Underground Conduits in Place, Painting Doors and Trim

You know, there are times when I wonder why I started this process. It doesn't happen often, but occasionally I hit a low where it seems like this project will never end! It may last a minute or a few hours, and then I'm back on track. One of those moments occured on Saturday, Nov. 23 when I rented a mini excavator to dig the trench for the underground conduits. The conduits will hold the electrical, telephone, and coax cable running from the utility pole to the entry panels on the house.

The reason this got me down was that we worked non-stop 6 hours on Saturday and another 8 on Sunday, and this only got us a trench with no roots blocking it! We had to come back again to complete the laying of conduits in it. The problem was all the roots from two big trees I had removed at the front of the property. I tried digging a trench straight across the yard, but this went right through the tree stumps. Even when I dug a bit of a zig-zag around the stumps, we still had to deal with all the roots. The trench for the electrical conduit had to be at least 30 in. deep. We had to get down with shovels and electrical saws and whetever else it took to get through each root. That's what took the time.

It was fun operating the machine, but can you believe it: 2 days to dig a 50 ft trench? During that weekend, it just didn't seem like I was making any progress. All the painting was at a standstill and a whole weekend seemed wasted... But I'm all better now! ;-)

We're painting doors and trim inside now. It's a slow process to prep each door frame. First you need to remove any protruding nails or staples from when it was assembled. Then there's filling the holes and scuffs with wood filler. Once that dries, you sand it down. Finally, it's ready to paint. And it takes two coats to do the job. At least the doors won't have nail holes to fill when we get to them.

After the doors, I've got a LOT of trim and moulding to paint!