Progress and Setbacks

This has been a hugely expensive week. We shelled out several thousand dollars today alone, on top of what we paid out Monday and Tuesday for supplies and materials deliveries. 

A good chunk of it is labor, of course, and there's a lot of labor to be done. But we're heading into the really costly stages, with plumbing and wiring and fixtures and walls and windows and doors and adobes and beams and and and until I'm ready to tear my hair out.

Today started out like this:

Photo copyright Aji, 2016; all rights reserved.

We had the construction crew and the plumber's crew stepping all over each other (well, actually, they did pretty well at working on separate projects in such a small space). The regular crew got the foam in all the way around and the rest of the rebar tied in, while the plumber's crew dug the conduits for the water lines, laid the pipe, and got the drain set for the ground-floor bathroom.

Photo copyright Aji, 2016; all rights reserved.

You can see the rebar nestled in the cinder block at right, and the foam edging it all, with the pipe in the center. How they managed to stay out of each other's way enough to do the kind of incredibly neat job that both crews did is beyond me.

Photo copyright Aji, 2016; all rights reserved.

This is what it looks like tonight: Kitchen rough-in in the foreground; bathroom shower drain in the center; bathroom connections to the left; utility room hook-ups beyond that. They buried all the rest of the pipe so neatly you can't even tell the dirt was ever disturbed.

Now, it all looks like the photo in the widget up at the top. The plumbers are done for a month or more, while they get the walls up, the beams installed, the windows and doors ready, and the wiring done. We still need another load of fill, and another load of crusher fine for mortaring the adobes; we need to get the slab poured next week; we need the massive adobe pallets themselves (along with the delivery charge); we need to go down to Lowe's or Home Depot and go window shopping, literally. We need to arrange for the wiring, which has been pushed back because of the cost of everything that needed to be done this week.

I'm still tearing my hair out.

I said last night that there would be no rest for this, but I had no idea how horribly right I was going to be. The new YouCaring page has had to go up already, and it's a doozy. It's not like we have a choice. We're in this now, and the only way out is forward, however long it takes. So please, share the link from the page itself, use the widgets, spread the code around, all the usual.

As thanks, I'll leave you with this, which reminds me of the Maathai story about the hummingbird:  "I will do what I can." 

Photo copyright Aji, 2016; all rights reserved.

That's all I can do, and I'm doing it.

All content, including photos and text, are copyright Aji, 2016; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.