Two Jobs Today

I spent my morning as a tractor operator moving soil, as reported in my last blog entry, and my afternoon tearing things off the side of David’s house and cleaning up my mess. David sealed in a window and worked on the soffit as well as other odd jobs. His soffit work is seen in the following picture. It is looking real nice.

I cleaned up along the front of the house and weeded the landscaping at the same time. Wednesday morning I will pick out the good bricks for my brother who has a project he wants to use them on. He needs about 500 bricks and now has 200, so I need to find him another 300 from our various piles.

As I worked on the south end of the house, tearing off enough to allow us to build out the southeast corner on Thursday morning, I noticed the serious condition of the windows. The three at the south end will be replaced after I leave this summer. If we have time we will remove the brick from the south end before I leave.

Later this week, we will move the tractor from the retaining wall project to this site. We have several brick piles near the house that need to be transferred to the main storage pile. There are several pieces of concrete that need to be dug out and moved as well as clean up from installation of the underground electrical service. The old electrical service was an overhead located at the south end. It was an old sixty amp service and needed to be upgraded to a 200 amp. The main power requirements were located at the northeast corner of the house, so it was decided to put a main breaker box there and connect with an underground service and make the old main service panel a subpanel. The old service will be switched over to the new on Thursday. Once that happens we can move the dryer to the new laundry room and remove the old dryer vent so we can put on new siding along the front. We can also finish filling in the electrical trench and finish off the lawn in that area.

Planning is a big part of construction work. If you forget a step in your plan your project will come to a standstill until that forgotten step is done. One of the requirements of a successful builder is the ability to develop a good plan and follow it.