5/25/08 Drove the truck to Brian's shop and unloaded it. Brian put in an order to Stoneway for the parts I still need and which I will pick up Tuesday morning.

5/27-29/08 I went up to the property for 3 days: Tuesday through Thursday.

Before I left, I stopped at Stoneway Electric to pick up some parts. These were ground bars I needed to complete the service panel wiring, and a kit of parts needed to make an outlet down at the service pole. I also had to stop at the Post Office. I was delayed both places so I got out of town later than I wanted. My hope was that I would get to the property in time to complete the wiring of the service before the electrical inspector got there.

I arrived at the property at 12:18. There were a couple of traffic cones in my driveway so I knew that either Verizon or L&I had been there already. Both were scheduled to come in the afternoon. I was hoping I wouldn't miss them.

Two minutes after I got there, at 12:20, Verizon showed up. The guy said he had been there in the morning and he had left the traffic cones. He had forgotten that he was scheduled for the afternoon. I was relieved that the L&I inspector hadn't been there yet.

The Verizon guy drove his van up to the upper roadway. I pulled wire off a spool in the back while he dragged it down the hill alongside the electrical conduit. Just about the time he yelled that he had enough wire, the L&I electrical inspector showed up. I went down the hill to greet him. He was sitting in his vehicle working on his computer so I started scrambling to get the ground wires hooked up at the pole. I didn't even get started.

The inspector, Dave Westermann, came to look at the meter pole and he told me that in addition to the buried plate, I needed another ground rod. I explained that we could use the ground rod in place for the temporary service but it wasn't hooked up yet. He pointed out that the plate and the rod needed to be separated by at least 6 feet and that I could move the plate to a different part of the ditch so they would be sufficiently separated. He also said that I needed to bury the ground wire at least a foot where it will run from the old ground rod to the buried plate. I moved the plate and then got a coil of #4 solid copper wire and a brass clamp, called an acorn, for clamping a ground wire to a ground rod, and frantically started hooking up the two grounds.

Meanwhile, Dave went up to the building to inspect. The first floor was still locked up so he couldn't get in to see the service panel. He started in the crawl space, which I had unlocked for the Verizon guy, and he inspected my water pipe ground. I had an aluminum clamp on it which he said was not acceptable on the copper pipe. I needed a brass or copper clamp. I also didn't have the grounding plate buried up at the cabin. I showed Dave where I planned to bury it - in the ditch where it was deep enough - and he said that was OK. But it was supposed to have been completed prior to the inspection.

When I opened the building and Dave looked at the service panel, he could see that it was not completely wired. I needed to install the ground bars, which I brought with me and showed to him. I also needed to hook up the ground wires.

Dave made it clear to me that he couldn't stand around and watch me work. I should have called for an inspection after the installation was complete. This was one of the many lessons I have learned on this project by doing it wrong the first time.

The result of the inspection was that I passed the service part of it and flunked the feeder part of it. He put a sticker on the meter-disconnect which indicated that the PUD could now energize the box and provide service. I have something like 15 days to fix up the deficiencies in the feeder and the service panel. Most of the deficiencies, like the incomplete wiring and grounding, and the wrong kind of clamp, can be completed easily once I get the parts. The hard part is covering the conduit.

In the 150 foot run of conduit through the woods, 66 feet of it are on the surface of the granite bedrock. These portions need to be vaulted in concrete. Dave told me I needed to call the lead inspector, Don Millar, on 509-886-6563, and explain the complications of vaulting over the rock. I was thinking that I could have a re-inspection done on Thursday when I had the wiring completed and then get an exception for the vaulting to be done later. I was dreaming.

Dave looked at some of my wiring and conduit and he answered a lot of questions I had about what would be acceptable and what would not. I was happy that my switch in the column in the dining room was acceptable and that my plans for running wires up through the corners of the loft and for feeding the baseboard receptacles were also OK. I just need to make sure that there is no Romex in contact with the chinking mortar. That will be easy to avoid. He said that the EMT elbow I had installed in the east corner of the loft was also OK. He had some kind of name for it, but I don't remember what it was.

In the process of the electrical inspection, the Verizon guy installed the phone box on the outside of the cabin and told me that he now had dial tone up there. He backed his rig back down the hill and left.

After Dave left, I had lunch. Just as I finished lunch, Ross Williams pulled in the driveway. Ross has been following my progress on the web site and has tried to catch me at the property a couple times but has missed me so far. I was happy to finally meet him in person.

