Busy day

After getting the electrician started, I met with a landscape architect. Our lot has so many challenges that I really feel like we need one. They do a lot more than just tell you what to plant. They will address the grading (water pools near the house and garage), the drainage (water is being collected and vented under the house), retaining walls, trees, fencing, privacy, hardscaping (paved areas such as retaining walls, driveway, walkway, etc). In addition, he will help us come up with a long term plan for things like adding a living space in the backyard, which may include a table and chairs, a barbeque and a fire pit, etc. We may add a back door. The side walkway is a utility area that doesn't funcion well. There isn't easy access to the trash. There is a non-functional landing out the side door. As you can see, it's a huge list and each item is really complex and they all interrelate. There's no way we could tackle this on our own.

The plumbers had their worker back today, and they allowed me to use some of his time to dig my trench in the backyard. He was so much faster than me. He dug the remaining 1 1/2 feet of depth in just about 3 hours. He also dug out some of the dirt where the concrete is dug up. This was another good choice to pay someone to do this. It was a lot less taxing on me and the trench is now done and won't hold up the electrician when he is ready.

This is the completed trech (20 feet long and 2 feet deep)

Here is where the concrete is broken already on the walkway near the house. The guy doing the digging did some digging here as well:

It has really paid off for me to be at the house every day. It really speeds things up - so often, someone has one little question for me that I can decide on the spot and they can get back to work. If I wasn't available, they might have to stop working on it and come back to it. I also spotted that the toilet rough in was in the wrong place! It was done yesterday after I left for the day, and thank goodness I spotted it today so it was easy to fix. It just goes to show you that even with a written plan, things can go wrong.

We've noticed a weird plastic pipe on the back of the house and never knew what it was for. I finally found out from the electrician - the previous owners used it to run electric wires from the attic to the crawl space using sprinkler pipe! This is not safe or up to code! I was glad to find out that not only can we remove it we have to in order to pass inspection!

Here is a shot of the back of the house from early on (it's much cleaner now). You can see the vertical plastic pipe near the window on the right.


Since tomorrow is trash day, I worked on filling the trash cans. We still have 30+ bags of trash from the prior owners in the garage. I make sure to fill our trash cans every week. I also worked on cleaning out the food left behind in the kitchen cabinets. We had to demolish the lower cabinets due to water damage, rotting and splintering. But the upper cabinets are in fine shape so I purchased some cheap lower cabinets that sort of match just to last until we can do a remodel. So anyway, I was cleaning out the food left behind and it was NASTY! One cabinet had a bug infestation at some point (all dead now) and the carcasses littered the cabinet floor. Everything I picked up had a coating of dust-slime-kitchen grease-? and many things stuck to the cabinet shelf. There were lots of things left open like drink mixes. I still cannot believe I haven't seen any critters!