Howell Cabin

We spent today at the cabin for Sig's birthday. We played more than worked. I built a little wall rack for the archery equipment. I got the water turned on for spring, got the snowmobiles parked. Oh, and I swapped out the video cards in the trail camera. We had a lot of interesting visitors in the last nine months or so. We had a raven come by a few times, and a bunny. We had a few ungulate families coming through.   Behold this handsome fellow!   This canine (wolf? coyote?) spent a fair amount of time in the east woods: Our bear wandered by. But the real story was cats. Cats, cats and more cats. Here's a big boy, pretty lean. Then this handsome fella, who was sporting the latest digital wearable technology.     -         And a new feline! This short-tailed guy. Bobcat? Lynx? We need a cat-spotter's guide.  

The fire pit under the Milky Way is rapidly becoming a central attraction!   But before it got dark...   We got to the house and confirmed that the power was now running to our permanent meter and panels. We have a single 120V circuit wired for construction; unfortunately, I wired it wrong, and the GFCI kept tripping. :v) After correcting that, we were confident that the new wiring was correct, and we could fill in the service trenches. We took another trip to Smith Excavating in Ellensburg for sand.   We taped up the conduit ends to keep the conduit clean in case we ever need to pull new wire through them. (That already saved our bacon once!) Then we shoveled sand into the pits where the wires emerge from conduit to protect them from rocks. Next, we filled the holes back in with a rental excavator.   There was a big mound of dirt and rocks at the top of the hill left over from the original trench excavation two years ago. It was a snowmobile obstacle. With what was ...

  Remember the electrical pits we covered up with the excavator a couple weeks ago? First order of business was to uncover the one at the top of the hill. Turns out our ridiculous 36kW water heater will dim the lights less if we pay the power company to install bigger wires from the transformer to the house. So we have to uncover our conduit so they can pull the new wires through. Eliot and I dug down to the existing wires, then along the conduit. Neither conduit had bellends at the end, which seemed wrong. Mabye we lost track of how they'd been installed a couple years ago? Concerned that there was a gap in the conduit a little farther away from the transformer, we dug and dug six feet along the conduits, and didn't find the gap. Eliot had a brilliant idea: if the conduit had a gap filled with dirt, sound wouldn't travel through the pipe. We remembered you could slap the pipes to make cool echo noises. So I went down to the other end, pulled the tape off, dug out the mud t...

  To get our electricity hooked up, we need to lay conduit in a trench from the meter base on the wall to the existing pit where the power company's wire pops out of conduit and connects to the temporary power pole. We rented a toddler-sized excavator for a day. Jon dug the conduit trench while Christina measured. Siggy cleaned up the lumpy bits in the bottom with a shovel. While we had the machine, we dug another short trench to bring the water pipes over to where we'll install a reservoir tank. Siobhan did most of that digging and backfilling with the excavator (see top picture). Since we had it anyway, Jon drove the excavator around attacking vine maple roots and smoothing out pits left over from electrical installation a couple years ago up at the shedlet. Then we did a few odds and ends, like covering the vent holes with plywood blocks and cleaning up more low branches from the trees in the woods.

 (Some exclusions apply.) Eliot and I replaced our plywood front door with a cheap interior door from home depot, in an attempt to reduce the number of new mouse-shaped occupants. We got the range wiring installed. Next, we went after wiring the furnace. The good news was that we needed only a single run of 6awg wire -- we only needed a modest electric backup heater. The bad news was that the HVAC folks installed the furnace so that the electric supply input was 1.5" from a triple stud that we're not allowed to drill. We gave up at dinnertime. Saturday Eliot and Christina installed window trim legs on the laundry room window. Siobhan and Eliot installed more legs on the kitchen windows. A little caulking got astray. Siobhan shot a few bullseyes. This is Isaac and Jennifer, the couple that designed the building last year. Eliot thought this looked like a stock photo architect meeting, so I made Isaac wear a hardhat. Christina and Jon made the last few windowsills, and she paint...