Skip to main content

Electrical corrections & the highest point

 
Friday

Jon went up to meet the inspector for the electrical rough-in.


Oooh, the robins nesting in our rafters kicked out an eggshell! On Saturday, Christina saw one parent feeding worms.

 

We got three corrections. First, we were supposed to "make up the grounds", which I knew from when Darwin taught us that for the shedlet, what, three years ago? Shoot.

We also needed a dedicated laundry circuit. We'd planned one (even had a labeled breaker), but somehow forgot and strung those receptacles onto another chain. That was an easy fix.

Last, the inspector wanted a floor receptacle along the balcony front edge. I never want to plug anything in there, but ... okay. I drove to Ellensburg to buy a special floor receptacle box (pretty pricey!), came back, and spent the afternoon installing it. I made a test installation on a piece of scrap, then very carefully went to work on the fancy car-decking floor.

 
 
Here's the finished installation:


Saturday evening I went on a seven-mile walk from the cabin to the Easton airport.

Saturday

We saw some wild turkeys on the road to our cabin.

Most of today went to making up grounds: stripping the cable covers, splicing together the grounds, and grounding metal boxes. About a hundred boxes needed the treatment. Most went pretty fast. The high-up ones took lots of time for setting up scaffolding.


     

Christina and Siobhan worked on finishing the front door.



Sunday

We rounded out the rest of the electrical corrections in the morning, and re-checked our work.

Just before noon we set out to attach the diagonal braces to the chimney. The actual task is pretty simple -- fasten four bolts through the roof, and attach them with wingnuts to a strap around the chimney. The problem is that all those parts are 30 feet up a very steep metal roof.

Jon ran to town and bought a climbing rope. The first task was to get the climbing rope over the roof. We tried tying twine to a stick and throwing it over; that failed spectacularly. We tried pushing a fiberglass wire-fishing rod up the roof, and that failed. We finally managed to string together a contraption with gatorade bottles, fish rod, PVC plumbing leftovers, and lots of gorilla tape, and got the twine over the peak.


 

Eliot clipped into the safety harness and ascended the roof using the climbing rope.


  

After measuring the placement of the chimney, Jon refabricated the support bars to an appropriate length. Siggy helped form the bar ends with the vise.


Eliot drilled through the roof, and Jon met the bolts on the inside of the sheathing with nut assemblies.


The whole endeavor took seven hours and a lot of sweating.

Everyone mellowed out with a late night dinner at ihop on the way home. Here's Eliot teaching Siggy a subway game.


Monday update

The electrical inspector approved the corrections. Hooray! (He also approved the final inspection for the shedlet.)

Comments

  1. Molly LiljaJuly 12, 2021 at 10:35 AM

    Awesome! Totally cool. You guys are going to treasure these memories.

    ReplyDelete
  2. JJuly 13, 2021 at 4:15 PM

    Congratulations. You guys do good work!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

It is DONE!

The final inspection was today. This guy is Levi, the county inspector, and as you can see, we passed! He only had two questions for me. One was about the energy efficiency credits and the blower door test, for which I had the compensating paperwork for the low-flow faucets already prepared. The second was asking for a smoke detector outside the bedroom; I pointed up and he saw that we already had one tucked into the alcove. And that was that! I got up at 5am to be certain I'd be here before the inspector, and I was ... by about five hours. In that time, I took another truckload of tool buckets down to the storage container, then picked up all the floor protection in the great room and vacuumed and mopped. It's glowing! Then I went back down to the storage container to get a hammer so I could glue in 32 wood plugs to cover the screws for the french doors. I fought with installing the screens, but the frames are too big! The manufacturer said "yeah we don't even make th...
Post a Comment
Read more

Odds and ends

I made progress on a bunch of little things today.  I painted a fencepost in 12" segments and pounded it in at the property line, where the outdoor camera can see it. Now we can measure the snow accumulation. I worked on finishing up almost-complete receptacle branch circuits. The first one I worked on was a little mystery: all the receptacles were installed, but the power didn't reach past a certain point in the line. After some investigation with a wire tracer and watching through the videos we took before covering the walls, I worked out what had happened: two receptacles shared a stud bay, facing into opposite rooms. The plan had been to bring power up to one box, jump over to the other box, and continue back down to the crawlspace to the next box. We forgot the jumper. I couldn't fish a wire between the boxes myself, so that repair waits. Upstairs, installing two receptacles completed the branch. The bathroom vent hole in the tile backer board was a skosh too small. ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Energy efficiency testing

I came up after work to meet Brian, the contractor who is doing our blower door test: In this test, a big fan pumps air out of the house at a prescribed pressure differential, and then the air flow rate is measured in cubic feet per minute, then converted to whole house air changes per hour. The maximum limit is 5.0, and we scored that. Hooray! Brian said that we'd done a pretty solid job sealing the house, especially for an owner-built house; getting extremely tight seals requires careful awareness of the sealing challenges at every stage of construction. Another thing I learned by building a house. While I was up there, I got most of the way through installing a heat pump water heater to comply with energy efficiency requirements I re-discovered when looking up the blower door test requirements. This is all a bit silly. For our application -- a house occupied infrequently -- the on-demand heater is the best efficiency tradeoff, because it has zero standby waste. Unfortunately, th...
Post a Comment
Read more