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.

So... wanna buy a house?

No, not our house. Well, not our current house.

This one is on the market again.

Doesn't look like they've done much to it, aside from destroying the exterior with a whole bunch of ugly landscaping, and wasting a lot of perfectly good cedar turning the downstairs workshop into a laundry room. And given that what they're asking isn't a whole lot more than what they paid US for it, I don't think they're being motivated by any potential capital gains, if you know what I mean.

I'm tempted to go and take a tour if they have an open house, but the War Department has no interest in it at all. Something about preferring the memories over whatever travesty has been foisted upon it since we gave it up. Actually, I can see her point.

But anyway, I'm sure nobody comes here for updates on the old shed. You want to know what's up with the new digs, right? Well, we're mired in that unbelievably interminable stretch of paint, fill, sand, paint, fill, sand, sand, vacuum, beer, sand, fill, paint, etc. Which is a pretty accurate summary of doing the trim in the War Department's office/our new guest room.

I would give you a preview of what it looks like but a) it looks a lot like my office, only slightly bigger and slightly brighter, and b) I just painted the window sills and had to erect a cat barricade to keep the little bastards from jumping up onto the fresh paint:



And before some smart-ass (Dad) asks why I didn't just close the door to keep them out, it's because the door frame is also wet, and I haven't hung the door yet.

But the floor is done, the new curtains should arrive sometime this week (thanks, Mom!), the trim is almost, almost, almost finished, and with a little luck and some more work, we should be moving furniture in this weekend and getting our respective rooms together.

Oh, and speaking of flooring, we've got about 150 sq. ft. or so left of Elements by Kentwood Maple Saffron engineered hardwood flooring - anyone want some? Cheap?

Man, where did THAT month(s) (and a bit) go?

Seriously, what happened to the last two months? It seems like I just updated this thing yesterday, and then I look at the date and realize I've left all my reader(s) hanging for two months.

And then I go and drop a relatively short post on you anyway... Uh... sorry?

Where were we anyway? Looks like we had just put in the stove and started messing around with the outdoors. Well, the stove is pretty much the same (still sheer awesome), so why don't we get caught up on the garden then?

The also bad news is that I don't have much in the way of photo-editing software installed on this computer yet, so I can't do my usual before-and-after presentation, but I CAN post some pictures of how the yard looks now, and tell you how it got that way.

I should also take this opportunity to point out that the outside - pretty much all of it - is really the War Department's demesnes. I just do the heavy lifting and some of the less-precise chores, like mowing the lawn. She's the one with the landscaping background, and she also does NOT share my complete and abiding hatred of the outdoors. (Actually, it's not the outdoors I hate per se, but the creatures that inhabit it. Especially the wasps. Actually, specifically the wasps. I really hate wasps.)

Where was I?

Right, the wasps. I mean, the yard! The yard. Yeah.

Okay, I'm never going to get through this post without resorting to my second favorite method of presentation: the list!

Things we've done so far:

• Finished digging out the roots from the huge cedars we cut down at the front of the house; fixed the irrigation pipe I busted while digging out said roots; planted some heathers and rhododendrons instead; and covered the rest of the bed with bark mulch.
• Dug up the turf from the shallow spots on the lawn; filled in the shallow spots with topsoil; and reseeded the now-not-shallow spots.
• Removed the stupid-looking stones from around the front bed by the big rock; weeded out all the dandelions, foxglove, and primulas; planted some heathers, rhodos, and the azalea we rescued from the backyard; and covered it up with some decent soil and a top coat of bark mulch.
• Took out a strip of flower bed along the stone wall beside the sunroom; and reseeded it as lawn.
• Cut down a couple more cedars from along the side fence; yanked out some dead or decrepit plants that really weren't doing well there; planted a "Japanese Black Dragon" wysteria in their place (which I picked out solely because of the name, by the way); and it's still an ongoing project, so lots more to do along the fence there.

Oh, what the heck, here are the "before" shots of the yard:







And the "afters":











Here are all the stones from around the beds in the front yard, now carefully piled up on the stump where the dolphin fountain used to be (a VAST improvement if you ask me - both in terms of replacing that god-awful fountain, and in terms of moving the haphazard, random assortment of rocks from around the beds in the front):



We also...

• Built a mason bee box and put it on the side of the house. (Absolutely NONE of which was my idea, by the way. Bees, wasps, butterflies - all just brothers from different mothers if you ask me. Evil flying nasties that'll sting you as soon as look at you.) Anyway, it's kinda cute, eh?

