Day 23: Trench Number One

Tuesday

More rain today, which means no progress yet on our foundation. We need a good seven or eight day stretch of no rain and sun to dry things up and give us time to get the foundation in. Keep your fingers crossed for some good weather for us.

The rain didn't stop our electric company, PCEC, from getting their trencher there to put in our underground power line. We debated on whether to put in an overhead power line or go with an underground trench. The overhead powerline was free, whereas the underground was $2 per foot, and we have a quarter mile to go. On the other hand, PCEC basically puts in the underground at their cost when you buy it up front, and it's a lot more expensive to convert to underground later if you were to get tired of poles. We'd like to line our drive with trees that will, at some distant point in the future, be tall enough to interfere with overhead power lines, so we ended up going underground.

The trench starts back by the power pole next to the road. It then runs along the property line for a couple hundred feet.

 There is a 7.5' utility easement along the property line in which the power line needs to stay. The fence-line separating the two properties doesn't lie exactly on the property line. Rather, it is on our side of the line by about 10 feet and on a bit of a diagonal. This means that the utility easement is on our side of the fence for the first bit, and then crosses over to the neighbor's side of the fence for the remainder of the run. Apparently the fence was built using an old line of telephone poles, which were placed in an old easement and then abandoned. This was OK with me as it meant that the trench wasn't on our side of the fence for the bulk of the run. The neighbor was pretty understanding of us needing to have a big trench dug through his property.

 That big role of orange is our underground line, just waiting to go in the last hundred feet or so.

I also made one additional piece of progress today. I met with Brett from Bowman Plumbing to discuss our underground plumbing strategy and get his take on the house. Our house is not a typical design in terms of foundation, layout, or structure, so it's taking a bit a planning to figure out how everything is going to work. Brett did a great job of coming up with a plan for our underground plumbing and talked me through a lot of good ideas to consider for the rest of the house. I plan on hiring out the underground plumbing (under the concrete slab) and doing the rest myself.

Daily Stats		Hours Worked			Cost
	Day	Trevor	Family/Friends	Contractors
Today	23	0	0	16
All Time	23	21.5	20.5	82.5	$13,496.75
Summary of 4/29/2014		Work Done Today
		Underground trench for electric line, met plumber
		Materials Used Today
		Who Helped Today
		Contractors On Site
		Met Bowman Plumbing offsite to review plumbing plan