DAY 217: A Month of Lots Of Little Things

It's been a month of lots of little things.  We've been busy getting ready for the four way inspection.

There has been low voltage electrical:

There was lots of work done on the gas line.  This black pipe was one of the trickier pipes.  It was so long that we couldn't just load it up into the floor joists.  We ended up drilling a hole through the concrete from the outside and then threading the pipe through that hole. 

 This was one of my jobs. Not the pipe part, but making a hole to accomodate the pipe.  I had to cut the floor board but the fun part was using Brent's mammoth chisel drill to pound out the cement around the pipe. I'm getting a little more comfortable with the tools. 

Brent checking the lines

We installed the central vac system this month.  Of all the things we have done this was one of the easiest jobs.  I was excited when we gave it a little test run by hooking up the shop vac.  I was surprised by the power with just a shop vac.  I am hoping that this new fangled device in our home will motivate our children to vacuum frequently.... 

There has been lots of foam cutting.  We keep touching up holes in the styrofoam and that always leaves excess.  We are constantly trimming up foam.  It is still one of the fun and easier jobs for the kidlettes (and me). 

 When the kidlettes were little one of their favorite books was a simple board book called "Shoes".  It repeats the same phrases over and over so it's easy for little preschool children to repeat the story and predict what will happen next.  There is a line that repeated in my head over and over when I watched them in the rain one day: "Rubber shoes for muddy squishing".  There has been plenty of muddy squishing during the wet month of April.

Do you remember our windows that didn't match?   

We also worked on that this month.  The bottom right window was the problem window.  We called Omar and he came with his concrete chain saw.  It was interesting (and loud) to watch.  It took almost 2 hours of work. 

(I can't get blogger to work for me tonight, sorry about the double images...)  When finished the window looked like this:

Brent "re-framed" the window with v-bucks and styrofoam.  We packed the styrofoam with cement and we're almost good as new.  I didn't take a picture yesterday of our finished product.  But, it now matches, YAY!!!

When Omar cut the window you could see a perfect cross section of our wall:

The 4 vertical scribbles show the 2 inches of styrofoam.  This is all the insulationt hat will be used in our home.  The one horizontal line shows the 6 inches of concrete sandwiched between the styrofoam.  Pretty impressive, eh?