This is the ongoing saga of our experiences building a beautiful Modern Chateau in Atherton.  Live the process vicariously with us as we do this together in real-time…

Part 5: The Rough Trades

Oct 16, 2021

Are you thinking about building your own home, and are searching for some “in the trenches” stories about how it is done? Well welcome home! In previous editions of this construction blog, we’ve detailed the land acquisition, design, foundation, and framing.  Check out those blog posts, or just take our word for it: we now have a have a attractive structure (financially and aesthetically) of concrete, steel, and wood, on a great plot of land.  But we’re not done yet.   We’re about to add in the circulatory systems that transport liquids, gasses, and charged particles around the house.  We’ve got the skeleton built, and now we’re building the internal organs and circulatory systems.  This is the stuff that makes a house work. And this is what we call the Rough Trades.

The “Rough Trades” got their name because all the workers are really boisterous and get into fights all the time, like a wild west saloon at fightin’ time. 

Actually, that is not quite true.  But it is fun to imagine. Its only rough in contrast to the “finish” parts that come later.  There are three big ones; let’s look at what they are and what’s interesting about each system in turn: Plumbing, Electrical, and HVAC.

Plumbing

Plumbing is pretty fascinating stuff—and not just because it’s named after the Latin word for lead (“plumbum”, which pipes used to be constructed from, before we realized that lead poisoning was a thing), or because the godfather of the plumbing fixtures industry really was named “Thomas Crapper.”  No, we love plumbing because it’s a really fun 3D puzzle to solve when building a house.  Remember how our walls have all these 2x4 or 2x6 spaces between the future surfaces?  Plumbers are going to use a lot of that space.  Rough plumbing fixtures (such as the inside part of a faucet, or the thing a toilet mounts to in the floor) go in with priority; we know exactly where everything should go thanks to our detailed elevation drawings from the design team.  Then pipes start connecting hot and cold supply lines, and other pipes start taking used water away. 

One kinda obvious thing about water supply is that it is under pressure, so the lines can run from a hot water heater in the basement to a shower on the upper level and water still comes out.  But waste water is not under pressure, so pipes need to angle down to work.  And we also have drip pans and condensate lines that take water from where is rarely comes from or is not supposed to come from at all (like your gas furnace, or your washing machine) and routes it down and away.  Then there are natural gas supply lines, carrying pressurized fuel to your fireplace or gas stove or firepit. 

Vent lines go *up* from a drain line to equalize the pressure in the drain.  Why? Consider beer.  It “glugs” when you pour it into your thirsty mouth because the liquid falls down from gravity, but there is no way for new gas to get into the top of the bottle.  The area above the beer is getting larger and larger by the departing liquid, creating a partial vacuum.  As some point, the vacuum pulls in gas from the outside through the beer below it.  The outgoing liquid and the incoming gas share the same hole and alternate… thus the “glug”. 

As it turns out, glugging beer is much more popular than a glugging sink, but the same physics is at play.  So, we have even more vent pipes hidden inside the wall, and connected to the air outside, so that drains always have a secret source of air that enables the waste water to pour smoothly away.  The sink just works.  But we also want beauty:  those vent lines are going to exit the house in a place least likely to be noticed.  Some houses look like mushroom forests on the roofline at the front of the house… not ours!  We make the plumbers work a bit harder to route the vent pipes to the least obvious location possible.

Fresh water comes from the City, and waste goes out through the “sewer lateral” (a mostly-sideways-but-slightly-slightly-downward-sloped pipe connecting the house to the municipal sewage system that typically is buried a few feet under the sidewalk or road).  “But wait,” you say. “How does my basement toilet ever connect to the sewer lateral?  I know that sh#% flows downhill!”  Ah, dear reader, Thomas Crapper would be proud of you.  We install ejector pumps (which pumps sewage up and out) and sump pumps (which do the same for any groundwater) in various places.  And we often install redundant backups and remote monitoring devices to be safer. 

“But wait!” you exclaim again, eager to explore plumbing further.  “Sewage stinks.  Why don’t I smell it if the waste pipes slope downwards to the public sewer?”  Another great question young padawan! There are clever little water buffers keeping the stinky pipe from the habitable house; that “P-trap” under each sink is a way to keep a constantly refreshed macaroni of water between your refined nose and the stuff we don’t want to think about. 

