Interior plaster DONE. Plus a $6K deposit on fixing the septic disaster, and more for the exterior mess.

Photo copyright Aji, 2017; all rights reserved.

Rain today, a solid storm, and the first of my squash is now up. 

It's been a day of extremes, very good things alternating with not-very-good things, and a lot of stress involved all the way around.

The bad first: The exterior plaster mess is a costly setback. Sherm and his crew will fix it, but as with the wiring fuckup, this one wasted resources that we don't have to spare. Unfortunately, because it's largely performance of a service, and work was done (if badly), it's not really recoverable. We don't have the time (or the necessary health) to pursue something that stressful anyway. Blood from a stone is a losing proposition, because it'll be only us who bleed.

Also, it was an expensive day in other ways. The plumbers came out early, checking the problem with leak inside the tank itself. They isolated it, and they'll be out next week to fix it in advance of commencing with the install of the evaporative system. There's no charge for the fixing of the leak, obviously; the evaporative system is another matter altogether, since it involves an additional $12K on top of what we've already spent. So a check for half that amount went out the door today, putting a very big dent in our resources. The other half will be due the end of next week, if all goes well.

Between these two things, I'm not nearly as confident as I was about our ability to fund everything else all the way through. [Actually, if it were only the septic, that would be fine; that was accounted for in our tight existing budget. The plaster effs up everything, though; all that remains to be seen is how badly.] But while we always prefer sales and we want folks to share the link to Wings's site, I'm not posting the donation link, because I'm going to do my damnedest to bring everything in under the wire. But we still have a huge amount of materials costs, and things like the upstairs flooring, the water heater, the cabinets, the kitchen sink and appliances, and a LOT of lumber and stucco and Portland cement and so forth yet to be bought. Those last few have to be cash, because they have to be bought locally; the rest can all come from Lowe's or Home Depot, and so I'm posting the links for gift cards here again:

• Lowe's cards via our Amazon wishlist;
• Lowe's cards via the company site; and
• Home Depot cards via the company site.

There are a lot of folks out there who need cash help immediately, and folks should focus on that. But on the off-chance anyone feels like kicking in a few bucks toward the habitability effort here, this is the best way. Frees up the cash for materials that can only be purchased that way, and for the huge amount of labor still involved.

Now, as to what happened today that was good: Interior plaster is DONE! And it looks like glass:

Photo copyright Aji, 2017; all rights reserved.

That's the downstairs bath, which got three coats because of the humidity the room will generate. But even out in the open, it looks pretty cool — here are our beloved bancos, which they were able to seal today, too:

Photo copyright Aji, 2017; all rights reserved.

And the photo doesn't begin to do them justice, but they had supplies and equipment piled in the center of the room at the end of the day, and I couldn't get a clean shot. They really do shine like that, though — or maybe I should say glow. At the end in the foreground, roughly where I was standing to get the shot, we'll install our small woodstove, aimed out toward the room at an angle; the large woodstove will go on the far side of the house, near the south corner of the west wall, where most of the cold winds come from in the wintertime. And that's a huge savings, having had the stoves already, so that we don't have to worry about heating except for the labor involved and extending the flues.

And now, I have other work to do, stuff that's been delayed all day while I deal with . . . ::shrugs:: ::points upward:: . . . all of that. Many thanks to everyone.

Oh, and just now, at this moment? A tiny hummingbird showed up at the feeder outside the window, our first since the wildfires began over a month ago. I'll take that as a good sign.

All content, including photos and text, are copyright Aji, 2017; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.