Fun with electricity

Well, it's story-time again here on everyone's favorite Broadmead-based renovation blog. The sunroom, which I was planning on writing about next, is becoming something of a saga here - a real saga, not a pseudo-saga like that bookcase nonsense I posted about last time. Let's just say that were I to relate ALL of the details (and I will - eventually) the sunroom saga might even fill THREE posts.

For now, however, I'd like to tell a story about how, despite all experience to the contrary, we can still occasionally be lulled into a false sense of complacency, and how nothing in this house is EVER easy.

For this particular story, I need to begin with - ironically enough - the sunroom. Better yet, we need to go all the way back to the last half of this old post, and the installation of the lights at the front of the garage for you to get the full idea...

Anyway, a few weeks ago (has it really been that long already? It has? Holy shnikies...), we were prepping the sunroom for the contractor to come and start fixing it. As usually happens, once we started taking things apart, we kept finding more things that needed to be fixed. When we opened up the wall beside the door on the greenhouse side of the sunroom, we found a light fixture near the top of the wall, and one of Frank's outdoor electrical specialties, the ever-popular "let's just run the electrical wire through an old, leaky piece of sprinkler pipe so we can get it out to the greenhouse" approach, near the bottom of the wall. While we were expecting the latter, what with previous experience and all, the former was a bit of a surprise in that, to all appearance, it seemed to be wired correctly.

Well, right up until we took a closer look at it, that is. Here's what the light looked like on the outside of the sunroom wall:

Funny thing about that (aside from the fact that it's attached to the wall with a BIG JESUS NAIL right through the fixture), is the apparent height of the mounting box. See, in that picture, the light is obviously mounted below the top of the sliding glass door. On the inside of the wall, however, the wire that was obviously supplying electricity to the fixture went through a small hole well above the top of the glass door. As we looked back and forth between the two sides of the wall, it became clear that the extraneous piece of wood on the outside of the wall was hiding... something we probably didn't want to see.

Of course, we first had to take a closer look at the fixture, and the weird and wonderful ways Frank found to attach things to ... other things. This picture shows the brass nut on one side of the fixture (which was the wrong fastener, btw - you can clearly see that it wouldn't screw down onto the bolt far enough to keep the fixture tight to the wall) and the nail someone drove right through the fixture - presumably to hold it to the board that's keeping the whole thing from being flush with the wall. Oh, and notice that the nut on the other side of the fixture did not match the one on this side... which you can only see because the light wasn't mounted at the right angle.

But wait! It gets worse!

No, really. It get worse. This is what it looked like after we took the light off the mounting bracket:

And this is what we found behind the board nailed to the wall:

Um... yeah. That IS speaker wire. I mean, it's an exterior light - it's not like anyone is ever going to CHECK it.

Anyway, as Bill Cosby might say, I told you that story so I could tell you another one.

The point of all this is that, after the lights on the front of the garage, and the light on the side of the sunroom, we felt pretty confident that we could handle pretty much anything in terms of the electrical stuff going on in this house. So when it came time to do something about the motion sensor light on the side of the garage, we went into the project expecting the worst. Which of course, is not at all what we found...

The underlying issue with the light on the side of the garage is that it... well, didn't actually work. We knew the motion sensor part of it was at least registering movement because every now and again, I'd hear it click as I walked past it. The lights, on the other hand, remained stubbornly dark.But it seemed like a logical place for a motion sensor light, and with the days getting shorter, we figured it might not be a bad idea to at least see if we could get it working.

Well, the first thing I noticed was that both of the bulbs seemed to be loose. Like, probably not actually burnt out, just not screwed in tight enough. But I took them out anyway to get a closer look at the light. It SEEMED to be in pretty good working order, and I was testing the range of the motion sensor arm to try and aim it down towards the walkway when it snapped right off in my hand. I guess the plastic was a little brittle from being exposed to the elements for so long, but still. With repurposing the light now out of the question, I took off the rest of the light and found, to my utter shock and ever-lasting surprise, a properly wired light fixture with a pancake box set into the stucco and fastened securely to the plywood backing board behind it. The wire that fed the box wasn't pinched in the hole, it wasn't SPEAKER wire, and in fact, seemed to have been installed by a qualified electrician. "Will wonders never cease?" I thought. "Just when you think you have this house figured out, they throw something done RIGHT at me. Shame I had to break the damn thing, eh?"

Anyway, off we hied to Crappy Tire and bought ourselves a new light fixture. Daylight sensor, adjustable motion range and light duration, the works. We brought it back, unpacked it, and the War Department went up the ladder and wired it up. Once she was done, I went up and carefully attached it to the mounting box. I tightened up the screw so it was good and snug, popped in a couple of bulbs, and Amy flipped the breaker.

