Day 65- Living in the Dark Ages

Ok, so I am going to go back a moment and tell you the real story on the siding...and how it put me in the dark. So the honestly the siding that I blogged about below was really only about 95% complete at the time. On Day #65 we had a HUGE issue which really could have killed a few sub-contractors. BUT, let me start with a back story to explain. So I had to get all new wiring for my entire house. There was some existing knob and tube wiring running through the house which is NOT safe. I was first going to pull out the knob and tube and re-wire as needed and because we could not see some areas in the ceilings we went ahead and re-wired the whole house. So for the first month while new wiring was being run I had one outlet that worked and it was down in the basement, so lots of extension cords and such were run all over from the basement. Then when we were actually ready for Indianapolis Power and Light to come out and power up my new meter they took their sweet old time of 2-1/2 weeks. They powered to the new meter but it looked horrible with the new whips going to the original porcelain anchor on the house which was 3-4 feet from my meter that had been moved over for my new back door location. I was told by my electrican that they would install a new anchor next to the next meter. Problem being that this was wrong- my electrician should have installed the new anchor because IPL doesn't do that anymore. So needless to say when my new back door got installed you could reach up and touch the electrical lines...awesome. So I called IPL and about a week later a guy showed up who then informed me about the anchor and that I would need to move my meter base over 1 foot, extend a pipe up to 13' above ground (which I would have to custom bent around my new gutters which hadn't been installed yet) and then attach it to my top dormer for support because my house does not have a soffit. OR...I could go underground for $500 and he would allow me to not have to move my meter base over. Well I thought about it for about 5 minutes while we stood in the rain discussing this and decided that once I paid my electrican and a custom pipe bender to re-work everything I would probably only be saving myself $300 to make something that was going to look hideous. So I decided to fork out the money and pay IPL $500 and a Trencher $400 to get my power underground and never think about it again. It was a good decision...just hit my budget kinda hard.
Soooo...while I am waiting on IPL to come and change it to underground (another 2 weeks) my siding guys are trying to finish my house. They were working around the new back door, standing on a metal ladder ledge strung between two other metal ladders they moved the nuetral line with their hand in order to get a siding dimension underneath it and the old porcelain knob on my house SNAPPED IN HALF! The 120' drop between the telephone pole and my meter was now hinged on the top of my meter base which was unscrewed from the house because they were putting siding up and therefore SNAPPED at the top of my meter and set fire and sparks flying and fried my new meter base. Needless to say as soon as the sparks started flying the two sub-contractors JUMPED off their metal ladder basin and hit the ground running. Now if only I had had a video tape there to capture the chaos...instead a get a phone call from a contractor who is kinda shaken up because he almost died and is not sure what to do. I called IPL emergency who came out right away and at least got rid of the live wire laying in my yard. So now the problem was I had NO power at all and decided I would just wait on the underground to be trenched and laid so that I didn't have to pay IPL to give me temporary power. Luckily my neighbor was nice enough to let me run an extension cord from his garage for what turned into two more weeks. THANKS NEW NEIGHBOR!!!! I definitely owe him some cookies or something!!