Can you dig it, baby?

Only two weeks later than planned, we have electrification (and watering - that is, hooking up water) of the shop nearly completed. First step: trench!

our new mountains

trenched from both sides

electrical line running from the box to the shop

While it is difficult to get a sense of scale from these pictures, the trench comes up to my chest, when I'm standing in it, and the mounds of sand are about 4 - 5 feet high, when you're standing next to them. It took about a week to have it dug - not the actual labor, mind you (which took about 3 hours or so), but to get someone out here to dig it. Specifically, the someone we had already hired. As in all of our endeavors thus far, all subsequent work was dependent on getting that finished. . . so, we waited. Once we had our trench, then it was a matter of 4 days, or so, of work and voila:

panel box

wired with outlets

lights!

outside light and outlet

Now, during this process, it was understood that the people who had dug the trench would return to bring water down to the shop. After numerous unreturned phone calls, however, it became clear that this was not going to happen. With some discussion (and time being of the essence, as we are getting ready to move all of our stuff from Seattle this weekend), we decided we would do it ourselves. After copious reading online and discussions with his dad, Tres and I hit the home improvement store and bought a bunch of PVC and glue, then spent some time on the weekend gluing it together and laying some of it in the trench (poor boy had to dig a portion out by hand, as our master diggers had failed to make room for a drain pipe). It was stinky, but, I thought, kind of fun.

trenching for the drain (with our pipe in the foreground)

pipe laid out

trying out the new tub

The great news is that we've now been inspected and our very kindly neighbor came over and filled in our trench, so now we can get to work on finishing up the insulation and putting up some Sheetrock!