Last Sunday night, we put out messages to the contractors asking when they would finish with their respective portions of our construction.

Mr. Contractor let us know that the handrails from the main level to the basement were to be installed on Friday. They weren’t, but the company delivered the materials. (eyeroll) We needed to get the rest of the trenches buried, so we called on our neighbors. A few of them have toys they like to use around the mountain — either to keep the roads passable or help with projects like ours.

Yesterday, neighbors came over to help. Beth drove her tractor over with the bucket loader and a backhoe. Rich brought his strength and willingness to help us move dirt and landscaping blocks. Beth buried the trenches. The rest of us saved what material we can use later, then loaded the remaining construction trash into the trailer for the landfill. Later in the day, Bill helped with the last of the dirt to bury the gas lines. His tractor could get into places Beth couldn’t, so I didn’t have to shovel quite so much dirt to finish burying the hole.

I got in touch with the plumber about training for the fancy water filter system we had installed. We weren’t able to meet with him on Thursday, but he was working on it when we finally got up the mountain on Friday. While he got the system going, it wasn’t right. When we got back up to the house on Saturday, the pump was running, even though we weren’t there. Our old house had much the same configuration, and the pump didn’t switch on unless we had water running. That didn’t seem right to us. Plumbing is a closed system. So, we shut the system down and called the plumber back. I suspect we won’t hear from them until next week.

We have only a couple more inspections before we can call for the (almost) last inspection for our temporary Certificate of Occupancy. Of course, those will happen next week.