Lots of progress

The electrician started his second day of work. He is working on rewiring all the outlets and switches. As I've mentioned before, the house was built in 1952, and there has been a lot of unpermitted work done on it since then. The contractors keep finding all kinds of weird stuff. The electrician commented today that he was surprised there hadn't been a fire. Yikes!

The good news is we have a target date for the rough inspection! The electrician expects to be done next Wednesday 2/22, so allowing a day for problems we are aiming for an inspection Friday 2/24! It feels really good just to be able to talk about such a major milestone with some degree of concreteness. Even if it doesn't happen that day, it will happen soon.

I spent a good deal of today digging a ditch! I was thinking if my cubemates from my corporate days could see me now.... I spent about 3 1/2 hours on it. The electric in the garage is really unsafe - it was installed using sprinkler pipe! So we have to dig a trench to rewire the electric from the garage. The shortest distance is from the garage to the house then to the electrical panel. We are using a spot in the concrete walkway surrounding the house that is already dug up. The first three hours were fun, then it got really old. It is truly "backbreaking" work - you really use your back to work the shovel. I was careful to lift correctly though, and I never lifted too heavy of a load since the length of the shovel makes it feel heavier. The difficulty with this ditch is that the dirt is packed hard and that there are tree roots all through it. I would shovel a few times, then stop and cut the tree roots and repeat. The roots ranged in width from a hair to 6"x3". The big one I actually took an axe to and cut a section out wide enough for my trench. I saved lots of earthworms, and was happy my soil had them. I wished I had my compost pile set up so I could have put them on that. I did see one nasty bug though - it looked like a huge, bloated ant (maybe 1-1 1/2 inches long). I hope it wasn't the pregnant queen ant. I put it back in the ground and it was gone by the next time I looked. It was nasty and reminded me of something on a nature show.

An interesting lesson - the first three hours of ditch digging were fun. Then it got really tedious. My body was tired and the progress was slow. I think it was my brain that forced me to quit though. It just got to be too much. I've found this with the demolition as well - about three hours plus and hour or so to cleanup is my max in one day. A guy from the plumber's company was digging out front as well (we have to replace the sewer line due to tree roots in it). I noticed he works and takes breaks in short bursts. He might work for 10 minutes and then take a 5 minute break. He never attacked anything with a frenzy the way I did. I guess this is how you can dig for a long period. Both plumbers have worked with him for a long time and said he is an excellent worker so he must know what he is doing.

The final excitement of the day came when I was leaving. There was a geyser coming out of my front lawn! The guy digging there hit the water main! The water was shooting up about 10 feet. The plumber had to shut the water off at the street. He said it was no big deal to fix. I was glad he was there because I would have had no idea what to do!

Here is the start of the ditch. It's about 20 feet long, and 6 inches deep at this point. It took me about 3 1/2 hours to do this.


This was the biggest root I found. It's about 6"x3" and I hacked at it with an axe until I split it. I had to cut it twice to remove the chunk I needed.