mid-week update

Sorry, no pics this time. I hope to get some soon. Meanwhile . . .
Jeremy has been hard at work on the electrical, hoping to schedule an inspector to come for the rough electrical on Friday or Monday. His evenings are spent rerouting wire, looking at the puzzle that comes when you are removing soffits (in terms of wire runs), and drilling holes through ceiling joists. It is turning into a house-wide project as he discovers where wires connect together.

Todd meanwhile has been busy under the house, shoring up posts that support the beam we now have in place of a load-bearing wall. His back will be extremely thankful when that work is over. His back suffered a bit of a relapse when he hefted more than his share of the cabinets when they arrived on Tuesday, but today he removed the old door from the garage into the kitchen and cut the hole that will house the new door from the garage into the mudroom.

We keep running into problems caused by substandard construction. The latest is the subfloor in the kitchen. We ripped up one layer of plywood last wekeend, intending to be able to lay bamboo floor this weekend, taking care of the squeaks by screwing down the remaining layer of ply. Well, the ply that is there, the original subfloor, is supposed to be tongue and groove plywood so as to reduce any movement. Fat chance. It is regular ply, butted together. No wonder we have serious squeaking. This, combined with a seriously unlevel floor, has us deciding between gallons of floor leveler (will do nothing for squeaks) or taking out the other layer of ply and replacing it with the real tongue and groove stuff AFTER spending time in the crawl space leveling the joists. In one other shake-your-head twist, the old entry door was put on backwards, leaving the outside open to easy credit-card style surreptitious lock picking. We will replace that for a model that opens the correct way!

But progress is being made! 1) The rats nest of wires is slowly disappearing from the old soffit area. 2) The old garage door is sheetrocked in, so we can begin to imagine life coming in another way. 3) Appliances are mostly ordered, with only the range hood to go on that front. 4) The cabinets are HERE!!! and they look wonderful. 5) We have an appointment to look at countertops tomorrow.

Hope to post pics of all that is getting accomplished over the weekend. For now, send good thoughts about wire and junction boxes to Jeremy, and send healing thoughts to Todd's back. Me, I just try to feed everyone and make sure there is enough coffee.

All the best to all,

Nica (for the crew)