Work around the house

The last few weeks have been sort of non-stop work around (not inside; mostly) the house. We're getting lots of little (and not so little) things fixed and new things worked on.

First we finally hired an electrician to sort out some of the potentially dangerous electrical wiring around here. Turns out some of the wires coming up (seemingly at random) out of the ground here and there were actually LIVE (or at least hooked up). One in particular showed spark-/burn-marks from where people must have turned on the breaker it was connected to, trying to figure out where it went. Could potentially cause a fire in the wrong conditions. Also, we had a 100amp line going from the garage to the electricity pole, where it went into the same 200amp breaker that the house was connected to! That's another potential disaster.

Fortunately we now have a new pole (apparently the old one was rotten), a new electric-panel on the pole (the old one had been gutted by the previous owner and it was cheaper to just replace the whole box rather than try to fix it), and pretty much all of our wiring has been sorted out and made safe (lots of junction boxes without covers, overstuffed, etc). The electrician also cleaned up some of the wiring directly attached to the outside of the house, so most of it is now gone, making the house look a lot nicer, too.

The electric company got out here in record time (under 10 days, I believe) and everything aligned perfectly, so we didn't have to wait too long for the new pole and box, and they got it all done in most of a morning, and the house was back to full power by 2pm or so.

The day before the pole showed up, Justin showed up to start work on the lean-to for the horses in the lower pasture. Also, Herb, the back-hoe-guy showed up and dug the foundation for the barn we hope to get done soon!

Today, the phone company-guy showed up with a 'ditch-witch' to replace my bad phone line (the temporary line has been laying on the ground for the past week or so).

Then yesterday, I got the electric-fence hooked up to the new electric outlets by the new pole (this is basically what started us down the path of having to clean up the electric stuff in the first place), as well as the water-heaters for the horses (submerged in the water-trough to keep the water from freezing). Now I no longer have a LOOOONG extension cord running from the garage to the field for the water, and we can stop moving around the temporary electric-fence-zapper to the lower pasture.

Also today, the concrete guy came by to take a look at what needed doing, and he'll show up monday to start on the concrete foundation and frost-wall. Once that's done, we'll have at least the bottom of the barn done, and presumably framing can start, though that may not happen until April, due to scheduling on Justin's part (the reason he's building us a quick lean-to so the horses have SOMETHING to stand under during the winter.

With all this work, we've had to redo our alarm clocks and timers for the heaters every couple of days, and everyone was getting sick of that!

So thing are coming together and are looking pretty good! It's nice to get all this done in jut a few days/weeks, rather than stringing it along for months and months.