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ELECTRICAL
Your plans will almost always have electrical outlets and plugs and switches right on the plan. I find without exception, it is best to go through your house in detail right after the rough construction of your house. You need to have the ability to walk through the house with the vision of where the doors are and which way they swing and how you want to turn lights on and off. You need the ability to somewhat visualize how you want to do your major furniture formations, so you can see where you want wall plugs and how high you want them. It is nice if you can figure out where any floor plugs might go. (The solid brass floor plugs are a nice choice) You also want to figure out where you want any spot lights in the ceilings. There are basically 3 types of recessed spot lights. The kind which are installed flush and shine down straight. The one's which you angle toward your fireplace, etc. And than there are movable one's which you turn after the home is finished. Do not take these steps lightly. If you do not spend a lot of time studying all the possibilities you can think of, you will make more mistakes than you want or need to. Understand this, you will make mistakes, but the biggest mistake you can make is not doing enough thinking and planning. Its no big deal if you approach this with the correct attitude. You start from the front door with you plans in hand and a red pen to mark you plans. You walk through your home before the plumber and heat contractors get there. You think of your lighting shadows and the potential dark spots and you try and light your home accordingly. After you have finished with your ideas, call your electrical contractor and have him walk through the home with you. If he is considerate, (and most of them are) you can glean an enormous amount of information from him. No offense, but don't go to a cheap lighting fixture place after you have built your brand new home. I see people at the big outlet stores all the time, trying to save $1500 or so by purchasing their lighting at a savings. My gosh, you spend $300,000 to $500,000 for your house, and than you spend $2500 on lights. The rule of thumb is to spend at least $1.00 per sq. ft. on your lighting packages. Today's homes in a semi-custom atmosphere are more like $2.00 a sq. ft. Here is another things to keep in mind. When you are purchasing exterior lights, make sure they fit the size of your home. Too often people pick out lights which are too small for their home or much too large. Just make sure they are proportionate. By the way, the people at the small lighting company's, who deal with new construction all the time are an excellent resource for knowledge. Think about it. THEY DO IT ALL THE TIME. In most cases they will have great ideas. You have to pay for knowledge and if you have to pay an extra $500 to $1000 to light your home in a professional way then pay the extra money at the small lighting company's. The changes in the present day construction with electrical has more facets than one might expect. The 3500 sq. ft. homes and larger have created changes in the electrical needs of housing. Electricity is carried through the wires, and the longer the runs the better gauge wiring you need. When my houses first started going over 3000 sq. ft. we began to have the need to consider large gauge wiring and more amperage. A friend of mine had to put in two 200 amp services. He did not anticipate the problems it was going to cause with the electric company before he started. The electric company has (Detroit Edison in our area) to run 2 lines from the box to bring in larger amounts of electricity. Normally 200 amp service is more than enough. Some of you can go back where 60 amp service was the norm in the 60's and 70's. 100 amp service became the norm in the 80's, along with 150 amp service. Now, many of the big homes are getting 200 amp service from the custom builders and we put in 400 amp service in some cases.
You have regular home wiring which includes the normal wiring of the home which falls under the electrical contractor who is wiring your home. What you see in the above picture is home wiring where you are installing exterior lighting for light posts going down a road and or electrical outlets to plug in holiday lights. The picture seen above was a money saver for our customer. The electrical company was not set up for digging the trench. We went to one of our people with the right kind of equipment and dug this 250 foot trench and laid our own wiring and got the approval from the building department to do so. We had the electrical company set up the wiring to the box in the house but we had the opportunity in this situation to save the customer $1,000. The advantage of having an experienced builder is they have been through many situations and are normally way ahead of a person trying to build a home on their own because, frankly this is what the builder does for a living. |
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