I was surprised Sunday morning to find a Georgia Power crew parked at the driveway of our new house.

The small (looking) white box at the right rear wheel of the rightmost truck is an old dishwasher that someone dumped at the side of our driveway sometime between Thursday afternoon and Friday morning. They pulled up far enough that they weren’t really visible from the street. The fact that someone would discard a kitchen appliance on someone else’s property gives you some idea of what a substantial minority (I hope) of our population is like here in Georgia. I will call the county to report it Monday morning. I found a footprint from the culprit next to the dishwasher. Based on the size of my own foot (around 10 1/2), the person who did it may either be or be related to Bigfoot.

One of the Ga Power crew said they were trying to catch up on work that has been delayed because of the rainy weather we have had. I’m still surprised they were working on a Sunday.

I first saw them when I left the house to walk the dogs. When I came back home I could hear their little backhoe banging on the rock that underlies the entire building site. Fortunately, they said they had little trouble digging through it.

They laid the cable from our temporary power post to the front of the house where our meter will be. Here is the backhoe working near the contorted maple we saved to haunt our front yard.

Of course we wanted the electric meter to be located at the rear of our house, but the engineer said that they had to put it on the front to minimize the distance they had to run the cable. I don’t think the difference is all that great, but apparently it’s enough that the engineer was worried about voltage drop over that difference.

I didn’t post about the visit by the I-joist manufacturer’s representative. He came out on February 17 to see the damage that the plumber caused. Based on his inspection, he thought it should be relatively easy to repair two of the damaged joists. The third will take a little more work, but it’s nothing the framer isn’t familiar with. The engineer is supposed to provide a letter specifying how the damage can be repaired properly, which I will have to show the county building inspector before he will pass the framing. I haven’t heard from the engineer yet. I hope it won’t take much longer.

I have had wood-burning stoves where I lived for about 30 years, from the little mobile home I lived in for six years when I moved to Huntsville, to the house I bought near the little town of Gurley, to the house where Leah and I live now. So, naturally, I wanted a wood stove in our new house. This time, instead of putting it in the basement, we’re putting it in the living room, so we wanted something that will look good even when it’s not providing heat.

There isn’t much in the way of choice in Rome, so a few weeks ago I drove down the Martha Berry Highway (US 27) to the small town of Bremen, not far from Interstate 20, to Bollen’s, which has a large selection of stoves. I was looking for a stove that would be small enough not to run us out of the living room with too much heat, but large enough that I can duct some of the heat into the bedroom and bathroom. I found several smaller stoves that would work. I took some pictures and brochures home for Leah to see. So on Wednesday we drove back down to make our decision.

Along the way we stopped at El Nopal in Cedartown for our traditional huevos rancheros.

Nopal is Spanish for cactus. The fruit of the nopal is called “tuna” in Mexico. In the US, it seems that the cactus and the fruit are called prickly pear, which is a native here, too, although we don’t eat them.

Every restaurant prepares their ranchera sauce differently. We like the way it’s prepared at Los Portales, our nearest Mexican restaurant. El Nopal’s was different, but good. We don’t usually eat the tortillas, but El Nopal’s were almost fluffy in a flat kind of way, so I ate a couple. Good.

After Leah ate and I stuffed myself, we continued on to Bollen’s, where we picked out our new stove.

It’s a smallish Hearthstove Tribute, which is made with soapstone rather than plate steel or cast iron. The iron framework is covered with what is called brown majolica enamel. The stove manufacturer doesn’t describe how they coat the iron, but it may be a porcelain coating, which would explain the term “majolica.” In any case, it looks very nice. It was available in a pale, blue-green majolica enamel, but everyone thought the dark, reddish brown would go with more colors. That’s a good thing, since we haven’t selected the wall colors for the living room.

There are other, larger soapstone stoves in the background. Soapstone and iron or steel stoves have somewhat different heating profiles. An iron or steel stove heats more quickly, but soapstone absorbs more heat before it begins to radiate, so it heats the room more slowly. On the other end of a heating cycle, iron or steel also cool more quickly, so a soapstone stove should provide at least some useable heat longer than an equivalent iron or steel stove. I hope it will also moderate the heating so that the living room doesn’t get too hot.

I’m used to flat black iron or steel, which can be fairly decorative, but this stove is really pretty. We thought that would be a good thing, since the stove will be a prominent part of our living room décor, even when it’s just sitting there without a fire.

We left the stove at the store, since we can’t install it or even store it in the house yet. I think we’ll be ready for that in about three or four weeks, depending on when we get an engineer’s letter for repairing the joists that the plumber damaged.

I mentioned earlier that we failed a building inspection on the framing of our new house because the plumber, or one of his minions, had cut into a piece of material that he shouldn’t have. I finally did what I knew I had to do, and went back to the lumber supplier to find out what a structural engineer says needs to be done to fix the problem. In preparation for that, I looked more carefully and found that the problem was even worse than I thought.

First, for those who may not know, most houses today use engineered supports for the floor called I-joists, as opposed to what is called dimensional lumber (which is wood cut from a single piece of tree into long pieces like 2-by-4’s or 2-by-10’s). An I-joist is made from two long pieces of wood, about the size of a 2-by-four, at the top and bottom of a piece of oriented strand board that might be nine inches or so wide. This results in a joist that is very strong and light, and can be almost any length you need. Ours are 11 inches deep and 32 feet long. The top and bottom pieces of wood are call flanges. The OSB is called the web. It’s called an I-joist because of you look down the length of it, the cross section looks like a capital “I”, with the flanges making the cross pieces at the top and bottom and the web making the body of the “I”. Unfortunately, the font on this blog is a sans serif, so you can’t see the flanges. Here’s a photo of a couple of I-joists.

