Good progress and wasted effort
Three and a half walls are packed with insulation so far.
Only the south wall still has some to go.
Michelle met me at the house after work last night, and we were pleased to see the progress the guys made Tuesday and Wednesday.
When I spoke with the plumber yesterday morning to get the cost estimates, I instead was told that he’s delayed on another project and won’t be able to do mine until Monday. 
I’m a bit disappointed, but there’s nothing to do about it. I was probably going to have the plumber install the downstairs water line because I didn’t have enough time last weekend (due to some needed sleeping and lollygagging on Monday) to finish it. I wanted to try take care of it last night if possible, so I rode the vanpool to Berkeley last night.
The north wall has completed shearwall, Tyvek,
and the siding is already going up.
That’s when everything started to go awry. I forgot that we pressurized the water line over the weekend, so when I cut on of the caps in order to continue the line down into the bathroom, water went spraying mightily. D’oh! No worries. I moved stuff out of the way before it all got soaked, and then opened the shutoff valve for the (not yet installed) hot water heater to dump out the rest of the water. Shortly thereafter, I discovered that I didn’t have most of the copper fittings I needed to finish the job. I drew up a schematic of what I’ll be putting in, and went upstairs to help Michelle with wiring before we went to Home Depot.
Meanwhile, Michelle was trying to wire some outlets and not faring any better than I was. One of the wires was resisting staying in its wire nut, and she spent a lot of time fighting it. She had moved onto another outlet by the time I got upstairs to help. I managed to get her unruly wire into place, only to realize that she had bought 20 amp outlets instead of 15 amp outlets. I hadn’t specified on my shopping list, nor over the phone when she was at Home Depot earlier in the day, and they looked almost the same. D’oh!
Off to Home Depot we went. Michelle returned the outlets and found the correct ones while I went to the plumbing aisle with my schematic and laid out fittings on the floor 6 minutes before closing, figuring out what I needed where. Mission accomplished.
The evening wasn’t a total bust. We had a nice dinner at Cha Am on Shattuck before we started working, and we ended the evening with the right supplies. The house itself, though, didn’t really see much improvement for our efforts.
Tonight, we’re going to see Mambo Kings at the Golden Gate Theatre thanks to a couple of my mom’s friends bailing out at the last minute. I hope they feel better.
Framing and shear wall inspections are scheduled for Friday.
Since the plumber won’t be there until next week, I’ll just finish the plumbing this weekend.