• Made a nice home for a couple of passing ducks. Okay, so we didn't really do anything specific to attract them, they just showed up one morning and have been dropping by for visits fairly regularly ever since.

• And, lest I forget, I also drove all the way up to McBride to pick up a painting that, it turns out, didn't fit into my car. Fortunately, not only was the consolation prize a rather spectacular photograph:

But mon pere was gracious and awesome enough to drive all the way down FROM McBride the following week to personally deliver the original painting as well, which looks absolutely amazing and really helps to finish off the bear pit:



Anyway, we're currently working on Amy's office/the guest room, and I've already finished the floor, but it's late and I'm tired, and I'm sure everyone would rather I post again this weekend than waste EVERYTHING in one post now, right?

Right?

Hello? Anybody still reading this?


Bueller?

Sheer awesome

Man, I can't even tell you how much I've missed cooking with gas. I also can't even tell you how much of a piece of shit the old electric stove was - but I'm sure going to try!

So, the stove that Frank left us was probably original to the house. Which means it was installed in the middle of the 80s, and was not exactly pampered, if you know what I mean. For example, to set the clock, we had to hold down the "Clock" button, and then press and hold the up arrow until it reached the time we wanted. Simple enough - provided the clock button actually worked, which, of course, it didn't. I had to lean hard on the clock button and kind of roll my thumb around until it engaged, and then whale away on the up button until the time started to move, and hope that I got the time set before my thumb moved off the sweet spot.

And then there were the burners. Not one of the damn things was even close to level, which meant that pots and pans wouldn't sit flat on the burners. To heat up oil in a pan, for instance, we kept having to turn the handle of the pan to make sure we got an even heat. It also meant that using the wok was an exercise in frustration, as it wouldn't sit flat on the big burner, so we'd get hot spots in different places, depending on which direction the handle was facing.

Also, I had started to notice that things in the oven cooked faster on the right side, closer to the door. Which meant that every time I baked or roasted something, I had to turn the pan halfway through cooking to make sure I got an even cook.

But not anymore! The same guys that hooked up our gas fireplace came back last Wednesday and installed the new gas stove. (I took the old electric crap-pile up to Hartland on Saturday and drove away without a second glance. We would have sold it or given it away, but neither of us really felt comfortable having anyone we knew actually use the damn thing.)

Here's the most awesomest stove in the world, nestled tight up against our favorite Frank-artifact (Fartifact?), the What About Happiness label:



It looks a little different than our old friend, but it's pretty much the same model, just five years newer - and with more glowy lights!



And just to prove that we're using it to make awesome food, here it is baking my world-famous Panko-and-herb sockeye and rosemary potato wedges:



First time using the oven, and rest assured - it kicks ASS. Seriously awesome appliance.

Whew.

Well, after that, anything I post will be a let-down, I'm sure, but I do have some other progress to report, and it's pretty awesome, too.

I was out in the garage on Saturday, putting a cat flap in our bedroom door (that's for the next post, that one is), and my Crazy Neighbour™ came wandering over. Seems like his wife had gone out for the day and he was bored with sitting around the house. So he figured he'd come over and maybe do some work on our place for a while. (Seriously - I didn't ask him. He volunteered. Because, as I may have mentioned, he's crazy.) Well, he took one look at the big mess of concrete where the lamp standard used to be, and that was it: that thing was coming out.

So he brought over a whole mess of tools and started in on it. Well, I couldn't very well stand there and let a guy going through chemotherapy tackle such a big job on his own, so I put my project aside and went out to help.

Now, I realize the picture isn't all that impressive, but let me tell you: there was a full metric shit-ton of concrete underneath that light. It took the two of us the better part of an hour-and-a-half to get it out of the pit and we didn't even break any sprinkler pipes while doing it. When we did get the lump out of the hole, we had to beat it apart with a sledge-hammer to get it small enough to lift into a wheelbarrow. I put most of the rocks we knocked off back into the hole and threw some mud over it:



The pipe sticking out the side is the "conduit" (i.e., sprinkler pipe) that Frank used to run the electrical. And yes, it was FULL of water.

Anyway, emboldened by our success, we turned our attention to the second of the two stumps left when we removed the big cedars from the front of the house. I had actually got the first of the two out the weekend before.

