Picking up where we left off and continuing from there. The plumbing is done except for the whirlpool because we can't find a roman tub faucet that matches the rest of the house's faucets. We'll have to mail order one. It's nice to have running water, even though there's only cold because there's no power to the hot water heater. We've already had one failure; the master bath toilet shutoff valve doesn't work. When it's full open it shuts off. We can leave it halfway open but the toilet fills very slow that way. We'll have to have it replaced.
The plumber was done and left Friday morning. Friday afternoon, WE Energies came to install the gas. :-/ Now the plumber will have to come back to finish up. That's okay, it can wait until we have the whirlpool faucet. We don't really need heat that badly yet.
Electric installation is proceeding, slowly. We have all the ceiling lights in place except the bedroom closets, basement and the dining room chandelier, just because it's likely to be run into as we're working. That can wait until we're almost done. Most of the outlets are hot. We still have a lot of outlets that aren't going yet; some circuits were mis-installed and have to be repaired first. The electrician completely forgot to supply an outlet in the hallway and run a feed to the kitchen and hallway ceiling lights, and the drywaller buried boxes above the stairs and in the powder room. We got the feeds fixed but those buried boxes will be a little more challenging to fix. We also still don't have power to the hot water heater (Paul bought a nice electric one with 5500 watt elements for faster recovery), the furnace, the dishwasher or the A/C.
We have a major problem with the landscaping. We don't know how to do the window well for egress from the basement. We would have been in much better shape if we had bought two smaller windows instead of the one big window because we could buy a simple cheap manufactured product, attach it to the wall and backfill around it. With this big window we can't get a manufactured product that big so we're kind of screwed. The only good news is that the rules that apply to making retaining walls don't seem to apply to window wells made from retaining wall block. I think we'll put in drain tile, fill up the well almost to window level with dirt, compacting along the way to make it stable; set the stones and fill behind it with dirt. We can't think of any other way to do this. It will be very hard work and take a long time but there just doesn't seem to be any other option other than removing and bricking up the window, which would also cost money and the work would all have to be redone when we want to do the basement at higher cost. Any way we look at this we lose, but it seems making the block wall will minimize the total pain.
And inside, work is continuing on the millwork. Kathy and her mom got all the casings painted and started puttying and painting the doors, which was excellent, and Paul set to work on installing casings starting Saturday. He has his brother Steve's excellent Ridgid miter saw and a pneumatic brad nailer, and once he got into the swing of things he made good time on these. Tonight he finished all the casings around the doors that have been installed to date. Next we'll have to get more casings, because we've run out, Paul has to hang the rest of the doors and trim them and then the base moldings in the carpeted areas will start. Maybe we'll have all the millwork done by the end of the week if we work hard. That would be good. Then we have to start on that window well...... :-(
Time to make the 9/30 completion date is running out. It looks like we may need an extra two weeks. :-( We're hoping not to but we'll see.
