Enhancing the Garden

Yesterday, I spent most of the day working on our garden area. My dad and I cut and framed 2 raised beds. Then, later in the day we built the frame for a green house. Here are some pictures.

A decorative angle cut that my dad taught me to do using the skill saw at a 45 degree angle.

One of the raised beds in all its splendor!

Bringin' the heat

I learned about how to connect a small box heater to its power source when Don and I installed 3 of them in a large basement today in Bothell. Apparently, this is one of his easier jobs, but it required some skills that I have yet to perfect. We had to bring wire from the main panel out to three locations, which included cutting some drywall and being able to snake wire through the inside of the wall and the insulation it contained, drilling holes through studs for the wire, and a few other nifty tricks. Stay tuned!

September 18, 2008

Day 2 of 2 working at Jon's house is now over. So today, we connected the wire from the main panel in the garage to a service disconnect behind the tea house. Then, made a second route over by the fireplace and installed a new panel there. Sorry, I don't have any pictures this time because I forgot my camera. New things I learned! 1) You can distinguish the ground wire from all the others because it is usually the smallest. And it is often left uncovered so it's more obvious (that is, when it is in an extra outside coating with other wires). 2) Square D is a brand of electrical equipment that is usually extremely overpriced, but has about the same quality as GE (General Electric). It's sort of like the Monster cable manufacturer...
3) According to the code, when bringing electricity to a new building, you can't go bring the wire out more than 15 feet from the source. 4) It is also against the code to tie the end of an extension cord and the end of a power tool's cord together (if the tool gets out of hand, they want it to be easy to remove power from it.

I've definitely learned a lot more than this, but I think that's all for now!

Wire, soap and conduits

Today I went to Queen Anne to work at someone's house with Don, the electrical guy I mentioned before. John, the homeowner, is building a Tea House in the upper part of his property, and he needs electricity in it! So what ended up taking most of the day was just getting all the wiring through conduits from the garage where the main circuit breaker is (above), all the way up to the tea house. This included running the wire through a number of unnecessary J(junction?)-Boxes. And every time we got to a gap where there's a junction box or the conduit ends, we had to pull the wire all the way out and then put the end into the next conduit.
The work mostly comprised of me feeding the wires through to the tube, and Don pulling at the other end (we switched off every so often but he was obviously a better puller than I). Every so often, I squirted a little bit of "soap" (basically a lubrication to help ease the wires through) onto the wire before passing it through the tube. As you can see, the top left conduits in the 2 upper of the 3 pictures feature the fish tape, a metal wire that we hook onto the end of the group of electrical wiring to pull it through (obviously our hands aren't that long or skinny!).

I'd say that for my first day working on electrical, I learned quite a bit!

My first job

It looks like im starting my first job tomorrow! My friend Don is an electrician. I contacted him a couple of weeks ago and he told me if he had any good jobs coming up he'd let me know. So Wednesday and Thursday I will be helping him out in Seattle! All I know so far is that it involves pulling some wire out of a conduit, a channel-like tube that protects electrical wire. I guess that's all for now!

Welcome

Hi! I'm Nate. I'm a Junior in high school. I like to work hard, and respect the value working hard. I do not believe in trying to come off cool all the time around my friends and I don't listen to Nickelback! I really can't stand sitting down for long periods of time and trying to apply my mind. It's okay if its for around 2 hours but after that I can't focus on anything. I just have to stand up and do something else for a while. ANYWAYS,

This school year I am going to be learning some valuable skills in the trades. I desire most to become an electrician (I really don't know why, I know next to nothing about being one), but am also hoping to learn masonry, and maybe a couple others like framing or drywall. Hopefully all of the above! I can't say I think any one of these skills will be the most challenging of all, because I think they're all going to be difficult.

I've talked to a few guys already and it sounds like I've got a couple of almost for-sure jobs already. I will be blogging my adventures with pictures probably a lot more blogs. Stay tuned!