We went up to the cabin and he looked the project over. We did the grand tour up to the spring. I took the overflow pipe off so Ross could see the cleanout cap, and I was surprised to find a caddisfly larva in the pipe. A caddisfly must have gotten in through the screen last year, when the screen had developed some holes, and laid eggs that eventually hatched into this critter. That is a good lesson for me to replace that screen on a regular basis before it ever develops holes again.

We went up on the high rock twice, once to look over into the valley on the back side, and a second time, as an afterthought, to take a look at how straight and flat my roof is. Ross is an electrician, in addition to his day job at Stanford, and he gave me some great advice on some of the details on how to proceed with the wiring. We had a really nice visit. I took some pictures of him.

After Ross left, I hooked up the phone to the jack I had installed in the bedroom, and I hooked the phone wire to the new box Verizon had installed. The phone worked. I was happy about that. I moved the cordless phone base station up to the cabin with the hope that the phone would work down in the trailer. On the first attempt, it didn't. Then I strung the wires to the answering machine and from there to the base station as far as they would reach, and then I set the base station on top of an upside down bucket sitting on a table in front of the bedroom window. Then the phone worked in the trailer -- as long as I was right next to a trailer window. It wasn't a very acceptable arrangement, but at least it would work until I could get a phone line down to the trailer. The previous one had to be cut in order to switch the drop over to the cabin.

I called Plain Hardware to see if they had electrical parts. If I was going to get inspected on Thursday, I needed to get the parts before I returned to Seattle. I needed two acorns and a brass water pipe clamp. It sounded as if they had parts like that, so I got in the truck and drove to Plain hoping to get there before they closed. They had the acorns I needed, but they didn't have brass clamps. Theirs were all aluminum just like the one I already had. I bought the acorns and headed back. On the way, I stopped at Mike Tutino's and had him weld a stub of ground rod onto the other half of the steel plate he had cut the previous week. Of course I fed Bert and Ernie a few dog biscuits while I was there.

Next, I strung a phone wire through the crawl space and down around the hairpin turn all the way to the trailer. It barely reached, but by taking all the slack out, it reached OK. I hooked it up to the new Verizon box, and then I tried hooking it up to the old Verizon box outside the trailer. I didn't really know what terminals to use in that box and nothing I tried gave me dial tone. It was getting late so I gave up for the night. I just sat close to the window when Ellen called and the service was just good enough to have our usual evening call.

On Wednesday morning, I tried to call Don Millar. I left several messages trying to reach him. I even left a message for his supervisor in Kennewick. In all my attempts, I was only able to talk to one human being. The rest of it was all recorded messages, option menus, and leaving voice messages.

I went up to the cabin and installed the ground bars I had brought with me. I installed the equipment ground wire, the insulated ground wire, and two breakers for the two kitchen counter-top outlets.

A PUD guy showed up and he opened up the transformer box down at the road. I went down and talked to him. He said he was just checking that everything was OK for energizing my panel the next day, Thursday. He said it looked good. He told me, though, that I needed to clamp the 3" conduit to the pole and that I needed to support the 3" sweep better at the bottom of the ditch. He said that a common problem is that when the dirt settles, it pulls the conduit apart at the box. It didn't look to him (or me) that the sweep was resting on solid undisturbed dirt.

Brian Kemly called to find out how the inspection went. I told him that we passed the service part and flunked the feeder part. When I explained how I had wired up the insulated ground on the service panel, he said I had done it wrong. I had wired it to the neutral bar and it needed to hook up to the equipment ground bar. But the wire is too big to fit in the ground bar, so I need a special lug adapter, which of course, I didn't have. We both hoped that I hadn't cut the wire too short. Brian said that he would order the special lug adapter and some de-ox goop for clamping the aluminum wire. He also said that the aluminum water pipe clamp should be OK if I raised it higher on the pipe to get it away from contact with dirt or water.

I got a return call from someone at L&I saying that Don Millar was out and that I should call him at 8:00 in the morning. It was clear to me now that I couldn't ask for an inspection for Thursday. I would flunk again without that special lug adapter.

Next, I went to work in earnest to get dial tone down at the trailer through that wire I had strung. I got an RJ11 jack, that I planned to install somewhere in the cabin some day. I wired a couple short leads to it and plugged a phone into it. I started at the Verizon box at the cabin and tested for dial tone up there. I got it. So I chose a pair (the orange/orange-white pair) from the cable, and plugged it into Verizon's box. Then I went to the trailer and proved that I had dial tone through that pair of wires down there. Then I hooked that pair, in every combination, to the four screw terminals in the box, and couldn't get dial tone in the trailer. I hooked the phone wires in the trailer directly to the orange pair in the cable and got dial tone, so those wires were OK. The problem was somewhere in that box between the old buried wire and the RJ11 jack that my trailer wire was plugged into. Most of that was hidden behind a part of the box that I didn't open. I couldn't make the screw terminals work so I decided to jury-rig it.

