Gas!

Two weeks in, and we started smelling gas.  Near an outlet.  That's no good.  We called National Grid, and, since it's their ass if something blows up, they sent someone out in under 30 minutes.  

The old gas meter

Well, not quite.  Two days later, we smelled gas again.  So we called National Grid, again.  This time, they were a little more thorough, and surprise!  They found some more leaks.  This time, more serious.  In order to fix it, they were going to have to dig up some of the street, and replace all of the pipes inside the house.

Call in the street crew

Which is exactly what they did.

They ended up replacing all of the pipes (the old ones were 100 years old!), as well as the meters.

The new meter

They also increased the size of the pipes (the old ones were 3/4 inch, the new ones are 1inch.  Which is good for when we eventually do our oil-to-gas conversion

The new entry point pipes

Some of the new piping.  shiny

It wasn't that bad of a leak, and "if they didn't know about it, it would've been fine", according to one of the techs on the job.  But we didn't feel like smelling gas for the next 5 years, so we called it in.