Wiring and plumbing and deck, oh my!

This week, the driveway has been nicely full of cars, although this picture doesn’t quite capture it because there were at least four other cars not in the picture:

Now that the power pole is up (owned by the phone company), the electrician could get to work with the wiring. Here’s the big wire, which will connect the pole to the house (via secret underground passageway):

On Thursday, we signed an easement with the power company that gives them access to the pole so that they can connect it to power (from the nearest pole, across the street). That’s supposed to happen sometime by the end of next week.

Meanwhile, inside, the electrician is pulling out the old wiring and putting in the new. This is what all the old switches and outlets look like now:

and this is what the new boxes look like (well, maybe not quite that out of focus…):

Wednesday morning, we walked through the house with the electrician, pointing out places where we wanted lights, light switches, and outlets. By Thursday morning, these new boxes were up all over the addition (upstairs and down), in the basement (plenty in the new office), and in parts of the new kitchen.

Speaking of the kitchen… to put the new windows in, the guys had to essentially build us a new back wall for one side of the kitchen. This picture shows the new wall and the two new windows:

The rangetop/hood will go in the space between these windows.

You can see a few remnants of the old wall still there. Note the piece of branch supporting the lower sill of the right-hand window.

Here’s the new kitchen wall from the outside:

As you can see, work continued on the deck flooring:

I don’t have any pictures yet to prove it, but the plumber is also at the house this week. Pipes are going in for the two bathrooms. It’s a bit dicey to do this for the upstairs bathroom because there’s not much space between the floor and the beams downstairs, so some of the pipes need to run through the beams. The plan is to cover these pipes while still allowing most of each beam to be exposed. Tricky.

Also, yesterday and today, roofing! Pictures coming soon…