We had the appraisal of our current house on Wednesday. The appraiser had said she was coming around lunch, so we worried about not being able to get our traditional Wednesday huevos rancheros, but we managed to fit it in before she arrived. That’s a major step in the process of selling. We, of course, have no idea how she will evaluate the house. We have certainly spent enough time and effort to make it as good as possible.

With that step out of the way, the closing date of July 21 looms.

The painter says he will complete his work by this weekend. He has a regular, full-time job as a painter and is doing our work when he can, which has caused the process to drag out longer than I had hoped. The plumber installed the toilets on Wednesday and is coming back Thursday to plumb the vanity in the guest bathroom, assuming I can get holes drilled in the back so it can be pushed up into place. I’ll need help unloading the master bath vanity, which currently sits on my trailer in the garage. The electrician needs to install the exterior lights and hang the ceiling fans in the living room and master bedroom, as well as the vanity lights in the two bathrooms.

When the vanity is unloaded, I can pick up the 12 interior doors that have been waiting at the building supply store and start hanging them. Leah and I have to decide on how tall to make the baseboards. I bought a six-inch and an eight-inch board Wednesday night so we can compare them. After putting them down in the living room, I lean towards the six-inch, although several sites I read recommend eight inches for a nine-foot ceiling. After we decide and I buy a fortune in pre-primed boards, Leah and I have to throw a painting party. And then I install baseboards for a while. And trim the doors and windows.

All of this in the next two weeks. That’s why “scary good.”

Oh, yes, Leah is worried about the cat situation. I have to fit in building two cat pens sometime before we move so that we can acclimatize the cats to their new home and lessen the danger that they will take off into the woods when we move them.

Leah is afraid they will travel up the road to our current house, so we got a sign.

Two Georgia Power trucks passed me and the dogs on our walk Monday morning. I was expecting a crew, so I turned around and hurried the dogs back up to the new house. It was good that I met the crew there, because they were ready to leave. They expected to have to dig a trench from the temporary power up to the house, and they didn’t know where to put it. I explained that it had already been done, so after a consultation with the Georgia Power engineer by radio, they got to work.

All they had to do was dig up the line from the street at the temporary power drop and splice the cable there to the one that leads up to the house itself.

They have a tool for everything. This one cuts the big cables.

This one strips insulation off the big cables.

This one clamps the two bare ends together.

And this one heats the heat-shink tubing that insulates the splice.

It’s a propane torch. When its heat is applied to a plastic tube, like the one you can see at the toe of the worker’s right foot, it shrinks down to grip the cable tightly.

It didn’t take the crew long to finish. They pushed the dirt back into the hole they had dug and were on their way in under an hour. Later in the day, Leah and I went back to hang the door between the kitchen and garage. After Leah went back home, I flipped some circuit breakers and then some light switches.

And just like that we have lights in our new house. This is the kitchen. We have six recessed lights and the small ceiling fan with lights. The bare wires hanging from the walls will attach to under-cabinet lights one day. This will be a well-lit kitchen.

What you can’t see above the ceiling lights is blown-in cellulose insulation. I and two helpers did about a third of the attic on Saturday. Cellulose insulation is finely ground paper with a flame retardant. I brought 100 bales to the house Friday evening and Saturday morning. One helper emptied bags into the hopper of a special blower that chewed it up and blew it about a hundred feet down a plastic tube, the other end of which was attached to my hands up in the attic. We blew 50 bundles in from around 11 am to about 5 pm. It was a hot and incredibly dusty job. I have to get about 50 more packages to finish. I think we’ll get it done next weekend. After that, I expect never to go into the attic again.

In the meantime, painting is supposed to start on Wednesday, and hardwood flooring on Monday.

The county building inspector approved the permanent electrical power installation at our new house Wednesday morning. Leah and I went to Los Portales for lunch and had huevos rancheros to celebrate.

A requirement for permanent power was that at least 60 percent of the fixtures be installed. I think we met that requirement. We lack only ceiling fans for the living room and master bedroom, vanity lights for both bathrooms, the light over the kitchen sink area, and a couple of random lights here and there. The electrician was supposed to have driven two ground rods about eight feet into the ground next to the electric meter. Unfortunately, that would have mean driving them through eight feet of rock. The building inspector graciously agreed to let them ground the system on the uphill side of the house, which already had one ground rod inserted through the cast concrete basement wall. There is also plenty of depth of non-rock to drive the other ground rod through at that location.

The tile contractor started his work on Tuesday. By late Tuesday he had laid about a third of the tile in the kitchen and had put in the isolating membrane (which allows the tile flooring to expand and contract without cracking) and heating cables in the two bathrooms.

The tile is the latest fad, a wood-look. Leah and I put down a piece of our hardwood next to it; it’s a near-perfect look-alike. The tile color is called mahogany and the oak flooring stain is called cherry. There won’t be any confusion about where the tile begins, but the floor should have a very consistent look throughout the house.

