31 May 2016

Drove down to Vermont Specialty Slate, arriving at 7:45 to find the Open / Closed sign in the Open position, the doors wide open, lights and radio on… and absolutely nobody there.  Twenty minutes later, Jim Souter (the owner) pulled in… and told me that our slate would be in next Friday, not last Friday… and sorry for the confusion.  Got back to Δ□Ο just as Tom was arriving… all prepared to lay slate on the front entry porch.  So instead he troubleshot the phone system, coming to the conclusion that the alarm system wasn’t passing tone to the house phones.  Called Cary Marshall, who came out at noon and determined that the alarm system wasn’t passing tone to the phones because it wasn’t getting tone from the Comcast router.  And around we go!!!!  The culprit seemed to be the new phone wire that I’d run the other day.  Sure enough, that wire’s termination at the router was faulty, as in not plugged all the way into the jack.  Oooops!  While waiting for Cary, Tom installed the Code-required electrical outlet at the east end of the kitchen peninsula cabinet.  He and I also put in the two security lights on the north end of the woodshed.  Steve was here most of the morning, continuing to insulate pipes in the mechanical room… and repairing a pinhole leak he discovered during that process.  Roger and Joe Desabrais came by just as Cary was leaving and took measurements for the custom glass walls and door needed to complete the guest bath shower enclosure.  Lit the old campfire for the first time this season and enjoyed some delightfully smoky burgers for dinner.

30 May 2016

A/C ran all night, never getting the house below 73°, with the set point at 68° and the outside temperature in the mid-60’s.  Something ain’t right!  Apparently, when the well went on strike yesterday, the heat pump’s controller, being a member of the same union, also walked off the job…  Called Steve Poplawski (who happened to be the Ryan’s on-call technician today) and he arrived at 10 o’clock.  Steve put the geothermal heat pump back to work by turning the circuit breaker off, then on again four minutes later, and, like magic, we started getting cold water again.  What happened to the good olde days when you’d just replace a blown fuse with a penny?  Now everything is controlled by a finicky computer chip.  Spent the day schlepping the last few car / truck loads of our stuff from Kate’s over to our new house, then doing a thorough cleaning at Kate’s place.  Marty & Merry came up to enjoy the first (of, hopefully, many) fabulous meal in our new house, this time featuring Bourride and Aïoli (Provençal Fish Stew with Garlic Mayonnaise) plus Bread Pudding with Hard Sauce.  A heavenly meal with heavenly folks in a heavenly setting!!!! 

29 May 2016

Fifty gallons of well-chilled water provides a lot of cooling.  We didn’t run out of A/C until after midnight, when the outside temperature was low enough to open the windows.  Except for Geisha and Shlomo deciding it was time to get up at first light, we slept well.  John Williams and Glenn Tupper arrived, as promised, at 7:30.  A little tapping on the pressure sensor pipe, a small adjustment to the geothermal pressure set point, and we were back in the water business.  Chree put in some of her garden plants in the morning.  Moved four car / truck loads of “stuff” out of Kate’s house, and there’s plenty more to go!  The entire Lapidus clan came up for a tour mid-afternoon.  Perry and Steve came over for Sunday Sauna at Six.  Lake temperature is a whopping 75° already; lake level is 15″ below the top of the dock.  These are values we expect to see in July, not May!

28 May 2016

So what always happens at 6 pm on the Saturday of Memorial Day weekend?  You got it: the well pump controller got sick, leaving us not only with no water, but, thanks to a geothermal heating and cooling system that must have lots of the clear and wet to operate, rapidly failing air conditioning… with the outside temperature hitting 90° today.  The good news is that less than 5 minutes after I called Spafford’s answering service, John Williams called back to verbally troubleshoot the problem (which didn’t work) and promise to be here first thing in the morning.  He suggested a dip in the lake to both cool down and clean up.  Riiiiight!  Did I mention that the house phone is kaput this weekend, too, hopefully not due to the rewiring I did on Friday.  James came by for an hour and used the mini-excavator to regrade the slope in front of the garage, hopefully removing the lake that was forming every time it rained hard.  Bob and Toni Best, a husband and wife window blind installation team, were here most of the morning installing (wait for it…) Graber thermally insullated window blinds throughout the house.  Absolutely gorgeous, all of them!  Chree and I spent the day cleaning the new house.  We retrieved all of the pots, pans, and dishes out of Delores… and (trust me, you don’t want to know why) put most of them straight into the dishwasher, which we’ll run just as soon as we have water again.  Oh, the joys of new home ownership!

