A bad day

Today I started by calling for my inspection window at 7:30. We were schedule for between 12 and 4, so I headed over to meet the contractor at 8 a.m. Today we were scheduled to have a bobcat delivered, which is like a small bulldozer with a something like a drill bit that can be interchanged for the front scoop. With all the problems getting this concrete out, I wasn't hopeful of a smooth day. Sure enough, the contractor called me and said they had cancelled his rental. He spent a few hours lining up another rental for tomorrow.

I took avantage of a small break in the activity to do some much needed personal errands like food shopping and wash. One of the things I had to do was go the office supply store to buy something that would write on black. The city-issued no parking signs I'm using have a black space in which you write the parking restrictions. Thus, I needed to do an extra errand and spend $3.87 on a white marker that I will probably never use again. Why not leave it with a white background like the rest of the sign so I can use the ever-present-on-construction-sites Sharpie?

I then spent the next few hours waiting at the house for the inspector to show up. I was out of things to do at the house, so I got in some reading time. Well, this inspection was very disheartening. I was really confident based on yesterday's inspection that the electrical (and possibly some other stuff) would be signed off. But no! He looked not only at the correction the first inspector noted, but at the entire system again. He found a few really minor things and we also have to install a new outlet for the oven (the oven type and location has changed since the first inspection, and I didn't catch that this needed to be done before we could pass). This was a disappointing day. I was really hoping to be able to start closing the walls up, and now we can't. It also feels really discouraging to try three times and still not pass the rough inspections. We are going to try for next Wednesday, and I think everything should be good by then, but I certainly won't have my hopes up.

After the afternoon inspection, I went to Ikea to look at under-cabinet and in-cabinet lighting. It was a long trip, and it was really hard to make any sense of these particular items there. The one staff person didn't really know about lighting, and tried to convince me that these lights were turned off and on by unplugging them. Huh? I ended up buying some stuff which I will ask the electrician about. I don't think they are going to work though because they are not designed to be hard wired, and you are not supposed to conceal the plug or run the wires through anything. My day ended at 9 pm.

It feels like it's been such a long time that we've been working on this, and there is still so much to go.