Progress, or not

[billeyler]

After adventures with the plumbing and the electrical, we think it's all about to pass inspection if it already hasn't. Part of the plumbing had to be redone at least twice. More electrical work had to be done per the inspector to get it passed, including some ugly conduit outside that we didn't expect. One major glitch involves electrical work we had done 4 years ago.

When I bought the house in '92, I soon realized that all the power lines, phone lines, etc were hanging over the garage. Well, not so much hanging over the roof there, but within an inch or two of touching the roof. I knew that shouldn't be like that, but it never came up in the home inspection.

From time to time, the utility company would come through the neighborhood to trim tree branches, even checking with us to let us know they'll be around. At the time, I had dogs, and they wanted to be sure the dogs didn't get out (or bite them). Nothing was ever said about the low-hanging power lines.

About 1999, the (by then) 39 year old shingle roof on the garage had deteriorated so badly, that a prior roommate and I set about tearing off all the shingles and reshingling. We only did the south side of the garage where the power lines weren't; unfortunately, the north side of the roof was in even worse shape than the south side. I didn't want to risk electrocution though, so I let it be more 'deferred maintenance.' Over the next few years, chunks of the old shingles simply slid off with the winds, but I didn't want to attempt to reshingle that area until we could get the power lines raised.

In July 2004, about the time we had the windows replaced, I called PNM to ask what we could do about the lines. Could they come out and raise them? Nope. We had to hire a contractor to do that. I thought this was odd, but they were adamant it wasn't their job to deal with the lines from the pole to the house.

So we got the name of a licensed electrician to do this for us. I can't remember where we got the electrician, but indeed he was able to raise the lines about 4 or 5 feet over the roof, putting new anchor poles on our house roof, new guy wires. It worked great! Soon after, Danny and I (painstakingly) tore off the north side shingles and replaced them all or a period of a couple of days. Yay!

As part of the project, the electrician suggested we put in a new breaker box with upgraded power. Since we figured we were going to do future remodeling, we thought that was a great idea. He said (of course) that we didn't need a permit to do that. Duh. But it was done, and it's been there happily churning through electricity for 4 years. I think there was even a new meter involved, which must have involved the utility company.

Fast forward to this week. The electrical inspector said the work wasn't 'green tagged' when it was done and threatened to have our power cut until the issues were resolved. On top of that, he said that power lines are supposed to be EIGHT feet over a roof by code and some anchor join part is supposed to be PNM certified and the part the prior electrician used wasn't. That would be pretty much impossible.

Our current electrician hustled to get all the issues resolved with licensing, etc. We seriously hope they pass on the height of the wires over the garage roof. It's assinine to me how this has been handled to date.

I can see us now having to move out of the house because there's no power at all. Grr.

Comments

[billeyler.livejournal.com]

I've always been a trusting person, but these situations always test me to the max. We insisted on the GC permitting and inspecting anything that could possibly need permitting and inspecting this time. Which of course is why these issues are coming up.

The Albuquerque maxim is "if it can be done in a weekend out of sight of anyone, then it doesn't need a permit." Hah.

I hope your gas issues don't go wonky on you.