The great flood

Once again, we arrived on Wednesday, hoping to do finish up what we needed to do on Thursday to call for a Friday inspection.

J.C. brought his daughter, Michelle, to help with the wiring upstairs. Meanwhile, Gerald built the pony walls that would house some of the electric.

Here's Gerald and J.C. putting one pony wall in place.




Gerald and I had talked about installing the rest of the bats on the siding while we waited for the inspector. But on Friday morning, Gerald thought he'd just as soon uninstall the toilet, insert the test plugs and charge the lines. Because you never know.

It was a good thing he did. The test plug for the toilet just wouldn't hold. Every time we got the water lines close to full, the plug would blow. Here was Gerald putting it back in place after the first flood.

It didn't hold. We tried it two more times. By then, there was so much water, Gerald had to drill holes in the floor to drain the water out. The inspector was expected between 11 a.m. and 1 p.m. At about 10, Gerald called Yarnell Hardware to see if they had a test plug. They did. I drove to town and got it.

It didn't hold either.

We tried everything we could think of. First, we filled a 5-gallon bucket full of water and put it on top of the plug. It blew. Then we tried two buckets, one on top of the other, separated by a board. It blew, too, and made the flooding situation worse.

As a last resort, we rigged up this compressor over the plug using a complicated system of shims. We were still charging the pipes when the inspector arrived. But, miraculously, it held, just long enough to get through that part of the inspector.

We hoped for the best, but prepared for the worst. The inspector was much more encouraging. He found the plumbing to be "very clean." He noted that there were "many improvements." He said this was a big house for an owner/building. But he said we were "drilling down on it" and he would "get us through it."

There were still things we needed to do. One would involve another trip to the planning office in Prescott, but he promised this would be the last. He and Gerald looked at the poles at the entrance and while we didn't get it resolved, Gerald felt good about it. It started to seem like we would, indeed, get approval some day in the not-too-distant future. We felt a whole lot more optimistic.

As if to authenticate our good feelings, we enjoyed the nicest sunset we'd seen at the land in quite a while.