Let there be lights!

After almost killing ourselves each day this week, we are finally finished with the garage renovation.  The ceiling is painted with two coats of flat white paint, and the fire code walls all have two coats of the pale yellow paint we chose. We still have to install the vinyl baseboard, but that has to wait until the paint on the walls thoroughly dries.  We'll get back to that task later this summer.

Rick has moved on to working on the new first floor laundry/ craft room / office.  He finished the framing for the pocket door, and we picked up the solid oak, six-panel door a few days ago.  Right now he is staining the door and getting it ready to hang.

Today Rick was up before 7:00 (I "slept in" until 6:57), and we both were working in the laundry room before 7:30.  We planned where we wanted to install the ceiling can lights, and then Rick started to draw the plans on the ceiling and to cut the drywall where the cans will go.

Rick cuts the first hole for the seven can lights
that we installed today in the new laundry room.

Three down... and wired... four to go.

The first three cans went well.  We even were able to fish through the wire from one to another with few problems.

Then we moved to the other side of the room.  The first cut did not go well because we ran into some unexpected 2 x 4 framing in the attic.  Duh!  Of course!  We used to have a corner fireplace in that area, so the added framing was supporting the structure of the fireplace.  We removed the fireplace years ago, but the framing remained in the attic.

A quick trip to Home Depot showed just how distracted we were.  I elected to stay in my work clothes, but Rick made a quick change into some "good clothes" for the store.  The only problem was that he got distracted in the middle of the change, and ended up with some interesting footwear.  Neither of us even noticed until we were walking OUT of Home Depot.  Ah, well, maybe Rick will start a new working man's fashion trend.

OK, so they did not quite match...

After adjusting the placement of that mis-cut can -- and patching the errant hole with a new square of drywall-- we were back on track, or so we thought.

We decided to change the layout of the lights on that side of the room since that is where the cabinets, desk/ sewing table/ and storage unit will be.  We moved the lights to better accommodate the tasks that will occur on that side of the room, and are we glad that we did!  When we moved the lights, we double-checked where rafters might be and discovered that our original plan would have run into rafters in three of the four planned lights.

With the holes all cut, we moved on to fishing through more wire.

With the new plan intact and the holes successfully cut, we once again pulled the wires with little trouble.  Then Rick went into the attic to connect the wires to the junction box that an electrician friend of ours had wired years ago "in case you ever need some extra lines."  God bless Mike for his brilliant idea to run those lines from the attic to the electrical box in the basement.  He made our job today 1,000 times easier.

By 5:30 this evening, we had seven brightly lit and functioning new can lights in our laundry room.

Tape on the floor marks where the new cabinets
will lie.  The lights above will give us task lighting
for everything we hope to accomplish.

Seven lights will give us the illumination we desire, and the fan
in the middle will be replaced with a non-lighted, white fan
for ventilation.

That was one more major project, and we both are happy with the results.  Each light can be adjusted from 2500 - 5000 K of light.  We set the lights at 4,000 K (cool white), and that will give us more than enough light to work at the computer, to sew, to weave, and to find the lightest of stains on the laundry.  If we leave the blinds up, we also can light up half of the back yard.  I think we have enough light for anything we want to accomplish in that room!

Inside Jobs

In addition to watching the trees come down in the back yard, we also have been keeping busy with inside jobs.

As I mentioned earlier, we are putting 5/8 inch firewall drywall in the garage.  We have lived here for 28 years and never noticed that there was nothing between the garage and our house except 1/2 drywall on the interior walls, a bit of insulation in the walls, and 1/4" paneling inside the garage.  That seems to have been the way of building houses in this neighborhood in the 1970s since many homes still have their garages lined with brown paneling.  While we painted the paneling a light yellow years ago, we never made any other improvements.  We were long overdue to bring the house up to code by adding the firewall drywall in the garage.

For the last couple of weeks, Rick has been hanging, taping, mudding, and sanding that drywall.  Yesterday we actually were able to put a primer coat of paint on the south wall between our garage and living room.  By tomorrow, we hope to be able to finish the sanding of the east wall between our garage and family room.  Rick worked on it early this morning, but it just became too hot outside to continue that task.

We stated the day delightfully by meeting Lindsay, Christopher, and Owen at the Botanical Gardens.  They have a Lego Exhibit there staged throughout the gardens.  What amazing things engineers and artists can do with just Lego blocks!  Each exhibit listed a fact about what was constructed and how it was connected to the garden.  The placard also listed how many blocks (literally tens of thousands) were used in each exhibit and how many hours (think: hundreds) the builders took to complete each work.

