My Industrial Cabin Build

[buckeyefarmer]

My wife and I had a great visit at the build yesterday, but I choked on the video segment. You’ll see.

I’m sorry I kept him from work, I felt bad about that. David and his wife were gracious hosts. I hope I gave some meaningful tips based on my experience at building my home myself.

What a beautiful view.

The key is getting ready for rough in inspections so drywall can begin. I don’t think the water line or electric service need to be installed before that, but I’d call the inspectors to see what they expect to be done. For mine, they did not want any wires terminated in panel at rough in, but they did want the boxes all wired up with grounds connected and pigtails on for outlets. His plumbing is roughed in.
The water line from the well to the house, and electrical conduit from meter to house can be done while the drywallers are working, unless your county is different. My pump was put in well a month after my roughin passed. Probably best to call the inspectors and ask what exactly they want to see for rough in.
I would prioritize that over finishing the siding, siding is another thing that can be done parallel with drywall.
The sooner drywall goes in, then it’s painting, then you can start outlets, lights, interior doors, cabinets, vanities etc. the key is drywall, and the key to that is roughin passed.

I think it’s about 2 1/2 months of work once drywall starts.

 

[deezler]

C of O here requires a finished house. Finished.

That's f&*(ng obnoxious and draconian. No "temporary" C of O? We were given 6 months on our temp C of O before final inspection. We took about 5 months of it, to wrap up all the loose ends (finish second bathroom, final landscaping and retaining walls, etc).

I guess I should send my local inspector a love letter, he was really quite flexible and understanding for some unorthodox building strategies at my house and my buddy's next door. A "by the book" guy who also creatively looked for vagaries and opportunities to be flexible with zoning interpretation. Zero compromises on safety, but very accommodating on procedural items.

 

[jjp8182]

To move in we had to have 1 fully functioning bathroom - toilet, tub, sink (shower was not enough),

By that definition, my house (where I'm at least the third owner) wouldn't be "finished" as the one bathroom only has a toilet, two sinks and a shower. Granted in my county (and a fair number of - but not all - other counties in Alabama) the only reason to follow/obey building codes is for safety and resale as permits and inspections aren't technically/legally required for anything other than septic systems.

So to my mind that makes me wonder if "finished finished" has a defined state - and if the building inspectors would even accept an certain styles (e.g. industrial build) as a finished state.

Hopefully that's a non-issue as dealing with moving goal posts isn't exactly fun .... especially if/when it's only occurring due to someone power-tripping and inserting their interpretation/opinion for the actual requirement. From talking to coworkers, I've gotten the understanding that can be pretty routinely experienced in at least one of the nearby counties where permits/inspections are required) ...which makes knowing the written code & requirements for every nit-noid administrative detail a necessity for any DIY home work there.

 

[gary49]

Albemarle County used to allow TCO’s, not sure when that changed. Electric boxes need to be “made up” for the rough in inspection, that is, grounding conductors and neutrals wirenutted together, and any other conductors connected such that they are ready to be connected to any switch, receptacle, or other device that is to be installed at trim out. You don’t need electric service to house or water service whether well or public water for rough in inspection, although I must say I personally consider both to be a high priority item because it is mighty convenient to have power and water present on the job site and connected to the structure as soon as reasonably possible. It would be worth a call to the inspection department to find out if all the bathrooms need to be finished for a CO, many houses get CO’s with basement bathrooms just roughed in, but you might need to set all the fixtures in your case if the drywall is installed in the bathrooms.

 

[WoodChuckDad]

I had previously talked to the inspector and was told they want all bathrooms done. That means two showers all sinks and toilets. Functioning kitchen. Meaning it could be a temp cabinet with sink plumbed up, need appliances. Definitely stove. And I’m not sure they would accept the wood stove as a heat source.
We will find out as this all progresses. I got a lease signed on a house rental yesterday. This weekend we will be moving. Trying to get moved in fast to avoid paying for two places. There is a full basement and garage. I will be able to clear out my storage unit and that should save me money each month. It’s not much farther to the build but it is 20 minutes closer to work. There is no high speed internet although I have an order in to see if they can run it to the house. There is a big cellularone tower on the mountain across the road. Just 1 mile from us. So at the least I can get a 4g/LTE modem. Since both of our jobs are almost completely computer based, this will make a huge difference in our lives. By this time next week, I hope to be fully moved in with only the heavy woodworking equipment thatbis in storage left to be moved.

