The electrician came out yesterday and before he arrived in the morning, Stefan wasn’t really sure we had anything for him to do. But once the guy got here and we started talking to him, it became clear that we had more than enough work for him for the next several days. Not only do we need him to install a fuse box in the guest house closet but we also wanted someone to finally set up our satellite dish on the roof which also entailed running new cables around the house.
Yesterday he focused on the stuff he could do from the ground…and today he decided to brave the roof. You might remember our stories about Stefan trying to get up there himself and do this work…of course since we didn’t really know that we needed new wiring, a new dish and so on, his efforts were rather fruitless.
We told the electrician we’d use our climbing harness on him and “safety” him from our attic window. He’s got two little kids at home, after all, and putting him at less risk certainly seemed like a good idea to us. It’s incredibly steep up there, as you can see from the photo of him going out there. I could never take photos of Stefan doing this, since I was the one securing him last time.
He actually had to make several trips out to the dish: once to remove the old one, once to put the new one up, then he needed to align it and then once more to clean up the cables and secure them with cable ties. I think by the 4th time he was up there, he was actually starting to enjoy it a bit. He certainly seemed more secure up there by then.
While the electrician was doing his various tasks, Macky and the two guys he brought along today (oh yeah, did I mention Macky FINALLY decided to show up – which was very good for his sake) also did a lot of work. Although Macky said the work Stefan had done on the plumbing was good, he decided to pretty much redo everything to his own personal style. Since we won’t be paying him by the hour, it’s ok with us and at least we can be quite certain that everything will hold water in the end now.
Since he’s been doing this a lot longer than a day, he has quite a few tricks to make things go easier such as using wooden scraps to build holds within the drywall studs which then keep the shower mounts in place just where he wants them. Then he welds the copper piping into place as he needs to.
He also redid the piping the for showers so everything looks much cleaner. Again, if you know what you’re doing, it all seems much easier.
The guys Macky brought with him got started on digging out the canal this morning in our courtyard so they could connect to the piping that Macky laid last year when we built out the kitchen. They also had to dig a new stretch connecting the mudroom to the guest house which we will also be laying network cable in since a hard line to the network is always more reliable than Wi-Fi and cheaper as well. As you can see, the courtyard was a bit of a mess today.
This afternoon they started putting in the 10cm PVC piping connecting all the pieces of the drain and have actually begun to close up quite a bit of the courtyard again. We definitely don’t see them finishing up today but by tomorrow we should have everything closed up again, it seems. This was also a good time for them to flip over some of the stones in the courtyard which we’ve noticed over time are much lighter than the others. And where they did the drain last year has also begun to settle a bit which was getting a bit annoying for us….so hopefully after this it will all look proper again.
One of the canal diggers also got going on our brick wall to build up our walk-in closet. The door you see on the right is the door leading into the wine cellar which our electrician is also now laying a cable to so we have a light outside there. We figured this nook would be great for the closet since it’s too small to do much else with and there was already partial access to the guest house.
Stefan’s very happy that they are building up the wall for us here since he wasn’t really looking forward to it…and the guy doing the wall now seems to really know what he’s doing which makes us even happier since we would have been “winging it” to say the least. Not that we don’t manage to pull off whatever we attempt – but since this wall goes all the way to the ceiling and is about 3 meters tall, it’s just more reassuring to know that it’s being built right.
So as you can see, some massive progress has been made here today. The electrician just finished hooking up the satellite and we have TV again for the first time in 9 months. It’s going to be a bit strange to have it again but at least it will take a bit of stress off our DVD player. I’m pretty sure there has been even more progress since the last time I was in the guest house taking photos so I will try to snap a few more once the guys call it quits for the day. But they should be back again tomorrow and at least now we can go on vacation with our minds at ease about a lot of things.
As much as we complained about Macky in the last few weeks and as angry as he made us, we are extremely happy to have him here working again. He does do good work and he has good ideas – he just generally takes him time and clearly doesn’t have very good time management skills. Nor is he very good at letting his customers know if he’s planning to show up or not for the day. Very frustrating to say the least but at least when he is here working, you can see the progress at the end of the day. So I guess we’ll postpone writing him off for now but we are happy to have a back up guy now for many other things. Kovey still tells us all the time not to let Macky know he’s been working for us since Kovey usually works as a subcontractor for Macky. But we’d be the only ones really losing out if Macky did find out so why would we do that and sabotage one of our best new workers?
Now we just have to hope that Macky shows up tomorrow with his guys to finish what they’ve started!
