This week was crazy schedule-wise anyway.  I spent the whole week in Seattle on business and have to fly back to Seattle tomorrow.  So we only planned on working on the house one day this week.  But an early monsoon last Wednesday even cut that short.

Last Wednesday afternoon, an early storm rolled through and lightning strikes started two wildfires about 10 miles north of M.T. Acres.  The Forest Service called them the Dragoon Fire and the Lizard Fire.  The fires grew on Thursday and merged on Friday morning, so now they just call it the Lizard Fire.  As of writing this (Saturday evening), the Forest Service is saying the fire is 5% contained and has burned about 10,500 acres so far.

https://inciweb.nwcg.gov/incident/5217/

As we turned off the paved road onto the gravel road near M.T. Acres.

At the house:

When we left M.T. Acres, the fire was about a mile from us  and the wind was blowing from the south.  I hope it stays that way.

My plan was to start laying floor tile today, but we had some prep work to do first for the floor and the fire really sapped our motivation.  If a fire is going to burn our house down, I want it to happen before I cripple myself up laying tile.  So we spent the day scrubbing concrete for tileing and getting the doors ready for Tina to varnish this coming week while I am gone.

On a positive note, the doper HVAC guys did get the furnace and A/C installed.  But the furnace is not yet connected to the gas and the whole job looks like it was done by a blind 3 year old.  GRRR!!!

Nothing is straight and many of the exhaust joints are not even completely covered with the sealing tape.

The A/C at least works, sort of.  But the whole HVAC job has me absolutely furious.

They did not even ask us what components we wanted installed, so they installed the cheapest, crappiest ones they could get past inspector.

The furnace:

The A/C:

The builder and I are going to be having a very uncomfortable conversation this week because I am pissed!

As I mentioned in last week’s blog, the HVAC people had dropped off a big fancy furnace and a big fancy air conditioner as well as a huge pile of their tools last week.  So we decided to wait to start the tiling in the main hallway, living room, dining room and kitchen until after they were done.  We had some busy-work to do anyway, so it was not a huge setback.

Last Thursday, we went to the house with the first of 4 loads of tile and associated supplies expecting the HVAC would be installed and working, or at least the register vents in our work area would be installed.

The HVAC guys had obviously been there because all of their tools were gone.  But absolutely nothing had been accomplished.  I called our builder to find out what was going on with them and he told me they would be by on Friday.

Since we bought the tile in Tucson, which is about a 3 hour round trip, plus loading and unloading time, I spend the day Friday picking up loads of tile and driving them to the house.  (I only have a Ford F150 so I really do not want to carry more than about 1300 pounds at a time on it.)

By noon on Friday, the HVAC guys still had not arrived so Tina called the builder to ask the status.  At about 2:30PM Friday, I was on my way back to Tucson to pick up the next load of tile and Tina called me to tell me the HVAC guys finally showed up.  But all they did was pick up the furnace and air conditioner they had left the previous week and drop off a smaller crappier unit.  They informed her they would be back today (Saturday) between 7:30 and 8:00AM to work on it.

They finally showed up about 9:30AM.  The first thing I noticed is they both looked and acted like a couple of strung out, dope-smokin’ hippies.  The skinny one, who I think is the son of the owner of the HVAC company, had every excuse in the book why they had not accomplished anything, from his father being in hospital, to somehow having 4 kids that were not his suddenly living with him, to being sick…  The fat one was just hired help, I think.  His purpose in life seemed to be just taking up space that could otherwise be used for more productive purposes.

After about 30 minutes of observing these two morons at work, Tina could tell I was pretty much at my breaking point and she sent me back to rental house to pick up the replacement interior door that Menards had shipped which had also arrived Friday.  By installing the door, we could at least claim we accomplished something useful this weekend.  I was gone about 2 hours and when I got back, the HVAC guys had left already, promising to come back and finish this week.  In the hour or so they were actually stumbling around working, they managed to install only the register vents that were in the way of our tiling.

