Almost ready for some painting

It's almost 6am on Good Friday as I start this next post.  While Troy and I were running wires, etc., last night, the electrical power went off in the neighborhood around 9:15pm (not our fault!) and stayed off for just over an hour.  So, I decided to wait until this morning to update the blog.


As mentioned in Wednesday's blog, I wasn't expecting any of the construction team to show up yesterday, but Chris and Tony were able to be here for the morning and built up more of the wall for the master bedroom/bathroom.

Chris and Tony working on the master bedroom/bathroom area

Tony puts one of the side wall blocks in place

Chris mixes another load of mortar

Tony puts one of the front wall blocks in place

The front wall is now at 8 block height

The back and side walls are now at the maximum height of 11 rows of block

While the guys were building the walls, the mudders were down in the "dungeon" continuing to mud the various joints in the wall board.  They finished the major work by the end of the day and will return on Saturday morning to sand the walls and ceilings to complete the job.  Then, I can begin painting.


Also during the morning, the telephone company guy arrived to run a line in the underground pipe to the outside wall of my office.  I'll bring the initial wires from there into my office and extend individual lines out to the rest of the house, including the new apartment, through flex conduit that was installed in the ceilings some weeks ago.

New box connection at the pole

Installing the new wire on the outside of the house

At the end of the afternoon, Johnny stopped by to deliver the three sections of railing for the new stairs.  Two sections were able to be stored in the office, but we had to leave the third section outside for now because it was quite large, and heavy, so the two of us couldn't easily angle it through the door.  We'll wait for a third person to help.

The large section of stair railing

Troy arrived just before 6pm and our first goal was to get a phone line working for the holiday weekend.  Unfortunately, the telephone guy didn't leave the original line available until I could get all the new lines distributed throughout the house, so I wanted to re-establish a connection right away.  This meant Troy had to climb up through a small opening under the new stairs and hook up an outlet box to the underside of the upper floor, then connect the flex conduit to it.  He kept insisting that he could easily do it, as long as there were no monster spiders in there!  We had already run a piece of flex there from the main control box in the office, which was to allow access to the phone and internet lines, so just needed to finish the connection to upstairs.

Troy sorts out the connections for the outlet box

Troy fastens the outlet box to the underside of the floor

Troy determines where to cut and add a coupling to connect the flex conduits

These pictures show what I discovered in the "dungeon" under the house, back in 1986 when I first started to dig out to make a radio room, which is now Jason's "man cave."  The intention was to just have the 8 x 10 room with steps leading to it from the outside.  But, I remember poking my head through a small air hole while digging and discovered another area that later turned out to be 10 x 30.  So, I decided to dig that out as well.  Once I started to dig out in the long room, I saw another air hole at the far end of it and poked my head through there, too.   I saw yet another space, so figured I'd keep on going!  That space turned out to be 12 x 15 and is now my office.  Too bad the air hole for the above area wasn't accessible from the office room or I would have dug that out back then, also.  It would have been an additional 8 x 10 room to use down there.


Okay, that's it for now.  Today, I'll make some fish cakes and then start running new telephone wires upstairs to access the new underground line.  Of course, if I eat too many fish cakes, I might have to take a nap and just dream about installing those lines!