The Electric is a Go and Other Happenings

The electric passed inspection. Hopefully, we will have power by the end of next week! No more noisy generator. Yea! This week, Eric has been moving lots of dirt.

In other news, the exchange students Martynka (Poland) and Evelyn (Germany) went home on Thursday. We'll miss them, but I hope they are enjoying being home. Martynka gave me 3 really neat books for the baby. Two of them are the original Winnie the Pooh and The House on Pooh Corner written by A.A. Milne and illustrated by E.H. Shepard. This version has the English text on the left side and the Polish version on the right side. Very cool. Now, if only I knew more Polish sounds than the word tak (pronounced tock, means "Yes" ).

"You've got a little work to do."

We don't claim to be electricians or electrical engineers. So when I called the inspector to see if he'd been by, it was no surprise when he said "You've got a little work to do." Doh! 1. Remove the ground screw-wrong application. 2. Isolate ground and neutral in load center 3. Move ground rods to one side of meter box 4. Ground rods require one continuous wire-not a separate one to each and last 5. Wrong clamps connecting ground rod to ground wire. So with those corrected, although I'm still not sure we have the right clamps, we will try try again tomorrow. Here's the fixed versions. Note: The copper wire coming from the top actually must be hooked directly to the ground bar on the left side of the panel rather than grounded to the box.

Pushing Dirt and Making Sparks

Last week consisted of some rain days and mainly backfilling. Saturday, Eric mounted the meter panel, breaker panel and 2 inch conduit. We finished pulling the wire on Sunday. I actually got to run the fish tape and then pull a rope through the conduit all by myself. I even got to help pull the 3 mains until we got to the dual 90 degree angles. Hopefully, it passes inspection today, so we can call the power company and get hooked up. Sunday, Eric had an opportunity to use the neighbor's skidsteer, so it was a full day of grading, taking off top soil and backfilling.

This is an impressively large load for the old backhoe.

Ooh meter panel with grounding rods... Note: The grounding rods in this picture are incorect. They should be continuous. See picture in more recent post.

One day all the black, white and porch foundation (now just concrete forms) will be covered with dirt. Do we dare count how many buckets worth?

On the other side of the house, this land needs to be taken down to about 8 inches below the top edge of the concrete. I wonder if Eric knows how much landscaping block is in his future...(post occupancy)

"Those windows are huge!" -Rita

After some rain, work and party delays, on Saturday, June 16th we were back at it again framing 1st floor walls (Okay, not me but everyone else). Our crew this weekend consisted of my mom and dad, Randy, Kenny, and Team Gemo.






Assembling the back family room wall.


Team Gemo takes a break to sample the local brew.


Raising the family room wall.



Luc and Grandma hanging out.


The end of a great weekend. Thanks to everyone who helped out!

Deck, Deck, Sheath.

Saturday, June 2nd we worked on the 1st floor decking. Emil, Randy, Paul and Skip came to help out. It started out pretty rainy, but then turned into a beautiful day as you can see. We used Trus Joist's I-joists for the flooring system. We like these because it was nice and simple running one continuous span across the width of the house. This will also save us some head height in the basement because we can run duct work, etc. between the joists rather than under. Placing a joist.

Randy's gatorade commercial.

Sheathing by the stairwell.