The good news is…we are done with electrical. DONE. Finally! The not so celebratory news is…well, we still have a lot of other work to do. Drywall is tentatively starting in the next week or so, which gives us limited time to get our electrical and framing inspections, insulate, install the drywall reglets and bead board at the vault and move a bunch of stuff out of the house.
1. On Monday, we celebrated Kyle’s 32nd birthday. Exhausted from the weekend before, we kept things pretty low-key.
I picked up cupcakes earlier that day and brought them to dinner with friends that night.
My caption for this one is, “Happy Birthday. Now get back to work!”.
Since both of our birthdays and our anniversary are in August/September (and since we’re directing most of our extra pennies towards the remodel) we decided to get each other things for the house. I saw this print on Jenn Ski’s site a while back and thought it was perfect for chezerbey. I love the colors, the graphics and maybe…someday soon, we’ll have the real Eames deal. I think the print would also look mighty fine on a steel ledge.
2. Sometime during the last month or two, we decided that we needed a new shower curtain rod. Our old one was the IKEA adjustable model, paired with simple stainless steel o-rings, which often had a tendency to catch on the rod. So after an extensive online search we found a Moen commercial rod that was a single length and had hidden fasteners and satin finish end caps. I also found ball-bearing rings in a satin finish (do you know how hard it is to find shower rings that aren’t chrome??). When the rod was finally delivered, we opened the box to find two satin finish end caps/brackets and one chrome finish rod. What? Annoyed that they made a mistake and I would have to return an odd-shaped item that came in a box about 10x too wide, I got back online and tracked down the specifications so I could figure out the right part number. And then I saw, “satin finish end caps with chrome rod”. Umm. Hmm. Whatever. It’s not that big of a deal.
3. Before the walls get insulated and covered up, we decided to install a couple runs of conduit from the basement up to the attic, just in case we need to run more wire in the future. You never know.
4. On Saturday, I went to IKEA and picked up 4 kitchen wall cabinets to use as part of our stair guard rail/storage cabinet (we chose the wall cabinets since they’re shallower). The boxes will sit on top of a 2×4 plinth (similar to what we did at the island) and will have shelves and doors with open shelving above and a wood wrap along the sides and top. The plan is to install 3/4″ plywood and then drywall the backside of this unit (since it will be an extension of the stair wall) so finishing the basic build out for this is on our pre-drywall to-do list.
We’re keeping the original jamb trim at the front door, but needed to come up with a simple detail to transition from the drywall to the jamb.
We also redid (for the 3rd time) the layout for the media components. The orange flexible non-metallic tubing will house the speaker wire and runs to the two speaker locations.
5. One of the things on our electrical odds and ends list was to install an outdoor light at the basement door. It’s the same light that we have at the front door and mud room. Simple and inexpensive.
Kyle also installed an outdoor outlet (which we had zero of) at the back of the house.
Since we’ll eventually have some type of deck out here with outdoor speakers, he also installed a speaker volume control. Our backyard doesn’t exactly exude ambience right now, but it will. Oh it will.
6. Since we don’t have a kitchen, I didn’t plant much in our veggie garden this summer. We do have 3 tomato plants that are just starting to turn. Ripen, little guys, ripen!
Dude, I know how you feel. (This is Bailey’s “baby”. He’s had a hard week too.)
And that’s what’s up at our house. We cannot wait for drywall to start! Not only will it give us a bit of a break (or at least allow us to scale back from our current frenzied state), but it’s going to radically change the feel of the space and put us that much closer to being done with this thing. Actually, what I’m really looking forward to is being able to mull over a different set of details – like artwork, area rugs, and which side of the couch the throw blanket looks better on.