POP!

"Huh," she said. "I've never seen blue flame shoot out of the top of an electrical panel like that."

So, yeah. Turns out that the pancake boxes are somewhat problematic in that when you have a long mounting screw right in the center of the fixture (as we did), it tends to line up directly with the wires being fed into the box from behind. Okay, so we need a new box. And, as it turns out, more wire. It seems that when they wired the original pancake box, they didn't leave any extra in the wall in case this sort of thing happened. Luckily for us, the wire was easy enough to trace because they had actually fed the wire out into the garage, and run it down the face of the drywall rather than inside the wall cavity.

So, to fix MY mistake, we had to retrace the wire back to the outlet set in the wall of the garage;

• Open up the drywall at the socket box on the inside of the garage.
• Feed the wire up through the inside wall cavity to the light fixture.
• Drill a 4.5" hole in the plywood backing.
• Cut open the drywall in the garage to access the back of the box.
• Rewire both the outlet and the new box.
• CAREFULLY reattach the light.

Oh, and of course, we didn't have enough wire OR a spare outlet box, so there was (yet) another trip to Home Despot in there somewhere, too.

Looks pretty good, now, though:

The moral of the story?

Oh, jebus. I don't know. We don't do morals much around here. Swearing, though - THAT we got covered.

The Saga of the Bookcase

Fair warning: this really isn't a saga. I admit nothing and promise less. (But you should all be used to that by now...)

Anyway, as I've mentioned before, the War Department's office is also our guest room (as our friend from Toronto* found out over the Labor Day weekend). This means that in addition to her desk and files and whatnot, the War Department has to share the room with a rather large bed. There are also two large windows and a closet - meaning there is precious little floor space against the walls she can use to put a bookcase or even a chair. As a matter of fact, there aren't even that many walls on which to hang pictures or artwork.

The solution was to find a bookcase to hang on the wall beside the bed to give her a little extra storage and display space. The problem with the solution (oh, you knew this was coming) is that bookcases just simply don't come in the precise dimensions we wanted. Which meant that, if we wanted something that was nice and would fit where we wanted it to go, we would have to build it ourselves.

Fortunately, I actually have built bookcases (well, one) before, so once we had the overall size of the thing figured out, it was off to Home Despot to pick up the lumber.

Now, I COULD (and probably should) bore the crap out of you with all the little details about making the bookcase. In fact, maybe I will. After all, making it was something of an endurance test for me, so why shouldn't reading about it be just as much of an endurance test for you, hmm? Only without the distinct possibility of sawing off one of your fingertips on the table saw. Unless, you know, you were trying to stay awake.

Right, so, as always, the issues started with buying materials. In fact, there were several mistakes made when selecting the materials. First, I bought the wrong plywood. No seriously. I mean, I blame the War Department, at least partially, because she was with me and didn't notice that we were buying good-one-side plywood, rather than the good-two-sides that we actually needed. Not that it was THAT big a deal, really, it just meant more sanding, but what really compounded the mistake was buying twice as much as we actually needed. (Looks like I'll be building another bookcase at some point, I guess.)

Anyway, along with the plywood we bought some trim to finish off the face of the bookcase to hide the edges of the plywood. We bought the right stuff, at least... and too much of it. (So I guess the next bookcase will likely have the same trim? Yeah. That's it.) Again, I blame Amy - she knows I'm not so good at math.

Then we took all the materials home, put them in the garage, and left them there for a couple of weeks. You know, to acclimatize. Or something.

When I finally got off my ass long enough to get started, I drew a careful diagram of the pieces I'd need, realized we'd bought too much plywood, swore, and then set about marking out the pieces on the plywood. I made all my markings, set up the fence for the circular saw, double-checked the width of the saw guide, locked everything down, and cut the first piece (the largest piece) approximately 3/32 of an inch too short.

When I finished swearing, I double-checked to make sure the War Department hadn't heard me, and quickly checked all my other measurements to make sure that it would all still work. Fortunately, I had cut it too short - too long, and I would have had to start over with the back-up piece of plywood. So, good thing we had it, right? Right?

Anyway, the rest of the cuts went okay, although I had a devil of a time figuring out the placement of the shelves and had to measure everything about eight times before I got it right. You see, the design called for a 3-foot by 6-foot unit, 7 inches deep, with 9 little cubby holes. I really wanted everything to line up nicely, but because I had cut the first pieces too short, I had to recalculate the placement of the center shelves. (Heh, the best part is that I don't think Amy actually knows any of this yet. She thinks the shelf is 6" x 3", but it's actually closer to 71 5/8" by 35 7/8". Hee hee!)