I will be having a “Come to Jesus” talk with our builder Sunday night about these morons.

But here are a few of the vents they did manage to get installed:

Beyond that noise, we did get the final interior door installed and I think it looks pretty sharp with the other doors.

Tina visited the paint store again and got the final coat of paint on the exterior doors.

I have been a Minnesota Vikings fan my whole life and Tina has been for the Pittsburgh Steelers as long as I have known her.  But I guess now we are “Go Broncos”!

Finally, I moved a boatload of tile.  Each box is roughly 60 pounds.  That does not sound like much, but at my advanced age (50 last week), I am definitely feeling it.

Work has me traveling for the next 3 weeks, so progress will be slow.  But I have 4th of July week off so I am hoping we can get the gain share of the tile done in the main part of the house by then.

This was a crazy week with the house.

It started with a letter showing up in the mail on Tuesday from the power company.  When we had power run to the house, it started with us writing a check to the power company to even give us an estimate of how much they were going to gouge us to run the lines.  They came back with an estimate of around $11,000 which we had to pay for before they would even begin work.  They ran the power several months ago (as I detailed here) and we never thought anything more about it.  This week, a check for $3,100 showed up in the mail from the power company.  They over-estimated and wanted to give some of our money back!  Who ever heard of a utility company actually being honest about the difference between their actual costs vs their estimated costs when it favors them?!?

God bless Arizona!

By the photos, it does not look like we accomplished much this week although we were working as hard as we have ever worked on the house.

We hung the 9 interior doors that were in good enough shape to hang.  (But how many photos of doors do you really want to see?)

We had to fix a few jambs that got damaged in shipping, but those turned okay.  The one that was a real bugger was the door from the laundry room into the main hall.  The stud on the hinged side was twisted in a bunch of different directions.  We had to cut out several nails before we finally got it right.  Even so, it is only partially right.  Still, it will work fine and very likely, will rarely, if ever, be closed.

Our original plan was to hang doors Saturday and Sunday, then start the floor tile in the hallway and living room on Monday.  Unfortunately (or fortunately depending on how you look at it), the HVAC guys had showed up last week and left our furnace and A/C in the garage.  Since I did not want them trooping around on half-laid tile (without grout), I decided to postpone starting the floor tile until next weekend.  Thus, we spent the rest of this weekend painting the outside doors and cleaning up our work area in the garage.

This was also the first weekend that we slept at the house.  It makes a world of difference not having to drive almost an hour each way between the house and the rental house.

The dogs really seem to enjoy exploring the big yard.

We do have a toilet temporarily set up in the master bathroom and it even has a door now.  But we are using the room that will be my office as a kitchen.

And we brought our camp stove over so Tina can do any cooking that cannot be done with a microwave outside the front door.

We even celebrated our first home-cooked meal at the house with a “red neck candle lit dinner”.  (We did not bring any candles, so a door shim held with a Vice-Grip worked well enough.)

The only challenge part is bathing.  We do not have any working bathtubs or a shower yet.  So bathing consisted of standing on the back porch in our underpants and showering with the garden hose.  Even though the house it pretty much out in the middle of nowhere, we did not go “full commando” because we occasionally get a horseman or four-wheeler that goes by.  It sounds worse than it really was because the water in the hose is really warm due to the sun and it is good enough to get the salt and the dust off so we do not get a rash.

We do have a solar shower in our camping stuff so I may have to figure out where I can rig that up next weekend for more proper shower.

Last weekend when we were out working on the house, we had all of the living room and dining room windows open.  It is surprisingly comfortable in the house, even when it is 90+ degrees outside with the windows open.  However, when we went to leave we discovered the big window in the living room would not lock.  We called the builder about it since the windows are his responsibility and after inspecting it, he informed us the window is “defective”.  He ordered the replacement which will hopefully be in within the next week or two.

Our mail-order interior doors from Menard’s arrived last week while I was out of town on business.  One of those was also “defective”.

