-- Wiring: Over the weekend we shut off the power and ripped out all the old wires and outlet boxes to make way for the new ones. This was much harder than I thought it would be. My stupid, weak forearms couldn't even cut through most of the wires, leaving Sam to do all this work and develop a big finger blister in the process. This weekend, we also got a lot of the new wires strung in the basement and in part of the main house, but there's still lots to do there. Lots and lots.
UPDATE: Got more wires out, put some home runs in. Most of the electrical in the basement is done now. Can lights are also in throughout the house. The pix below are about a week old, so things are already looking much different. I promise I will update as soon as I have more time!
Breaker box in the living room:
Wires running along basement wall:
Can lights in the loft:
-- Roof: The roof is finally done! Pictures to come for this and all the updates below. (Check back to this same post. I'll probably just put the pictures up here rather than starting a new post for them. Just don't have the patience to wait for them to upload right now.)
UPDATED WITH PICTURES:
View from below (from the loft):
View from above:
-- Plumbing/heating: These are also done! The poor sub-contractor, Martin, apparently thinks the house is cursed, as anything that could go wrong did. He had to make a bunch of extra trips out to the house -- no small feat, since he lives a couple hours away (up near Bellingham).
UPDATED WITH ONE MORE PICTURE:
Our furnace, which sits in the loft but will be behind a wall:
-- Windows: Our windows came in, and Ben and Sam started installing them on Friday. Unfortunately, part of the order was wrong -- a few windows were frosted when they shouldn't have been. Ben and Sam decided to install a frosted window in the living room, which I think looks odd. So it looks like that one's coming out and we'll have to wait for a new window to be made. A few of the windows -- for the dining and living rooms -- are huge. I didn't really appreciate how huge until I saw them sitting in the basement, waiting to be installed. Luckily, Sam's dad and Uncle Chris were both in town on Sunday and were able to help lift those windows into place. This was a much more laborious process than anyone anticipated because, as it turns out, all the old window frames are parallelograms instead of rectangles. Ben had to do quite a bit of improvising to get them in. But they're in and look great!
UPDATED WITH PICTURES:
One of our huge windows (this one's in the dining room):
Frosted window in the living room (picture quality isn't adequately conveying why I don't like this):
More windows lined up against the wall, waiting to be installed (including our beautiful picture window, at back, that will go at the front of the MIL apartment):
-- Lighting: We had a long discussion about the lights in the living room; because the ceiling is shallower than normal, we can't put in normal can lights. We're checking to see if we can get little LEDs instead. Additionally, we had to figure out where we wanted a TV so that we could figure out where to put sconce lights. Then there was another long discussion about where to put the switches for all those lights. Hard to keep it all straight. In the end, though, I think we decided that there would be seven LEDs lighting the living room and stairs, two sconces over the fireplace (those were there previously), a sconce between the large front window and the entry door, a sconce between the door and the stairs, and a fan/light in the ceiling.
-- Framing: Ben will probably finish framing everything this week. The basement looks like it's about halfway done.
UPDATE: I have a picture posted below, but the basement looks much, much different by now. Biggest change is that Ben has now framed out the two bedrooms. One of the bedrooms' closets will need to stick out into the living room a couple of feet because it wouldn't fit with a queen bed in the bedroom. We could either put in a tiny closet instead (three feet across?) or just steal a little room from the living room. Hope we made the right decision.
Framed out south wall of the MIL:
-- Final dumpster: We filled our fifth -- and hopefully last -- dumpster, which should be hauled off soon. On a somewhat related note, we decided to pull our garbage, yard waste and recycling bins up onto the porch for now, since rude people keep using our garbage cans for their overflow garbage. Not happy about that, but don't want to go into it right now.
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