Paradise ponders...

Paradise ponders...  What a busy day today!

Early this morning the roofer/siding guys showed up, and they got the soffits all finished plus most of the siding on one (of three) sides of the mud room.  They left very early, just as they did on Wednesday...

Later in the day our builder his two helpers showed up, as promised last week.  They went right to work on replacing the door from our kitchen to the back yard.  There were a few challenges there that we didn't expect.  First, on removing the old door a few of our kitchen tiles were broken.  I'm sure it can be repaired, but it's just one more thing to do on a long list.  More alarmingly, we discovered that the old door had been installed in two stages, and they were not exactly lined up.  The point where the two doors met was about a half inch closer to the outside wall of the house than either end was.  If you looked straight down at the exposed wood, it made a shallow "V", with the point pointing outside, and the sides slanted toward the inside.  To fix this, our builder had to mark a straight line from one end of the door hole to the other on the floor, then cut away all that tile with a diamond saw blade in an angle grinder.  What a pain in the patoot!  But they got that done, and got the new door mounted, just before knocking off for the day.  That means the giant (9' wide by 7' tall) hole in the side of our house got closed up before it freezes tonight.  Phew! 

Our fencing guy was supposed to show up this afternoon and never did.  But ... just before I came in to make this post, he pulled into our driveway with a trailer full of the steel wire panels they'll use to make the fence.  He had the day from hell, where basically everything went wrong.  He'll be back in the morning to start the actual construction.

On top of all that, I started the work of installing a 50 amp circuit for the Tesla's charger.  The first step on that project was to remove a built-in ironing board in our laundry room.  We didn't want the ironing board, and it had been stupidly installed anyway – its presence prevented one of our cabinets in the laundry room from opening.  I have to cut into wallboard to put this circuit in, and I figured if we were getting wallboard people out here anyway, I might as well get rid of that ironing board.  Well, to my surprise, when I pulled out the ironing board I discovered that the opening it exposed would make my pulling that circuit quite a bit easier!  Yay!  I mounted the 220V outlet box in the garage and attached one end of my 6/3 cable to it.  Tomorrow I'll start cutting wallboard and running the circuit over to our load center, which is on a different wall of the laundry room.  I had to run up to Lowe's to get the right breaker, but now I am in possession of all the parts I need to do the job.  Woo hoo!