Then I got to start putting it together:

Once the initial pieces were good and bonded, I could start adding trim:

And yes, the trim overlaps on the bottom of the bookcase so you can slide books off the shelves without having to lift them, It also helps to conceal the wood we attached to the wall to help hold the whole thing in place. I also added edge trim to cover up the faces of the interior shelves. Which, of course, was slightly bigger than the plywood and thus had to be sanded down.

Somehow I completely failed to take a picture of the sanding and painting process. Which is particularly weird considering how unbelievable tedious and lengthy the process was. I had to sand the whole thing with three grits of sandpaper, fill the holes, sand again, prime, sand the grain down again, fill the cracks and holes I missed the first time, sand again, paint, sand the grain down again, and then paint AGAIN. And then, of course, we had to figure out how to attach it to the wall.

But, and I say this with all due humility, I think it looks pretty damn good:

Yes, we probably overdid it with the brackets, but there will be people sleeping there some day. And not just friends from Toronto, damn it. People we actually like.**


*Hi Gillian!

** I kid. Gill's the absolute bomb, and the best house guest you could ask for. Seriously - I'll send her over. You'll like her. She's awesome.

Fumbling towards fall

Well, we FINALLY seem to have gotten some decent summer weather here on the Wet Coast. Of course, it's September, but who's counting? I'm going to go ahead and use that as an excuse as to why I haven't posted in six months (or however long it's been - I'm too hot and lazy to go check).

Actually, now that I think on it a little, that's exactly why I haven't posted in so long. Not the good weather, I mean, just that I am hot and lazy.

Mostly lazy.

Anyway, just because I haven't posted doesn't mean we haven't been busy. We just haven't done a LOT of work on the house - aside from gardening, lawn mowing, cleaning up cat puke... you know, the usual. I still haven't set up my office beyond getting my desk in and my computer working (read above re: hot and lazy), but the War Department's office is looking really good - one more thing to put up that will be the subject of its own post, I'm sure - and the garage is a little more organized than it was. We even found time to clamber up the side of Mt. Doug with a friend from Toronto one particularly fine afternoon:

We also made these, which was fun:

Tasty, too.

Anyway, nobody comes here to read about our cooking (and if you do, you're probably going to be disappointed when you ask me to post recipes and then I never get around to it because, well, hot and lazy, remember?) so let's get to the meat of the post, shall we? The end of summer means that we are running out of time to do something about the horrendous state of our sunroom and get it all buttoned up before the rain comes back. (In case you forgot about the sunroom, check it out here.) Fortunately, Mike - the guy who installed our floors - has recovered from a recent bout of cancer (wish I was kidding, but hey - he's doing really well now) and was looking for some minor projects to get back into the swing of things.

As an aside, can I just say how utterly tickled I was to hear that he thought rebuilding our sunroom - something that would take us an absolute minimum of six months to do ourselves - was a minor project? No? Well, never mind, then.

Our part of the deal was that we would be doing the demo work ourselves, along with the eventual refinishing of the inside, including drywall (Joy!), paint, trim, and tiling the floor. With the windows coming in supposedly this week, it was time we got back to work and started taking out the crap.

This crap:

Yes, we've been using the sunroom as something of a storage room / project staging area. It just seems to be the place where all the stuff winds up that doesn't REALLY belong inside, but probably shouldn't get rained on. Before we could find places to store all that stuff, I had to finish ANOTHER project I was working on that was taking up most of the garage:

And before I could even START that project, I had to finish this other one.

Maybe it might be easier to just tackle these in order, eh? Matter of fact, there's probably just too much for one post, so maybe I'll just pick one topic for this one, and do up another post for the next one? Who knows, maybe it might even force me to post more often, right? Is this too many question marks for one paragraph?

Okay, forget the sunroom, forget the other project, let's back up the train and start over. Man, this being lazy thing just leads to a whole lot more extra work, doesn't it? Makes me wish I'd listened to what my mother told me all those years ago. ("What was that?" "I don't know - I wasn't listening.")

Right, so, I mentioned a while back (I think I did - I went looking for the post and wound up editing six others and forgetting what I was looking for so you'll just have to find it yourself) that we had these windows in the upstairs hall that let in all this light in the morning. Given the angle of the windows and the positioning of our bedroom, the light streams right into our bedroom door. In the winter, it's not so bad, but at certain times of the year, that light starts streaming in right around six in the morning which is too damn early - especially if it's the weekend and you're trying to sleep in. Not that we EVER sleep in. much.

