Feeling Wired

While I was at work this morning feeling wired from too much coffee, Kenny was at the model home in our new neighborhood meeting with the wiring company, ITG. To be perfectly honest, I wasn't quite sure how important this meeting was so I let Kenny take the lead and didn't feel too bad about having to miss it because of work. I figured they could stick the outlets wherever and call it a day.

Turns it out it's pretty important and I kind of wished I hadn't missed it. And it didn't involve electrical outlets at all. Luckily my break at work coincided with part of the meeting so I was able to conference in for at least a little bit.

There was one thing we knew for sure going into the meeting - we wanted to keep the cost of the upgrades down while also including the few things we felt were really important. One of the items we decided to add was a pre-wire in the living room so our television can be mounted without all of the ugly wires hanging down.

We also found out that that we get 3 cable jacks and 1 phone jack included in the purchase price of the home, everything else would be an upgrade. We chose which rooms to include the cable jacks in - master bedroom, living room (where the pre-wire will be for the mount), and one of the additional upstairs bedrooms - and to put the phone jack in the study. We also got to pick exactly where in the room we wanted the jacks to be. No more laying in bed and watching the TV from a funny angle.

In addition to the cable hookups that are included, we decided to include a box in the basement that will allow us to add more cable hooks up in the future without having to have things rewired and come from the outside. At least that's how I understand it.

The other thing I wanted to know about was adding the pre-wire for an alarm system. Because it's new construction, the wiring company can pretty easily set things up for an alarm system, include the keypad and the window and door sensors and call it a day. But ultimately, we decided to bypass using ITG for the security system and to go with another company. I had done a little bit of advanced research (thanks for the advice, Dad) and thought we'd get a better deal that way. 

The sales guy didn't try to sell us on the central vacuum system or any other crazy upgrades, which there are plenty to choose from, so we came out of the meeting underneath of the budget we had agreed upon and happy with our decisions. Although, it would have been pretty cool to have surround sound in the whole house. All in all, it was a productive meeting and we can check another item off of the list that gets us closer to the start of construction.

Oh yeah, and did I mention we got a phone call this evening from our loan officer letting us know we were approved? Woohoo! We're both really happy that it didn't take the 3 weeks the loan officer said it would. Now we can just relax a little bit and enjoy the process.