It was a big day here at the island place.
The fabulous crew that did our excellent solar plant install came to wire the new garage and re-wire the house. We’d contracted for it a couple of months back: I kept thinking I could just do it myself, but HA pointed out how challenging it was to do the one set of kitchen plugs I had installed and how much trouble I had with things like crawling around under the house and in the attic. In addition, I’m about 6’3” tall and, uh, not thin so crawling around in a 111 year old attic is probably asking for structural failure.
I got a quote for the job, and it was higher than I’d hoped but less than I’d feared. I knew these guys were good. They not only did a fabulous job on the solar plant, even acceding to some of my stranger requests (like locating the panels almost 400 feet from the house). On top of that, they had fun doing the job, which made me feel really good about it. My resistance to hiring contractors for work I can do myself is that I often end up unhappy with the work to the point that I end up re-doing at least part of it. With these guys, I was confident that I’d be happy with the product.
So we scheduled for their earliest opening, March 3-5, and I put it in my calendar, and put it in my brain as “re-wire in March.” I think it was January or maybe December, and I had the trip to Maui in the mean time, so it got shunted to that “you don’t have to worry about it until March” part of my brain.
When February 28th (Friday) rolled around, I thought “I should really check on that.” I looked on my calendar and realized that they were scheduled for the very next work day, and I had some work to do to get ready for them. I hadn’t heard a word, though, and I’ve gotten so used to things happening on island time that I wasn’t too concerned about it. I emailed them on Friday and asked what the schedule looked like, but didn’t hear back. We texted on Monday morning and they said they needed to pick up some materials and then would be up. Surprise! I still didn’t expect to see them for a while (their office is over an hour away) so we took Luna the Big Dog™ on a walk, knowing that — in the unlikely event they came early — we’d at least see them coming up the road.
We saw them coming up the road.
They arrived by 9, with the boss/owner, two journeymen, and an apprentice. They swarmed over the house. They solved a really thorny problem with getting the ceiling wired in the kitchen: not only is there no attic access, but when they tried to fish a wire from the old house attic through a hole drilled in the wall to the “new” (1930’s) attic, they discovered that the new attic was built with trusses stabilized with plywood sheathing covering the whole truss, blocking the path from the old attic to the hole for the fan box in not one but two places. They ended up using a drill with a very long shaft to drill a small hole from each side and then fishing a rod through the dead space. It was an impressive feat. I told them I’d be okay with surface wiring, but they prevailed and it looks great.
I had to bring down the mail and phone servers while they made some changes to the main panel, but that took less than an hour, preserving my uptime.
They aren’t done yet; mostly it’s just wire stubbed out at every nascent socket location, but they did more in a day than I would have got through in three months. They expect to finish tomorrow, including the all-important overhead feeder from the house to the new garage.
—2p