I broke off the plastic wall plate from the phone jack so that there was just the little plastic cylinder with the jack on one side and four screw terminals on the other side. I screwed the orange pair to the red and green terminals, plugged the trailer wire into the jack, and I got dial tone through the trailer phone wires. I stuffed that broken jack inside the Verizon box, shut the lid, and called it good. The phone now worked and that was all I cared about.

A group of Gray Jays showed up while I was working on the phone. Two adults took peanuts from my hands as usual, but there were a couple of juvenile birds watching who never got up the nerve to try it themselves.

Then I went up and buried the second ground plate in a deep part of the upper trench. It took quite a bit of digging to bury the plate but I got it done. Then I used an acorn, a split-bolt, and a run of #4 solid copper wire to connect the plate to the equipment ground wire in the cabin floor. I also raised the water pipe ground clamp higher on the pipe.

Back down at the meter pole, I dug a trench from the old ground rod over to the main trench so that I could bury the wire connecting it to the buried plate. I also tamped the dirt under the sweeps and shoved a big flat rock snugly under the 3" sweep. Then I buried all the exposed copper wire and tamped the dirt as I did. I had heard that thieves are out stripping copper wire from anywhere they can find it. I want to get this ditch covered as soon as possible.

On Thursday morning, I called Don Millar right away and learned from his message that he would be out all week. After some run-around, I got ahold of his supervisor, Gary Guller. I explained that the ditch cover hadn't been approved because of the complication of the vaulting, and that in my opinion, the open ditch was a hazard. He told me to hang up and that Dave Westermann would call me in a few minutes. I felt like the wheel had turned full circle.

Dave did call right back and apologized for the misunderstanding. He said that it was OK to close the ditch even though he hadn't signed off on the ditch on the permit. The signoff still required the vaulting to be done. He opined that 15 days would not be enough time to get that concrete work done so he told me to wait until I get a letter after the 15 days expired and then to call Don Millar and explain the situation. He would then give me an extension of time for the re-inspection. I am slowly learning the ins and outs of the permitting and inspection processes.

I called Mike and left a message that he should close the ditch as soon as possible.

Next, I went up and closed the upper portion of the ditch where it was deep enough. It was a lot easier shoveling the dirt back into the ditch than it was shoveling it out in the first place. With the ditch up there filled in, it made a nice walkway through the woods to where the vaulting needs to be done. I used it to wheelbarrow some nice big rocks out that I will use for the front steps.

I spent some time looking at the vault site and imagined some staircase possibilities. After thinking about possibilities for mounting handrail stanchions, I tried fitting a 1 1/2" galvanized pipe into a 2" PVC electrical conduit and found that they fit almost snugly. I decided that I could embed short vertical sections of the PVC in the concrete steps, and then later, stick the galvanized stanchions into them and fasten the rail to the pipe. I would use two rebar hairpins around each PVC stub to reinforce them into the concrete. I would hold the whole assembly in place with rebar tie wire to keep it in place when the concrete is placed. I got kind of excited about building the staircase. I thought through possibilities of mixing my own concrete and moving buckets of it down the hill on a zip line I could rig up. Lot's of possibilities came to mind. None of them all that easy to do.

I used a level, a clipboard, and a piece of paper and pencil to measure the slopes of the different pitches on five different sections of the conduit. I'll use that info to start designing the stairs. I left for home at 1:00.

5/30/08 I returned some tools and parts to Brian Kemly and talked with him about the wiring and the vaulting. I also picked up the special ground lug adapter and some de-ox goop. He thought I should hire a professional concrete finisher to make the stairs and he recommended Don Hogham (pronounced Hokum). He called Don and explained what I wanted to do. Don said that if he (Don) did it, he would also build the forms. I got the impression that it would be first class quality and fairly pricey. I also got the impression that he wouldn't be able to get to it until August. When I got home, I called Don and left a message for him to call me.

5/31/08 I talked to Ellen, Bill Odgers, and Kerry Sedevic about options for getting the stairs built. All of them helped firm up my opinions about what to do and how to do it. At this point, I think I will design the staircase and build the forms myself, maybe even in the next two or three weeks, and then try to get some help from Dave, Bill, Kerry, and/or someone else to place the concrete. I'll have a pumper and a concrete truck come in with the concrete. I decided to have landings where the pitch changes and to have one handrail. The treads will be 3' wide. I made a rough design and a preliminary list of lumber to start with. The excitement grows. This kind of work is fun for me and I am eager to start it.