 

27 May 2016

Sonny and Brandon got started on the wood bin first thing in the morning.  Steve also was here early doing his plumbing thing, including putting in vent covers around the house.  Eric returned and, in a few hours, finished mudding the garage.  James also arrived and got to work digging all the big rocks out of Chree’s 20′ x 16′ garden, filling the bottom of the excavation with Ploof’s Special Topsoil (aka: sand, but it does grow grass nicely), and then topping the area off with a truckload of all-purpose compost (APC).  Expect our home-grown tomatoes will cost about $200 each this year… Sean also showed up, ostensibly to take pictures of the finished house, but for that he’ll have to return another day.  Standing in the living room and looking at the installed custom cabinetry, Sean pointed out that the cabinet that houses the WiFi router and DVR was sitting much too low with respect to the TV enclosure.  I had to agree, the lines just weren’t right.  So Sonny and Brandon quickly ripped out the router cabinet, put a couple of 2⅝″ shims in place, covered the front shim with a piece of scrap drywall, and had Eric mud over the face.  All done in about ½ hour… at least, that’s the way it appeared at the time…  Larry and Earl got here mid-morning to continue installing the security system.  So Larry says to me, “Do you know that the alarm panel has to be the first connection on the phone line?”  “Yes,” says I, “Cary told me that.  But (dawn rising over Marblehead), let me go check where the kitchen phone line ties into the loop.”  A few minutes later I discovered that (1) the kitchen phone was the first connection on the phone line, and (2) Sonny and Brandon had finished the wood bin except for the very top board, i.e., there was still access to the inside of the wall where the phone lines were running.  Whew!  After figuring out which line went where, I reached through the gap and (fingers crossed and eyes closed) cut the line to the kitchen phone.  Then Earl and I used that line to pull two new lines down through the wall and floor into the mechanical room.  After doing our electrical magic, we had a new line from the router box down to the security box and thence into the house phone line loop, including back up to the kitchen via a splice in the cut line.  Sonny and Brandon then went to reinstall the router cabinet.  After Sonny finished inserting “all” of the lines into the 3-gang junction box that is inside the cabinet, I noted that the all-important line down to the security panel was missing from the collection.  “Ooops,” he said, “that wire must have fallen out…” and was now at the bottom of the wall with only two small holes giving access 3-feet up.”  “No problem,” says Brandon, “Mr. James Bond here will use a mirror and a coat hanger to fish the line back up.”  Only two problems with that: we didn’t have a mirror or a coat hanger.  But I did fashion a hook out of some AWG 12 wire I retrieved from the dumpster.  After fishing around blindly for a few minutes, Brandon relinquished the hook to Sonny saying, “A hundred bucks if you get it first try.”  “Hold on,” says Sonny a few seconds later, “I’ve hooked something.”  And, as Sonny’s and my good luck would have it, sure enough he had snagged the missing phone wire.  Mid-afternoon, with the house getting a mite toasty (the outdoor temperature topped out at 89° today), I asked Steve if he could get the air conditioning going.  Took him awhile to figure out the wiring (which he ended up jury-rigging), but Chree, the dogs, and I will be enjoying cool sleeping accommodations tonight… and forevermore!

