NOV. 17 UPDATE: Walls and wiring

First, for the house update -- then I'll get to the excuse for it being late!

Don and Dave got a lot of work done over the weekend -- Don and Mary came on Thursday night, instead of Friday night like they've done past weekends, so Don and Dave would have two full days to work on the house. And that time really showed by noon Sunday when they quit for the day.

We had been planning on leaving the west side of the upstairs just as a railing for the time being while we concentrated on making the downstairs livable, but as Dave considered the wiring plan for the house, it became clear that building the walls now would make wiring the upstairs a lot easier. Not to mention that the drywalling could be done all at once, instead of having to do some drywalling after we were already living in the house. So here you see the upstairs -- I'm standing in the northeast corner of the upstairs, looking west down the hallway, toward the west bedroom (to the south) and a large closet (at the end of the hall).


Don and Dave built the wall on the north side of this bedroom (this is the east bedroom upstairs) this weekend -- they'd already done the west wall of this room some time ago.

Dave spent more time "playing on the monkey bars" -- i.e., balancing on the scaffolding -- to install the box for the fan. That fan will really be necessary to make sure the heat from the stove doesn't just sit up in the second story. We're hoping this home heating plan works!


The woodstove was roaring pleasantly most of the weekend, and it really did make a noticable difference while they were working out there -- they didn't need to wear jackets while they were out working. They still wore hats most of the time, but that could be a fashion statement.


Don and Dave worked until midnight on Saturday night, but they didn't really realize what time it was -- they were in the wiring "zone," apparently. But when they came in, they had the two north bedrooms (downstairs) all wired! I think Don finished the east upstairs bedroom on Sunday morning, and Dave got that fan box installed then as well. They finished off wiring the addition also -- Dave had been working on that throughout the week. They've also got a plan for much of the rest of the wiring, so hopefully a lot of the "thought-work" of wiring is done now and just the "work-work" remains.

... So, on to the excuse: I didn't post this Sunday night because I wasn't on the computer, and I wasn't on the computer because the power kept flickering in a number of rooms in the house. It really spooked us, because the power would go out in outlets that were not only on separate circuits but in separate buildings -- the barn lights would go out then, too. We thought there might be some crazy short in the wall that was causing the problems, though the barn light problem threw us off. We called an electrician, who recommended that we call the power company first to make sure there wasn't a problem at the pole, before the electricity got to the house.

We did, and the power company found several loose connections on our lines, one of which was running to the barn. So maybe that was the problem.

But then a woman from the power company called later in the afternoon and said that we weren't the only ones having problems, and that they had found problems in the line going up to our area -- apparently all the farmers around are running their grain dryers and overloading the system.

In any case, we haven't had any more problems this afternoon, so hopefully we've put off rewiring this old house for a while. And hopefully everyone can sleep a little better this evening -- Dad said he didn't sleep well last night because he was worrying about the wiring, and Dave brought in the fire escape ladder he'd bought for the new house -- just in case!