Watcha doing?

[tango]

Fun with heat guns. Today's job was stripping paint from the trim that is going to go above the window. At some point in its history some genius decided to paint the beautiful wood white, and the paint got into all the nooks of the cut top.

With a heat gun I was able to get the vast majority of the paint off, although it left a rather nasty sticky goop on the wood. It's tricky to get it off because even the heat gun tends to melt it to the point it smears and it's not easy to cleanly remove it. So I tried some steel wool dipped in acetone, which helped a lot. Now my basement smells of acetone.

Tomorrow I'm going to have another session with the wood, looking to root out the bits of paint that sit in dimples in the wood. I may need to use a chemical stripper to get at them but I really hope not. Then I can take them upstairs to be stained and lacquered, and put them in place over the windows.

[IMINXTC]

Old man in the rock.

[tango]

My windows in one bedroom are more or less done. I still want to put a bit of trim under the windowsills to cover over the janky bits of drywall that aren't entirely smooth and flush. The next room will need some wood cut - what I took out is painted a nasty shade of bubblegum pink and frankly the wood that was painted isn't nice enough to bother trying to strip and sand it. So I'll use some red oak to get the nice grain pattern and accept it's new wood rather than old wood. I can put a nice edge on it, stain and lacquer it, and make new trim from scratch.

And in a twist I decided I don't have enough to do, so took on another project. My daughter needed a better place to live so my wife and I helped her secure a new home, but it needs some work. Nothing major, some paint, some trim and a bit of electrical updating. So I get to put my dad hat on and see to that too. At least this is something we can do a bit at a time rather than needing to rip entire rooms apart.

[Cloudwalker]

My windows in one bedroom are more or less done. I still want to put a bit of trim under the windowsills to cover over the janky bits of drywall that aren't entirely smooth and flush. The next room will need some wood cut - what I took out is painted a nasty shade of bubblegum pink and frankly the wood that was painted isn't nice enough to bother trying to strip and sand it. So I'll use some red oak to get the nice grain pattern and accept it's new wood rather than old wood. I can put a nice edge on it, stain and lacquer it, and make new trim from scratch.

And in a twist I decided I don't have enough to do, so took on another project. My daughter needed a better place to live so my wife and I helped her secure a new home, but it needs some work. Nothing major, some paint, some trim and a bit of electrical updating. So I get to put my dad hat on and see to that too. At least this is something we can do a bit at a time rather than needing to rip entire rooms apart.

Do try and get some sleep sometime.

[tango]

Today's fun job was running a cable from the basement to the attic in the new house. I managed to push a fish tape through the gap between the exterior brickwork and the inner wall, so today's fun involved hooking the end of the cable to the end of the fish tape and pulling it back up through the wall. Of course nothing is ever that easy, but we got there in the end. Now I've got a new piece of cable connected to the breaker panel, ready for a new socket in what will be my granddaughters' room. I've got new grounded cable run the length of that room and the adjacent room, but there's a section of old cable I can't pull through because it's stapled, so I'll need to run a cable under the floor rather than routing it via the lights. Then I can run it back across the two rooms and have nice new cable powering the whole of that section.

New cables are nice, they include handy features like ground wires. Along the way I'm also removing as many of the metal back boxes as I can and replacing them with slightly larger plastic ones. Firstly that gives me a little more space for outlet, and saves a little more space because they don't need to be grounded. A lot of the metal boxes have no space for a grounding screw, but I have a drill and tap so where I can't get rid of the box entirely I can still ground it.

In the meantime my daughter is packing boxes and throwing away stuff. Because I'm pulling things apart I can't have the grandchildren in the house just yet but can give her a key to the garage so she can start moving stuff rather than having to do it all at once.

And right now I'm sitting on my butt drinking a beer. I feel like I've earned it.

[Cloudwalker]

You make me tired just reading this.

[tango]

You make me tired just reading this.

I make me tired doing it, but it's a good tired knowing that my daughter and granddaughters will have a secure home.

Today was a bit more electrical work. I ran a cable under the floor from one eaves space to the other, cut a couple of holes in the wall to fit extra sockets (you can never have too many sockets) and found a couple of existing cables where I could use the old nasty cable to pull a nice new cable through. There's still a short section that doesn't want to play nicely - I don't know if it's stapled inside the wall or if I need to do a little more wiggling as I try and pull it through. I really want to get that short section replaced because if I can do that I can get a properly grounded cable into the attic space, which will be handy because at some point in the future I'd like to put ceiling fans up there.

