Last week I gave an update on the boring, tedious work that goes into making the parts of the house you’ll never see. We were hard at work protecting the inside of our walls from spreading fire, as well as a myriad of other related activities like stapling off wire (to keep it out of the way of errant drywall screws), installing blocking for towel bars, hand rails, and closet rods, and handling those last few hidden items like tub drains and HVAC balancing that you can’t do once they are covered up by drywall.

This week I’m happy to report all that hard work has paid off. I had my first electrical inspection last Friday which left me with only two minor touch-ups. Those were cleared earlier this week in a 90 second re-inspection by the incomparable (and deeply sarcastic) Electric Frank. Among other highlights of those conversations I offer “There’s a sh-tload of wire in this house… if you’ll pardon my language.” And “boy, you must have done a lot of homework before you rigged this up.” Out of over 250 different outlets, switches, and fixtures, I needed one additional outlet on the end of my kitchen peninsula (glad he caught that because I would have missed having it in the final kitchen) and the need to swap one breaker to a combo AFCI / GFCI. Less than 5 minutes work.

We also passed the final framing inspection in similar fashion. Inspector K walked through the place with his best x-ray vision and Amy followed behind him with a can of spray-foam touching up any minuscule or hard-to-find gaps in framing, blocking, or drywall. I had left a couple items that I needed to ask about when he came, and he gave me some options for dealing with those. We had them touched up same day and passed on re-inspection the next morning (Friday).

With both of those important hurdles cleared, we are going at breakneck speed trying to get things ready for insulation and drywall. Stay tuned for more updates very soon.

On a less positive note, our long intense days at the job site have brought a small string of injuries worth documenting for posterity. WARNING: if you are grossed out by descriptions of physical trauma, the back half of this post is not for you. I promise no gruesome pictures though.

So last week I had a hole saw jump the hole I was boring in an odd location and tear into my left thumb. That left a series of jagged shreds that bled all over. Not all that deep, but messy and super painful in the shower. Its taking awhile to fully heal.

Then this weekend Amy was hammering on long 12″ threaded rods that go all the way through our extra-deep walls to hold up the roof ledger board for the screen porch. In doing so she accidentally smashed a finger with the hammer causing a huge blister and lots of swelling. Having done this a few times myself, that one also takes awhile to heal up.

Neither of those injuries was as bad as the thumb injury Amy got working on the breezeway a few months back. She was holding a small piece of 2X4 blocking on the inside of the breezeway while I fired a nail into it from the outside. The board split and flew apart, bending her thumb back and injuring it badly in the process. Its still not completely right all these weeks later. 🙁

I have a rival for that one now, also caused by the imposing framing nailer.

This beast weighs quite a bit and fires 3″ galvanized ring-shank nails at very high speed, embedding them past the nail head in solid lumber. In this case I was using it to install rafters into heavy gauge metal rafter hangers that were, coincidentally, hanging off that same screen porch ledger that cost Amy her swollen finger. One of those long nails decided not to go through its intended hole, hit the 90 degree bend in the rafter hanger, and turned sharply, sailing out as a lethal projectile. This has happened a few times in a job this big (we’re into our third box of 2000 framing nails) and its always unnerving when it does. But this was the first time it hit anything we cared about, namely the little finger on my left hand. (As an aside, the poor off-hand is always the one to take this abuse, and always from the dominant hand who is swinging the hammer or firing the nail gun). In this case I wound up at the top of an 8 foot ladder with a heavy nailgun in one hand and the other hand with a long nail fired clear through my finger, sticking out of both sides. This made getting down the ladder difficult, to say the least.

Strangely, it didn’t hurt too bad when I did it, and it hasn’t seemed to cause any permanent damage so far. But pulling a ring shank nail (ribbed to better grip the wood… or whatever else it might be nailed into) out of my hand was not easy to do, and not an experience I care to repeat, EVER. Still, with a wad of gauze and some tape we were back to work in under 10 minutes. That first aid kit Miss K made in Girl Scouts has sure come in handy!

Here’s to more of the good news and less of the gruesome kind in the future.