Now NORMAL people could just close their bedroom door at night, but NORMAL people don't have whiny-ass cats that howl if they're deprived of our company for more than five minutes while we're at home. Of course, we could also come up with a system of curtains to block off those windows, but they're impossible to get to, and I have no idea how to rig up a system that would allow us to open and close the curtains (without use of a remote control, which would be AWESOME) once we did install them.

Anyway, our solution to this was, I believe, not only ingenious, but a pretty clear example of what sets us apart from NORMAL people.

Here are the windows in question, coincidentally enough, at about 7:30am one fine Saturday morning.

And here is not only a perfect example of the light cutting right across our bedroom door, but also the solution.

Yes, we installed a cat door in our bedroom door. We liked the solution so much, we put one in the War Department's office, too.

Anyway, it's taken me so long to get around to finishing this post that the September weather has turned cloudy and grey, and I'm not nearly so hot anymore. Still pretty damn lazy, though, so that's all for now. Tune in later this week for the saga of the bookcase!

It might be Broadmead, but it's still Victoria

It turns out that this neighborhood of ours, as awesomely fantastic as it is, isn't quite so far removed from the rest of this city as you might think. Oh, sure, we're perched up on the sunny side of Broadmead, with a view of Mount Doug and the Blenkinsop Valley. We've got a Garry Oak in the backyard and a few resident wildlife species:



On any given day, more people pass our house while walking their dogs than they do driving in their cars, and the neighbors have all, to a soul, been wonderful.

But it's still Victoria. Case in point:

We finally finished the War Department's office, which looks spectacular, thanks to all our hard work and some fantastic seamstressnessing (totally a real word) on the curtains by my mom:





Looks awesome, eh? Here they are closed, so you can revel in the majesty;



Anyway, finishing the office meant we could finally start moving stuff out of the garage, and putting it in the rooms it was all supposed to inhabit. Fortunately, nothing else had been damaged beyond repair by the mice (leave it to those little bastards to destroy the most expensive thing in the garage) and we got the last of our furniture out. This left nothing in the garage except tools, proper garage stuff, and a whole schwack of things that we wanted to get rid of anyway, but couldn't actually get to with all the other crap in the way. For example, this thing:





That's a canoe with a large, ugly patch, several small holes, and a completely rotten keel. (It also may or may not have smelled strongly of mouse pee. Maybe.) We were originally going to try to get it fixed, but the guy who was going to fix it inexplicably disappeared. Like, not answering his phone, and he doesn't appear to live/work at the address he gave us. Which, again, if you've ever tried to hire a contractor in Victoria, isn't actually all THAT uncommon in this town...

At any rate, the War Department finally decided that storing the damn thing in the (probably vain) hope that we'd eventually find someone who could fix it for less than the cost of a new one was, well, hopeless. We picked a fine Saturday morning, and started hauling all the stuff out of the garage and stacking it in the driveway so we could clean it off, identify the stuff we wanted to get rid off, and reorganize the remainder.

As it so happens, that particular Saturday happened to be the day that our neighbors two doors down decided to have a garage sale. This proved something of a distraction when I had to inform an elderly couple picking over our old hockey sticks, paddles, and a roll of carpet underlay that we weren't actually selling anything. To reduce the amount of embarrassment this misunderstanding could cause, I made up a sign that said "NOT a garage sale - sorry!" and, after holding it up to ward off another couple that had stopped their car in front of the house, propped it up at the end of the driveway.

It was right about then that it occurred to us that maybe we could take advantage of the garage sale's proximity and the increased traffic to get rid of a few things and save ourselves the trouble of loading up the truck. After all, in the old house, we had often disposed of unwanted furniture and electronics by simply putting it out on the curb with a "Free" sign attached.It's actually something of a local and well-known tradition in Victoria. Hell, before Amy and I moved in together, she got rid of a hideous, orange plaid couch using this exact method. A hideous, orange plaid PULL-OUT couch that smelled like cat pee. Students - what are you gonna do?

Anyway, we decided to test our luck, and dragged the canoe down to the end of the driveway, positioning it between the Not a Garage Sale sign and the end of the driveway. I stuck a free sign on it, and went back to organizing the garage.

Now, before I say anything else, let me say this: I am not going to use any hyperbole, exaggeration, or overstatement. This is absolutely, positively, 100% true:

The canoe was gone - GONE - in less than twenty minutes. I didn't even have to help load it.

This town, I swear.