Arizona New Home Construction Series, 2022 - What's inside your walls

Hi everyone and welcome back to my channel. Today is episode three in my new construction series and I hope you have the time to watch to the end. I explain why I feel that knowing what's inside your walls is very important as a homeowner. So let's get started. Let's go take a look and see what's hiding inside of these walls. This is a ceiling for the kitchen. You have the blue junction boxes for pendant lights. There's the vent for the ductwork. You have the brackets for your can lights. The ducting for the vent for your range hood. The black pipe you see underneath that is your gas line for your cooktop or gas range. Your outlets that go above your countertops. The kitchen island has outlets on the outside, an outlet underneath the sink for the garbage disposal, and the dishwasher. You'll have a hot and cold water, a drain, and then you'll also in most cases have a line that'll go from an option of a reverse osmosis system that goes to your refrigerator. Here's where the refrigerator is installed in the kitchen. So you have water coming into the kitchen and it is also plumbed from the under the sink so that if someone wants to put a reverse osmosis system or have filtered water, they plumb that water to your refrigerator so that you don't necessarily have to use the filter in the refrigerator. You can just use it directly from your filtration system or reverse osmosis. The owner suite has two sinks. So you have a hot and cold at each sink. You have drains at each sink and then you have the vent for your plumbing drains. You'll also have the electrical for the wall switches and any vanity lights, ceiling lights, and vents in your bathrooms. This is a shower and in your shower you will have a drain in the floor. Then you'll also have your vent pipe in the wall as you can see on the left along with your hot cold water and then you'll have the piping for the shower head. This is the other side of the bathroom wall and as you can see here you have what we call a clean out in the wall and you'll see these throughout your home and it gives you the ability to get into different parts of your plumbing in case you have something that's clogged or backed up and it's a way for you to access those without having to go through all of the plumbing throughout the house trying to find that clog or that backup. The laundry room has several components. You have your hot and cold water for your washer, the drain, the vent pipe for the drain. Here the builder has installed a gas line so the homeowner has the option of gas or electric. Always check your home especially for resale to see if that home has gas or electric and in some cases both so you'll want to know that. This laundry room has also been plumbed for a sink so you have an additional hot and cold water drain and vent pipe. This video is going to give you a little bit more of what goes on in the attic. So they do have the makeup air unit or your furnace and they have your duct work already up. Now let's talk about jump ducts. Here you have two separate rooms that each have a duct in the in the ceiling and then that duct is jumped into the hallway so then you'll see where there's two ducts in the hallway that are mounted and as we get into drywall you'll see this better and the reason they do that is it helps prevent the vacuum in your home. So as you know if your door is not quite shut but it's it's shut and then your air conditioner or your furnace comes on and then that door will slam. So jump ducts help prevent that vacuum throughout your house. Here's your networking junction box. All of your networking cables throughout the home all come into this box and then this is where you can put your wi-fi component, your modems, routers, splitters for your home. Here's where the homeowner has asked to mount a tv so the builder has put a sleeve in from the bottom where your cables are and your outlet is to the top so your wires will be hidden. All of the wiring in your house goes from the walls up into the attic space, comes across the attic into the wall on the exterior wall. It can be on the garage side or it can be on the other side of the home but it's all going to come into one spot in the wall and that's where they will place your electrical panel on the outside of the home. Here is a photo of the electrical panel prior to them putting breakers in. This builder is utilizing three types of insulation. They're using spray foam insulation in the attic against the roof. This gives the home a very airtight fit and it also keeps your attic space cooler than it would be if there was no insulation against the roof and only on the ceiling. Next you'll find blown cellulose insulation in all of the walls. This also has a great R value for efficiency. In this particular home they've used insulation batting and they have filled certain walls and used that insulation as sound barriers. One of my main reasons of doing a video on what's inside your walls is what happened to a client of mine. They were purchasing a new build. We went to do our walkthrough and as we were doing a walkthrough we noticed this paint underneath the kitchen cabinet that was almost melting. It looked melting and this is the actual photo. I went back and found my photos for this and as you can see the paint just doesn't look right and the builder said that they would fix all that. I walked over and I opened the cabinet and I saw this black stuff in the cabinet and everybody kind of looked at me and the builder's rep said oh we'll clean that off not a problem. So then I opened the bottom cabinet and I found more more black stuff and more problems and my client kind of gave me a funny look and they're like what is that and my response is well I'm not a certified professional mold inspector but I'm pretty sure this is mold. Sure enough later that afternoon the builder came in and started pulling cabinets off the wall and this is what they found. They found mold and there was mold on the back of the cabinets. There was mold on attached cabinets. They had to seal off that area because mold spores can be airborne and they had to remediate this room and my client was a little concerned because they have asthma. They aren't real sure about having a home that has mold in it and they they wanted to know what their options were. We were very fortunate that the builder had another home that was similar and so we we were able to opt out of this contract for this house and we moved them into another house. Thank you for taking the time to watch today's episode and I hope that it was helpful to you. I want you to understand everything about your home which is the whole idea behind my new construction series. If you have any questions concerning anything in my videos please consult a professional. As always I'm just your Arizona Realtor. If you'd like to see more episodes please make sure that you like, subscribe, share, and ring that bell for future episodes. Thanks everyone!