Remodeling Continues

The sun will come up in a few more hours. Not too long after that happens my parents will start the long drive from Salt Lake City to Virginia. They'll be here 20 days to help me remodel the basement.

My mud and tape guy will finish the basement walls about two days before they get here. I've taken off the outlet plates and taped up the plugs and torn the old door casing and baseboard molding off the walls. I even ran Ethernet cables through the walls and false ceiling and into each bedroom for when we get fiber internet in March.

After the mud and tape guy sands everything down I'm going to mask everything off and we'll be ready to paint. Mom and Dad are going to help.

As soon as the paint is dry we'll get rid of the old carpet and put in the hardwood flooring the seller left for us, then replace the doors, door casing, and baseboards.

I don't know how long any of this will take. We might be finished with the work halfway through their visit or we might be finished with their visit halfway through the work. If everything goes right I'm guessing two days to paint, a day to rip out the old carpet, four or five to lay down the new flooring, one more to hang the doors, then another two for the baseboards and door casing.

But nothing ever goes right.

* * *

I spent yesterday in the attic running a new light fixture into the stairwell. It was a tricky job because almost every wire in the attic is already on a switch leg. I wanted to run a motion sensor switch for the stairwell light. I figured if someone is carrying a laundry basket up and down the stairs they won't want to be reaching for a light switch while their hands are full.

The only source of always on electricity I could reach from the attic was a power outlet on the fireplace face so I tapped into that, ran some zip wire from there to the top of the stairwell, dropped a motion sensor switch into the ceiling, then ran the wire to the center of the stairwell and dropped a light fixture. I was taking pictures of the wires every step of the way, zooming in to see which wire I had in my hand, the hot or the neutral. I wrapped a piece of masking tape around the hot wires to make them distinguishable by feel.

I can't read a tape measure anymore but I was still able to lock it into place and use it that way to make sure the light fixture and the motion sensor were both centered in the stairwell. When you really think about it most electrical work is done in the dark anyway so my blindness didn't slow me down all that much.

Once I had everything perfect I flipped the breaker back on - and nothing. Turns out I had the red and green wires coming out of the motion sensor wrong. Flipped them around and voila!

Somehow I lost my drill in the attic. I must have set it down for a moment and it disappeared into the blown insulation. I went back up there twice to feel around for it but I couldn't find it anywhere. It's an old drill and kinda underpowered so it wouldn't be a big loss if I didn't need it to install the new doors.

* * *

Mom says her car isn't able to hold everything she wants to bring. She's bringing me towels, pots and pans, all kinds of food, and a million other things only a mom would think of. Mom's gonna mom.

Dad seems excited about the work. In a way he and I are in the same situation - a lifetime of accumulated knowledge and skills but no opportunities to put any of it to good use. I've mentioned in an earlier blog how great it feels to be doing something this big and important again. Retirement has it's perks but so does pouring your efforts into something meaningful and seeing the fruits of your labors take shape.

* * *

The two hardest things I've done so far have been the stairwell light and the Ethernet cables.

I called up the fiber internet company before I moved here and asked if service was available yet. It won't be until March. That's when I realized I had the opportunity to run Cat 6 cables into all the rooms to prepare for it so I asked where the fiber optic cables would enter the house. They said it would enter in at the same place the existing internet service does, the main difference being the existing service uses coax cable to reach the router but the fiber service uses Cat 6 Ethernet cables.

I ran a Cat 6 through the ceiling from the point of entry to an unfinished wall then ran three more cables from that wall into the three bedrooms. We have a false ceiling downstairs so it wasn't too hard until I got to the garage. How could I get the cables into the two upstairs bedrooms above the garage?

The two upstairs rooms have a bathroom between them. I ended up fishing the wires under the bathtub and into the walls from there. It might not sound like much but I was really proud of that solution because I didn't have to cut out any of the upstairs drywall to connect everything. I just cut a hole the size of a single gang electrical box, extended my tape measure into it, hooked onto the Cat 6 cable, drew it through the wall, then put a box and a plate cover into the wall.

I sent my mom pictures of the Cat 6 cables along with captions like "through the ceiling", "down the wall", and "through the chase." I took a picture of the final wall plate and captioned it "Nothing but net!" My kids are too young to get the reference but my parents remembered.

* * *

I'm hurting today. I thought I was getting enough stretching and exercise but that attic kicked my ass. I'm coughing up fiberglass insulation and my back and legs are hurting from all the contortions necessary to work in such a confined space. I had to keep my weight on the rafters up there - if I got off them I would have fallen right through the drywall and into the stairwell twelve feet below. Sometimes it felt like playing Twister up there, right foot on this rafter, left hand on that one, tape measure between my teeth, taking pictures with the same hand that's holding the drill.

I had to wash the fiberglass insulation off all my clothes so I couldn't even soak my aches and pains away in the bathtub. The bathtub is my wash tub and the wet clothes drip dry from a curtain rod above it.

I don't even want to make breakfast because I don't want to walk up the stairs to the kitchen.

Still, despite all the complaining, this has been fantastic. I haven't felt a sense of accomplishment like this since before I went blind and I'm loving it. It will be great to share this experience with Mom and Dad when they get here.