Lights! Ducts!

Saturday it was my birthday and Paul Simon's too. I spent the better part of the morning honoring our birthdays with an 8-album music marathon of Paul Simon tunes while Justin and Jason, a sheet metal journeyman that Justin knows, rearranged the ductwork in the basement. We now have all of the necessary ductwork to heat the basement and some of the ducts for the upstairs reorganized for optimal ceiling heights.  Being my birthday, the guys wrapped it up in the early afternoon so Justin and I could get on with our celebrating.

 Justin, a sheet metal apprentice for the day, patching the old duct for reuse.

Jason is fitting our new East/West trunk of duct with a branch for the bathroom.

 

Here's my new design for the mantel. Justin gave me the urn on the right for my birthday. I plan to hang a large mirror above the mantel in lieu of that too-small artwork.

We amateur electricians have nearly completed the wiring for the basement lights and about 60% of the receptacles. This is my first time really working with wiring in a house. I've done little projects here and there but I've never wired up a lighting circuit until this basement project came along. Now I've got my 3-way switch badge and new breaker badge. The best news of all is that we now have a respectable number of lights in the basement to actually carry on down there without dragging around the clamp-on construction lights. Woohoo!

Labor weekend

We have a theme for Labor Day weekend around here: labor. First, we made a couple of more rooms by framing up some more interior walls. We have more framing to go but we need a little rerouting of some duct work before we can finish framing the rooms. And then there are all of the soffits...(we'll be at this framing gig into November, I think.)

When we changed up the stairway lighting last month, we disconnected all of the lights in the basement so we've had a hodge podge of extension cords strung up to temporary lights. It was getting pretty annoying to feel your way down there and find a light. But, we've got switches in two rooms now and receptacles partially installed too. All in a weekend's work.

In other news, Justin and I harvested a bunch of blackberries and I whipped up 12 cans of blackberry jam (seedless!). Now that I've broken out the canner, I am planning a big can-stravaganza next weekend to fill up the larder.

We finally got off our duffs...

It's been an eventful summer and we've been enjoying the nice weather and relaxing our weekends away. In the meantime, our basement project has been languishing. But, we got a handful of proposals to fix our water problem in our basement and we are starting to think beyond the day that the perimeter drain is installed.

Over the past few weeks, I've been playing with the floor plan and thinking about how we might like to use the new space. One thing that was giving me trouble was a window in the closet that we've recently split into two closets. Who wants a window in a closet? Not me! This weekend we opted to close it up and I have to say that it looks about 100 times better on the outside of our house now. Before, we had a pair windows that were different dimensions so their appearance was lopsided.

Framed up...

Insulated and hemmed in with some scraps of plywood. We chose not to remove the lathe on this wall because there is blown-in insulation in the stud cavity so the plywood addition makes the plane even.

Another effort we took on was rewiring the three-way switch to give us a light at the top of the stairs to the basement. Three-way switches are tricky but I figured it out (on the second try). In my defense, the switch had some very confusing labeling on the hot and neutral terminals. I had thought I was wiring up hot to hot but the labeling got the better of me. It works now and all we need are the permanent light fixtures before we are ready for drywall in the stairwell.

An awkward angle to view the two new junction boxes wired up for control by two switches.

 

Here today, gone tomorrow

Well, our giant pile of rubble is packed up and ready to be hauled away. We got super, super lucky and found some folks via craigslist to come take the large pieces of concrete. It was a win win because now we don't have to pay for disposal/recycling and they get some free material to build their retaining walls. Justin ordered up a dumpster for the smaller scraps and we filled it up in quick time and still had a mini pile remaining. The pile wasn't large enough to warrant using a dumpster so we decided to take a trip to the dump with it. We also filled up our yard waste bin with so many weeds that we can barely move it. We are hoping that it is not too heavy to collect.


We have a lot of small pebbles and gravel that was under the slab of concrete and we are hoping that when we install our drainage trench and french drain, we will be able to reuse this material for that. If you look closely in the picture above you can see the contour of the filled-in trench where Justin installed water and electricity to the garage last weekend. I want to have an easy option for irrigating my vegetable beds when we put this yard back together and thought that a spigot off the garage was a better option than drawing water from the spigot on the house. And, despite being wired up inside of the garage, the previous owner never actually pulled power from the panel to power the garage. So, Justin's got the conduit in place to allow for us to actually wire the garage to a real power source, not just thin air.

The $100 hole

Who knew that a simple do-it-yourself electrical project could cost more than $100? That's the price for wanting lamps in the middle of the living room without visible cords. A special brass outlet box, some Romex and two hole-saws later, we've got an electrical receptacle in the middle of our living room, to be cleverly hidden beneath our sofa.

Photo Update

I'm doing some lunch-time blogging since we are leaving on a little ski vacation tonight and I won't have time to get these photos up at home. Hopefully when we return on Tuesday, not only will we have a new president but also a lot of progress on our windows, HVAC and electrical work. Here are a few photos from Thursday night:

Lots of wire in the walls

Some new can lights for the master bedroom

New windows in the rear dormer!
Our new plumbing wall. We have plumbing for the water heater, sink and washing machine now.

Big Work Week

Wow, things are moving ahead swimmingly--so much so that I'm now talking to a realtor about listing my 'old' home. We're holding our schedule well and we think we might be moving in around mid to late March.

We have the electricians in the house now and yesterday they roughed in most of the lights and outlets in the top floor and started in on the main floor. I'm pretty happy with their professionalism and flexibility so far. Our windows have been delivered and window/siding guy Glen and his school bus-driving buddy were at the house all afternoon after the bus-driving shift on Thursday putting in the new windows. Of all of our subcontractors, we have been most concerned about this link just because we had no referrals from friends and found this guy through Service Magic which I wouldn't recommend using in general. But so far, he's shown up promptly and he seems to be doing the work we hired him for so I have no complaints. In fact, all of our subcontractors so far have been great. After we pass inspections, maybe I'll do a post with referrals and put a little plug in for them.

In other news, our friend Jill Z. came over to the house on Thursday evening to help us choose some paint colors. Jill's worked in color consultation in her professional life and has a great eye for this stuff. She brought a fan deck of paint colors and we narrowed the field down to a few key ones: a grey-blue, a creamy tan, an accent red and a white for our casework and trim. I'll post some swatches when I get them in the right format.

We ordered our kitchen cabinets last week and I thought I post a sample of the style: a shaker door style. Our deeper drawers will have a detail similar to the door style. Our shallower drawers will just have a plain front. For our kitchen, the maple will be painted white. We think this style is consistent with the period of the house and we are attempting to established an updated craftsman style for the main floor. I say 'establish' because while we didn't buy the house in an updated condition, there was some unfortunate updating that occured in the mid-to-late century including a fiberglass tub insert and cheap particle-board kitchen and bath cabinets.

For our upstairs bathroom, we are keep less with the style of the house and we opted for a more contemporary style vanity cabinet. It will be a slab door (no panels) and will be a darkly stained birch with a whitish countertop. The house will be classic/period on the main floor and more contemporary on the second floor style-wise.

This photo I found online is similar to the look we are trying to achieve in the upstairs bathroom. Our bathroom is much smaller than this and will have a simpler layout.

In the downstairs bathroom, we have opted for a more period-specific look with a pedestal sink, matching cast iron tub (not a claw-foot though), subway tile for the wall and built-in medicine cabinet/mirror. We'll be installing those small hex-tiles on the floor and this combination should give us a very classic look albeit brand new.