done moving

I actually forgot to post earlier this week about the fact that we've officially completed the move downstairs. Don wired in another of the ceiling fan lights from upstairs to light the new temporary bedroom:


Then he put up some 2x4s to re-create the old front hallway between the stairs and the living room and stapled tarp to them to make the last wall, fully enclosing the living room. All of the tools that were in the family room got moved up stairs so that we can use it as a guest room -- Lindley's already used it, over the weekend while we were selling at the convention. My sister will be using it next week.

As soon as Don gets back from his latest business trip, he's going to start organizing the upstairs demolition. The window company called us and said they were looking for work in the next few months, and would we be interested in a couple of incentives? Why certainly! So as soon as the demo gets done upstairs they'll come in and do the windows finally. And sometime around there the upstairs HVAC will get done, too. It seems that scheduling things in the off season is really the way to get fast service in the contracting world.

i need to start using my tripod

This action wiring shot came out okay, but it could have been better.

this post is more than one sentence long

I suppose you might actually like to know what's going on around here, aside from my various wittily-captioned photos and LOLcat obsession. The big news is that the first floor subfloor is officially done, and we're moving on to wiring. Or rather, we thought we were moving on to wiring.

We went out and bought some good books on wiring and electrical work (yes, Dad, including one that is about the NEC code). Don spent most of Saturday reading and then making an electrical plan (which he says I can post once he has redone it so it doesn't look like our house is inside a funhouse mirror). You may recall that last weekend, he and his dad cleaned out the basement and did the first of the new wiring, putting in far more lights than anyone actually needs in a basement (at Don's insistence). Once that was done, we could really plan out how we wanted the electrical to work in the first floor. It's really nice to be able to consider things like where we want our Christmas tree to go, and be able to make sure that there's a plug there for the lights. So we made our plan, and Don started placing boxes for electrical outlets in preparation for wiring.

The problem? Well, we realized that we can't actually wire until the HVAC and window contractors have come through, as they'll be changing our spaces. And since we have yet to be able to get hold of either the HVAC guy or the window company (WHY won't anyone call us back?), we are at an impasse. Frustrating, but it gives us some time to recover from the massive construction effort (and for me to get over the bout of poison ivy which, despite everyone's best intentions, I've managed to contract) and to start clearing out the clutter upstairs in preparation for the move downstairs once all this is over with.

There's a positive side to everything. But I would really like to have air conditioning soon.

it's a bird! it's a plane! no! it's electricity!

We have a light switch.


And -- get this -- it turns on some lights. I'm serious.

for a construction day, they produced a lot of demolition debris

Before Don and his dad could get started on the floors, they discovered that they needed to do some further demolition work. Specifically, they had to remove all of the wiring that had been run through (and I do mean through) the joists in the basement.


I don't honestly know if this is standard practice or not; I don't believe we'll be doing it if we rewire (I think there are little brackets you can buy now to attach wires to other things without drilling through them) although Don, as usual, is the final arbiter of what we're going to do in cases like this (and by "Don", I mean "Don's dad").

In any case, they lost a good part of the morning by having to do this, cutting down on how much floor work they could do, but it wasn't such a great loss, since they wound up getting a massive head start on the electrical work that needed to be done.

For those of you curious about the procedure, they first turned all the electricity off in the house (putting a severe damper on my plans to do my design homework). When you do this, and are working with the breaker box, keep in mind that the main feed into the box is still going to be live. Don't touch it. Next step was to start cutting and pulling. They did this in a mostly-organized fashion, room by room, and followed each line all the way back to the breaker box. Once a breaker was empty, they removed it from the box (sorry, I have no idea how to do this -- maybe Don will comment with his technique, since I was upstairs being cold the whole time [edit: see Don's comment here]).

A large number of breakers were emptied and removed from the box, which is a great start on the rewiring work we need to do. So, not such a loss for the morning.