More Electrical

We decided to put a second breaker box in the basement, and all the basement is wired through that. This way, if we decide in the future to separate out power bills from the renters', we can. The breaker box is in one of the bedrooms, next to the closet.

Window Pictures

Pictures of some of our new windows, which Ben and Sam spent an entire day installing last week.

Picture window next to the main entrance:


Picture window next to the MIL entrance:


The view from the second bedroom upstairs (looks into the backyard; you can see the shed out there):


And the view from the master bedroom (looks toward the townhomes):


The boys also got all the basement windows in, but I don't have any pictures of these yet. They will have pretty deep window sills, which should be nice.

More Basement Framing

It's kind of hard to see what's what when you're just looking at framing, but here's the basement, basically all framed out. You can see the entrance at the far end of the room (and the new picture window right next to the door). The bedrooms are on the left side of the picture. The closet for the closer bedroom juts out into the common living area because there wasn't quite enough room for it in the room itself.


Here's a picture of the entrance, which now has a little coat closet (on the right in the picture -- sorry, it's dark and blurry):


This picture looks into the doorways for the bathroom (on the left) and one of the bedrooms (on the right). Like I said, it's hard to make out what's what, but I promise it makes sense.

Black Lungs

It's been another not-so-relaxing weekend for The Bagley Project. Between work work and house work, Sam and I haven't had much time to just unwind. But hey, I suppose we can unwind in November, eh?

Things are really ramping up on the house, though Ben worries that we're a bit behind schedule. We were originally hoping to move in at the end of this month, but now it looks like I'll be keeping my apartment until the end of November. Between now and then, here's what needs to be done: (1) finish electrical (hopefully within the next few days -- almost there), (2) get a city inspector to come look at the plumbing/heating/electrical/framing, (3) insulation (sub-contractors are scheduled to come in next week), (4) get another inspection for insulation, (5) sheet rock (sub-contractors can hopefully start Friday, but that may be optimistic), (6) lots of other crap.

Sam and I spent much of the weekend cleaning the house and breathing in tons of dust. I feel like my nose and throat are coated with a fine layer of soot. We also had to move a lot of crap into the shed to make way for the sheetrockers. Apparently they won't work if there's anything on the floor because -- get this -- they walk around on stilts. Stilts! It's like a circus and a work site all in one. In any case, carrying around box upon box of nails really makes you realize how many stairs are in the house. Also makes you wonder how many boxes of nails one person really needs.

Sam also spent time banging metal plates into the studs so that the sheetrockers don't accidentally pierce our new electrical wires. That would indeed be a bad thing. Meanwhile, Ben is basically done with framing. In fact, I think BJ (the FHA inspector) qualified the framing as 100% done. I believe he also gave Ben the rest of the plumbing/heating money, and $ for the windows. Sorry I can't be more specific; I haven't really been involved in any of that. I honestly don't know what else Ben's been working on, but I'm sure it's something important.

Okay, I'm going to start a new post to get some pictures up, so that's all for now.

Rusted Pokey Things - 3; Sam - 0

It turns out that, if given the choice between driving a nail through the fleshy part of one's hand or doing the same with a screw, my recommendation would be the nail. This is likely a decision that I could have been able to come to a priori, but I can now - with little satisfaction in the knowing - say with first hand experience (I pause for the collective groan from the bad pun).

I took most of the day off today to work with Ben on the house. My first thought was that I would work this morning at Tully's, then meet Ben around noon to help around the house. After seeing the sunny weather this morning, and given the forecast called for rain, I chose to postpone the work work for house work.

Although we had fairly large plans for the day, we ended an 11 hour workday having installed all the windows both upstairs and down. They look very good. The amount of light that comes into the basement once you take all the boards off is quite amazing. The problem was that all of the holes were different measurements on the outside compared to the inside (in other words, in the 6-10 inches of wall the hole changed size). This caused Ben a lot of consternation and made both of us spend far too much time trying to place the windows. However, in the end we set 8 windows in the MIL basement apartment, 4 windows on the first floor (the others had already been finished), and the three windows at the loft height.

Tomorrow is back to more electrical. We have another draw inspection scheduled for Thursday, and hope to have most of the electrical completed by the end of this weekend.

My hand is in a little too much pain to continue typing, so I'm going to leave it there for the night...

Let There Be Dark - Updated with Pictures

Blog updates are not coming easily, as I've been finding it very difficult to stare at a computer all day at work only to come home and do it some more. So here's a rush description of what's been happening since I last wrote:

-- 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.

Plumbing and Heating Pictures

UPDATE: Apparently those aren't hoses. They're flexible pipes, which is what all the fancy people are using these days. They expand better than rigid pipes, which means there's a smaller chance of having a pipe burst in the winter.

****

To be honest, I don't really understand all of what the plumbers and heat guys have been doing. Hopefully you've gotten some sense of the progress there from previous posts. This post is just to show you the pretty pictures.

Here's our water heater. It heats water for the entire house. See how tiny it is? I think I've seen burrito platters bigger than that. The water heater sits in the laundry closet upstairs. As you can see, we also have a heat vent going through that closet. This means we need to get a stackable washer and dryer if we want to maintain any storage space at all. Fortunately, it looks like you can get some pretty nice stackers over at Home Depot.


Ben showed us these hoses (is that even the right term?) to explain why we were going to have killer water pressure for our showers. Apparently the vertical hoses in the picture are bigger than normal, while the horizontal hoses coming out of them (and leading to the bathroom) are standard size. This creates a bottleneck of sorts, and increases the water pressure going into the bathroom.


There's really no point to this picture, except to say that it sure is nice to have shiny new things every once in a while.


And this picture isn't really about heating/plumbing, though you can see where we'll have a vent that helps in the whole process of pumping cool air from the basement and putting it into the main floor. (It's not quite air conditioning, but should be nice in the summers.) Instead, this picture is really about showing you our beautiful new stairs leading up to the bonus loft. I realized that I didn't have a very good picture posted of these yet.


Ah, what a feast for the eyes.