California 2 Puerto Rico

We completed 4 major tasks today.
1. Pour the concrete Power Pedestal.
2. Dig a 3ft trench 280 feet from the pedestal to the house.
3. Rough in the downstairs bathroom.
4. Purchased 1200 feet of PVC Pipe

Good News about our Electricity
While we were preparing the trench to lay our two “2 inch” and two “1 inch” PVC pipe to run the electrical, Nelson stopped by. Nelson is a somewhat retired electrician who worked for the electric company for 30 years . He is going to complete our electrical as a favor to Jerry. We got a confirmation from him that we will pass our electrical inspection (thanks Brian) after he runs the main line giving juice to the house. He did a walk through of the house and was very impressed with the “American Style” wiring and forward thinking (he actually said “muy preperado”). The forward thinking comment was because we have already hooked up an inverter to the main breaker that will allow us to plug in a nice quiet Propane Generator that will power the entire house if if there is an emergency or the power goes out. He is going to come on Thursday and run 1/0 cable to the house from the pedestal. We are going to run a #6 ground wire with each 1/0 wire…since we are going over 150ft we are upping the gage of the wire to avoid brown outs when we fire up AC units or whatever AMP draining appliance we are turning on simultaneously.

Even better, Nelson was the man in charge at the electric company here in Puerto Rico. His territory was the West side of Puerto Rico. With that said, Nelson is telling me that he will pull some strings and get the power company out to the house at the end of this week or early next week to install the poles, hang the power lines, hook up our meter and sign off on the pedestal. All of the other time frames we collected along with estimates were putting us out at least two months before we would get power. Many thanks to Jerry, who introduced us to Nelson (everyone knows the Vargas family), and made this all happen. Oh, wait, AND the electric company only charges about half the price of what electricians charge for the same job. Stoked!

Pouring the Concrete Pedestal
Josh, Jerry, Mark and I spent the morning finishing the form for the Power Pedestal and filling it up with concrete. We mixed about 8 bags of concrete with a couple wheel barrels full of rock and sand and mixed it all right on the concrete road at the end of our driveway. Once we got the concrete mixed, we filled 5 gallon buckets by shovel and passed the buckets on down the line, half way up the ladder and then Jerry poured the bucket full of concrete into the form we created. I would say we carried about 30 buckets of concrete in 90 degree sunny hot Puerto Rico. With the extra couple of buckets we had left over, we poured a little concrete slab to stomp the mud off of our feet before going into the house.

June, the backhoe guy, showed up about an hour after we finished pouring the concrete and dug a 3ft hole through from the pedestal down to the house. Interesting geography going on in our yard, we have very rich soil on top and slate and granite underneath of us. He broke up so many rocks, Josh came up with the idea of enclosing our outside shower with a stone wall from the rocks that were in our front yard. His three house cost me $80. I know, after digging the 4ft by 5ft hole for the pedestal that it was $80 well spent.

Hoche, the plumber, showed up bright and early at 7:00am this morning. He brought a helper and a hammer drill and chipped and chipped and chipped away at the walls in the soon to be laundry room and bathroom downstairs. It looks like he has finished about half of the room. You can see where he has chipped in the septic for the washer, toilet and shower in these pictures. The sink is going to be located on a wall we are going to erect to separate the laundry room from the bathroom. He will be returning tomorrow morning to continue the laborious task of chip chip chip.