Finally, after months of design work, months of choosing a builder and a week or two of paperwork, we finally put the spades in the ground today. I am so excited. We will now be spending a lot more time on the details of constructing a house, and certainly I will be spending more time on this blog now.

Our contractor put on a fine little show today, not only to please the customer (us!) but I think it also helped set us in the right frame of mind for the next few months of digging and concrete pouring. They arrived at the construction site a few hours before we got there, and had dug a hole and put up a large painted tripod. They had built a plastic “time capsule” into which we together placed a set of house construction drawings as well as a copy of today’s newspaper. The “capsule” (i.e., a piece of cut and painted plastic pipe) was then ceremoniously lowered into the ground, the tripod removed, and the hole filled in. The whole family held a brand-new shovel each, all the store stickers still attached, and smiled for the camera. Two minutes later we retreated to the cool shade of a tree, sipped our ice teas, and watched as a worker finished filling in the hole. That was probably the end of the hard “labor” we had to do on this project…

A funny thing is that, as far as I could tell, the “capsule” must have ended up somewhere halfway between the ceiling and the floor in the basement-to-be, so in about a week or so I’m sure they’ll bump into it again!

I’m a Western-trained engineer and not a believer in the myriad exotic details of Feng Shui. “Feng Shui”, by the way, is according to Wikipedia the ancient Chinese practice of placement and arrangement of space to achieve harmony with the environment. However, I do believe in having the space I live in being in harmony with the environment. As Wikipedia also states, “In its traditional form, Feng shui is a discipline with guidelines that are compatible with many techniques of architectural planning. Space, weather, astronomy, and geomagnetism are basic components of feng shui”.

But more importantly, construction workers do believe even in the more exotic aspects of Feng Shui (and other local superstitions), and it wouldn’t hurt to keep them happy. But if the local Feng Shui practitioner had told us that the house was in the wrong place, had to be moved 6m left, rotated 45 degrees, and chopped at one end – we definitely would have ignored his advice.

So what did he say? Believe what you may, but apparently since the lot is uniquely pocket-shaped and the front door faces east, it is in an excellent position where money will flow in… Also, we appear to have the right number of windows, doors and staircase steps, and the lot is favorably located in relation to the river, the mountains and the winds…

Finally – we have decided on the company that’s going to build the house, and today we signed the contract. It took us longer than we had expected to decide on the builder, but on the other hand we will be handing over to them a sizable chunk of cash so we decided that it’s better to be safe than sorry. Mind you, there are never any guarantees and only time will tell if they built you a good house or not. In the end it was a judgment call based on price, quality, ease of communications and a fair bit of gut feel. Wish us luck.

The houses that they showed us included several that we honestly didn’t like much, but we weren’t going to blame them for the decisions of the architect or the home owner. There were some quality issues in some of the houses, but in most cases they were again due to decisions not made by the builder, or due to material that they hadn’t selected. We continued to feel that the risk is manageable, especially since we are planning to be directly involved throughout the construction.

The remaining quality issues that we felt were due to poor workmanship, we feel can hopefully be avoided in our house through proactive management –we plan to work with them in advance of every step, explaining in detail the quality requirements. We also outlined the requirements prior to signing the contract, and the fact that they still signed is a good sign (so to speak). In addition, we are paying the architect to actually have a representative on the site, every day until the end, to independently oversee the work of the builder. Finally, if something does go wrong and the builder screws something up and can’t fix it, they were at least cost-effective enough that we can afford to bring in a specialist to fix the problem, with the project still ending up costing less than the higher-end builders would have charged us. There is always a risk, whatever you pay, but the risk can be managed.

I had a 2h meeting with the electrical engineer of the proposed builder today. Despite detailed discussions on the relatively complex auxiliary systems I am asking them to install, I felt good about the discussions, and about the builder. We are down from selecting between five builders to just two. This electrical engineer works for a company that built another house very near our own site. They’ve done quite a few offices and manufacturing plants too, and are relatively familiar with wiring up local area networks and audio systems.

I felt comfortable enough with these guys that they remain the main contender for the building contract. It took me an hour less to explain to these guys what the wiring was all about than it took me to explain it to the architect’s electrical consultant.

What’s so special about the wiring? Well, besides the fact that there’s lots of it I also have special requirements on flexibility and ease of maintenance. We (obviously) need to have all light switches and lights working when we move in, using standard 220VAC connections. However, over time I will be migrating the lighting control over to the Home Control System, room by room. All light switches will now merely provide low-voltage inputs to a local microcontroller, which decides whether or not the light should be on in that particular room based on inputs from the switch, from a motion sensor, from user-interface panels and from the main controller. When I switch over a room, I don’t want to redo any cabling in the walls. Hence, the need for unique cable arrangements and local panels.