This purple peony-- complete with a bumble bee--
was at least four feet across.

We were trying to figure out what kind of internal
structures were used to keep the Lego hummingbird
suspended above the yellow trumpet flower.

Workers used tens of thousands of Legos to build this magnificent peacock.

Even two gardeners and their wheelbarrow
were constructed of Legos! 

Once we came home from the gardens, we decided to get started on renovating the family room into our new laundry/ craft room.  Down came the crown molding, off came the baseboards, registers, outlet covers, and window coverings.

The dark family room awaits renewal.

We start the transformation.  The blue will work much better
for a laundry and craft room.

After Rick and I cut in around the edges of the room, he really started to transform it by rolling on our new light aqua coat of paint.  The color is Antiguan Sky, and the room definitely will need two coats of paint to cover the dark umber that has been on those walls for many, many years.

I think that I am going to love this room when we complete it.

I am pleased with the results so far.  The room looks larger, brighter, and more clean.  We needed a change, and this certainly is creating a new look for that corner of the house.  With the trees gone in the back, we will get more morning light in that room, too, so many elements are affecting the look of the room.  I hope it becomes a bright, welcoming place to not only do laundry, but also to create new items on the loom, on my sewing machine, and on my computer.  We have a long way to go yet, but if that room turns out as well as the laundry room at Gladys did, I will be very happy indeed.

Housing Horrors and Staying Put

As most of you know, we had a whirl-wind couple of weeks as soon as we arrived back in Wisconsin for the summer.  Our financial advisor told us we should look for a new house to better suit our interested and our needs, and he gave us the name of a good realtor on the Thursday after we were back in Wisconsin.  On Friday we contact that realtor, and she immediately started to send us listings of homes.  On Saturday, she took us to a private showing on a house in the neighborhood of our dreams.  On Sunday, we made and offer, and on Monday, the offer was accepted.  All was good... until the inspection report came back with failures in several areas.  Long story, short:  after $2400 worth of expenses, be backed out of the offer.

Our next step was to look at brand new homes, but we soon discovered that for prices almost beyond our means, those houses did not come with tiled bathrooms, granite countertops, six-panel solid oak doors, a huge kitchen, heated bathroom floors, Kohler fixtures, or triple-paned Pella windows.  We would have had to invest $20 - $30,000 just to bring those houses up to the standards we currently own.

Since the first-floor laundry was a huge consideration for moving, our next query was to learn how much putting a laundry addition on to the back of the house and enclosing our porch into a four-season room would cost.  The answer: way too much!  One contractor told us not to put that kind of money into this house in this neighborhood.  He suggested that we take one of our three bedrooms and convert one into a laundry room.  That idea did not appeal to us since we did not want to leave our daughters with a two-bedroom house to try to sell someday.

However, I did have another thought.  Traditionally, a first-floor laundry room is located next to the kitchen and near the garage, and we happened to have a den that fit that description perfectly.  Yes, we had to move the TV into the living room, but we are adjusting to that scenario well.  Also, the plumbing for the washer and the duct for the dryer both are located right below where we want to locate the units on the first floor.  Getting the laundry installed into that room will take both time and effort, but in the end this may be the perfect solution for our dilemma.

Since we decided to stay where we are, we have to face other problems and repairs in this house.  The first thing that had to go were the dangerously large and brittle trees in the back yard.  We had an art least 120 foot cottonwood that dominated the back yard.  While it has provided good shade all of these years, it also is old, brittle, and subject to killing us or our neighbors if it happened to fall in a storm.  We also had a very leaning cottonwood at the back of the property and a smaller ash tree on the property line that we wanted to take down.  That process started on Thursday of this past week.

This huge cottonwood dominates the back yard.

A worker in a boom truck cuts off the upper
branches on the smaller ash tree.

The cottonwood before...

during...

more during...

and after they finished "topping" the tree on
Friday.  They will return to remove the trunks
and the debris on Monday.

Lots of debris needs to be removed from the neighbor's yard and from our yard.

The trees did not come down as we expected.  First, they are taking more time than the owner of the tree service anticipated, and secondly, they are in our neighbor's yard as well as in our yard.  We are going to owe the neighbor some restitution for the damage to his clothesline and his garden.  In the end, though, we will be glad to have them all gone.