Winter 2012. Installing interior walls. Note the bracing, and the Tyvek that still covers the hole in the front of the house for a future window seat installation in the master bath.
Julie installing an electrical box in one of the SIP walls. With these "structural insulated panels" you have to plan any electrical runs ahead
before you put the shell together. Careful to make sure they are tight and square!
Copper pipes--old school! (I swear, the contractors and inspectors we had in later, before we closed in the walls, all said this. "Oh, copper! That's old school!" I'll add that they said this admiringly. Note the joints, sweated with solder. We could have used "Sharkbite" connectors, but those can run from a $7 dollars apiece for a simple connector to over $15 for a valve connector. A plain sleeve-type T-connector runs maybe $2-3 + pennies for the solder. We reserved Sharkbites for valves, and some final connections to the incoming water supply.
Here's a Sharkbite valve of the type we installed for the system shutoffs in the crawl space.
Nice and easy. Just clean up the end of the pipe, insert and you're done. For us, though, saving money--and the satisfaction of admiration for having attempted our connections the "old fashioned way"--led us to keep these to a minimum. Sweating a joint on a valve does run some risk of damaging the valve components and seals (for amateurs), so that was one driving factor to using these for valve connections.
And then there's always more wiring to run. Here's Eric putting in the 20-amp service to outlets for the upstairs bathroom outlets.
Be sure to keep the run-holes at least 1-1/4" from the edge face of the stud! This keeps drywall screws from digging into wires and pipes.
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