Playing Catch Up

Hello again!

In the time I’ve taken between updates, we’ve hit a stall in our progress. At the moment, we’re waiting on a coordinated effort among the cement contractor, the electrician, and the electric company. Getting everyone’s schedule to align (even without including my own schedule) is proving to be a slight challenge.

What we need is this: the current electrical meter is attached to the side of the house right outside my side entrance – when we built the garage addition, we thought it would be awfully nice to move the meter to the alley side of the addition and bury the line through the backyard so it’s both out of sight and out of the way. This is a matter of aesthetic preference and practicality – we need the overhead lines out of the way if we’re going to re-roof the back of the house, let alone reconfigure the pitch of the roof.

Once we have our trench dug (32” deep – which seems excessive to everyone but the City code), we can bury the connection from the existing breaker box in the basement to the new breaker box/meter in the garage. The new breaker will connect directly to the incoming power source and will run the circuits on the back half of the house. Running the circuits in the back of the house from the breaker box in the garage will save a small amount of wire/money, but will save more with regard to time and energy involved in installation.

At any point during this process, the electric company is supposed to be coming to remove the power from the house, trench through the alley and backyard and reconnect the power to the new meter box at garage’s new meter socket. (I learned that a meter socket is a fancy word for high priced metal box. It’s the housing for the dial that records how much power you’re consuming.) In speaking with the territory manager, I found that the power company we have locally will provide 25’ of trench and 25’ of cable free of charge. Anything past 25’ is charged to me as the homeowner, but the charge is pretty minimal when you consider I won’t have an overhead wire getting in the way of the goings-on at the jobsite.

Once the power shenanigans have been resolved, we can get to work on the roof.

I’m in the process of finding a new roofing contractor. The one I had contacted and verbally committed to has more or less flaked on me…which is unfortunate because I received a great bid from him. So meeting contractors starts again. It’s not my favorite part – they’re pretty quick to tell me I should’ve just built a new house. It’s unprofessional to stick out your tongue at someone, otherwise I might.

At any rate, we got a pretty good deal on the materials for the roofing project. Trusses conveniently went on sale and there was an 11% rebate on most other building materials – including sheathing, shingles, building wrap and all the other odds and ends we will need. So, in an effort to save money and a little time down the road, we bought most of what we’ll need in the near future and then some. I likened spending all that money to ripping off a Band-Aid…do it quickly and it won’t hurt as much..