Casa Blanca: Colorado Off-Grid House Build, Ep.19: Electrical and Plumbing, Pt 1

I've been working on both the electrical and plumbing "roughs" more or less i parallel. The standard process isn't really designed for DIY tinkerer builds. In a normal flow, once primary framing was done, you'd do your basic wiring and plumbing installs and call for the first of two inspections for each. The idea is that in a normal flow, your next priority would be insulation and drywall, "closing up" the walls. So the roughs are meant to check all the things that will be invisible once that happens, which makes sense on a normal build where those are definitely your next steps.

The trouble for us is this is forcing us into all sorts of detail-oriented decisions like shower pan designs and "exactly what do we want XYZ switch to do, from where?" earlier than we'd like. These are things we'd ideally like to research and consider for awhile before doing, like putting a lot of thought into light switch placement, and even changing our minds at the last minute, but because we can't proceed to final inspections until the walls are "closed up" we're having to make compromises we know we'll regret later because we're being forced to make things harder to change than they should have to be. But that's the way it goes.

One side comment: It may seem a little onfocused to do so many things in parallel instead of just picking and completing one task at a time, but actually this works very well for me for two reasons.l First, I have pretty severe ADHD, and one side effect is that you don't get to choose what you're motivated to focus on. If you get stuck on something it's easy to get distracted and "spiral" on irrelevant things. Having multiple tasks going in parallel means when I get stuck on one thing I have plenty to switch to and keep going. It's all work and all has to get done, so as long as I'm doing SOMETHING, I'm still making progress overall.

Second, (and probably more important) my nearest parts-supply store is 30 mins away, and is a small-town hardware store with very limited selection. My next choices are 45 mins (each way) and have more options but still not what I can get at Home Depot or Lowes, the nearest of which are 1.5hrs away (again, each way). In that situation, missing just one item can make for a really big time setback if it blocks the one task you're working on. By working on many things in parallel, I can make sure that each trip "to town" is for a variety of things that all unblock 4-6 tasks: a plumbing fitting, a gas pipe nipple, a stud shoe, etc. You might ask why I don't just get all these things ahead of time, but in this stage there's a lot of "fitting up" work that is really hard to pre-calculate, no matter how careful you are, and you can't predict accidentally chipping a plumbing fitting anyway. So as crazy as it sounds, this is actually a very efficient way to proceed.