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.