I will say Menard’s was really good about the whole thing though.  I e-mailed them a few photos of the door and the SKU sticker on the door and they agreed to ship a new one the next day.  I expect that will arrive either late this week or early next.

The other 9 doors look pretty good.  Except 3 of them had damage to the door jambs from shipping.  I do not think any of those are beyond repair.  Worst case, I might have to make a few new door jambs, but that is not the end of the world, just a little more time consuming.

The major accomplishments this week were to get the second coat of paint on Tina’s big orange “accent wall” in the living room and to get most of the electrical topped out.

I have decided to call the living room “accent Wall” the “Trump Wall”.  First off, it is a wall.  Secondly, it is big and orange just like our president.  A couple times I found myself walking into the room and saying: “Well hello Mr President.  We both voted for you but never expected you would show up in our living room.”  Then I realized I was just talking to a wall.  But never let it be said that Tina and Mike did not do everything in our power to make “Living Rooms Great Again”!

It is really nice to finally have electric outlets and fans and lights inside the house.  Just running an extension cord from the outside circuit breaker box to wherever we are working (and having to pull around construction lights) is a time consuming process.  It is much better now.

The outside fixtures are also in.

And the security lights.  We have security lights on all four corners of the house, controlled by two switches inside the house, and they light up the area around the house like a prison yard!

Finally, one of our biggest problems has been finding the tools we need to work on the house.

When we moved from Minnesota, we intentionally did not unpack anything that we did not immediately need to live in the rental house.  That means, the garage of the rental house is literally packed floor-to-ceiling with stuff, and my workshop stuff is squarely in the middle of it all.

So we decided to move a couple of my workbenches and my tall shop cabinet to the build house along with most of my small power tools.

That freed up a fair bit of space at the rental house as well as giving me access to most of the tools I will need to complete the build.  Until now, we have been working from whatever hand tools we could carry in plastic bins.  This finally gives us some organization on the build site and some tools that we will need moving forward.

We did leave all of my woodworking machines at the rental house as we still have to epoxy the garage floor.  But the stuff we brought out is all on wheels so it will be easy enough to roll into the living room to do the floors in the garage.  Once that is done, we will bring out the big guns!

I had to go back to my normal work week this week, so our progress was slowed by that.  But, I did get the locks installed on the doors. So now we can secure the house.

We are still waiting on some backordered parts for the garage door.  But until those come in, a couple screwdrivers, strategically placed, lock it up well enough.

We had to get the house secured so we could unload the tools from my cargo trailer as the interior doors are due to arrive this week at the rental house.  I am hoping the trucker delivering them can just unload them from his truck right into my trailer.

We wanted red oak raised panel doors.  Unfortunately, red oak anything (doors, moldings, etc.) are really hard to find and really expensive here.  The cheapest I could find prehung red oak doors locally was about $430 each!  So, I went online and was able to order them through Menards for $130 each.  Even with shipping it was well less than half of what I can get them here.

We got the propane tank this week and I ordered an attachment for it so I can fill the small propane tanks for my smoker and the patio heater from it.

Tina has been “Accent Walling” again as well.  This time it is the living room wall that faces our best view of the mountains.  She said she wanted to draw peoples’ attention to the windows facing the Cochise Stronghold; I think this will do it.

It still looks a little ragged along the corners but that is because the corners are still masked.  I hope we will not need to put a second coat on it, but I am thinking we probably will have to.  Painting the peak was a nightmare.

Note to self: Forbid Tina from going to the paint store!  If this keeps up I am going to wake every morning in our nice new home with a migraine.

Tina and I must be getting old because through this whole process we have not gotten in a single fight or even said a cross word to each other.  Tomorrow we are going to pick out ceiling fans and lights so we’ll see if our luck holds!

The builders are winding down their responsibilities for the build as our responsibilities ramp up.  I took the week away from work to spend time getting a good start on the house.  We spent most of the week priming and painting.

