Thursday, April 20, 2006

Dungeon Construction: Day 5 1/2

Small crisis this morning, and waaay more noise than before.

The plumbers showed up this morning, which was a surprise to me, and while they pretty much knew what had to be done, they also showed up with rolls of plastic piping. I know that this stuff is up to code, and in fact is used in most of the new houses we've seen recently, but I can't get over the fact that it's plastic and plumbing should be copper pipe. Everything else in the house is copper and I'm of the completely unscientific and unknowledgeable opinion that metal is superior to plastic.

So, much consternation on the part of the plumber, who insists that plastic is fine, and me insisting that we specified copper and want copper. He doesn't have copper and will need to head back to his shop for it, "and might not be able to work here today." Called Ethan (the contractor/pm) and he straightened it out tout suite. Copper it is. He's going to rough out the bathroom, move the oddly placed sprinkler system pipe, and move the pressure tank on the hot water heater so that we can built the wall at an angle. At least we kept the bathroom in the same location as the existing drain stuff.

And, jack-hammering unexpectedly at 8am is definitely a way to perk people up. They have to move the drain for the shower, which entails busting up concrete. That thing is noisy.

We bought the speakers last night, and already I'm having buyer's remorse. We got the "middle" size of tower speakers, and I'm wondering if we shouldn't have bought the "large" size, since I know we might have speakers for much, much longer than any of the other components and we're eventually going to want bigger ones. For the techies among us, we got the Definitive Tech speakers (DP7004 fronts, CLR2300 center, and four BP2X surround speakers. Specs here). I've also done a rather nice schematic of how to wire the speakers and their locations - click on the image to get the full size one! I am such a geek.)

We also decided on a receiver -- Denon AVR-2807. It has an ipod control dock, and something called HDMI switching. All I understand about it is that you can input pretty much ANY type of cable from your components (svideo, component, cable, digital) and it will output a single, digital, converted signal. So, one cable to the projector, not four or five. Works for me.

More pictures tonight -- framing should be almost done and plumbing in place.

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