We chose the dark tile because we were tired of trying to keep light-colored tile and grout clean. We’ll never do that again.

The inspector is supposed to contact Georgia Power directly to authorize the permanent power connection. A Georgia Power engineer told me their work would be done by Friday or Monday.  In either event, the hardwood installation will have to wait until the following Monday. I discussed the situation with the hardwood installer and we agreed that we need to get the air conditioning installed to let the hardwood acclimatize before it’s nailed down. That means I have to get the HVAC contractor to install the heat pump compressor on the outside and plumb in the refrigerant lines next week. That will give the wood plenty of time to get used to its new home.

Prior to that I have to prepare a level spot about five feet square at the back of the house for the heat pump compressor pad. I worked on that on Tuesday.

The area above the pad (between the manual compactor and the shovel) used to be a hole. I spent a good bit of time shoveling dirt into the hole. If the world were a just place, you would be able to tell how much work that was, in addition to not having to worry about who’s going to be the next President.

Anyway, the pad is nearly ready. I need to haul a little more dirt from our gigantic dirt pile to make sure the downhill edge is stable, but the pad itself is about the right size, and very close to level.

Our plan for the weekend is to blow cellulose insulation into the attic, and to hang a door between the garage and kitchen. Given the temperatures we have had lately, I expect this to be a draining experience.

Working in an attic is not my favorite thing to do, but there are things up there that need doing.

The first was to build a walkway so I can blow in insulation. The next was to install our whole-house fan, formerly known as an attic fan. This is it, just to the left of the walkway.

It’s supposed to be much quieter than the old-fashioned fans like the one we have in our current house. The gray rectangle on top is insulated doors that open to let two smallish fans suck air from the house and blow it into the attic. The weather for the last few weeks has been ideal for using an attic fan. We look forward to having one that’s quiet enough to leave on overnight.

There is about six feet of headroom from the top of the ceiling joists to the ridge beam, but  there is about two feet less on the walkway. That means I have to stoop to make my way deep into the recesses of the attic, which I had to do Tuesday.

In the photo below, far, far in the right hand distance, out near the edge of the roof, there is a metal chimney coming through the ceiling and then continuing through the roof.

I had to put pieces of plywood across the joists to get out there. So I went from stooping in the middle of the attic to hands-and-knees just over the shiny duct you can see, and then to a crawl as I approached the chimney. The chimney is insulated but there is a requirement to keep attic insulation at least two inches from it. There was a pass-through fitting at the ceiling level that provided that space to about six inches in height, but I need to keep 16 inches of blown-in cellulose away. So I fabricated a sheet-metal shield and installed it to bring the protection up to the required level. It sounds easier than it was.

The shiny, round duct is supposed to take warm air from the ceiling over the wood-burning stove and carry it to our bedroom. The vertical sticks are for measuring insulation depth. The lower line at the top is 16 inches. The upper line is 18. When I blow the insulation in, it should all be between those two marks.

The weather has been pretty good lately. The nights have been cool and the days not too warm. That has been good for working in an attic. Tuesday, however, it was in the lower 80’s and sunny. That meant the attic was hot. I don’t know how hot it was, but when I came down the ladder to 80 degrees in the house, it felt comfortably cool.

This is me just after I finished installing the insulation shield.

Fortunately for you, you can’t tell how sweaty I was.

Everything went well Tuesday. That means mainly that I didn’t step through the sheetrock and fall to the floor below. It wouldn’t have been too big a surprise if I had. I seem to have a little problem with falling lately. First I kicked the ladder out from under me and had to drop from the ceiling joists to the garage floor, hurting my shoulder in the process. Then, after my shoulder had recovered to the point that I could work, I fell again. That time I was unloading a sheet of 3/4-inch plywood from my truck. I managed to unload it onto my foot which told me that it was pretty heavy. In the process of getting it off my foot, I stumbled and fell against the garage door frame. I hurt my shoulder again, but not enough to keep me from working. And then on Sunday while I was unloading garbage at the county transfer station, I tripped over a parking lot tire bumper and went down on both hands and my right knee. Now I feel a little more of a twinge in my shoulder, but my knee took the brunt of the fall. It’s stiff and sore.

I’m beginning to wonder about myself.

I mentioned the garage. I think we’re going to be really happy with the garage. I picked up our hardwood flooring on Monday and parked it there.

That’s about 3000 pounds of hardwood, which is as heavy a load as the trailer can handle. Even with the trailer backed in, I could pull the truck in far enough to shade the cab. Our Subaru is going to feel lost in there.

The tile is stacked outside the garage and the mortar and underlayment are just out of sight to the lower right of the photo. The tile installer is supposed to start next Monday or Tuesday. The hardwood installer is supposed to start a week later. In the meantime I hope to get electrical power to the house and the air conditioner working so that I can move the hardwood in and let it start to acclimatize.