Quick update...

Roof is finished! Now we will not have rain on our heads. They did a great job.

Finally uprooted the evil rhododendrons. Man those things are hard to get out of the ground. My cool across the street neighbor let me borrow an axe. I axed all around them, in some places I actually had to wiggle the axe quite a bit to dislodge it from the roots. Once that was done, much digging and some skillful pick wielding by Tina later they were all up.

The neighbor asked what I wanted the axe for. I said "Well, Tina really pissed me off today." Without missing a beat, he said "And it's her time, huh?"
Cool neighbor. :)

We went out and bought a ceiling fan to put in the master bedroom. Tina and I believe that with the exception of a few days a year, the tiny AC unit downstairs combined with a ceiling fan in our room should be sufficient to keep the house a bearable temperature. Could never say that in Florida. ;)

We took down the old fixture in the bedroom (a very old but very ugly 4 light ceiling lamp) and cut all the wires connecting it (after killing the power at the breaker box, duh!). At about that time we realized that this is one of the dreaded fixtures powered entirely by knob and tube. So now we have no light fixture AND no ceiling fan. (For anyone wondering, we HAD to cut the wires to even get the fixture down to see that there was knob and tube behind it.)

I plan to do some reverse fishing-fu and tie good wiring to the bad wiring and find the connection in the attic and then pull the shit through. I hope this will work and we can just attach the correct wiring with ground and be done with it, at least temporarily. We also learned that most of the fixtures in the ceilings of the house are on the same circuit. Upstairs AND down! Interesting mess of wiring. I'm pretty sure this isn't standard procedure. This is going to be quite a chore to fix.

Other than that, I took the psuedo shutters that Joanie hated off of the house. Quick and painless, and then I patched all of the boo-boos with wood filler.

Oh, and we finally got the wireless up and running! I'm writing this post sitting outside on the porch. It's 69 degrees outside and partly cloudy. I love this place!!!

That's about all I can think of to post for now. Next on the agenda is finishing up laying the flooring, ripping down the storage room to uncover the back porch and door (which has to wait until we buy a new lock) and replacing all of the outlets outside. There are currently three outlets outside that are all technically inside outlets, just on the outside of the house. And two of them don't even have roofs above them.

Construction codes? Bah! To hell with them! No waterproof outlets for us, thanks!

posted by Unknown @ Monday, July 03, 2006