 

[gary49]

They won’t accept a woodstove for the heat. Sounds your new rental will work well except for the internet part. The county and Dominion have made a deal to extend the Firefly network in almost all of the county. Central Virginia Electric, one of the Co-ops serving some parts of the county started the Firefly build out a couple or three years ago. It’s fiber optic cable to wireless transmitters to serve groups of houses. Basic service is 50 megs, 100 if you want to pay more for faster. $50/month for basic service. All of us lucky enough to be served by CVEC are supposed to get connected by Spring of 2022, a lot of the southern part of the service area and down in Nelson County is already connected. Unfortunately, I haven’t seen a schedule of when the extension to the rest of the Albemarle County is supposed to happen. I think you and your wife will be glad to have not rushed into moving into an unfinished house. It’s hard to work on a house when you’re living in it, everything makes dust and debris and it’s really difficult to keep the finished areas clean, and then there’s the psychological thing where you want to relax when you get home, not start up on some more work, YMMV.

 

[WoodChuckDad]

They won’t accept a woodstove for the heat. Sounds your new rental will work well except for the internet part. The county and Dominion have made a deal to extend the Firefly network in almost all of the county. Central Virginia Electric, one of the Co-ops serving some parts of the county started the Firefly build out a couple or three years ago. It’s fiber optic cable to wireless transmitters to serve groups of houses. Basic service is 50 megs, 100 if you want to pay more for faster. $50/month for basic service. All of us lucky enough to be served by CVEC are supposed to get connected by Spring of 2022, a lot of the southern part of the service area and down in Nelson County is already connected. Unfortunately, I haven’t seen a schedule of when the extension to the rest of the Albemarle County is supposed to happen. I think you and your wife will be glad to have not rushed into moving into an unfinished house. It’s hard to work on a house when you’re living in it, everything makes dust and debris and it’s really difficult to keep the finished areas clean, and then there’s the psychological thing where you want to relax when you get home, not start up on some more work, YMMV.

I installed CVEC headquarters IP phone system back in 2006 or 2007. I am currently a cvec customer out here in Free Union. I am skeptical of that 2022!date fore firefly out this way, but by next week I won’t be an active customer anymore. I hAve Dominion at the new Rental and at the build.
I got an automated phone call today from comcast telling me that they can not offer me service at the new house. T-Mobile claims they can
offer Extended 5g. I don’t believe them but I ordered the router just the same. If it defaults to 4g/lte and gives decent service, I will be happy. I will take our weboost system with us. Not sure I will be putting it up. Depends on how things go with the cell modem.
I picked up the keys tonight and dropped off a car load of boxes. Jefanna packed half the kitchen up last night. She was happy. She had a couple hours of panic whenI first gave her the news last week but tucked into the whole thing pretty quickly and even embraced the trailer option. Her upbringing was kind of nomadic so the sudden announcement of “we gotta move” shook her a bit.
I was considering everything on the menu but we lucked out and found what I believe is a great option for us. I didn’t want a 12 month commitment and would much prefer to be there on the land but we both work full time jobs elsewhere and need to be able to keep our momentum both for the build and for the other parts of our lives. Laundry, showers, folded clean clothes. Those things add up. A little bit of space from each other, now and again wont hurt. Although we have been working from the same dinner table all the way thru the pandemic then on the build together and it has been a pretty good setup.
The kitchen is a little dated but everything works.
The stove is quaint.

There is some quirkiness to the whole set up but it grew on me rather fast.
We
Aren’t far from Monticello.

 

[buckeyefarmer]

Good luck on the sudden move.
I use LTE at home and can work remote ok using it. Even streaming works fine unless there is a tower outage. I do use a weboost also to improve signal.

 

[BigBlue1]

You should be fine on LTE if you have a decent signal. My wife & I both worked on sub-5Mb/s DSL (usually under 3) for a year, then spent 3 years on AT&T LTE modem. Totally fine for full-time WFH including audio & video for Zoom/WebEx/Teams meetings and all standard IT connectivity (including SSH). You'd be surprised how little bandwidth you can actually get away with.

You should check into Starlink for your future home site. We got that back in March and it has been fantastic. There is usually a waiting list for getting service at this point because they are just ramping everything up. It is a great system for rural locations that aren't served by cable or DSL and you'll get faster speeds and unlimited data unlike most LTE modems.

Rob

 

[WoodChuckDad]

I signed up for the Starlink beta program wait list last summer. When I found out about pre-orders I put mine in and paid my deposit in February. I met someone local, the other day who got Starlink in January. But he was a retired Rocket Scientist who knew a lot of people in Nasa so I got the feeling he had an inside line.