Building/moving to a new home – day 27

I’m back in Floyd to move the new house project along while the bright blue October weather lasts.

Night time temperatures drop to the high thirties, but days are warm and bright with clear skies and warm sunshine. Maples are turning bright red while cool breezes whip leaves and needles off the trees in a continuing show of fall splendor.

We completed a significant milestone this morning when an Appalachian Power engineer and I agreed on an environmentally optimum routing of our underground power feed. We had to snake the trench route around a neighbor’s well and through one hundred feet of his forest. We managed to find a route that worked without removing any of my neighbor’s trees. Whew!

It is almost anticlimactic that we will pay only a few hundred dollars for the installation of our underground service.

UPDATE: I want to acknowledge the superior customer service I received from Dave Edwards of Appalachian Power.  In an age when we almost expect indifferent service from harried and distracted customer support organizations, Appalachian Power is able to field competent and responsible people like Dave, who is a 21 year veteran in the power distribution field. He was a pleasure to work with and gave me confidence that we are in good hands with Appalachian Power.

An additional benefit in this project is that Citizens, the telephone cooperative, and Appalachian Power will share the ditch-digging expenses and through the magic of bookkeeping, there are enough "ditch credits" available in some account so that I will not have to pay for the installation of the underground feed to our new home.

The pace at the construction site is beginning to quicken again. The footers for the house will be poured today! Yay!

Work will begin on the forms for the house foundation tomorrow. Yay!

The slab for the garage will be poured tomorrow. Double Yay!

The garage contractor had concrete blocks left over from building the garage foundation and I will have him use them to build a foundation for a woodshed.

Anyone have suggestions for a good woodshed design?

More later…