“But wait!” you implore, getting your advanced certification the Plumbing Arts. “I hate it when hot water takes so long to come out of the tap, why can’t it be faster?”  Great question, reader!  We do something called a “recirculating hot water system.”  Instead of one line of copper from the basement to your faucet, filled with water than has been cooling down since the last time you ran it, we use something more like a big loop: two lines that are constantly circulating around and staying hot.  When you turn on this tap, the hot water is right there.  More cost, more work, more satisfaction.  At the Young Platinum Group, we’d rather just be known for happiness like this. Our target buyer is an extraordinary person living an extraordinary life; they expect some extras like this.

And just when you thought plumbing was done, a whole *other* system of pipes comes in—your fire suppression sprinklers.  This is pressurized water able to spray from every part of your ceiling to stop a fire.  What makes the sprinklers shoot water out? Is it the reflection of laser beams against smoke caused by a fire? Is it Fire Chief Barney at the local fire station with his finger on the button?  Is the system controlled by advanced home automation systems hackable by criminals?  Nope.  Kind of like a grenade, each sprinkler head is spring-loaded to go off if it can.  And the only thing stopping that from happening is a tiny bulb of glass, which is formulated to melt just before most of the rest of your house burns.  They were pretty clever in the good old days.

Electrical

So plumbers have a pretty cool job, and they take up a lot of the space inside the walls of a house.  But the absolute first pick of stuff to go inside the walls and ceilings actually goes to the electricians.  No one likes a ceiling that draws attention itself with many and unorganized penetrations.  But that’s the default unless you create a “reflected ceiling plan” that shows exactly what goes where, and ensure that the space for things to line up perfectly really does exist (wayward joists, arrogant structural beams, and impetuous pipes sometimes force an in-the-field compromise).  When you walk down a corridor, the can lights in the ceiling above should be evenly spaced and centered.  And when the corridor enters a room, the lighting pattern should blend in seamlessly.  If we do it well, you don’t notice it at all.  It should appear obvious and easy in the finished house.  So as soon as the framers are done, electricians are installing can light boxes and junction boxes where all the switches and outlets will go, before anyone else grabs the space.

Most of the electrical work is actually the wiring, but most of the changes relates to… well… us changing our minds.  There is a big but tedious site walkthrough where hundreds of metal boxes (the can lights and their attached heat dissipation systems) are tucked into the joists above, and hundreds of blue plastic boxes are nailed to the framing.  We developers walk thru and think hard about how people will use the finished house.  Neat questions come up, like, “I think this switch should turn on the lights in the entry area and also the landing above”, or, “This switch is too close to that switch that does the same thing; I’d rather walk across the room to turn it off and have fewer switches.”  Despite thinking in excruciating detail about this at the design phase, this is where we see it in 3D for the first time and rethink things. Mostly we simplify and remove.  Indoor-outdoor coordination always seems to need extra work, and the decisions often involve finding the right balance between flexibility (“every single thing gets its own switch”) and convenience (“group all these things together because people will want to flip one switch and have several things happen at once”).  Each house we build, we get better at this.

On the engineering side, electricians are considering circuits, which ones get AFCI vs GFCI versus normal, which ones (if any) are prioritized for backup generators, where and how many subpanels to use, how much and where the solar panels go where the electrical outlets go…  and there’s weeks of wiring alone to do after we finalize the design!

Then we have the low-voltage aspects of the house. This refers to all the stuff that needs some kind of wiring, but won’t electrocute you. Internet connections—both hardwired and WAP points—are mounted. COAX cable locations are placed. Speakers are mounted in walls and ceilings. Surveillance cameras guard the perimeter. Motion sensors and perimeter intrusion sensors are set up. Fire detectors, garage door openers, landscape lighting, telephone lines, thermostats, and even certain pretty lights are all in the plans. And each of them needs a certain kind of wire connecting them to somewhere. Many of the wires go to the “cable head end”, or “the AV closet”. This is where the eventual owner will put their choice of gear, but ideally they’ll never have to open up a wall to get what they want. We’re building the complete “body” so that the future owner can insert the “brain” of their choosing.