We set a deadline for ourselves to have all of the spraying done by today.  That is because the sooner we were done with spraying the house, the sooner the electrician can come back and outlets and switches installed.  Presently we have to run a 100 foot extension cord from the breaker box (outside) into the house.  Then we plug in a power strip and plug tools, extension cords, etc. into the power strip.  Thank God no inspectors showed up while we were working because they would have a heart attack.

But I was able to get the entire house sprayed with a coat of primer and all of the parts that we are not doing by hand with a roller, sprayed with 2 coats of paint.

The days that I sprayed the living room, dining room and kitchen were exceptionally hot for this time of year, maybe the mid 90’s.  Standing down on the floor (at human level) it was extremely comfortable with the high ceilings.  But up on top of a ladder painting them was absolutely miserable.  Not only was it well in excess of 100 degrees up there, with the respirator and all the other painting crap I had to wear, it was brutal.  I could only work for about 20 minutes at a crack before having to come down and rehydrate.  That made for a slow couple of days.

Tina did the bathrooms and laundry room by hand with a roller because it is just too confined of a space to work well with the sprayer.

They both came out exceptionally well.

Tina told me a week or so ago that she wanted to do some “accent walls” in the house.  I had never heard the term before, but when we started this whole project we decided the ground rules for it were that she could do anything she wants to the house as long as she leaves MY garage alone.

Saturday, she “accent walled” a wall in the master bedroom.  So now we are the proud owners of a big damn purple wall.

And two smaller purple walls (also in the master bedroom).

When she explained “accent wall” to me, I was hoping for a southern drawl or maybe a charming Irish lilt.  When she showed it to me, the first thought that popped into my head was: This is a hair-lip Pakistani accent screaming “Yanquii go home!!!”  But I have to admit, it did kind of grow on me after a few hours.

She has plans for another “accent wall” in the living room:

This one is going to be Burnt Orange.

We also got a toilet set temporarily because the outhouses are going away this week.

Outside, they got the slab poured in front of the garage and for the propane tank and also got the gas line run.

Finally, Smiley got the fence done.  It looks great!  I do not know if the picture does it justice, but that fence is absolutely perfectly straight.  You can only see it if you look corner to corner on the gate side, but he set the gate about 3 feet back from the corners to make it easier for me to pull a trailer in.  We could not be happier with it.

Except for a few minor clean-up details like pouring a concrete slab for the propane tank and another slab in front of the garage, the outside of the house is basically done.

Our part of the build technically started last Friday.  But Friday was basically a lost day.  All we accomplished was to go to Home Depot (a 30 mile drive one way) and get some of the painting supplies, primer and caulk.

So Friday we got supplies, loaded up in the War Wagon with all of the tools and equipment that we will need immediately and drove it to the house.  We also started our plan for our work for the next few days.

We also included all of the camping equipment that we will need once the fence gets done, so we can start spending nights at the house.  (We need the fence done so the dogs do not wander off.)

We spent the first couple days caulking every single inside corner and every window.  We also got almost everything masked off well (hopefully).

I also broke down and bought a Graco paint sprayer.

What a difference a proper sprayer makes!  When we lived in Minnesota I had one of those stupid Wagner Power Sprayers.  I bought it specifically to spray our brick fireplace in our livingroom.  It was awful!  We had to constantly come along behind it and brush out the drips.  This Graco sprayer is still not a professional model, but works very well.  Once we had everything taped off, I was able to spray each of the bedrooms in less than an hour each, and that is with no experience with it and using a ladder rather than a scaffold.

Of course, using a sprayer the primer goes EVERYWHERE!  So I had to don protective gear to cover my face.

Here is my Jihadi-Suit version 1.0:

That did not work out well AT ALL!!!

The paper mask fills up with primer in a very short time.  When it does, my breath immediately starts fogging glasses.  But worse than that, I started sucking primer down the mask and completely covered my face!  My entire face that was not covered with the Jihadi hat was completely white.  And primer does not wash off with soap and water.  It is designed to stick to things and it serves its purpose well.

I found Dawn dish washing soap works pretty well with it, but you really have to scrub.  My face was already a little sunburned and scrubbing on it for an hour with dish soap left me in more than a bit of pain.

