I purchased a house at the end of September.  It is a craftsman style bungalow that needs a lot of work.  The first few weeks were full of removing trim and adding outlets.  I started a weekly newletter to go out to friends and family about my progress. I am just starting week nine and I am still up to my eyeballs in work.  But here is week 3:

Week 3

House Rules:

1.       Do not impale yourself (or anyone else)

2.       You choose to not wear safety glasses at your own risk

3.       Do not use the kitchen sink, use the one in the first floor bathroom

Thursday: a constant battle of saying, one more outlet (see picture above of an outlet box put in).  There was a phone jack in the dining room so that seemed like an obvious place, I got the hole cut and figured out which cord it was in the basement but I thought that I needed to increase the hole size to get the wire through so I went back to scraping floors.  (as I type about scrapping floors my hand cringes and stops working normally.)

Friday: Dad came into town, we grabbed dinner at a local (walkable) Mexican restaurant.  Looked at the progress on the house and how to put another outlet in the living room which lead us to the basement:

To my horror in the basement there was a centipede (which are a common occurrance in the area). So dad took care of it, and gave in a burial at sea (toilet) while I stayed in the basement.  To my almost equal horror the toilet leaks, which lead to rule number 4, do not use the down stairs bathroom.

Once I regained my composure (and stopped staring sadly at the toilet waste pipe), we were back to the ‘one more outlet’ and the man cave ceiling being in the way of seeing how previous lines were run.

We looked at bedroom 3 and the light fixture, to my delight the wires in the light switch box are connected to the light fixture, when we went to unwrap them the lights flickered, yay!

Then went to the grocery store.  Joe was out of town this week on business in Hawaii, so dad was able to sleep in a bed.

Saturday Morning(one more outlet): we worked on removing the rest of the man cave ceiling so that we could see hole the door bell and maybe light switch work, but based on how Jason had overlapped the ceiling boards we had to start at the opposite side of the one we wanted to access. Getting the ceiling down took a while but luckily the only thing that damaged in removing it was a pipe that goes to the spigot outside which started to leak, very slowly, and I tried to seal it with joint component. But the doorbell wires run through the cement blocks so that option is out.

There is a light switch that up until this point did nothing that we could drop a wire down to an outlet in the living room on the north wall. So we started looking at the switch and the porch light and the light possibility in the living room.  The porch light was easy, it was the extended fixture that was broken and once we removed that the light switch worked to turn on the porch light. It also appears that we will be able to switch the power to the light fixture, the diagram is drawn on a napkin from lunch.

With the last two currently installed electrical questions answered we went to the home depot searching for slow grow spray foam insulation. As it turns out home depot doesn’t sell it and you can only buy it on week days, which concerned me that this is not a project for DIYers.  But most DIYer probably don’t want to drill 6 holes in between each stud to inject the stuff- so that would set me out of the usual range of DIYers. And I am an engineer which automatically means that I can appear confident about things that I know very little about. And it looks like fun, unlike searching for studs in a lathe and plaster wall.

So Saturday afternoon we buttoned up more electrical stuff, wiring outlet and the like.  Dad got more of the man cave lights working, he found some records in the ceiling (the best treasure yet).  John would like the man cave to be a workout room, Andrew claims he wants a model train set in there, Bryna and I would like it to be a work shop with our tools. Jim and Cheryl said ‘oh, this is going to be a Bounder house.’ (Bounder is the Sydey 36’ that they own and we all sail on)

Sunday: Andrew installed blue outlet boxes, Bryna scraped and looked for studs in the walls after I had given up, Les cam down and made a landing/box for the attic, Dad and I removed carpet and then I started scraping at the yellow paint in the kitchen because it was a nice day and we could open windows. Somewhere in the fumes of goof off the day passed very quickly.  The window is not even close to done, it just looks distressed.  But the garage door now opens with the press of a button and the lights in the man cave all work and there is a support beam in the basement.  Scott came over too and signed up to help with all of the plumbing projects, hopefully we will find the time to do these things. He was very annoyed with rules 3, 4 and 5.

Rule 5: after dinner use your napkin to clean your plate because I have to cart the dishes back to the place on 53^rd because of rule 3.

All of the carpet is gone.  We are 88% done with scraping off the brown stuff.  We scraped after dinner and once John got there he was the staple guy, so when a scrapper would find a staple we would yell ‘staple’ (or ‘gold’) and John would come remove the staple.