Being a goal minded person, I find setbacks frustrating. Yet, the building of our home and the things around it has had this rhythm since we started. Occasionally, we are able to complete all that we want to in a weekend. Hurray for those weekends.
This weekend it was our goal to get our rough plumbing completed. Nick, our nearby retired neighbor, was helping us. He has done construction for years and, well, has an opinion on each step of the process. Some of his ideas have been really great. He’s a bit of a talker though, which can slow things down. Jer had tried to see if Nick could work all day Friday and Saturday, but we never heard from him.
Jer and I headed up to the property Friday afternoon and relaxed for the evening. The next morning, Jer cut down a tall thin tree (something that was planned for the following week). I filled a trailer full of building debris. We were beginning to wonder if Nick was coming at all. I felt especially stress over NOT meeting our goal.
In rolls Nick around 10:30am, telling us he showed up yesterday morning, but we weren’t there. Urgh! If he had just told us, we would have come earlier. Anyway, true to Nick’s style, he shared a few stories, told us he wouldn’t have done some of the things our electrician had done and wanted to change them. I don’t really trust myself right now as I’m still grieving my mom, but I just had to let him know we only had two half days to work on the plumbing, then kindly excused myself.
When I come back a couple hours later, I was informed they needed to move a bearing wall, the one we had asked our framer to make six inches wide for the plumbing reasons. He didn’t stack them directly on top of one another and Jer could already see the floor sagging in the crawl space. Urgh. That took Jer and Nick all weekend and messed up some wiring.
The good news is we planned to remove a very large tree in front of our house the following weekend, and were going to have to rent a bigger saw, not to mention our nervousness over taking down a tree that large so near our home. One of our neighbors is a retired lumber expert and took it down for free in minutes, trading his work for some of the lumber to mill. It took Jer a good twenty minutes to take down the other tree which was a third in diameter of the bigger one. Jer gets credit though, our neighbors saw-blade was three times longer.
I guess we will trade weekend goals and successes. Setbacks but still progress.