Ho-Ho-Home

As yet another illusory deadline sails past us like a rotted log floating by during a canoe trip, it's beginning to look a lot like Christmas as the new target completion date. Not including the garage, of course (more later). Although, I must admit that in spite of Thanksgiving week consisting of only three work days, an awful lot was accomplished.

On Monday, the plumbers, electricians, carpenters, painters and tile guy were all on site. All of the kitchen appliances and the sink were installed, and the electric outlets and lights were all hooked up. The base molding was finished, the living room and foyer painted along with the basement walls being touched up, and the tile backsplash in the kitchen was grouted and complete. On Tuesday, the family room, kitchen and upstairs hall were all painted and the basement carpeting installed, and on Wednesday the house was cleaned - pretty much - by the contractor's guys who also moved the furniture out of the trailer and back into the living, dining and family rooms. The garage was cleaned out, with all that stuff being moved into the now-almost-empty trailer. I stayed home, and thus began a five-day campaign to get the house looking as livable as possible by the end of the holiday weekend, by arranging furniture, hanging pictures, setting up lamps - whatever.

Also on Wednesday Sparky stopped by to put the recessed light trims in the kitchen and install the bulbs, now that the ceiling had been painted. That night, five of the bulbs in the 11 fixtures popped at various times during the evening. And when Shaw plugged the new TV into one of the electric outlets near the kitchen counter, nothing happened. At all. It wasn't the TV, so clearly there was some sort of electrical problem. As we were going to be out for several hours on Thursday, I called our contractor on Thanksgiving morning with some concern. I told him what was going on and he said he'd call right back. About three minutes later Sparky called and I explained the situation about the popping bulbs and my fear of a possible short-circuit. He told me that it must be a defective batch of bulbs, and said that if there was a short they would all pop and a breaker would trip. Okay, that sounds plausible.

When I told him about the dead outlet, he told me that particular outlet is connected to a GFI across the room (that's one of those rectangular outlets you see in kitchens and bathrooms - anywhere near water - with a little reset button on it). Sparky asked if the GFI's green light was on - I said no. He told me to push the reset button, I did, and the light came on. Then he said we should try the dead outline again, and lo and behold it worked. End of crises. About 30 minutes later the contractor called back to see if everything had been taken care of. And all of this was on Thanksgiving morning. Which is one of the many reasons why, despite the relative lack of speed and some shall we say quirky contractors, we'd use this company again any day.

Now, about that garage. As I've probably mentioned, ours has no interior walls or ceiling - just the framing and exterior sheathing. Apparently that was code back in 1961. We'd included finishing the garage in the original plans, but as we knew the space would be needed for storage and work prep during the bulk of the project, this piece would be left for last. Now that the rest of the house is all but complete I thought we'd start on the garage, but our contractor suggested that we wait until we have the final inspection for the house. This way, the inspectors can give their much sought-after approval, and then we can do the garage work without having any of the problems we ran into with the basement when we were told we needed revised plans from the architect.

Now that's a plan.