Six years after move-in, someone wants to hang a heavy television over the fireplace, add a grab bar in the guest shower, or run a new circuit to the garage for a welder. Every one of those jobs starts with the same question: what is behind this wall? On most houses the answer is a stud finder, a guess and a hole. On a house we scanned during construction, the answer is already on file. Progress scans get talked about as a way to watch a build from far away, and they are good at that. Their longer job starts after the drywall, and it lasts as long as you own the place.

A wall you can still see into

Before insulation and drywall go up, every wall in the house is open. The studs, the headers, the wiring, the drain and supply lines, the ductwork and the blocking are all exposed for a few days, and then they are covered for good. We scan the house at that stage, room by room, so the open walls are captured in three dimensions and can be walked through later the same way you walk through a finished room.

That record answers questions the plans cannot. Drawings show where a pipe was supposed to go. A scan shows where it went, including the small field changes every build has: a drain shifted around a joist, a wire run that took the long way to clear a beam.

There is a second, quieter benefit. Knowing the walls will be scanned changes how carefully they get built. Trades run cleaner when the work is going to be recorded and reviewed, and small problems get caught at rough-in, when fixing them means moving a wire instead of cutting drywall. A scan is a record for the owner and a final check for us, taken while the check can still change something.

How we run scans on a Piedmont house is laid out on our page about 3D progress scans for Piedmont builds.

Framing that follows the rock

Foothill lots around Piedmont often put the house on or against granite. Getting the foundation right means removing shelf rock in some places, fitting around it in others and sometimes engineering footings to bear directly on it. The walls that go up on that foundation step and turn with it.

The first scan comes right after framing, while every stud, header and stepped wall is still bare. The result is a picture of how the structure actually sits on its foundation: where the walls drop with the slope, where the heavy headers carry the window wall and where the blocking went before anything hides it.

Most owners will never need to look at it. The ones who do usually need it badly. Adding a lower-level bathroom, chasing a damp corner after a wet spring, or planning a patio that cuts near the foundation all go better when you can see how the walls meet the foundation before anyone opens one up.

Blocking, valves and the things you forget you asked for

During framing, owners ask for small things that matter later. Solid blocking behind the spot where the television will go. Backing in the shower for a grab bar that is not being installed yet. A spot in the closet for a future safe. Extra framing where a heavy mirror or a barn door will hang.

By the time the house is finished, nobody remembers exactly where those pieces landed. The scans do. You can find the blocking, measure from a corner and drill once.

The same goes for the things you hope you never need to find: shutoff valves in a wall cavity, junction boxes behind a panel, the path of a vent through a second floor. A handyman with a scan in hand works faster and opens fewer walls. That is the plain, practical reason to keep the record, and it is worth more on a big custom house than a starter home, simply because there is more house to open up.

Following the build between site visits

Many Piedmont owners live somewhere else while the house goes up. Military families, retirees and owners still working out of state can’t drive up I-90 every week to look at the framing. Our project manager is on the site every week; the scans cover the rest.

Each scan arrives as a 3D Vista link while the Ressio dashboard carries the photos, schedule and notes, so an owner can open the house from another state and walk the rough-in the same week it was inspected. Questions get asked while the walls are still open, which is the only time they are easy to answer.

The uses tend to be small and specific. Confirming that the outlet height in the office matches the desk you plan to buy. Sending a scan of the kitchen wall to whoever is helping you choose cabinets, before the boxes are ordered. Walking the framing on a Sunday night with a cup of coffee, two time zones away. In every case you are looking at the real house, measured, instead of a photo taken from wherever the phone happened to be.

That pairing of scans and Ressio is a big part of how a Piedmont build is managed for an owner who is not there. It replaces the monthly photo dump with something you can actually measure from.

The set is yours at closeout

When the build is done, the full scan and image set is delivered to the owner at closeout. It belongs to you, the same as the plans and the warranty documents.

Treat it like the rest of the house paperwork. Keep a copy somewhere safe and a second one somewhere else. Hand it to the electrician who comes out to add a circuit. If you ever sell, give it to the buyer; a documented house answers questions an inspector would otherwise have to guess at.

The record is a byproduct of building in the open. You saw the house go up while it happened, and you keep the evidence of how it was put together. The rest of the Piedmont process is on our Piedmont custom home page.

Want to see what a scanned build looks like before you commit to one? Call (605) 638-3040 or reach us through the contact page, and look through finished work in the gallery.