I don't have lights in the space I'm working on because I had to kill the breaker, so when the daylight starts to fade I stop working. On a cloudy gloomy day like today it's surprising how the light can fade. In an ideal world I'd have the lights and sockets on different breakers but don't have time or resources to pull walls apart to get at cables, not least because my daughter wants to get on and get moved in.

Right now my legs ache and my arms ache. I think tomorrow might be at least mostly a day of rest, I don't know if I'll take the day off completely but probably won't be doing anything overly heavy.

[tango]

I took a day off from the new house yesterday. It was good. If a rest is good enough for God it's good enough for me too....

Today I was back at it, trying to trace a circuit that's something of a hot mess. Because I've got multiple cables twisted together in back boxes it's hard to know just what's what and my continuity tester was giving me strange results. In the end I figured I'd push boundaries a little, turned the circuit back on even with cables poking out all over the place, and went around the house with a voltmeter looking to see what was live. Then I joined some cables together to see what turned on and what turned off.

It was a tedious process but I've got a better handle on what I'm dealing with. One particular cable that has been confusing me stayed live throughout the entire process, so I think it's one that is twisted around another cable. I found which cable feeds a socket I'm keen to update, and have something of an idea which cable feeds the downstairs bedroom. With a long spade bit I think I can drill through the floor into the basement and run new cables, which will let me get rid of at least some of the existing cables. For now I'm going to have to leave some of the nasty old cable in place, but I can replace some of it a little bit at a time.

At this point I'm wondering if I'm going to need another roll of cable.

[IMINXTC]

Seems the natural settings of where I currently live are beautiful while the human population.couldn't be creepier.


Violence and corruption abound and are senseless.


Right here on Planet Earth.

[RabbiKnife]

Seems the natural settings of where I currently live are beautiful while the human population.couldn't be creepier.


Violence and corruption abound and are senseless.


Right here on Planet Earth.

Seems to be everywhere

[tango]

More wire pulling. With a long spade bit and an extension I can drill holes through the floor inside the wall cavity by poking my contraption down through the hole where the back box once was. So now I have some cables run between sockets under the floor and I can make at least some semblance of sense out of a truly bizarre wiring situation. For now I'm still going to have some slightly bizarre stuff going on, with one socket in one room on the same circuit as the light in the room but not the other sockets in the same room, but it's contained and known. And it beats having one single circuit with one bedroom, one socket, one light, one bathroom, one socket upstairs and the upstairs bathroom all on the same circuit. Because, you know, what could possibly go wrong when you're potentially running an air conditioner and two hairdryers on the same circuit?

Anyway, today's job is running some more cables to feed it all. My wife is out this morning and when she's back she gets to help feed cable.

[tango]

Now my roll of cable is almost entirely used up.

Today I ran cables from two rooms back to the breaker panel, tidied up a couple of other odds and ends, and then my wife helped me run cable from the breaker panel up through a wall into the attic. I had one cable there already but got to thinking I really want two rooms upstairs to be on separate breakers rather than having an entire floor on one breaker. I don't know if two hair dryers running at the same time is likely but it's certainly possible, so I ran a cable so two spaces can have separate circuits. It will also be handy if I ever decide to refinish the floor and want to operate a belt sander and a shop vac at the same time.

I wanted to wrap up the day with another cable run under the floor but found my remaining length of cable probably isn't long enough. And now thinking about it, it seems like a better idea to lift another piece of floor so I can make a shorter run anyway. So maybe my remaining length of cable will just about do the job. I'm going to need another roll of cable for future work, but that can wait a while.

I have a socket that I've managed to disconnect, and I'm not sure how. Perhaps when it's all reconnected it will mysteriously spring back to life, or perhaps I'll need to lift some more floor in dark corners to trace the cable and find something I can connect it to.

[tango]

I had to buy another roll of cable. I couldn't figure out a route under the floor where I wanted to go without my fish tape getting caught on stuff, so I accepted the inevitable and took a slightly longer route.

Yesterday and today I was fitting boxes and running cables, today I was joining things up. I'm dangerously close to having a room fully connected.

[RabbiKnife]

All I read was “ dangerously “…
 

[tango]

If you hear a loud bang from my general area you'll know what context I used the word