I’m sure the political situation didn’t help… listening helplessly as a country slides into a tin-pot dictatorship run by a misogynist 4th rate fascist is pretty tiring mentally… but we’ve had some frustrating days recently and today topped that off nicely.
We had hoped to get the rainscreen finished on the south end of the house yesterday, but the promised slightly cloudy day suddenly became extremely warm and cloudless – making being at the south end of the house pretty much unbearable. Which – after we’d really struggled with a bendy piece of wood that didn’t want to go into place (deeply fun on a 4.5m high platform which is not exactly stable because it’s stood on gravel) – left us both feeling less than thrilled. Not least because there are only two pieces of rainscreen left, and then we can move on to priming what’s there… but mainly because it’s another 3/4 finished job in a massive list of 3/4 finished jobs where we don’t seem to be able to get over the finish line.
…we did also start work on the front of the house, tackling the open joint cedar cladding there – which looks gorgeous but takes an insane amount of time. Part of this is the attention to detail, which isn’t really the full attention to detail it should be getting, but does look good anyhow. I mean, really it should have all the joints made more carefully than we are, but it’s already taking hours / days (and potentially weeks) to get this cladding on.
Frankly, on our budget, I’m damn proud that’s happening at all.
So coming in to today, which was theoretically inspection day for the electrics, I was already feeling somewhat angsty. Now, as you’ve probably gathered, the “theoretically” implies that something went awry. Which it did.
See, my understanding of the rough-in (which it turns out was wrong), was that the wires run into the outlet boxes, but are not connected, and run to the panel, but not into the panel, and are also – not connected. Apparently, that’s not how it’s done here. The inspector was (again) very nice and explained that all the grounds need to be connected through all the boxes. And that the panel needs to be wired. Which somewhat terrifies me – because I am not at all fond of having the wires connected to breakers in the panel that aren’t connected to functioning outlets. But hey.
Also, I am less than thrilled at cutting the descriptions off our cables before wiring them in to switches – particularly for the multiway switches where I want to know which cable comes from where and goes where. But the positive is that he looked around and felt like ‘most everything else was fine. He just couldn’t inspect. Now I remind myself that this is a good thing. He didn’t come in and go “dear god, what have you done”. That’s always a good start. He is – broadly speaking – seemingly happy with our rough in, how we’ve fed and arranged the cables, etc.
However, the 37 outlets in the house all need us to sit down *now*, before we can have our inspections, and connect all the ground wires. All the switch boxes need us to work down how the wiring – and thus – grounding for each set of switches works (because some of the boxes have multiple feeds from the fusebox) – it’s not complex, as such, just there’s a lot of f’kin wires. Nearly all the main switch locations in the house switch multiple locations. The hall lights are switched in two, the kitchen lights in three, the dining lights in two… This means we have many ground cables flapping around. Well, in boxes. Still.
So while it is positive, it again means we’re not at the first inspection. I don’t see that inspection happening this week – because it is going to take hours to install the fusebox. And honestly, I don’t really want to pay the hundreds of dollars for new breakers to meet modern code*, so am looking for overstock and some discounts… so as to take the costs down again. But we really (really) want to get past this inspection so we can insulate the f’kin house before it gets colder and wetter, and we end up with it being full of mould. Because that would be heartbreaking at this point.
* Because apparently, we can’t just stick the old breakers in the new box**. Feh.
** Actually, they wouldn’t fit – but we can’t even just stick modern equivalent breakers in. All the circuits must be either AFCI or GFCI protected, except (curiously) the high current ones (which seems counter intuitive to me, but there y’go).
