Powerful

 So last week was a heavy hit in the checkbook.

We woke up on Monday and our power box and front walk looked like this:

But just after lunch time our electrician Francis shows up, because he wants to prep the site.

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What you see here is the result of four hours fairly steady work by just Francis. (You had to know I didn't help him.) This was just to get ready to actually do the work we would be paying a lot of friggin' money for. I was surprised at how little sidewalk he took out. From the description he gave us with the estimate, we thought that the entire front walk would be coming out.

The next morning at a quarter of seven the real work began.

And really, that's not even the hard part. The hard part is feeding power lines through a new stand pipe and the extending and threading all of the wires for the house into the box. "What?" I hear you thinking real loud. Well, this...

To get to this point took the better part of the day. I noticed that the guys doing this work took no breaks, did not stop for lunch and never once asked to use the can. Supermen? Perhaps. But they did not stop here oh no. No they needed to populate the rails with breakers and make their connections. Really a one man job. So one worked, one watched and one left. They lamented his departure when it came time to collect up all of the broken concrete, but what can ya do?

Much more nicely done than the panel they replaced. Clearly these guys still know what it is to take pride in ones work. They even took the time to identify and properly label all of the breakers, something that the old panel could not be said to have had done to it.

When all was said and done they buttoned up the box around four o'clock in the afternoon, I hope that they both clocked out and went immediately to get something to eat!

So now, our front walk looks like this...

And we just need to find someone who can do 2 square yards of concrete with a salt finish for us sometime before the HOA begins screaming.

As for our new power box, It looks properly tough sitting there like this, you can't hardly tell that it was replaced except well it doesn't look anything like any of our neighbors.

That's alright though, I take comfort in knowing that what we had to have done this year will just get more expensive the longer they all wait. Because you see, the insurance companies are beginning to cancel people's coverage if they have that lovely Zinsco power panel on their homes. Cute right? Well, we're safe. They can all come by our place and check out what compliance looks like.