Howell Cabin

Siggy and I came up to sort out a few things. We took a remote selfie with the outdoor camera.  Much of the morning was spent waking up the snowmobile fleet. We wanted to get them off the trailers before the trailers were difficult to move. Jon designed a little 3D printed roof to keep ice from blocking up the gate keybox, and we installed that today. Here's a glamour shot from our white Christmas of the roof doing its job admirably:   The great room circuit didn't entirely work, which turned out to be because, back at rough-in, the electricians (😬) had missed a cable hop between two outlets sharing a stud bay. Siggy and I used a magnet to fish a paperclip and a string between the boxes and fill in the missing cable. With a little more fine-tuning, the great room receptacle branch is in good shape! (Notice the branch tester tucked in the corner in the right photo.) Jon also fit and installed a fir cable raceway to cover the cable running to the balcony outlet box. It's not...

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. ...

I made a trip up today. I drilled and tapped the gate post to install key lockboxes. One is a combo lock for guests and contractors. The other is a Knox box for the fire department. This lets us complete a permit inspection. I found one log that didn't make it onto the firewood truck. I chopped it up with the chainsaw, which is how I learned that ice holds dirt in place and rapidly dulls the chain. Darn. Most of the time I spent today -- five hours -- was spent getting the hodge-podge network situation back to mostly-working. The 5GHz wifi link down to the big cabin only moves a paltry 1.7Mbps, but it's enough that the crawlspace temp and humidity monitor device can finally connect to the backend database again. The forest camera is working again, too!   Before I left, I put a fourth and final coat of finish on the closet floor.