Wednesday, May 23, 2007

Day 1 of 10

Day 1 of the 10 Day Challenge hit its first snag when at 5:10 PM we realized that neither one of us had taken dinner out of the van to put it in a workplace refrigerator. So we phoned in an order for pizza and picked that up on the way through town.

When we got to the house, we remembered that the dumpster was delivered that day, so now at the foot of the front steps is a giant orange beast of a container.

We ate pizza on the porch and looked at several paint chips, trying to narrow down our bathroom color options. We narrowed it down to a few different greens and a few different reds. As scheduled, we'll sleep on it and come back to them Wednesday.

We marked the sink cutout in the stone top for the vanity and carried it outside and set it up for cutting. I got started on it while Erika got started on the bedroom clean up.

The stone cut nicely, only a few spots of hard mineral deposits that would slow the cutting down to a halt for a few minutes before it resumed its butter-like passage around the oval. Using regular wood blades, 2 in total, the cutout was complete. We put the sink top on a piece of plywood and ushered it in and put it in place on the vanity. A perfect cut. We wiped it with a damp sponge to approximate the dark color that it will turn after we oil the stone, then dropped the sink basin in and placed the original backsplash and wow, it looks beautiful!





Erika got back to washing the bedroom walls and windows and I had a look at the splintered planks jutting out irregularly from under the kitchen floor into the space we created between the kitchen and bathroom (this will be the extended part of the kitchen eventually, where people can hang out while we cook for them!). These planks needed to be cut clean and somewhat square so that we can soon put down a "temporary" plywood subfloor. Pulled up the sole plate from the old wall that used to divide the area, adjusted the circular saw depth and cut away the plank ends. Easy. Swept and checked on Erika. Bedroom was looking good, and she wasn't far from being ready to put up the plastic ceiling in there.



I got side tracked and decided that I needed to fix up one of the kitchen circuits. This circuit has the back porch light and back yard spot light on it as well as a few kitchen outlets but we always leave it off because when we removed that partition wall we left a wire unconnected and hanging (it used to feed a switch that controlled a now obsolete hanging light). When we would turn that circuit on, you just had to be careful not to brush past the hanging live wire. I pulled the nearest receptacle, rewired and confirmed that I had deactivated it, and wired the receptacle back up and cut the old wire out of the wall. There's an open ground somewhere back up the circuit, but I'll find it another day. For now, at least we can keep that circuit on for outside light.

Plastic sheeting time. It was getting later into the night, not too late, but late enough that we started working quickly to get this up. Staple staple staple, slice with blade, staple staple staple, and it's up. Erika helped me get over some of the folds in the plastic, "it's a plastic ceiling," she reminded me. Ah yes, so it is.



We straightened up and were out by 10:30, goals for the first night of the challenge were accomplished!

- John

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