Septicsational!

It's finally happening...the septic is getting installed!!!  A short recap....I was granted permission to build the house without the septic completed, a very unusual permission, last year given the delay in septic happening was due to understaffing in the permit department.   The permit was finally approved in October and we were ready to go but then the rains started, and we could not dig...until now.  

The man, Jeff Caspersen, who knows where every septic system is in this valley, came back to work...he'll be both installing the system and doing the final grading around the house.  A strange discovery, however, was that the roll of fabric/material used in this task that had been lying on the ground since the work paused last Fall was nowhere to be found.  There is no story line about that that makes sense.   It's a 12' long roll, weighs about 150 pounds and no other trade on the job uses this material so how it managed to get off site will forever be a mystery.   We have been fortunate throughout this job that nothing has disappeared nor has there been any reason to imagine needing to be overly cautious about it.  I mean, if someone was going to lift stuff from this site there's a lot of expensive equipment and supplies everywhere!  So, we move on....

Jeff and his son got to work...first he covered the entire territory with his equipment to both get the tall grasses down and remove the waddles that had been in place for erosion protection during the rains.  Next, he laid out the placement of the two tanks.

 Then the digging began...man in the hole!!!

 No, son is not trying to bury the father...😂

 And, the final result..two spaces awaiting tank delivery next Tuesday:

 

Another big development, and resolution.   It's been a trying couple of weeks mentally and emotionally...as the finish line nears, I recognize my anticipatory energy and my project management self that likes to see and know that everything's gonna weave into completion smoothly gets amplified...because, after all, it's all about sticking the landing!  And, nothing about this kind of project goes that way so yet again, I hit a wall and was compelled to surrender, yet again, to reality and make some shifts in what I've imagined about how things would go...and, all's well and actually set up even better than my delusions envisioned.

In the lane titled "so much about this process is opaque," it became incandescently clear a week ago that in order to have my building permit finaled, the solar permit has to be finaled.  Solar power is required by law with new builds in California and Title 24 regulations dictate the scale of system minimum requirements.  I had intended to build a carport and put solar panels on it at a scale beyond the minimum that would have generated not only more power, but feed back into the grid, and I was going to get a battery for backup during power outages.  

We filed the permit application in November and it still has not cleared.   In addition, the costs to complete the house are predictably greater than I anticipated and I hoped to punt the solar project to later in the year to ease the financial burden now, but nope, that won't work.   Exploring options and pulling the solar, electric and contracting team together, we arrived at a solution vastly different from what I hoped to do, and it will be sufficient and satisfactory to get the building permit finaled, and likely in the month of June to boot.

The original plan was going to be a 7.4kw system, but instead, we're doing a little over the minimum requirement which was 1.7kw, and I'm installing 2.1kw.  I'm putting 5 panels on the roof of my house, which will be a lower infrastructure cost as well.  The good news all around is it's more affordable, I can expand later when I have the resources, the permit for this type of system can be issued in 24 hours and they're installing it all the week of Memorial Day!  One less obstacle to building permit final happening as soon as is feasible.

So, all that said, on track to migrate in the month of June, and with the developments of this week, this could actually synchronize to stick that landing after all.  My life...awe and wonder.