Here starteth the next lesson. zzzzzzz

OMG--- five weeks have gone by since I dropped my all on this website.  It seems to have gone by so fast!

Well that’s probably because it’s been another long dramedy, every single day.

Whose  idea was it to build this silly house…. Er ---mine--- I’ve nobody but myself to blame!   Groan. 

The Viking continues to be humiliated with various decorations… it’s a never-ending parade.  (The Viking was featured in the blog about POULSBO here for those who are wondering what the heck I am talking about.

http://www.coopersfolly.blogspot.com/2013_10_01_archive.html

As I said he had a St. Patrick’s day green outfit. Then I noticed the other day that somebody had given him Bunny Ears and a bucket of eggs.  Taken at a stop-light so sorry it's not close!

This week he got done up in a Sombrero and colorful bandanas for Cinqo de Mayo.  I wonder which fairy comes along and does this?  But I don’t have time to find out!

My main preoccupation every day is all about getting this house completed by the end of July and how I can make cuts in the budget. You want to move into a house with doors?  No such luck. We’ll be installing those and all the finish carpentry for weeks after we move in. AND AFTER I prime and paint all of them.   I just ordered myself a little paint sprayer to facilitate this task.

So let’s get to the timeline:

It’s been ROUGH-IN month.  By which I mean basic plumbing, basic wiring, and basic heating/air conditioning.  Most of the components for each of these vital services have been installed.  The furnace was installed by the heating guys and looks for all the world like a big oven-ready meat loaf.

Some of the plumbing is in the wrong place and still has to be moved.  The master shower is a TWO PERSON kind of thing but not at the moment unless the butts are together… if you know what I mean. We only stated the requirement for this placement three times….. apparently that was NOT the charm. I don’t think the plumber guy is quite getting the concept of chummy showers?

We finally got the garage floor concreted so that we now have a surface to work on in there—except that we don’t have garage doors on yet, so nothing can be left behind.  And those can’t be done until the drywall goes in—(think plaster in the UK.)     And we can’t get any of THAT until the COUNTY comes along and inspects everything.  One guy for the plumbing, one guy for the heating and –you guessed it, another for the electrics!  Efficient eh?  Actually Mr COUNTY electrics was invited out one afternoon last week and he came in the morning before the work was complete.

  He was snarky and he left.   Well dude, why did you come early then?  Rearrange the following letters….. norom…

So for a while, all we could usefully do was stop by and sweep out the house. And pick up more piles of trash about the place.  We spend a LOT of cash at the county dump! You can see Paul loading up for our third rubble dump below.

 The workers do not differentiate between building trash, nail gun ends and their lunch time wrappings!  So every pile has to be sorted before it can be disseminated to the right place.  One Saturday we picked up all around the outside of the house, mostly in the Geothermal field and put this together… and then had to get a massage!  I am looking for people who need kindling wood.   My neighbors apparently do not!

We are saving some of the siding leftovers as the well head looks like "THE ALIEN" coming out of an earthy tummy… Paul intends to build me a “wishing well” contraption to cover it up.  We thought this more appropriate than a Dr Who telephone box!  (Sorry USA readers, who will not have the vaguest idea what I am talking about !)

See one here: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/119697302568187146/

A couple of weekends ago we went churning into Seattle to place the order for cabinetry.  We had a cool view of Seattle on the way perched up in the side of the ferry boat.

 I HAVE all the kitchen cupboards in the man cave but we are also putting cabinets in the guest baths (of course), the utility room and our own main bathroom.  We were taking advantage of a measurable discount at said cabinet outlet so we ordered them a tad early.  NOW of course they are pending delivery and I’ve nowhere to store them.   See what I mean about Dramedy?   We are promised some drywall at the front of the garage within the next few days and then the doors.  It is not surprising when building a  house that so much of the work must be done in ABC fashion and just don’t try to do E or F until you got the early initials sorted out.  I learned that you can’t put down flooring until the walls have been painted and dry for a week AND the wood itself, (in our case bamboo) has been allowed to breathe in its own spot for a similar amount of time. WHO KNEW!  The nice folk at the flooring company called me and offered me an even better deal. Another order of stuff (2500 square feet of bamboo) and nowhere to put it!   Well not yet anyway.

 (Can you hear the sound 10000 dollars makes as it flushes away? – Er make that closer to 20K by the time I get it nailed down. BIG sigh.)

LAST WEEK WAS SUNNY…. As in 86 degrees, don’t forget your sunblock fashion.

I had sorted out colors for the external aspects of the house and so I bought a gallon of each and went to work like crazy on the work to be done, painting all (?) window frames and ‘cutting in’ the siding paint.

Some qualifications:  Hyperbole alert!    There are 29 windows in my house and I’ve done six of them. All does not yet qualify!

You will see in this photo that I have begun the siding paintwork but left large patches to be done.

Not laziness or shortage of paint.  We painted the Renton house five years ago ourselves, (while we still had joints that function) and to do this we went out and bought a pro-paint sprayer.  It’s a chunky little thing which we call R3D3.  R2D2 is taken as that’s what I use to refer to my Dyson Vacuum cleaner!

Anyway, I am painting with a wide margin around the windows so that Mr P can come along behind me with his sprayer and go “Flart Flart” and fill in the holes.   This is a term that came to me as I went up and down a step ladder 200 times trying to get my white paint work done.  During this exercise I ended up with EAVES in the back of my neck and bare electrical wires poking my howserfather!  SO FUN!

