Here’s an update after 7 weeks of construction. When we last talked, the upstairs was still open to the outside. They’ve spent a couple of weeks making things more finished and closed in. The electrician has been here and replaced our electrical panel with a larger one to accommodate the new circuits upstairs. The plumber was here to connect everything up from the basement so we have water, vents, sewer and everything all connected up. The power and water were off again for a day so they could make all of those connections. On one memorable day, we had 5 different people simultaneously working in 4 levels of our house (that includes 2 guys up on the roof!)

They also did a lot of finishing to the new roof section and getting everything weather tight. We really enjoyed talking everything through with the electrician to help figure out where to place lights in the new spaces and how we are going to use the spaces. He is going to put some extra light in that end room because we mentioned that we like to play board games and he thought we’d like the extra light there. You can see some of the wire spaghetti down in the basement in the photo below.

Although we aren’t really doing any of the work, it is surprising how tiring it is just having all of that activity going on around us. There’s just a lot of coming and going. Mostly they’ve been able to use the outside staircase that they put up early in the project, so not everyone has been through the house. But the plumber and electrician both needed to work on every level to get everything all tied together. They like to start early in the day and I am not really a morning person.

We’ve been trying really hard to keep Stanley out of the way so he’s not getting in the way of people trying to work, eating chunks of plaster off of the floor, or barking at the new people. So we’ve started a ritual with him that after all of the workmen have gone home for the day we announce “You are free to move about the cabin” and then we open all of the doors and gates downstairs. He always grabs a toy and runs around wagging and gurgling at us. (We call his happy noise a gurgle; he sounds like a Wookie.)