I do have photos from yesterday's downstairs work but we spent the whole of yesterday evening talking about what had been done and some of the misunderstandings there had been over (primarily) the electrical work so there wasn't time to post them. Then this morning we both had a talk with the builder and the electrician to work through the details. Nothing bad, really, just some breakdowns in communication.

There's a couple of things to say here. First of all, when you're getting bids on something like this you need to be sure about everything you want to be done. You need to have planned out and drawn up all of it. A few vague ideas about putting lots of networking in are not enough.

Secondly, you need to make sure that you communicate what it is you want to be done early enough that it gets included in the bid (or at least so you are clear on what is excluded).

This is not to say that we regret starting this, because we're really pleased with what's been done (the new lights in the family room look really good!) and firmly believe that it's going to be great once it's all done. I am surprised at just how stressful it is, and about how much detail you need to have sorted out before the work begins.

In fact, we actually did a pretty good job of thinking through most of the detail. The biggest place where it broke down was in the office electrical in general, and with the networking in particular. There was some miscommunication about what I wanted to do, and a misunderstanding about what the terminology in the bid meant (wishful thinking on my part, really. For the record, "five locations" means "five spots on the wall" not "five rooms"), and some further miscommunication about what the bid was actually for.

What it really comes down to is that I had not put enough fine detail into the network stuff before we began and we are going to end up paying for that. Well, actually it will probably cost about the same as it would have anyway, but it's a good deal less simple to deal with the electrician directly which is what we need to do now, than it would have been to work through the builder.

There are a couple of bits of work which I will be doing that I had not anticipated:

1. network box - we need an enclosure for the patch panel. This is one of those things that I thought of just before the work started and had a mild panic attack about. I had hoped to find a bathroom cabinet or something which would do the job, but this is going to be a bit of custom carpentry work I'll do later. It will be painted to match the walls so it's not too conspicuous. In any case, there was no expectation that this was in the bid since it was such a late thought on my part.

2. network connections - the electrician is going to run the wires, but I will be wiring up the sockets and patch panels that connect to those wires. This is something I had thought we had asked to be included in the bid, and I had misunderstood the language used in the bid as meaning that the connections would be made with fixtures we supplied. The actual meaning was that the fixtures and the making of the connections would be supplied by someone other than the electrician.

I am rather annoyed about having to do the wiring work. It will be time consuming and is more or less exactly how I do not want to be spending my time. But the electrician has said he is not licenced to do this part of the work (which is more a liability issue than a competence issue, apparently), and so it's either a matter of doing it myself or looking for a network guy to do the work.

Like I say, you need to make sure that you specify things quite carefully before you begin.

Posted by Dunx at May 12, 2004 10:20 AM