I-joist manufacturers have strict rules about where and how much can be cut in the web for things like plumbing, heating and air conditioning ducts and electrical wiring. The rule for how much can be cut from the flange is easy: none. Absolutely none. Everything I have read about I-joists says the same thing. Everyone I have talked to says the same thing. Everyone says that everyone should know this. But the plumber or one of his minions did not know, or did not care. In any event, they caused so much damage that the fix may be expensive. We have four butchered joists. One, fortunately, rests directly on top of a parallel wall, so it may be OK. The other three are not OK.

Here is a sample.

Note that the plumber or one of his minions has cut not only into the flange but into the web as well. Sheet metal was tacked all around the pipe. I had to tear it away to see what had been done to the joist.

Here’s the worst case.

It’s hard to see here, but to the right of the pipe as it passes through the floor, the plumber or one of his minions has cut away about 13 inches of the flange. The flange was cut to about the halfway point over the web. The lower flange in the bottom right corner of the photo has also been notched. The 13-inch gap is partially hidden by a piece of sheet metal that has been nailed to the floor. You can see light coming though the edge of the metal. This joist is now trash.

It may be that the solution will be to put a new joist on either side of the butchered joists. It would be extremely difficult to thread a 32-foot joist up into the space beside the butchered joists. Since there are some supporting walls and beams for the joists to rest on, it may be acceptable to use shorter joists as long as the ends are supported. I hope so.

As you may suspect, I am not happy about this. I think I said before that building a house is a process of solving a series of problems. Where will we build? How big? What floor plan? How do we get the front door to fit onto the front porch? (We move the front porch about six inches off center to the right.) How do we make the stairwell into the basement wide enough? (We take a few inches out of the kitchen.) How do we get the door from the kitchen into the garage to open so it doesn’t cover the light switches? (We swap the existing door with another door that swings the right way.) How do we make bedroom windows big enough to meet the exit requirements of the code? (We swap them for the windows in the basement.) It seems that there is always a problem to solve even under the most favorable conditions. We certainly don’t need for one of the contractors to create new, complicated problems because they or their minions don’t know a simple rule that everyone else seems to know.

I keep talking about minions. I met the plumber coming up the mountain as I was walking the dogs Tuesday morning. He stopped and I told him that we have a problem. When I said that some of the joists had been cut to install plumbing, he asked who cut them. If he did not do it, it must have been one of his minions. I can’t believe that a total stranger wandered onto the building site and decided, just for the heck of it, to do a little plumbing work. Or butcher work, as the case may be.

Anyway, it’s just the latest problem. The framer is confident and ready, once we know what’s required.

And now, on to some other things.

First, an update on Leah’s condition. She will have her staples removed on Wednesday (the day this posts, two weeks after her surgery). There are 33; I just counted. She has been improving, but still has pain and some nausea. She isn’t eating as much as she needs to. I hope the doctor or his nurse says that Leah can eat meat. Leah wants fried chicken. I’m looking forward to when she feels good enough to go back to our weekly huevos rancheros. That is traditionally on a Wednesday, but her appointment is for 2:15, so I guess we’ll miss it then.

And this is why I need a four-wheel-drive truck.

In order to meet another of the building inspector’s issues, the plumber has to test the drain and supply lines. He needed water to fill the drain lines, and since there is none on site, I had to haul about 50 gallons up in a tank in the back of my truck. The water needs to be higher than the point where the plumber puts the water into the drain system, and the only way to do that was to put it up on the slope behind the house. That’s a 65-gallon tank to the right of my truck. I filled the tank in the bed at our current house and drained it into the tank on the ground. So, obviously, in order to get the water in the truck to go into the tank on the ground, I had to be higher than the tank on the ground. That mean driving the truck up a fairly steep, muddy bank. A two-wheel-drive truck would not have done it.

I know it sounds like a rationalization, but when you need a four-wheel-drive, you need it, even if it’s only a time or two a year.

I had a surprise Monday when I went up to the house to answer some questions about the framing inspection. Painting had started.

I was surprised because it had been 21 F in the morning and had barely reached above freezing by late afternoon. I thought it was too cold to paint, but apparently not.

The body of the house is being painted a color called Hunt Club (not hunter green as I had thought earlier). The trim will be a light beige, which may not be far from the color of the unpainted trim you can see on the soffit. We both think we will like it. We picked out the colors using a Sherwin Williams application that lets you apply colors to an image of a house, so this is the first time we have seen the actual color. The vinyl windows are white and shouldn’t be painted. Leah found that odd since the trim will be beige but the windows will be white. The garage doors will also be white.

I didn’t do much to this image (taken with my iPhone) to try to keep the colors as true as possible. We both think we like the color. It was hard to tell for sure from the computer images we looked at.

We plan to use artificial stone on the bare concrete foundation. The pile of construction debris is still there. I’ll cull the useable leftovers and maybe some burnable pieces and then, one day, haul the rest off to the landfill.

The painters said they will be back Tuesday morning after it warms up above freezing. It’s supposed to be in the mid 20’s for a low Monday night, but it’s supposed to reach into the 50’s by afternoon

The questions I was going to answer were from a couple of carpenters working for the framer. The answers were fairly easy this time, and the guys should be back Tuesday morning to work on the issues the building inspector noted.

The plumber still has to install a few additional nail guards to protect drain and supply lines.

The next step is insulation, which I plan to start soon. The electrician also has a little work to do inside the walls. Once all of that is done and the inspector passes anything that will be hidden inside the walls, I’ll get a drywall contractor started.