Over the Past Month or So . . .

this nice young man, Gordy has been building us a new building right behind my office.  It is going to be called the Retreat as it is where the sewing will go on now that Martha, my longarm, has taken over the entire Cottage.

Here is what they have been up to ~

Monday Seems to Be Kelly's Day Off . . .

so we decided that even though things are going so much slower now that he is working, we would try to get a lot done each Monday.

Last Monday we got the wires from the house electrical box almost out to the Cottage electrical box but ended up about 5 feet short.  We had to crawl up in the yucky attic to run conduit

Image from the Internet

all the way across the attic (about 75 feet) and get the electrical wires through the conduit.  No pictures because the attic was too dark and dirty for pictures.  And so were Kelly and I after getting that done last Monday.

So, here is what we got done today ~

First, we got the rest of the electrical into the Cottage electrical box and then into the house.

We were about 5 feet short last week and so we had to change things up so that we could splice the wires inside the house and not in the box underground which caused us to add an additional 30 feet over the original 100 feet we placed last week.

We are going to leave all the junctions open until we get the electrical inspector out here to make sure we have done everything to code.

Then, if you were to go back to a little over a year ago and look at what this place looked like, you would see that the window in my bedroom looked like this ~

And once I pulled that nasty sheet off the window and saw that it was broken in several places because of bullet holes, I fixed the worst hole with a hippie flower.

Well, today we took out that old hippie flowered window ~

And started work on getting a beautiful new window in ~

Oh, yeah, now I can crack the window a bit at night without worrying about critters coming in!!

Ok, Who Stole the Entire Summer??

So much has been going on in so many of my lives that by the end of the day, I just want to sit down and watch baseball!!  So I decided to write a quick post this morning because so many friends have asked what is going on.

So, as you know the electrical has been a nightmare but Kelly and I are finally getting the hardest part completed - getting the ditch re-dug out and the conduit with the wiring in it.

Because the fired electrician did not get the wiring into the ditch until 6 weeks after Kelly dug the ditch, dirt fell back in and the grass started growing over the ditch.

Kelly got down on his hands and knees and sometimes his belly and dug out about 60 feet of the ditch.  I pulled the grass away so he could see what he was doing.

Ta!Da!  A cleaned-out ditch!!

Once the ditch was cleaned out, I ran wire through the conduit that is used to keep the wires safe and dry.  The fired electric was going to lay the wire without putting it in the conduit!!  Certainly a code violation!!

After I glued 60 feet of conduit together and ran the wire through, I laid the conduit in the ditch and started to cover it up!!

I washed the dirt back into the hole with a sweeper head on the hose.  I thought I was doing it the lazy way, but one guy told me that was a great idea because it would compact the dirt easier!!

Next, I had to add some conduit filled with wire for the lamp post that is going out front.  See those clots of dirt?  That is what has to be broken up to put back in the ditch and man, they were like big balls of kryptonite!!

Then on the next day of Kelly's day off from the golf course, we continued to clean out more ditch and put in more conduit.

Then we got the conduit attached to the sweep at the Cottage and added the connector box that we had to cut out our own holes for the conduit to fit into it.

More conduit for the 60 feet back to the well!!

This picture is the 10 foot ground post that has to be slammed into the ground 8 feet.  All was good until we hit pure clay and now we are getting it pounded in with a friend's pounder inch by inch over many day's time.  It's a bugger!!

Slow but sure!!  We have given ourselves until the end of September to have everything done for the rough-in inspection.  Once that inspection is complete we can start putting in insulation and getting walls up!!