Tuesday, November 28, 2006

Hey, Hey!

Lookie!!!! We got power! Well, sort of. This is as far as it goes right now; it's not actually attached to the house yet. The power company ran their poles etc. and we set our pole Thanksgiving morning or Allen did and I chopped a bit of firewood for Mama. We actually took the rest of the day off. Allen got the pole ready last night with the meter and breaker box and now I just have to call and get the power company to come back out and connect us. We should have had our pole set before they left but we had a little trouble finding an 18 ft. pressure treated pole. Ended up having to order one from the lumber company. Our temporary pole we set is about 15 feet from this one and then we will run underground to the house which is about 100 ft.
I would like to have run underground from this pole which is the second one from the house but I estimate it would have been a minimum of about $700.00. Maybe later. We also got a fair amount of this brush cleared up and burned. The weather was beautiful over the holiday weekend.
I didn't get to set any windows like I hoped. I went to see about buying them and they don't keep the ones I want in stock ( big suprise). All they keep in stock are vinyl windows and I don't want those so I will have to order mine and it will take about 3 weeks to get them. I should have investigated this more beforehand. So we put in the blocking that goes between the rafters that the exterior siding and the interior sheetrock or whatever will fasten to. If your rafters don't show you don't have to do this but since I wanted to make my life more difficult whenever possible.........I was suprised to see how baggy my pants look in this photo; looks like a family of raccoons just moved out. I have lost about 15 lbs. since we started building the house. It can be kinda stressful to do everything yourself and I have gotten sick a couple of times. It shows more than I thought.
This is a close up of the blocking that I was talking about. I dreaded doing it but it wasn't as bad as I thought it was going to be and now when the windows and doors are plugged in the house will be pretty much weather tight. This gave us a chance to use up alot of little bitty scrap pieces of 2x4 and plywood that we had been saving.
Since the weather was so nice, we worked after dark a little by lantern light. Allen thought he would get a little creative with the camera. I thought the photo was pretty cool! What is shadow and what is steel??!! Well, that's obvious, but it's still neat that the beam kinda looks like it could be shadows cast by something else. Or that's the way I see it. What do you see?

10 comments:

Anonymous said...

I think you look fine in those baggy jeans. Oh, by the way, I found those 15 pounds you lost.

I've never really understood that steel beam until this photo. That means you don't have to have a support post in the middle of your living space, right?

MamaHen said...

Thanks Pablo! And yes, you got it as far as the beam. I just couldn't figure a way to work posts in there and this was a neat way to not have them.

Rurality said...

Hmm, so the key to losing weight is building a house? We should have started years ago! :)

Anonymous said...

glad you almost got to hook up to civilization. electricity!
can't wait to see you working on interior...

Sveta

Anonymous said...

Hey Annie!

Things are looking good.

Youyr brother,
Mark

maybe I did this right...

Omelay said...

how do you plan to finish off the underside of the house?

R.Powers said...

Wow! I haven't been by for awhile and you have been busy.
It's looking great and congrats on electricity!

MamaHen said...

Hello Karl! I have been gathering tons of rocks from around the place (Blount county has plenty) and I plan to build a stone wall underneath. It will also have a stone planter that steps out in front of the rock wall to break up some of that space. In some places the stone wall will be about 8' tall and I thought it needed a little variation in it.

Jenn said...

Neat. Love the steel work.

MamaHen said...

Thanks Jenn for all your comments. Very interesting info.