Progress, i think?

In 4 days we are packing up and moving again.  After 4 crazy months, we are headed 'home'.  We are finally moving back onto our land, into an RV until we can rebuild the house. i am both excited and a little scared. :/  We always enjoy our time at the property, but there comes a time each day when the kids are ready to go back to the house. In a couple more days that won't be an option anymore.

Kenan has been out of the town for the weekend at a glass expo in Toronto. Leaving all the packing, organizing , cleaning etc up to me.  It is also Memorial day weekend, so i'm frantically trying to get my garden in all while keeping both kids entertained. The contractor finally came back out to hook up the electricity/water, which was supposed to be set up May 15th.  We could have called a plumber and a electrician to come out and do it, but we thought it would save us some stress to hire a contractor to just take care of it all.  Yeah, we were wrong.

There always seems to be a lot of destruction that goes hand in hand with progress.  This was of course necessary to run the electricity to the camper and the well pump. i don't love what they did to my yard, but it's progress.  right? Because i'm starting to wonder.  

We had a spiget installed so we can access water easily, and they hooked the electric up to the pump and...NOTHING. The pump is dead. We don't know whether the pump burned out during the fire because of electrical wire melting together and shorting out, or if one of the water pipes broke and drained the well before the pump/electricity was shut off.   All we know if that we still have no water, and now we have to call the well guy out to pull the pump.  Seriously kicking ourselves for not doing this in the beginning. We could have saved ourselves a lot of money by avoiding the middleman. Also, if we had just contacted the pump guy to start, he would have figured out the problem immediately when he hooked it all up (back on the 15th!), and could have pulled the well then and had it fixed...and we would have water right now. But no, nothing is ever that easy.  

i had a water barrel set up behind the RV to collect the rain water that was running of. It filled up super quickly, and i had a full barrel to water my garden plants.  Unfortunately it was in the way of hooking up the septic, and had to be moved. :( The contractor installed this fancy septic pipe that goes from the RV and connects to the pre-existing septic system.  So we should have a working toilet right now...IF we had water. i plan to create a little platform over the tube so i can set my rain barrel back up.

i have already started researching how to make a composting toilet. Even if we are able to get it all set up by the time we move in (i'm not very optimistic) it  makes sense to have a back up system, and the humanure approach seems much better/safer than just digging an outhouse.

We wanted the electricity to be totally hooked up on the 15th.  The electric company brought out a temporary electric pole and set it up on the 21st, but it was not connected to anything. On the 25th, the contractor came out and installed an outside outlet that we could plug the RV into.  So we technically have power!
However, after the RV had been plugged in for a few hours, i noticed that the inside of the RV was getting really hot...as if an oven was left on. i checked to make sure the heat was turned off then tried to find the source of the heat. It was coming from the breaker box/converter panel. It was actually hot to the touch.  i don't know what that means, but it did not seem right and so i unplugged it. It was mentioned to the contractor, and he said the electrical system of the RV is not his problem. So when Kenan gets back he'll take a look at it, and we will probably have to call out an actual electrician to check everything out, make sure it's set up correctly and make sure the RV's electrical system is okay.  Last thing i want is a fire hazard.  When we purchased the RV, it was plugged in and we walked through it and checked to make sure everything was working.  We also purchased it from the fire chief of the town next to us, and i really do not believe he would sell us an RV with a faulty electrical system knowing that we just lost our house to a  fire a few months ago. So i really don't think there is anything wrong with the campers electrical system, but i am unfamiliar with how it all works and do not feel comfortable leaving it plugged in if it is going to generate that kind of heat until i know for sure everything is fine.  So all that means is that although we have power, we still don't have power.
 It also means we will probably have to call out an electrician ourselves even though we hired the contractor so that we didn't have to deal with all this. Honestly, if it is this difficult (and expensive!!) just to get an camper set up, i am really dreading the house building process.

So yeah, that's where we are.