Occupancy at Last!

It has certainly been a long, cold, hard and lonely winter for us.  Working on the house 6 days a week was mostly a grind.  Tonight we celebrate having received the Certificate of Occupancy earlier this afternoon.  It does feel strange to think about moving out of the trailer after 10 years in there, but I think we will adjust.  

Another new chapter in retirement adventures!

We still have lots of landscaping to do this summer.  We did finish spreading the manure, but still have the top soil to spread. 

Mt Baldy view.

The front of the house with our view windows.  Another material pile there...  Our plan is to trench in some sprinklers around the perimeter of the porch and then cover a foot or two at the house with a fine crush and run product.  That's what that pile is, a test pile of sorts.  We have already installed some at the back left corner of the house there. We don't have gutters because of the heavy snow here, and the soil is so rocky we don't want to encourage too much grass to grow. 

Sheep Mountain view.  Manure spread, pile gone :-)

Electricity.  We passed our final electrical state inspection a week or so ago.  We first changed the Shop, where we are living, over to 100A service from the 200A that it has been on all winter.  The 200A will service the new house now.  We tore open the Shop service panel...

And put it back together on the 100A service and you can't even tell we were there!

We prepared the house service panel  to receive the 200A service cable... that we had to pull 50 ft through the 2-1/2" conduit we installed last year.  You can see the yellow pulling rope coming out the junction box at the bottom.

This is where the cable will come from, the 200A disconnect on the left.  You can see the other end of the yellow pulling rope coming out of the conduit stub there.  The 3 wire 4/0 service cable is coiled at he left.

We laid the service cable out to prepare for the big pull.  We tried to keep it as clean as possible to avoid added friction going through the conduit.  We weren't sure we were going to be able to pull that big cable through ourselves.  Fortunately our good friend Scott came over and gave us two more pulling hands.  I don't believe we could have done it without Scott.  Thank you Scott!

We fastened a makeshift cover to prevent us from touching the live top lugs in the 200A disconnect panel.  All ready on the right for the pull...

That's the LB joint at the house where the service cable will come out then enter the house.  The square gray junction box is directly on the other side of the garage wall.  All ready on the left...

And there is the cable all the way through the conduit.  Only have to terminate the ends now.

Successfully through the LB joint and into the garage.

There's the service cable coming into the square junction box.  Same on this end, just terminate the lines and that will do it.

And just like that all finished!

The State electrical inspector came the very next day and put our sticker on the service panel door in the garage.  Hooray!

A couple of days later, Jacob our HVAC installer came out and started up the system now that we have permanent power to all HVAC devices.  Right behind him came the State HVAC inspector and put his sticker on the air handler in the crawlspace.  Hip Hip Hooray!  Now just the final city inspection remains...

...but there was a hitch... we forgot to place this condensation overflow tube into the clothes washer stand pipe drain.  Oh my what a mess after three or four days before we noticed it.  We had the drain capped off because there was no water in the trap to stop the sewer gasses from coming into the house.  We didn't realize how much condensation would be pumped out by the HVAC.  Truly amazing!

We noticed water on the bath/laundry room floor as we were constructing the little cabinet for the laundry sink tub.  Once we figured out what was going on, we realized that the water was running down the inside of the wall as it left the washer hook up box.  The dry wall there was pretty wet.  We had a gallon or more of water in the encapsulated crawlspace.  All in all a bit of a mess, but we cleaned it up right away.  We decided to open up the wall and blow a fan in there for a few days.  That dried everything up real good.

There's the fan set up.  We patched up the wall just before the city inspector came out for final review.

We received the shades we ordered from Home Depot and put them up this month.  Gari works on the triple window.

Some of the shade results in the front room.  These are the top up bottom down shade variety.  We had similar shades at Cloverland, but these shades are now cordless.  Pretty slick.

Now we have moved on to constructing shelves.  Gari applies the beautiful finish.

We finished four rod & shelves last week, the master closet, the guest closet. the coat closet and the laundry room rod & shelf.  The belt sander died today so, we may have a few days off before we finish the linen shelves and pantry.

Master bedroom closet shelves.

Laundry rod & shelf

Coat closet.  Hangers hang.  Same design used on all the rod & shelf.

We finally got the stove to go into its spot by removing the small countertop section to the left.  We are still in discussion with Lowe's on this debacle.  It took them a month to engage.  We have a quartz backsplash that we will install behind the stove, but first Lowe's has to get the countertop fitted properly back into place.

We hung the first picture this month, a gift from our great friends Scott and Cindi.  It is a photo of the Teton Mountain Range that sits about 50 miles from here.  It won't be long now before we are living in a house again.

We sat and enjoyed the view on Mother's Day and accidentally finished off a bottle of white wine and snacks.  I woke up the next morning with a touch of the flu  ;-)