HVAC

The final component of the Big Three is HVAC – Heating Ventilation, and Air Conditioning.  The goal, of course, is to get clean fresh air, at the right temperature, humidity, and motion, to where people want it for comfort.  Typically that means bringing “new” air into a room (via an “Air Supply”—no, not the 80s band—the original kind) , and letting “old” air equalize out via an “Air Return”.  It’s a simple moving loop, with some manipulation somewhere in the circuit, like adding fresh air, heating or cooling it, and filtering out particles.  Or it would be a simple loop, if people didn’t have all these competing priorities like, “I want as high a ceiling as I can get”, or “I plan to do such-and-such with furniture so I want the air supply to be right there,” or “the design calls for 20 feet of unbroken wall so you cannot use this obvious space.”  So the HVAC team has to get creative.

They of course are bound by laws of physics:  Air flows smoothly across a straight raceway but needs to be pushed harder if the duct twists and turns.  You want a certain throughput of fresh air everywhere, so duct volumes and damper settings need to be in balance.  We’d like clean air to appear gently from an invisibly small opening, but air whooshes when the holes get too small, but then again no one likes gigantic grates… so… there are many compromises in the field despite the best-laid plans.  Remember, this team usually has to make do with whatever is left over.

And what about the actual “conditioning” of the air?  This usually means heating and cooling in Northern California; our humidity is pretty much ideal.  “Air conditioning” is a cool (haha) process.  You know how you feel cool when you get out of a swimming pool and a breeze blows over the water on your skin?  That’s because evaporation (liquid becoming a gas) is an inherently cooling process.  The most common air conditioning systems in use today just do a fancy version of that.  Well, not too fancy; the tech is a over 100 years old.  But still kinda magic to us mortals.

There is a big box in the mechanical room where air is pulled into from around the house.  The air first goes through a filter (which can be anywhere between basic, to just screen out big impurities like dog hairs, to medical grade, to filter out much smaller particles), and then passes over cooling coils, which chill the air.  Then a fan pushes that cool air through all the ducts into the rooms of the house.  Simple right?  But how do the cooling coils get cold? 

Here’s the nifty science of it all!  A refrigerant substance gets pumped around a closed circuit between the mechanical room and the “AC Condenser” outside.  You’ve seen these...  metal boxes a few feet in each dimension, making noise when the AC is on. By the way, the placement of this essential but unattractive thing is of high priority to us, and happens very early in the design process…  it must not intrude on the enjoyment of the future back yard!  The refrigerant is a cold liquid when it starts the journey at the mechanical room.  The absorbed heat of the house’s air turns the refrigerant into a hot gas, still inside a wee copper tube.  The hot gas loops outside to the condenser unit, where an electric pump compresses it, spreads it around a lattice of thin tubes with a lot of surface area, and a fan blows (relatively) colder air over it to cool it down. As it cools, it becomes a liquid again.  Then the cooled-down liquid loops back and does it again.  So via the power of chemistry and physics, and with a modest expenditure of electricity, this taken-for-granted-but-gosh-darn-amazing-that-it-works system… just works.

A furnace is a relatively simple device that passes air through a burning wall of ignited natural gas.  Pretty much like sticking your face above a stove.  A thermostat is the brains of the heating and cooling systems… it controls whether (and to what degree) the air is subject to the furnace, the AC, or neither.  Both systems share the same network of ducts.  There are other super-cool systems, like radiant floors and heat pumps, but let’s not get carried away in this article :-) .

Wrapping It All Up

So, by the end of the “rough trades” process, all the stuff that goes into the walls are in.  The mechanical room is not complete yet, but city inspectors come in to critique our work before we bury it all in insulation and seal it inside drywall.  It’s a quality check that is to everyone’s benefit.

So as this blog is written, we are on the verge of asking the city to come inspect our work.  We have great workers throughout and we are not taking shortcuts.  That’s one reason we get the best workers…  we pay super-fast, are well organized, and let them do quality work on a beautiful design.  So we’re not really worried about passing this big milestone.  But will we pass?  Tune in next time to find out... Because when we get the insides approved, its time to start covering up all these mechanical systems with the actual surfaces that future inhabitants will see and touch… inside and out!

Next Up: Part 6: Sealing the Envelope!