A synopsis....

Well, back to posting! This will be a catch-up post, since the last little while has been, shall we say, interesting. No pics sadly, but more will be coming soon.

I had a nice clever post all written up which I was going to call "It's Electric 2: The Return of Caleb" and I had it written like a movie preview. You know, "In a world where all the wires disappear into the walls and never come out again, one man has the courage to stand against the impending disaster...." etc, but before I could actually post it we ran into issues and everything changed some.  Basically, we found out that one plane ticket for our incredible friend Caleb, who, as you may recall, is an electrician, was waaaay cheaper than hiring a "real" (read: "paid") electrician. Caleb is such a great friend that he was totally on board with that, and cheerfully gave us 2 and a half days of electrical work in a sweltering dusty house. (Rewards in heaven, my friend.) A big part of the reason we'd called him was that Jack had discovered that the electrical work in the house was a great deal worse that we'd originally thought, and not only were we going to have to add circuits (which they'd pretty much finished last time Caleb was here) but actually re-do about 70% of the existing wiring. Some of what was there was pretty scary, and nearly none of it had ever met a code book. Jack is really good, but for that level he felt he really needed a professional. So, Caleb came up and they got it all fixed and it looked amazing. (We had a great time with him too; besides the work we managed to cram into the weekend times with friends, going to see Toy Story 3, and a fun extra movie night when Caleb missed checking in for his flight by 3 minutes, and had to take a 7am flight the next morning.)

Then enter the drama: the bureaucracy of permits is such that we ended up running into a big mix-up about what we had to have ready when for the permit inspection, and  differences between rough-in and finished inspections; we also found out that while Jack could do the work himself for a permit, he had to take a test first, which was only given once a month and the next wasn't until July 10. That was a huge blow because it had been our goal to have the whole upstairs finished by July 3. Of course God is faithful, but we needed to figure out how to reorder our plans, plus getting all the wiring inspected at once meant that everything had to be open at once, and our downstairs is filled with all of our stuff currently. That was a little discouraging. 

Enter Christine, our amazing friend who is facilitating all of this by letting us live with her temporarily, and who also has contacts for just about everything! She knows a great electrician who is licensed in our county (Caleb isn't) who should be able to help us ease through some of these delays and hopefully we'll be back on track soon. Praise God!

Adding to the house stuff was also a spate of busyness in the rest of our lives, most notably that fact that my business moved location and I needed to organize that move, and I've been under the weather a little lately too. It's amazing how quickly a lack of momentum can affect so much. But oh well, good lessons learned, and we continue to be sooo grateful that we're going through all of this with such a strong support system and such good friends. God is so faithful!  

In the meantime we continue to work along at our projects, and I do have more posting on some of those coming soon. God is so kind and faithful and we are still enjoying the adventure, but I do admit that I'm looking forward to the next phase of this project. This part is hot, dusty, and slow. Thanks again to all of our fantastic friends, particularly Caleb, Li'l J, Phil,  Dan and Stephen, who have helped us keep chipping away at all of this. We're hopeful that real progress begins moving more quickly again soon! Thanks for sticking with us as we journal on this. We're sure we'll be grateful for the record for our own posterity later on too. :)