Jihadi-Suit version 2.0 worked much better:

Although, it still did not work great with my glasses.  It pushed them up so the bifocal line was right in my work area.  If I took my glasses off it worked great.  The problem was, then I could not see.  So I went along spraying 5 or 6 feet, then taking the goggles off and putting my glasses on to see what I missed.  But it still worked far better than a roller and I call it “painting by brail”.

Today, I got most of the living room, dining room and kitchen primed, but I will save those pictures for next week.

Smiley also got about half the fence up.

Smiley does great work as the fences are absolutely stick straight and tight as a guitar string.  The problem is getting him to actually show up and do his great work.  I cannot get mad at him because he is just too nice of a guy.  But it will be really nice to have the fence done so we can bring the dogs to the house when we come to work.  The problem is, the dogs can only go about 7 hours without going outside.  Since it is almost an hour each way to get from the rental house to the build site, Tina can only put in about 5 hours of work per day.

Last but not least, we met some of the neighbors.

It is good because I like most cows more than I like most people.

The tapers got all of the interior walls textured.  We were happy to see the texture is not as severe as it is on our rental house.  It should serve well to hide the imperfections in sheetrock and taping, but not be so thick that it looks like the house is made from concrete blocks.

They also got the concrete put in for the floor of the shower in the master bathroom.  I was a little worried that I would have to do that part because I have never done it and my concrete skills are somewhat lacking.  Now, all I have to do is clean it up and lay the tile.

FInally, they got the texture done on the stucco.  We will see once it gets painted, but I think that is going to look really nice as well.

Our fence guy, Smiley, is busy welding up fence corners and will be starting the fence this week.

I am presently on a business trip in New Jersey but due to get home midday Thursday.  I am taking next week off from work to start on our part of the house.  The builders still have work to do, but it is far enough along that we can start on our part of the construction now.  So the weekly progress will slow down considerably once we are doing our part.

Last week the tapers got going inside and the stucco guys continued on the outside.

The tapers are a husband and wife team and they really move fast!  They are both really nice folks (as are all of the folks we have met on this project so far).  Although we did not meet him yet, our builder Brad mentioned the tapers have a teenaged son that comes out after school and helps them as well.

By Friday morning, when we were there, they had gotten the second coat of mud on the entire interior of the house, as well as sanding it, and were working on the second coat in the garage.  It looks great.

This coming week, they will be texturing the entire thing, then it will be our turn to start hanging doors, installing moldings and painting.

It seems the couple doing the taping couldn’t resist having a little fun as well.  I wish I had brought a pencil with me as I could have had some fun with a couple of the fixtures they had missed.

Outside, they got most of the roof installed except where they had to complete the stucco first.  They stucco guys got everything done up to the point where they are going to start texturing the stucco this week.  They got the top peak textured so the roofing guys can get their part completed this week as well.  It looks great!

I had taken last week off from teaching to get caught up on some of the busywork stuff for my business which ended up being a very good thing for the house too.  We were able to finally meet up with a fence guy and get the whole fencing situation figured out.

The fencing guy goes by the name of Smiley (his real name is also Mike) and he is the quintessential Arizona cowboy.  Our friend Eve and our friend Danny both recommended him highly.  We drove around and saw some of his work and his fencelines are absolutely straight as a rifle shot.  Beyond that, he is about 10 years my senior, stands at least 8 inches taller than me and about 100 pounds heavier without an ounce of fat on him.  And his name fits him perfectly.  He is the most polite, easy-going guy I have met in years.

Smiley had a few questions that we needed answered from the county regarding the regulations for setbacks for the fence on the three roads bordering our land.

The first problem was that we bought the land as 6 separate parcels, so the county would not let us fence the whole property, even though it is all one connected piece of land, because the house only exists on one of the parcels.  So that necessitated a call to a different county department to get the parcels combined into a single parcel.