I was also targeted (or should I say harassed) by a busy little bee who was convinced that I had pollen about me somewhere to be harvested.  No kidding.  When doing jobs like this you get to listen to the sounds of nature and one happy bird kept me company for hours going “wheeze” every 10 seconds or so. I thought birds were supposed to chirp?   Oh well. THIS took me four days to do.

As you can almost see from this photo, The guest side of the house is simply too tall for either of us to reach comfortably so I am in the process of farming out the high stuff.  An item that was ALSO not in the budget.  There are a LOT of those!

So from now on, when it‘s sunny and when I get my kidney function back I’ll be painting.   Currently I am dosing myself with antibiotics hoping that all that ails me is a simple infection which can be zapped!

So NOW for the BIG adventure.  What follows is somewhat documentary in nature.  It might be boring. If you know how to build and install a geothermal system – skip it. If you don’t I can save you quintumpty bucks so read on! 

When the furnace was delivered, it came with a Manifold, (Paul assures me that there is no matching PEDIFOLD) and a wonking great big roll of pipe. 

 Big stiff pipe.  In fact it was six rolls but who’s counting.   3600 feet of pipe.  Paul announced midweek, “we’re pipe bending this weekend.”  OK says I, with little to no knowledge of just exactly what that entailed. I was SOON to find out!

Paul built a table with rails on the side and squares marked out on it. This was to assist with folding up the pipe in completely even and regular sized loops.

We would make a loop and tie it firmly with bundle ties—I don’t KNOW what they call those in the UK but they’re plastic and you zip them up and they can’t be UNZIPPED EVER!  After making three loops the whole mess got pushed off the end of the table and we’d unwind some more pipe.  Paul made a carousel  device that rotated to assist with that.

So we folded and zipped and folded and zipped and so on until the curls wouldn’t shove any more so every three loops Magatha had to go and PULL THEM to get them off the table.
I was looking particularly elegant that day in a pair of Paul's jeans... his cookie tummy has grown to big for these, mine is close!

Eventually we had a set of loops that was long enough to fill a 75 foot trench.

We marked it’s position in the field and then we made five more!  About seven hours worth of folding and zipping. Then I went home and made dinner—I lie—I made it the day before and we nuked it!

We rolled them all up–like giant hamster wheels, and rolled them into the back forty field of the house.  Here is the sculpture field that resulted, with Buckley on guard.  Buckley belongs to my Framing fairy – Buckley is a world class thief and has stolen every doggy chew toy for miles around and presented them for my acknowledgement.   I bet the neighbors are pi$$ed!

While we were zipping and coiling pipes ROB the framing fairy and his foreman ELIAS came and finished the deck which they had framed earlier. I am delighted that this deck is NOT wood and will never need painting.  BIG WHOOP!  Miriam on the right is doing just the kind of work I prefer but must admit she'd just swept out the whole house for us.  More whoop!

  I am looking forward to British Tea on the deck.  Or maybe in the gazebo-- Paul has picked out a spot for that in the woods. 

Last week Paul took a day off work and the digging fairies came back to help us.  Jake and his cat (as in erpillar) and Mr Sandman.   The process by the way is: dig a blanking big hole, (six feet deep to be precise), lay sand down in the bottom of it, lay in the geothermal pipe and then bury it with your original dirt.  The sand acts as a cotton wool ball for the piping to lay on. So we needed a WHOLELOTTA sand!  

The sand delivery was totally fascinating—for the oddest reason. Mr Sandman arrived with a BIG DUMP truck and a TRAILER—with more sand.  In other words- a twofer load with less gasoline to burn.  He arrived, uncoupled his trailer about 150 yards away down the lane and dumped his sand with us.  THEN—stand by to be amazed, he backed down the lane and SUCKED HIS TRAILER into the back of his truck and then came and delivered the rest of the sand.   Just like somebody deciding to put the baby back where it came from!  (We all know a few parents who’d like to do that don’t we?)

 While I was painting I could hear Jake trundling backwards and forwards like a tank from WWII gathering sand to put in the holes.

I love this photo—it’s Jake measuring, is the trench is deep enough?   See the pole…Jake is standing next to it!  It’s deep enough!  
All in all we dug seven trenches in the form of a multiple Pi's—think 3.14159 – all the trenches coming into the big one across the top.  The leader pipes then got hauled by Paul into the garage through holes he DRILLED IN MY HOUSE and into the garage ready to connect to the unvarnished MANI-fold.  Apparently said device is in the man-cave somewhere. I wouldn’t know it from a – well almost anything! It could look like my kettle for all I know.

The pipes going into the first trench

The next step is for us to fill the pipes with glycol.  The liquid running through the pipes gets warm from being nearer the warm bit in the middle of earth.. no seriously!   That warmed fluid circulating through the (somethingorother including water heaters), means lots of savings on all hot water and heating.  I think my bank balance will be eased by this next winter... we shall see!

Paul swears he knows where to get a frillion gallons of glycol. He has prevented me from having a heart attack by not telling me how much that costs... also not in the bally budget!

I keep telling everybody, I’m the interior designer –leave off with all this talk about engineering for goodness’ sake, it gives me a headache!

So that’s about where we are. Paul is busying himself after dinner applying all the door handles and locks to our exterior doors so that next week we can LOCK THIS JOINT UP. And I will sleep better at nights. I understand that it is common for people with nasty addictions to come and steal electrical wiring for it’s copper content.   So far so good!

I just had a thought... everybody talks these days via Texting, Facebook, Twitter, PINTEREST etc etc.  They don't talk to one another any more. Why do they call it SOCIAL media?

Shouldn't it be called ANTI-social media?

AND SO IT GOES!

Thanks for reading

Magelred the Ever-ready.