Electricity, rain, heat/air system and fish.

Our electrician/plumber has started work on wiring the house. We spent some time walking through each room talking over exactly what we wanted in terms of sockets and light placement. Basically that boils down to loads of sockets everywhere and spotlight tracks on the trusses. Hopefully it won't take more than a week and a half to complete, then we can get the remaining insulation sprayed in and the drywall started.

The roof seems to be doing its job well - we went down last night after a heavy thunderstorm and found no evidence of water intrusion, despite there being large holes where patio doors are going (they'll finally be installed next week). The roof overhangs also worked well to keep the rain away from the sides of the house, although we still have issues with water pooling at the base of the slope on the west side. We'll need a permanent drain to deal with that.

Air handler unit in the HVAC room. (Shower/bath at right)

Our neighbour Larry is installing our heat/air system, he says he's even happy to work over the weekend as he'll never have a job so close to home (he lives across the road on the ridge). He also helped solve our issues of getting a decent internet service on site - it had looked like we were going to have to get satellite internet which is not ideal for a number of reasons. Anyway, to cut a long story short, Larry uses a Verizon mobile broadband hotspot device (which acts as a wireless router) because there is a 100 foot antenna belonging to Verizon on his land, needless to say, we shouldn't have too many problems with signal. It's also handy as you can take it all over the USA and get internet access.

Last Thursday we drove to Whitepath Water Gardens in Ellijay to pick up some grass carp to take care of the weeds in the pond. We also picked up the last batch of catfish they had (63).

Happy!

Acclimatizing the fish to our pond's temperature.

Releasing the grass carp.

One of the catfish that took a while to swim out into the pond, away from the bank.

Found a freshly shed snakeskin in the pond and laid it out on a plank to dry it out. It was 5 feet long and possibly belonged to one of the water snakes we'e been seeing.