The next issue was the county wanted us to buy a building permit for the fence.  I had done my research prior to the call and I know for a fact that we are not required to have a permit for an agricultural fence that is less than 6 feet tall.  I quoted the statute to the county gal, chapter and verse.  But she just did not seem to get that we are just putting up a barbed wire fence with a 4 foot mesh bottom to keep the cows out and our dogs in, without “2 inch fence posts every 20 feet or less”.  Finally, I gave up on her and just did some more research and could not find any special exemptions for the setbacks on the two roads we were worried about, so we conferred with Smiley and decided a 30 foot setback from the center of the road was adequate and if they want to sue me over it 5 years from now, I’ll see them in court.  GRRRR!!!!

I really thought a rural county in Arizona would be easier to deal with than the retards in suburban Minnesota, but I guess government people are the same all over.  I really need to find a hippie to punch and work these frustrations out!  <grin>

Back at the rental house…

The lemons continue to grow and we have a whole bunch of new blossoms on the tree.

The potatoes are going crazy.  They took forever to break ground.  But once they did you can almost watch them grow.  This is about 10 days of growth.

The maters are going insane!  Tina planted our Roma heirloom seeds harvested from last year in about mid-February.  We have so many blooms on them now, I do not know what we are going to do with all of them.  Our past experience with heirloom tomatoes is they produce considerably less than the hybrids.  But this is the largest crop I think we have ever grown.

Eat your hearts out Minnesota and New England!  We are going to be harvesting tomatoes about the same time you all are getting yours in the ground!

The only plants that are not doing so great are the peppers.  I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that Belle (the Amazing Water Dog) keeps digging them up.

Now that the windows are in, they are busy on both the inside and the outside of the house.  The sheetrockers started last Wednesday.  We went to the house last Friday afternoon and they were well on their way.  They were planning to have the entire house sheetrocked by last Saturday.

The taping is supposed to start this week.  Originally, our plan was to do the sheetrocking and taping ourselves, but after looking at the number of boxes of mud in the garage, I am really glad Tina talked me into allowing them to do it.  There are 30 boxes of mud stacked up in the garage, each one containing enough for 3 1/2 gallons of mud.  It would have taken me two months to slap up that much mud!

The stucco guy and his son were also out there working on the outside.

I had never seen stucco done before, so I found the whole process really interesting.  The stucco guy and his son are both really nice guys.  They took a good 45 minutes to explain the whole process to me.  They start by wrapping the house with Tyvek, just like the vinyl siding we put on our Minnesota house.  Then they cover the Tyvek with about an inch of styrofoam insulation.  Finally, they staple chicken wire to the foam.  They put expansion joints around all of the windows and finally, this week they will be covering the whole thing with concrete.

After all of it is done, the outside walls are going to end up being about 8 inches thick.  My only concern now is that the house might be too well sealed.  I am afraid if we go out for Mexican and I come home and rip a hot one, I may break glass!

They were having another inspection today on both the sheetrock as well as the outside.  If all went well with it, they should be starting stucco and taping tomorrow.

We also ordered the epoxy floor covering for the garage and laundry room floors last week.  We went with a three coat metallic epoxy system.  Tina and I will be doing that part.  If we are successful, it should look almost like marble when we are done.  We went with the epoxy thinking it would be cheaper and faster to install than tile.  But by the time we bought all of the primer and other chemicals it requires, it came out to almost $3 per square foot; in other words, about the same price as cheap ceramic tile.

Brad also mentioned today that we should be able to get in and get started on our part of the build in the next couple weeks.  I am both excited and apprehensive about that.  Every single thing we are doing to this house, we did on our Minnesota house.  So we do not have any significant new skills to learn.  But we have never done this much in a short period of time.

Finally, we have an appointment to meet with a fence guy tomorrow afternoon.  Our friend Eve is going to be releasing her herd of cows into our area in the next couple weeks.  Then we will be surrounded by about 400 head of cattle.  I would prefer if they are not hanging out on our back porch and Eve would prefer the cattle not eat the construction scraps.