Uh-Oh, Late Thinking!

Something you'll want to avoid is what we call “late thinking”. That is thinking out the details of a feature after certain steps in the project have begun, requiring the job to be a lot harder than it would have been had you figured out your plans at an earlier stage. One example of “late thinking” we ran into had to do with electrical wiring. We had lined out where the electric and phone lines would come into the house, keeping them well separated in the trench and even installed conduit, so new wiring could easily be pulled at some future date if needed. That was all good. We also had all of our permits in place, including the building, septic, and electrical permits. It is important to check with your county as to what permits and inspections will be required in your area. Requirements can vary between states and counties and whether or not you are within city limits. What we forgot to think out in detail was exactly where to bring the wiring from the outside electrical panel to the inside electrical panel until after the foundation was in place. After some thought we determined, it would be most efficient to bring it under the garage slab and into the basement, (as opposed to digging a new trench around the back of the garage to the back of the house). Luckily the garage slab had not yet been poured, and we were able to install conduit in the pea gravel under the slab. The challenging part was renting a concrete drill to drill a hole through 8” of concrete as well as a pesky piece of rebar. It would have saved hours of work and a pretty good bruise (from drill kick-back) if we had planned this out before the foundation was poured.

This is not the only time the electrical panel location gave us trouble. My husband consulted me on a preferred location. I didn't really want the panel in the middle of the family room, so I thought inside the bathroom would be a reasonable location. And so we hired a professional electrician to bring the wiring from the outside to the inside panel and install the panel in the bathroom as we had suggested. At some point the electrical inspector and his boss made an impromptu visit to check on our progress, pointed out a couple small items, but made no comment on the location of the electrical box. As my husband was involved in doing the majority of the wiring himself, he got a copy of the National Electrical Code and began to study. As he says, during some 'recreational' perusing of the code one day, he noticed that it dictated that electrical panels are not allowed in bathrooms. He called the electrical inspector who confirmed this was true. So one Saturday in February, we had to turn the power off, excepting for a few lights on extension cords from the outside power box and spent ¾ of a day turning the electrical box around and repulling various wiring back into place. We're grateful that not all of the wiring was in place at the time. The moral of the story is that it is the responsibility of the home-owner to make sure your house is built to all necessary codes. You can't always count on the professionals to watch out for you.

Another thing we planned originally that didn't work out was our plan to install our woodstove in the basement and pop the chimney out through the back wall. As we learned more about chimneys and backdrafting, we learned a chimney should really be located near the peak of the roof, and you don't want a long run of cold chimney outside relative to a short run inside. Right angle turns aren't recommended either. There are websites that can provide a lot more information on chimney details. But now we are faced with cutting a hole in our roof, so we can install our woodstove on the main level. I'm not including an exhaustive list of our mistakes in this entry. We'll talk about others as we cover various aspects of the building process. I suspect no project will be without its occasional bouts of 'late thinking', but we advise planning ahead as best you can to avoid complicated do-overs whenever possible.