More garage

We’ve been back home for a few days & I’ve been busy closing up the garage so we can go away again.  We got home late Sunday night and Monday saw me back on the road to Saskatoon to pick up the big door.  That went in Tuesday and Wednesday.  Yesterday was window day.

Wednesday was also trenching day but the official photographer had the day off & I didn’t take the time to document the mess I made.  You can see the leftover mess in the 3rd photo above.  I’ve been waiting to trench in the power until I tracked down the supplies to trench in a gas line at the same time.  That turned out to be problematic because it appears that the local plumbers have so much business that they don’t need to return phone calls …. ever.  I can’t even remember how many different plumbers I phoned and either spoke to their cast iron secretary or, on rare occasions, a real live secretary and never got a return phone call.  Of course when that happens a week or 10 days usually goes by before you even realize that the asshole hasn’t phoned back.  I have a hard and fast rule that I NEVER beg anyone to take my money so I flat out refuse to make a second phone call to the same asshole.  That meant that my circle of contacted plumbers needed to gradually expand. 

Last Monday I was halfway to Saskatoon when I realized yet again that the last asshole hadn’t bothered to call back.  So I Googled plumbers in Wadena (the radius was up to 100 km at this point) and phoned Water World.  Some dear old soul answered the phone and told me that Ashley would have to answer my questions but then proceeded to ask all the right questions about what I was doing.  I think she was actually Ashley’s mother.  When she finished she said Ashley would call me back if he had any more questions and I thought “Yeah right – I won’t hold my breath” but within an hour there was Ashley calling back and before I knew what was happening I had another stop to make in Saskatoon to pick up the necessary parts. 

I know nothing about gas fitting but Google is your friend and I had learned that some installations use plastic pipe.  There was 100 feet of copper line on Kijiji that I briefly considered buying but fortunately I didn’t because I’m sure if I had done that then when it came time to hook it up whatever plumber I finally found would have asked “WTF is that and WTF did you use it?”  It turned out that gas fitting is just like plumbing with PEX now.  I ended up with 50 feet of 1” plastic pipe and a couple of steel risers with what looks like oversized Sharkbite fittings.  Cut the hose off with a knife, clean up the end, jam it into the Sharkbite and bury the pipe – QED as father used to say.  I don’t know when I’ll get around to hooking up heat in the garage but it seemed stupid to bury the electrical and not put the gasline in at the same time. 

Ashley told me that the gas and the power could go in the same trench as long as they were separated by one foot so I dug a 3 foot plus trench, put the power in the bottom and the gas at roughly 2 feet below the surface.  They had to go in that order because otherwise I would have had to do some additional marking to indicate that the gas was beneath the power.  I’ve got the old power panel that we replaced in the house last summer.  It wasn’t big enough for the house but its way more than adequate for the garage.