A hole in the wall

There have been very few genuine screw-ups thus far in the house building process.

One exception was communication around routing the electrical and phone lines into the house. In short, when we went to put the permanent electrical conduit line into the house the porch was in the way. This really hasn't turned out to be that big a deal, but it did require me to drill a new hole through the foundation through which to route the electrical and phone lines.

I thought it would be fun to show the process of making the hole and closing it back up.

The corner of the basement wall where the lines need to come through

Cutting the insulation away to reveal the plastic vapor barrier which I cut so as to be
able to re-attach new plastic at the end

Drilling multiple holes to make one big hole. Daylight is showing through on the left

The hole complete. Not yet drilled is a second, smaller hole for the phone line
conduit to come through to the left of this hole

The electrical conduit coming through the wall

The view from the outside. Electrical on left, telephone on right

Same view after patching concrete with hydraulic cement and then coating the whole area with foundation tar

The view from inside

Re-installed vapor barrier

Re-installed insulation. That wire there is our phone line and that's what connects us
to the internet, so this blog is going through that line

Down in a hole

Glad I don't have to do this too often

At work about to install the new power pole. The new pedestal is just past the man on the left

The PVC conduit running from the pedestal down through the trench to the pole

Still concentrating on preparations to take down the garage, I've spent the last two days digging a ten foot long trench that is three feet deep between our electric meter pedestal and the newly installed telephone pole. It was going fine until I hit the cementazoic layer--consisting mostly of super dense rock and clay that really was cement like. At one point I was considering giving up, but just about then started to break through to the next strata down and realized I'd be able to work through it.

Today I laid in the pipes for the new power service coming from the pole and got a start on the piping for the phone line as well. Felton has been coming up periodically to check on the progress and keep an eye on my work.

All this will allow us to remove the electrical panel and meter from the garage in anticipation of next week's work.

In the meantime Nancy has spent her evenings moving the firewood to its new location away from the garage and I'm slowly working through all the tools, bike parts, and random shoe-making machinery in the garage.

It'll all come together, but we've got a lot to do!