Start of a Bad Week

Started off Monday morning with a meeting with the architect and the builder but... no plumber. Now that people are finally listening to our suggestion that they move the vent over (instead of trying to tuck it magically into the wall), I think we might get somewhere. Of course, without any input from the friggin' plumber, it's all just a dream.

It looks like the electrician can't finish up his work until he coordinates with the plumber, so he's kinda treading water. Of course, now the electrical is all up in the air, too. We noticed this morning that they are planning to install the wall outlets horizontally above the countertops. Last week they called me and asked how high up to put them (or something strange like that), and I indicated that we might want to have a thin strip of accent tile material, so they should go under that. And I guess that turned into horizontal outlets. This morning I found out that we are very much opposed to horizontal outlets, so they'll need to reposition them. Of course, they can't do them all because they haven't fully framed out the corner window yet. They're waiting on the windows, which are supposed to arrive on Friday. So we need to tell them to swap the outlets to vertical and put them wherever one normally puts them.

Then the lighting thing blew up. The architect who developed our design gave me a call - we've been mostly dealing with his project manager. He asked a few questions about the lights that they installed and told me a bit about quality of light, and said that the builder had called to tell him they wouldn't be able to fit CFLs in the fixtures that they installed. We agreed that the best next step would be to wait on installing any fixtures in the kitchen area until the light bulb thing was resolved.

Later in the afternoon we talked again, and we got into a lot more detail about it all. We agreed that for the kitchen they should go back to the original (halogen) design. I got scolded (appropriately) for not copying the architect on the email I sent to to the builder about changing the lighting. And I wished I'd never mentioned anything about it in the first place, because it seems like a MESS. He's going to try and figure out a solution with the builder, though I have 2 points that I feel pretty strongly about:
1) I asked the builder to have dimmable CFL lighting. I didn't tell them which fixtures to use, and they chose some that wouldn't work for that purpose. Not our fault.
2) The architect shouldn't spend much time messing with this, because two hours of his time probably costs as much as all the damn lights that have already been installed.

So, our laundry area plumbing resolution is still completely up in the air. The living room lighting is in question, and the kitchen lighting has been put on hold until they get the stuff that the architect specified. Couple this with the fact that last week was slow, we're starting to move in the wrong direction.

At least we were able to pick up the countertop sample today. Hopefully tomorrow we'll go look at tile and maybe even make a decision.