The Push for a CO

 

I am finding it hard to update this blog regularly as we make a huge push to finish all the projects that will get us a CO. Our goal is to be moving in a little over a month! All we do is march back and forth from home and day jobs to working on the house. 

We have so much to do but so little left to get a CO. Because we do not have a construction loan, we are not tied to what a bank considers a finished house. Often construction loans can't be closed out until everything is 100% complete including trim. This is not the case for us, so we are concentrating on the projects that are required by our building department for a CO. The bar is surprisingly low.... a little too low...so we will go a bit beyond for comfort reasons.

Required for a CO in our town.

• Potable water
• Septic system
• Enclosed building envelope that meets the minimum for safety and insulation requirements
• One sink
• One toilet
• No exposed wiring
• Heat
• Pass a Blower door test
• Nothing "unsafe" (this can mean a lot of things depending on your build)
• Functioning CO2 and wired fire alarms that are all interconnected 

You will notice that they don't really care if you can cook or shower. Those are not considered necessities from their perspective. We do consider those important! This means we are going a bit farther and adding those on our "to complete" list. Here is the rather short list of things we still have to do to get our CO.

1. Install our domestic hot water tank. Using an energy incentive coupon from our local electric company we purchased a heat pump one. The coupon gave us a $750 discount. With a little research into heat pump water heaters I stumbled upon the incentive program, applied and got the rebate to purchase it discounted from Home Depot.
2. One working toilet. We are really close to this one. It just needs water connected.
3. Kids bathroom sink but we need the countertop first.
4. Kitchen sink (sink is in already because it is undermount) and countertop. We are doing concrete counters in the kitchen so right now we are building the forms. We hope to pour next week!
5. Install outlets and switches for the kitchen counter and lights. The lights are installed and all the wiring is run; we just need to build in switch and outlet boxes into a poured concrete backsplash curb when we do the countertop. We don't specifically need a countertop for the CO but we do need the built in switches and outlets complete. They are an all in one project with the countertop.
6. Polish and seal the kitchen countertop. This will be messy and time consuming.
7. Do a blower door test. I have it already scheduled for mid June!
8. One small section of hall ceiling needs to be installed still. We are using beautiful zebra wood flooring. This is an easy project so it got left for one of the many days where we are missing something crucial to continue with one of the bigger projects. We have several of these small filler projects that we don't bother with until we get stuck and can't continue with something else. It does need to be completed before the CO inspection because it has exposed wiring.
9. Install the whole house energy recovery ventilator (ERV system), dehumidifier and the bathroom vent fan. We have everything set and wired, the units just need to be connected and mounted. (these count as small filler projects)
10. Finish the kids shower. It is close to being able to be tiled.
11. Install all our appliances (in most cases this is just putting them in place and hooking them up to already complete hook ups. The only exception is the range top propane connection.)

That's it! The list has gotten really short! 

Since my last update we have done a ton of things. 

We sheathed the great room curved walls with plywood. These will eventually get stained dark and vertical slats of light wood attached.

All the exterior and interior lights, switches, outlets, smoke and CO detectors have been installed except the outlets built into the kitchen countertop.

We designed much of our lighting to be hidden and make the space glow.

We have installed led lighting that can be changed to almost any color.

The in floor uplights were a big project. We them into the floor from the beginning not realizing they aren't a thing. So we bought outdoor landscape lights. Then purchased brass carpet flanges made for floor outlets to cover the edges. I drilled holes in the brass flanges to mesh with the bolt holes for the lights and presto! We have brass infloor uplights. It was actually a really long process of researching, purchasing all the needed parts (including special ordering matching brass bolts that were a weird size) and finally spending 2 hours per light cobbling it all together so it looks like it was supposed to be an infloor unit. But it is done and they are super cool!

We stained, poly protected and installed the kitchen cabinets. It was a bigger job than most cabinet installs due to the odd shape of the exterior wall.

The kids bathroom cabinets are in and ready for a countertop. 

The kids shower is coming along. 

We just need to pour the final mortor bed to get the height right, coat with water proof stuff one more time. We used Red Gaurd (the pink/red stuff on the walls). Then do the finished tile. Getting tile that we liked was difficult due to all the material shortages. After several tries we finally have tile that we like. The tile we had picked out previously was either unavailable or 4x the original cost so we had to go back to the drawing board.

We also installed half of the wood ceiling in the hallway of the kids wing. We used zebra wood. I just love how it looks on a ceiling. I think it would be too busy on a whole floor but it adds a lot to the plain hallway. We will get to the other half at some point. We do these easy projects when we lack the parts to continue with other projects. We go to Home Depot at least 5 times a week for something!

The toilet install is almost done. It just needs a water connection but it wasn't an easy one. We had to rent a core drill and drill out 6" of floor to move the drain away from the wall. When we had to locate all the drain pipes there was nothing but a foundation. It was almost impossible to tell if we got things right. After the house went up we didn't think to check that all the drains would work with where the walls go. Everything was in the plans but because the house is constructed using a soft form things were off just a bit in where we needed to locate a wall so it would be symmetrical on the other side of the kitchen. Our options were to have it be asymmetrical or move the drain so we could be the minimum distance from the wall. Because we knew having it be asymmetrical would bother us forever, we spent an amazing amount of time getting it right. We removed the floor. Used a special offset flange and a bend in the pipe to get the needed space. We then poured concrete into the hole and installed the toilet. This took weeks! And we screwed up the offset flange several times and kept having to redo it. Every time we messed up we would have to reorder the special parts to try again. Each try cost us $40 and I think 4th time was the charm of getting it perfect. 

We got the results back from our water test and it was a thumbs up! They then approved our permit to discharge into the septic so we are all set with the requirements for our local health department.

We will be moving into a very unfinished house but we will at least be living there and no longer paying for two places.

Fingers crossed we can make the deadline we told our landlords! It is so hard to calculate how long it will take us to do things we have never done before!