Before:


After:


And yes, I DID break a sprinkler pipe while doing that, but given that there are THREE of them right there, I figure one out of three ain't too bad.

Anyway, we managed to get the bulk of the thing out yesterday, and I went back out and tidied it up this afternoon.

Before:


After:


After all, it's not like we could mow the lawn, given that it was RAINING AGAIN. Seriously - there has not been a single day this entire spring that we could call the relatives and Toronto and laugh at them. (Although, to everyone living in Calgary, I have to still say, HA HA!) We STILL haven't mowed the lawn this year.

Looks like hell, too, but what can we do?

Anyway, I've got more, but it's late, and I want to save a little for the next post. Who knows, maybe I'll post something in the middle of the week! Oooh! Tricky!

A little bit of catching up...

We're mired in that seemingly interminable process of painting, installing, filling, sanding, filling, sanding, painting, and painting the trim in my office, and none of it looks all that impressive. It also, as I may have intimated, takes FOREVER.

So I thought I'd use this post to catch up on a mixture of things that have been going on around the house and in the neighbourhood. Not really sure what I'll wind up including, but hey - you get what you pay for with this blog.

Let's get started, eh?


Timer switch



That little beauty is the awesomest invention ever. I know it just looks like a light switch with a clock in it, but check it out:



It glows! Hahahahahaha!

Uh... too excited? Yeah? Thought so...

Anyway, the point of that particular switch is that, here in the wilds of BC, the sun goes down awfully early in the day in the winter. This meant that the War Department was getting home from work in the dark, and trying to unlock the door in the already darkened doorway. We needed a way to make the outside lights come on before she got home - preferably a way that didn't involve leaving the damn things on all day, sucking up power.

Unfortunately, the outside lights are on a three-way switch (there's another switch for them inside the garage), and we really didn't want to start tearing out drywall and rewiring them for a timer or light sensor.

Fortunately, we found these on the inter-tubage, and what with the War Department's prowess as an electrician, we now have outside lights that come on automatically when the sun goes down - and yes, the switch calculates sundown for us, without the use of an exterior light sensor. It even compensated for Daylight Savings Time. Gotta be right up there in terms of the best 60 bucks we've spent on the place.

New Arrival
I had to transfer some money from one of my investment accounts to another, and some of it "accidentally" made its way into an entirely different account. One that promptly signed over the contents to Sears:



What's in the box, you ask?

One of these beauties:



No, you can't see the front yet. Not until it gets installed on Wednesday.

Finishing Up Old Chores AND This Week In Mayonnaise
Way back when, we fixed this monstrosity on the front wall of the living room. As I explained at the time, it was a piece of old extension cord spliced into an electrical wire that ran through sprinkler piping out through the wall, and underground to the lamp beside the driveway - the fake wrought-iron Canadian Tire special visible on the right side of this picture.

Anyway, we were out puttering around in the nice weather on Saturday (seriously - what the ever-lovin' Jebus is up with the weather this spring? It's almost April and we haven't even mowed our lawn yet! Sheesh!) and Amy asked if I thought I could just push the lamp over, and get it out of the way. Turns out it wasn't nearly strong enough to support the weight of the slab of concrete in which it was based, and the lamp snapped neatly in half. Which, I suppose, made it easier to carry into the garage where it will sit until our next trip to the recycling depot. Once that was out of the way, though, we took a closer look at the base:



Yeah - looks like the electrical was equally as crappy on both ends of that installation. It's not even outdoor wire - just regular old Romex. They just fed it right up through the form and poured the concrete over it. And then they set the lamp down into the concrete, essentially ensuring that the wire would ALWAYS be passing directly through whatever water had accumulated in the base.

Oh, and those little round marks around the outside of the footing? Coins. From the eighties. Oh, and I just KNOW you're wondering how (because "why?" would be unanswerable) the coins were attached to the concrete. Go ahead, ask me.



Mayonnaise, of course.

Finished!
Anyway, in the five days or so that it's taken me to get around to actually finishing this post... we finished the office! Whoo!











Of course, I can't actually use it as my office yet. See, we kinda need it as a spare bedroom and to store all the crap we've been storing in Amy's office.

Three guesses what the next project is, and the first two don't count....

An Anniversary
Before I go, I'm not sure how this affects what I'm sure are a number of various and varying pools and betting circles out there, but this was exactly a year ago today:



So there. Nyaaah!