It was a long weekend for us trying to get a few things done at the house. First a little bit from things that were done on Friday.
Now that the shower tile was finally dry, they could install the fixtures in the master shower. Richard saw it before I did and said “it looks fancy.” ? I picked out all the fixtures, so I don’t know if he really knew what any of it would look like before he saw them.
Also the fireplace was finished off. It’s had all the pieces and parts sitting there, but hasn’t been finished. We went with a direct vent fireplace and the switch hadn’t been finished off yet either, but both of these things were done when we showed up on Saturday.
I also grabbed a photo of the temporary DSL connection that happened on Thursday. They will be coming back sometime in the next 10 days to trench and bury a one inch cable. They’re supposed to call us before this happens because we need to make sure they bury it in a way that we won’t accidentally cut into it or dig it up when we dig out our trench in the front a bit deeper for a dry creek bed landscape feature.
On Friday, Richard got a short update from our Field Manager and the schedule was to look something like this:
Saturday: Carpet Install
Monday: Trim/Carpentry people were coming back to do some finishing items
Tuesday: Paint
Wednesday: Plumbers coming back to do a few things they didn’t finish on Friday, Inspections, CO submitted
Now to the reasons we spent most of the weekend at the house….well chlorination. We have to chlorinate the well to disinfect it and then once we have properly disinfected it we have to call the health department for them to test the water and deem it drinkable. It’s a basic process where you pour bleach down the well, run the water into the well to let the bleach circulate, open up every water fixture in the house until you smell chlorine, then shut them off and then pour one more gallon of bleach down the well. Then you wait. You let it sit for a 24 hours, then you pump out water from the well until you no longer smell chlorine, then you open up and run each water fixture in the house until you no longer smell chlorine and then you call the health department to do their test. Seems simple enough, right? Well…
At first we thought we couldn’t get the cap off the well. The top of the cap has bolts in it that are recessed and we couldn’t get a socket wrench over them because they are so recessed. Richard finally figured out that the nuts on the bottom are how you have to remove it and they were just finger tight, so it was really quite simple but we were making it hard?♀️
So we got the cap off and poured the first gallon of bleach down the sides of the well, as instructed, and waited to smell chlorine. It said to do this and then let it run for 15 minutes. It took us quite a while before we could smell the chlorine and like I said then we had to wait 15 minutes before we could move on. We got tired of holding the hose so I wedged it in there and we left it.
After the 15 minutes we went to all the fixtures and ran them until we smelled chlorine. Here’s the thing though, we thought all the plumbing was going to be running at this point from what we were told, but it turns out the kitchen sink was still being worked on because the water was not on and we couldn’t turn it on under the sink either. The disposal was not plugged in either, so I am assuming this was one of the lingering things that were left until this week to finish up…but we didn’t realize that until we were 2/3rds of the way done with the chlorination process. At this point we decided to finish the process but skip that connection and hope for the best.
It took quite a while for us to do this part of the process…there’s a lot of connections! And it was hard sometimes to discern the chlorine smell because we’d already been around it so much. By the time we got done with this it was already into the afternoon. Once we had lunch we worked on our other project…our network rack! Because of the location of studs and spacing of the rack mounts, we had to buy some wood to place on the wall to then screw the rack into for stability as we didn’t want to use drywall anchors for the rack. I painted out the two pieces of wood we bought the color of the wall in the coat closet so it would blend in and be a little less obvious.
Once we got into the project we realized we needed some large washers for our screws in order to get the rack up and stable because the holes for the rack to sit on the screws were huge. This meant Richard has to run back to the store for washers. In the end, we got the rack up but also realized we didn’t have the extra rack screws with us for the components and so we called it a day. We originally rented a gas trimmer so I could work on some weeds while Richard worked on the rack and I didn’t even get to that either. We had already ran a bunch of errands on our way out to buy stuff for all of these projects and we were tired. We picked up a pizza, came home and watched OSU play (go bucks!) and were determined to get up early on Sunday and get the rest of the work done so we wouldn’t have to be there all day…again. We noted that the carpet installers never showed up while we were there, so we sent our Field Manager an email to let him know in case he didn’t already know about this change in schedule.
