And on the 698th day...

There was light! Yay! We officially have some light fixtures and an operating switch in the house! Check it out.

This one, and another one are in the mechanical room, which was the first room to get an outlet, and now it's the first one to get a light and switch. It's so nice to go down there, flip a switch and get light!

I really can't believe it has been a month since I posted. The month of July seemed to just go by real fast. Since the last post we've been working solely on electrical.

First, we got all of the outlet boxes hung, with a few exceptions, like the dryer and range 220's since the electrician will handle those, and a few others that we needed to double check heights.

We then made another trip to Menards to get round electrical boxes for ceiling light fixtures, and began to install round boxes on the ceiling for the lights.

Shawn had to take a break from installing boxes to do some framing work. He framed up the ceiling in the hallway so he could hang the lights boxes there. This picture shows what that looks like.

As you can already see in the picture, there are some wires that have already been installed as well.



Shawn also got around the duct work in the lounge all framed with lumber. He still needs to frame around the plumbing on the family room side, and the duct work inside of Evan's room.

We probably would have been done with more earlier, but we took a week off and went on Vacation to the Black Hills in SD. And the weekend before we left, we also had a huge storm roll through that did an impressive amount of damage to our big oak trees.

We lost the biggest tree in the area near the houses. Of course, it was on the fence with the neighbor, and it had to fall into his property. An awesome testimony is the friendship that we have with our fellow brothers and sisters in Christ that share our small group. The Sunday after the storm, it was our turn to host our bible study, and they brought their tractor and chainsaws out and did piece meal of that big tree. With their help we got all of the branches cleared out of the neighbors lot. The main lower section of the trunk is too big, so we had to leave that against our fence, and we hope to get back to it sometime.

Another impressive branch is this one that missed the new house by a few feet. Thank God that thing fell there instead of a few feet to the west! That was close.

Another worry that Shawn had with the storm, was that he was sure the chimney in the new house was gone. To us it didn't seem like it was very secure on the roof, but but it was still attached the next morning! We do need to go up there and see how solid it still is, and probably add to the to do list to reinforce it a bit more.

Last week the electrician dropped off the can lights and Shawn mounted those up in a couple of nights. You can see the ones here that go in the family room.

We also got some heavy duty fan boxes that come with a metal bracket to install fans in the bedrooms. The electrician claims that one of his workers who is 250+ lbs does chin ups on these things and they hold. They do seem sturdy enough for that, so hopefully our fans will be nice and steady on them. The light you see on there is a temporary light that the electrician install so that we have working lights while we await for the rough0in electrical inspection to be finished. They are supposed to stay on there until after the wall is drywalled. That way the new light fixtures will be saved from splatter. But we're not sure that we'll be able to drywall the ceiling since the upstairs is not finished. We'll see.

Last weekend, Shawn spent it drilling holes through the concrete wall for the outside electrical boxes for the wall lights, and doing some more framing and hanging more boxes.

Last week, the electrician began to work in the house and installed the second electrical panel. And this week he also ran about a third of the wires into the framing in a day! We were impressed, so we told him to just go ahead and drill all of the hole in the framing since he's so much faster. We were supposed to drill the holes for him and save a bit of labor, but it probably would take us a week to do what he did in one day! Though he left making the chases in the foam for the wires for us to do. So yesterday Shawn bought an electric chainsaw since the hot knife that we had bought for the task made too much smoke, which we're pretty sure is toxic. It was also pretty slow and if you weren't careful that foam dissappeared like a melting marshmallow. In this picture it looks like Shawn is holding one of Evan's toy tools. But Shawn got all of those chases in the foam done last night in one shot, though he says it looks like a blizzard inside the house with all those foam beads everywhere! I'll have to take a picture of that.

Tuesday night we met with the electrician to run through a few final things. He's been very busy with emergency work and clean up aftet the storms, and will fall approaching, he gets extremely busy with farm electrical needs and coops and stuff, so we're pushing to get our part done so he can finish. He said he probably would not be back this week to work some more, but maybe next week he'll have time to come back. Shawn also installed some light boxes in the garage to have that ready for the electrician.

This weekend my in-laws are going to watch Evan at their place, and I'll try to help Shawn as much as I can with electrical work. Bianca will be helping us out, though she is crawling now and has realized that there's a bigger world out there to explore than the pack and play and the crib.

We have 4 round boxes to mount in the bathroom for vanity lights, and two more outlets in there. We also need one more box for a light in a closet under the stairs, and install outlet boxes for the garage. If we get that done, we'll probably mount some boxes for cable, data and telephone wiring or we'll begin wiring the thermostats for the radiant floor heat. If not, we may star running the water lines to the bathrooms. We have to see where we'll be getting the pex pipe, depending whether we order that online and have it shipped or find it in a big box store around here.

I hope to have a post next week! Until next time, then.