Tache and I spent the weekend celebrating our successful leaps over the three most important building inspection hurdles: electrical, plumbing, and framing. The innards have been approved!!

For those of you not up to speed on the house inspection process (myself included until recently), the framing inspection is the big one. The way it works is you call the county when you’re ready for an inspection and they send someone out the next day. We’ve had six inspections so far: setbacks, septic, foundation, slab, footings, and shear nailing. Jefferson County has sent over Mitch for each of these.

Now, I’m sure Mitch is a perfectly nice guy in real life. Therefore, these next statements are not about Mitch the person, but Mitch the county employee. As Tache puts it, Mitch has “something to prove.” What that something is? We’re not sure. And prove to whom? We’re also not sure. Point is, Mitch likes to walk around, take good long looks at walls and nailing patterns, kick a few things here and there, tell us about all the shit he knows (you know, since he’s 23 and has so much experience), and then – for good measure – go back and double check the last place he kicked.

Despite my animosity, I should admit Mitch has signed all our past inspections… but not without what feels like a little sucking up: smiling at irrelevant(!) comments, agreeing with things that are easier to agree to than explain otherwise, and feigning a general gratefulness that he is spending a lovely afternoon kicking around our house.

Well, we caught a break on our framing inspection. We checked the county inspection list and saw they were sending Brandon. What a pleasant surprise! The smile on Brandon’s face was an infectious reminder of how exciting it is that we are building our dream home. Where Mitch stared, Brandon smiled. While Mitch was arbitrarily kicking walls, Brandon was inevitably smiling. As Mitch explained that he, too, is building a house and has had to make choices about this thing or that thing, but because he knows so much about this or that thing, he did this or that opposite thing of what we did… Brandon just smiled. Needless to say, we like Brandon.