On Sunday we did just what we said…got up at a decent time, got ready and went to the house. Richard started on the network rack while I decided to use the trimmer we rented. Since we had it for 24 hours, we didn’t worry about not getting to it the day before and I figured I could do it in the morning. I didn’t get very far into it when there was no string left and bumping it was not bring any out. I should have done a little digging and figured out how to open it to check it, but I just figured it ran out of string. So Richard took a break after an hour or so and ran back to the hardware store with the trimmer. There was string in it albeit not much and they told us we could have it for the rest of the day for free or get a half day refunded to us. I would rather have done the work so Richard brought it back plus some lunch.
I helped Richard figure out some things on the rack before heading out to do some weed eating. I did it in spurts for a while because I would get no string again and then figured out how to take the thing apart and restring it. I don’t know if the string was just badly wound, but the bump feature would not work. I did the majority of what needed to be done and was going to move on to some extra stuff I wanted to do when the darn thing kept wanting to shut off so I gave up and called it a day with the weed whacker.
By this time Richard had gotten a lot of the network closet done and was hooking up the last of the peripherals. We still have other things that go in this network area, but I think it’s turned out really well! I will be using my label maker to make some nicer labels for the cables, but for now we have temporary labels that help us identify each connection throughout the house. As you can see, the only thing hooked up so far is the DSL modem. We bought a rack and a switch and patch panel with plenty of room to grow so that when we get around to finishing the basement, there will be room to wire it all up.
After the network rack was done it was on to flushing the bleach/chlorine out of the well. There was no time frame listed on that, just to flush it until you didn’t smell chlorine anymore and that chlorine test strips are helpful. We bought a couple of different kits to use for this purpose including one to test for the bacteria that the health department will test for. Our front stoop became experiment central and Creative Kid loved it! We had some extra iron and copper tests which I let him play around with to try out how to do the test. Homeschooling at it’s finest!?
So we flushed for a while and tested. Off the charts the amount of chlorine that was in it. So we flushed for a while longer and tested. Still just off the charts but lighter. We let the water run another 15 minutes and while the test was lighter, it was still way up there. I believe the following picture is from the middle test after it had been past the reading time frame for a while..so the color isn’t completely accurate anymore, if anything the drying time lightened it up a little.
As you can see, the test confirmed what we already knew which is we have VERY hard water. It’s also rather alkaline, with slightly high PH and nitrates and nitrites are in the okay range. I’m not sure if the high chlorine content is effecting any of the other items, but after close to an hour we gave up on flushing out the chlorine in one day. We knew we would be coming back on Tuesday evening so we figured we will do more then.
Here are a couple of the other tests we ran. Pesticides and lead both came up negative.
Our iron test confirmed what our well driller reported, very low iron which is very good for our clothes washing! Also a copper test came back in the acceptable range.
I did however run the bacteria test because it came with a sterile back and a dechlorination tablet in it for collecting a clean sample. You collect the sample, do a process to dissolve the tablet and take the sample from there and pour it into another tube with another tablet that tests for the bacteria. You leave that test at room temperature for 2 days away from sunlight before you read it….Tuesday evening it should be ready to read.
So Richard talked to our FM today and he said the carpet installers wanted something sanded down before they install the carpet, so that is why it wasn’t done on Saturday. This of course meant the schedule changed. They did a blower door test to measure the air tightness and energy efficiency of the house, otherwise I don’t think a lot was done today.
Tuesday: Trim and Carpet
Wednesday: Plumbing, Inspections and CO submitted.
Friday: Loan Inspection
I don’t actually know when the last of the painting (front door, porch columns and whole house touch ups) got moved to, but I am going to assume Wednesday or Thursday. There’s also some things that are not whole categories that I know have to happen before the loan inspection that I am sure will get done this week as well, such as the glass shower door that has to be custom cut on site. All these things that are listed in our loan documents have to be done before our loan inspection on Friday. We signed our final draw on the loan funds so now the bank comes out to make sure all of the things that are in our build plan were implemented as that is what our loan value was based on. Our FM says we are still on track to get the Certificate of Occupancy back on Tuesday the 25th, close on the 26th, and our moves to start on the 27th. Lets put it this way, we don’t have a choice but our moves to start on the 27th so the rest of it has to fall into place! Ha!
Other things we have going on include having another 40 ton of gravel put in our driveway on the 24th over the larger construction rock, appliances installed on the 25th, two different landscape meetings for design and estimates in the next week or so and wrapping up a couple of things needed to close or to move in (insurance changes, water softener install, I still need to buy and install mirrors, etc). We’re so close though!
Until tomorrow…
Thanks for reading!
