Racing the cold snap
Just ahead of the first real winter cold, lots of intertwining action.
The hellish ruts left by trucks after the wet Christmas weekend need to be filled in, so I had made an appointment to meet onsite with Josh the excavator to see what he could do to smooth out the craters. I wasn’t even 5 minutes up the road before my phone rang. It was Todd from Xcel Energy, calling from the river place with questions about exactly where they should run the electric and gas lines. I said, “I’m on the way.”
When I arrived, the haunted/abandoned well rig was still there in the front yard, but now flanked by a couple smaller trucks and two guys with determination in their eyes. They were friendly-ish, but as terse as builder guys can be. “It’s pretty rocky here,” said the one with the scraggly beard —and that was the end of the conversation.
Todd from Xcel was also there. We walked the property line and worked out the route the utility lines will follow to the house. They’ll dig tomorrow and — best of all— he doesn’t think there’s enough frost in the ground to warrant charging the winter rate. That’s a huge relief since the winter rate would’ve cost about $3000 more than summer rate for digging in the lines. We parted friends, Todd from Xcel and I.
Not long after he left, Josh the excavator arrived, and I walked around with him to look at the ruts. He’s going to call a couple of his local sources for sand and he thinks he can get it done before the end of the week. There’s something about a guy and his Bobcat… *sigh*.
Throughout the morning I spied on the well diggers from inside the house. It took a long time for them to get the equipment up and running, and then the actual drilling started. The shaft spun and ground and sometimes sounded like it was eating rocks (it was) and sometimes spun freely, as if it had hit a pocket of sand.
Eventually water came out, brown and silty, a small flood that worked its way into the ruts that I’m hoping Josh will fill later this week. The well guys left around lunchtime, with only a halfhearted wave.
<next day> Yay! — I got a text from Lenny this afternoon that the power line was in.
And Josh the excavator confirmed he’s doing the grading/filling thing tomorrow.
There’s still a long way to go; the contractor needs to get the basement slab poured, and the wayward electrician and the as-yet hypothetical plumber need to do a ton of work before the lights work and the water runs, but this feels like a good jolt of progress. And it’ll be too cold for me to get much done inside the house for a few days, so while the TV weather guys are spouting windchill numbers, I’ll hunker down with my graph paper and project plan.
Stay warm everybody!
