This morning, the electrician came over. We were going to upgrade the panel from 100A to 200A entry, but the bureaucracy needed to get that done is just staggering. PG&E has to get involved. They have to hire an engineer to draft out the route to RETRENCH our front yard (all the wires in the neighbourhood are underground), and that takes a month (and 2-3 thousand dollars). THEN the re-trenching has to be done. Not too much trouble, but our front yard has some big trees that are in the path of the proposed trench. So add another 2-3 thousand dollars for that job. And then the electrician's fees are on top of that. He looked at me and said "If I were you? I would be trying to avoid this upgrade)." Um, ok. So he's going to look into getting the Electrical Permit rescinded, and my money returned. I like that in an electrician.
And he looked around, and decided where to put the Kitchen Sub-Panel. It's going to go in the pantry closet, which is great (he won't have to crawl under the 'sunken' part of the house, but I will have to pack up the contents of the pantry (which has become my go-to place to hide all the stuff that's accumulating on the kitchen counters as this remodel continues).
Shortly after the tile arrived, M&L got busy fixing the leak in the bathroom (before they put cement board down in that room). But before they could fix the leak, they had to turn off the water to the house.
That's great. You do what you have to do. It's fine.
But of course, the MINUTE that the water gets turned off? I've gotta go potty.
Isn't that always the case?
So I went off to school just a bit early to pick up the kids (and use the teacher's bathroom). It was going to be a full car on the trip home. Nate was having a friend come over, and Kelly was having one also, and she had her fingers crossed that she'd get to bring more. When school got out, I collected Nate and his buddy, and then waited around for Kelly and her girlfriends to finish their Chorus Line rehearsal. Kate was coming home with us (her mom was working), and Alice was making the 'oh please, oh please, oh please, oh please' prayer-motions, hoping that she'd get to come home with us, too. I couldn't raise her mom on the phone, but she was pretty sure that she was supposed to come home with us, and seeing as her mom wasn't around after rehearsal, I was inclined to believe her. So we had a full van. Five kids and me, heading back for lunch to a house that had an Only Barely Working kitchen.
When we pulled up, I saw our contractor's jeep in our driveway. He also is Alice's dad, and I heard moans of dismay from the back seat. "Oh no! Dad's here. He'll want to take me home! Can't we go somewhere else until he leaves?" Heh. She was MUCH happier when I pointed out that he was at our house because he was WORKING, and when he went off, he'd be WORKING, and unless it's "Take Your Daughter To Work" day, he was probably disinclined to take her away. So she was breathing a sigh of relief as we walked into the house.
And saw this!
Hmmm. What's down there? Whatever it is, Nate's not afraid of it.
OH, that's our contractor, standing over the hole. He lowered Nate down into our "basement", so he could have a look around. And the crazy kid was NOT dissuaded by the men talking about all the Big Scary Animals that lived under the house.
And while the kids played, and got in their way, M&L kept working on the cement boards. And then when they'd finished that job, they took a look at my dryer, and figured out that it had been installed incorrectly, and THEY COULD FIX IT. So now my dryer is venting the correct way, and I don't have to worry about the vent pipe pulling away from the wall all the time. I wonder if they can make my washing machine sit flush with the wall, too. I'm not gonna push my luck, though.
2 comments:
Your son is so adorable. That look on his face is so perfectly expressive of what a kid would be thinking - can I really? This is cool! I'm nervous, too!
nate is so brave to go down there! :) looks scary down there :D
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