selection before they wired circuits. Apparently math and load calculations is not their strong suit which is concerning.

All of the lights in the two garage bays, as well as the ceiling fans, and the exterior lights on the front of the building are on the same 15amp light circuit. If everything is on that comes out to a continuous load of 1536 watts. The larger issue though is that 800watts of that are the LED UFO High Bay lights and the amount of in rush current they pull at powerup immediately trips the breaker. It appears we are going to have to cut drywall and pull a completely new circuit for those 4 lights. At least that is the only solution I am aware of that will fix this. Not sure how anyone thinks that 4x LED high bay, 20 high output recess lights, 2 ceiling fans with lights, 2 flood lights, 3 garage door lights, a person door, and 2 breezeway recess lights on one circuit is a good idea. So for the time being I have removed that switch from the circuit so I can use everything else.



In the meantime, I put the new tool to work again and installed the workshop lights.





First time using Wago connectors but I don't think I will use anything else for light fixtures at least from now on. With the limited space in the housings, they definitely made life much easier and I also hate trying to twist wires together above my head. Just never seems to work as well as I can do it at wall height.





With just the cans and one set of 6 of the strip lights on it was already as bright as my existing small bench area in the house garage





The picture doesn't really show well but there is plenty of light. If not working on something super detailed I likely leave them dimmed to 3/4 most of the time with the option for a little more brightness. Max bright though is much less than the garage lights. I could have went with 6k lumen version but I think the 4k lumen ones will be enough.

 

Once I had lights inside on the entire first floor except for the bathroom I moved onto getting the network moved from the house to the garage and then fed back to the house.



The first part of this included pulling my 20 meter fiber cable through the conduit I ran from the house to the garage and connecting it to the fiber panel under the stairs.



I had planned to use 1in conduit from the pull box to the exterior fiber termination panel I had bought. Turned out it only accepted 3/4in. My fault for not checking. I likely could have just used a reducer at the end but ended up just cutting the 3/4in in-half and using a coupler so I could easily feed the cable through since with the 6 connectors it was too bit to go through the entire length.









The 20meter cable likely could have been 18 or 19 meters instead but better to be long than short since these are premade cables as terminating fiber yourself isn't that easy. Now though I had a path from the outside of the house to the network rack in the garage so I could move on to actually doing the rest of the work.





The first part was putting another hole in the closet off the attic so I could have more network termination for the new house camera lines. I only have 6 new terminations so this will leave with with 6 for future expansion but I can't really think of anything else besides 1 or 2 more items that could get added.









Once I was done for that day I got the new switch mounted on the wall which will keep this setup very small and out of the way in the closet. The UPS will fit right alongside it on the ground and not really affect anything in the closet.





As I move things around to new cable pulls and all the new items in the garage, I will have about 35-40 new terminations to do. I decided to buy a new all-in-one punch-down tool to speed this process up vs. 8 individual punch-downs per connector. The 45 degree connectors are also a nice touch and faster to wire up as well.











With the router and switches online in the garage I was able to swap the house switch over to the fiber connection and move the fiber ONT to the garage.









I now have wifi in the garage finally. It would bleed over from the house in places but it wasn't extremely stable before.



With the network active in the garage now I can move on to getting the garage cameras and other AP online as well as the lines terminated for the media cabinets and TVs.