26 May 2016

Sonny and Brandon installed the TV enclosure cabinet in the morning.  In the afternoon, Brandon started work on the wood box while Sonny did some small tasks: cutting the hole in the kitchen sink cabinet toe kick for the air conditioning vent. I put a final coat of joint compound on the area around the stove plug.  After Sonny and Brandon removed the bracing, I started the joint compounding process for the wall areas on either side of the guest bath shower panels.  I also did some joint compound repair work around three junction boxes that, ahem, needed further attention.  Steve spent the day insulating hot water lines in the mechanical room.  Dennis stopped by to check on Steve’s progress and discuss how we are going to control the HRV.  Answer: adjustable timer control in the mechanical room with an override switch in the kitchen that will also be on a timer, i.e., if the humidity gets too high in the house we can flip the switch in the kitchen and turn on the HRV… but a timer will turn it off again, if we have a senior moment and forget to do so manually.  Tom installed the 8v/16v/24v transformer I bought at Lowe’s last night and (drum roll, please) the doorbell now is working properly.  He then finished (with the exceptions of the garage and three other minor items that I can complete) all of the electrical work inside the house.  Larry and Earl continued installing alarm system components, including the entry keypad and master control panel.  I put the first coat of polyurethane on the handrails and what I thought would be the final coat of polyurethane on the custom coat hook rack I built for the mud entry.  Both coating came out horribly (!!!!), probably due to not following the instructions for cleaning my brush after it was used for staining the hand railings yesterday.  Even though the fire was still burning (6 days after being started!), I pulled the pile apart with the Kubota and buried the one remaining stump and a bucket-load of hot rocks.  After staking out where she wants her garden, Chree spent the afternoon cleaning the new house.  The master bedroom and bath, the laundry, and the half bath now are ready for occupancy.  Woe unto to any carpenter, plumber, or electrician who messes them up!

25 May 2016

I was at Goodro’s at 7 to clean them out of brushed nickel hand railing brackets… netting half of what I needed.  Sonny and Brandon spent the morning installing the two hand railings that will line either side of the staircase.  After they got the railings fitted, they disassembled everything and then Sonny coated the railings with a very dark Minwax Jacobean stain.  Ron Highter delivered the four absolutely gorgeous custom cabinets mid-morning.  Sonny (with a timeout for house destruction; see below) and Brandon spent the afternoon installing the cabinets that will house the Comcast router and DVR, the kitchen writing surface, and the hall knick knacks.  Steve installed the guest bath toilet and wired up the zone controllers for the radiant floor heating.  Jim Ploof dropped off his mini-excavator and skid-steer, which will be used to create Chree’s garden later this week.  Tom arrived late-morning and set to work finishing up the electrical work.  First item on his agenda was to get the doorbell working properly.  After triple-checking the wiring, he called the manufacturer, whose technical help-desk person suggested that maybe putting in a 24v transformer (vice the 16v transformer called for in the doorbell instructions) might get both chimes to work.  After that, he spent the rest of his workday installing electrical outlets.  Larry Stevens and Earl Taylor from Marshall’s alarm service arrived early afternoon and began installing the components for our alarm system.  After awhile, Earl went to Larry (who came to me) saying, “Weren’t there supposed to be both a klaxon and a motion sensor in the downstairs hall?  There is only one wire down there.”  “That’s funny,” I said, not laughing, “I thought there once was a security system wire in the corner of the wine cellar nook.  Oh, Sonny!  Please tear apart this brand new wall (fortunately made of screwed-on plywood in the shop) so we can find the missing wire.”  “Grumble, bitch, moan!”  Wall hacked apart, we found the missing wire in the ceiling over the wine cellar nook, wrapped around a drywall screw and tied in a knot.  Located and removed the screw (making only a small hole in the once-pristine wine cellar nook ceiling), only to find that the knot in the wire still was a show-stopper.  Nothing for it but to cut a hole in the ceiling big enough to extract the knot.  That operation was completely successful, but the ceiling will need some serious post-operative doctoring.  Kevin stopped by to give us his (choke!) price for building our patio.  Let’s just say that it will be a very nice patio… and Kevin will not be starving to death anytime soon.  After an early dinner, made a mad-dash to Lowe’s in South Burlington to not buy the 20 amp electrical outlets needed to complete the house wiring.  All of the local-area Lowe’s are out… and not expecting new stock for at least a few weeks!  Merde, alors, if you’ll pardon my French!  But, not wanting to leave empty-handed, I found $130 of other electrical stuff to fill my shopping cart.  Got back to Fern Lake at 8, ready for some serious slumber.