The Saga of the Water Main - Now With a New and Improved Ending!

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Just when I think the water main guys have abandoned us, they show up again in force. They were apparently waiting on yet another part. We arrived at the house last Monday to asphalt cutting and more vacuum truck action. They were cutting holes and installing connectors for our neighbors connections to the new waterline.

 And they made the street cut across to our lot. Later in the week we had an actual waterline running to our lot.

The real fun began when they pressurized the new waterline. Apparently they do this to test for leaks. But the crazy thing is that the plastic pipe they use actually expands under pressure. So they have to pressurize, take readings every eight hours and re-pressurize, until the pressure readings stop dropping. If the readings keep dropping after three days there's a leak.

 

IRL the eastern-most end of the pipe has a pressure gauge, but I don't have a photo of it sitting here typing on the hotel guest computer tablety-thing. More on that later. Jesse and Brad came by every eight hours or so last Saturday and Sunday, checking the pressure and re-pressurizing the line. By Monday they were ready for the civil engineers to come and sign off. 

Approval gained on Monday afternoon, they emptied and swabbed the line and filled it with chlorinated water. The pressure was tested again, along with a water sample that was taken to a lab in Longview, Washington for testing. Water sample approved, on Tuesday the line was emptied and swabbed again and pressurized with water from the city supply. The water in the line was sampled for testing again on Wednesday. Pending test results, we have the go-ahead from the City to connect the neighborhood supply lines to the new water main on Monday!

Back to the hotel digression...While all this water main stuff was going on there were several other things happening. First, the concrete crew has been working diligently on the retaining wall - more on that in my next blog. We have been spending six hours a day or more cleaning and prepping the house for move-in, until recently assumed to be sometime in November. And likely the most important thing, we received a temporary certificate of occupancy allowing us to move all our (stuff) from the storage unit in Portland into the house! 

I had an appointment in Portland with the nose specialist yesterday (everything looks good, but because of the tiny breaks at the bridge of my nose its going to take a good nine months to heal completely). And Scott will be rocking out tonight to The Pretenders and Foo Fighters with his twin brother Angel. So tomorrow seemed like the perfect time to rally the troops and move everything to Astoria. Having, in my questionable wisdom, decided to leave my laptop at home, I'm relegated to working within the framework and overt security limitations of a Hilton Business Center (really?) computer to bring you this news.

Have a great weekend!

Light, Sound and Video

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Scott admonished that my last post was particularly "upbeat". In my defense, I planned on two posts all along, what's going on outside and the electricians. Ah, the electricians. Things always seem brighter when they're around. (Pun intended, but it's actually true.) They were on site a couple weeks ago just in time to shed some light on Paula's visit.

In the primary bath Scott's towel warmer and the vanity lights are installed. Except for water the primary bath is complete!

In the den Scott's TV is programmed, the mini-fridge is installed and working and we have music! Beth hooked up the ceiling speakers to the Sonos AMP and set up the drawers for album storage.

 

Upstairs the pendant lights are installed over the stairwell, in the living room, kitchen and bedroom. They are soooo pretty!

The TV in the living room is installed with a Sonos Beam sound bar, all programmed and ready to go. The ceiling speakers are hooked up to the Sonos AMP and sound amazing.

And the Google Nest doorbell is installed and working. It's fun being able to see who's at the house or frustrating to see who isn't.

Yes, we have a smart home. After a lot of research I chose Apple HomeKit as the central control hub for the house. Currently the Lutron Caseta hub controls the lights, SmartThings can control the TVs (I haven't figured out why), Google Home controls the doorbell and Sonos controls the amps and speakers. 

As I added lights to the Lutron Caseta hub they were automatically added to Apple Home and ready to be controlled on both our phones in Apple Home and via Siri. Super easy! I had to play with the names and categories to make it all make sense. For instance, "Siri, turn on the Exterior Front Porch lights," was clumsy (default category, name) so I made a category called Porch that turns on both the porch lights and the light over the garage.

Now I'm spending lots of time on the internet searching for things like "can i add google nest doorbell to apple homekit," and "how do i add sonos amp to apple homekit?"

Crawling to the Finish...This is No Olympics

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At the end of our last blog we wrote "This coming week we are hoping for water, final plumbing, mirrors, final electrical, final countertop finishing, and retaining wall footings (and maybe even the wall itself.)" Ha! To be fair, we had retaining wall footings at the end of the week. And the mirrors are installed. But everything else is just laughing at us.

It would be another two weeks before the concrete sub was back on site working. They were on site during that time taking measurements, drilling holes, etc. And working off-site making some sort of brace for the bottom of the retaining wall. More details on that in the next post.

Water main work began with the vacuum truck digging more holes, this time in the street. The boring subcontractor did his thing, digging under the street utilities from 4th to 5th street and then pulled the pipe up through the tunnel.

An exciting start to the project! The city stopped by, our neighbors asked questions and our civil engineer, Geoff, was on hand. Geoff predicted we'd have by the end of the following week. That was three weeks ago.