Fighting with fishtapes

I did not make todays goal but I did have some progress I mounted the box for the ceiling light and ran wire to it and ran wire across the room to the outlet. Didn't get the outlet wire down to the box the fishtape and I had a falling out.


As I was attempting to let out more tape the tape began forming a loop outside of it's plastic enclosure. I was pretty exhausted and hot at this point and was not thinking clearly so I decided the best way to get it back in was to open the plastic enclosure and take out all of the tape and I could put it back in there properly. Turns out not such a good plan. We are strongly leaning towards just tossing the current tape out... it's so long I don't know how we'll ever get it untangled and back into the enclosure.

In the meantime I ordered these

Actually I ordered the slightly longer glow in the dark version but close enough I'm thinking these will be easier for me to handle. The tape was so large and unruly.

Tomorrow I will be taking a vacation from wiring to catch up on laundry and regain my sanity

The best layed plans

Last year as we were trying to balance both the office and the bedroom project we made a promise to each other that from now on we would work on one room at a time finish that room and move onto the next. As my dad and I tore out the bathroom ceiling Friday I thought of this and laughed. Sometimes it seems the house has other plans for us.

Friday we got the drop ceiling down, the plaster ceiling down, and the plaster off of the wall containing the plumbing runs to the upstairs and then hauled 268 lbs of plaster to the dump. We also got the bathroom and kitchen cleaned up hoping that a clean work area will make Chris and I more productive in the future.

Today, with the ceiling down it was time to start on the electrical. Poor Chris has been on a call for work ongoing since Friday so I've been pretty much been a one woman show. I've never done any electrical before, ideally it would have been nice to start on a nice easy room like a bedroom but what would be the fun in that :)

Prior to embarking on my own wiring project I was a bit hard on poor Chris. I'm dirty, exhausted, and about 100 bucks poorer and all I have to show for it is a larger hole in the wall and a solitary run of romex from the basement to that hole. Tomorrow I'm hoping to pick up the pace a bit and wire up the new fan plus the vanity and ceiling lights. Much to my dismay I will be putting the old fixtures back up I was hoping to find reasonably priced replacement fixtures but alas everything was too expensive or too ugly.

Hopefully tomorrow night I'll have a fully wired up bathroom.

Fun with Knob and Tube

Well after we hadn't heard back from the electrician, I started removing all of the old knob and tube in the kitchen. Most of it is gone except for the wires that run into the dinning room. Once it gets to the dinning room it branches to the rest of the rooms.

I put a junction there so that we could use the rest of the lights down stairs. I figure once we remove the rest of the knob and tube on that circuit, i will just pull the junction box down. For now it's in the ceiling and will be covered by a white plate.

Now to where the fun begins. In tracing the circuit I discovered that it runs into the bathroom. The problem was the wire was in bad shape and part of it even snapped off where it was pinched under a knob. I was able to isolate that from the circuit and now the bathroom is with out power. Good thing we have two bathrooms.

The plan is to remove the bathroom ceiling and run basic electrical for the light, fan and the one outlet. There is a drop ceiling as well so we won't have to get the actual ceiling repaired right away.

It looks like our next project will be that bathroom. It will be a pain, because to get to it we will have to go through our nice finished kitchen. :(

We have a trim color

My Brown Mahogany TransTint Dye came on Thursday afternoon and Saturday afternoon I got a chance to try it out.

First I had to calculate the proper proportions of dye to shellac the bottle says 1 oz of dye to 1 quart of shellac. I scaled the recipe back to 1.56CCs of dye to 50CCs of shellac. For this step I used one of my measuring cups from Rockler and a syringe I bought from the farm section of my local Fleet Farm. I ordered some syringes and assorted measuring vessles from American Science and Surplus on Friday but alas they did not arrive on time.



Next I measured out the dye and shellac, I had to dump the dye out on a little plastic saucer in order to suck it up with the syringe the neck of the dye bottle was just a bit too small


After measuring out the proper proportions I mixed the dye into the shellac and then applied to my sample piece using a piece of an old t-shirt
I was so pleased with the way it came out I stripped my original test piece and refinished it with the shellac.

New (Here I'm comparing it with the trim that is yet to be stripped, I may darken this piece up a bit with another coat):

Old:By my calculations I should need two bottles of dye to slightly less than one gallon of shellac. I'm still thinking I should be able to do all the kitchen trim and doors with one gallon of shellac. Once I get the final mixed up I should be able to finish the door that has been sitting in my shop since January. Whoo hoo, Progress!

Mowing the Grass

It had been a couple weeks since i had mowed the back yard. I gotten to the front on Monday, but by today the grass was 8 inches long. So with my trust 1975 Simplicity lawn tractor i headed out to the backyard.

To my surprise the backyard was full of wild flowers, mostly the same type, but it was pretty cool to see. So I ran back to the house and got the camera before I cut the flowers down with the mower.

Here is a full picture of the backyard












Here is a closer picture of the Orange and Yellow flowers.There are more daisy like flowers like the one below, but at the time i didn't even see them.

You can just barely see the moss in this picture. I just wanted to get a picture of it because it grows all over the place in the very back of our yard. It has given me the idea to start a small bog garden. Maybe 10 feet in diameter.
So all of it is mowed down now, well not all. I couldn't mow all of it. So Erin and I went out and marked were we wanted to put the fire pit and seating area around it. Then i mowed the grass shorter around were i wanted to keep the wild flowers. The plan is to then add more flowers by seeding the area heavily. I will post pictures of the beds later this weekend when I get the pictures taken and some of the daisies moved over.

Hiring Out

Well we've passed a major milestone in our house remodeling for the first time we are hiring out to get work done... it's not that we can't do the work ourselves, we just don't have the time.

We had an electrician come by this afternoon to take a look at the kitchen and the breaker panel. He seemed a bit put off by the knob and tube in the kitchen so I'm worried it may be a bit more than we want to spend. However, on the plus side he seemed somewhat enthusiastic about changing out the electrical panel(s) so maybe we'll get a good deal on that. He'll give me a call with his estimate in the next couple days. Here is hoping it's something we'll be able to afford.

Stupid Pine!

Attempt 3 on the staining was little more successful than attempts one and two however it wasn't a total loss I did really like the gel stains. Next time I have a non-pine project I'll have to give them a try.

After the latest failed attempt I decided to try a new approach. Many of the finishing sites suggest using dyed shellac to deal with the pine problem. Prior to this I was shying away from any colors that were not premixed as precision is not my forte. But remodeling a house isn't for the faint of heart so last night I purchased the Dark Walnut and Brown Mahogany TransTint Dyes from Rockler http://www.rockler.com/product.cfm?page=11448&filter=Dye along with set of mixing cups.



If this works out the way I planned (ha!) and I can get a color I like. I can then mix up a gallon of the trim color which I hope will be more than enough to get me through the kitchen and if the colors don't match exactly room to room I don't think it will be a huge deal.

Trim Attempts 1 and 2

Well five cans of finish and we're no closer to picking a trim stain.

Here was Attempt #1
From Left to right we have Antique Walnut, Royal Walnut, and Olde Maple. None of them seemed quite what I was looking for but I did think perhaps by mixing the bombay mahogany and the antique walnut I might achieve just the color I was looking for.

So then we have Attempt #2

At this point I was thinking... maybe the Polyshades isn't the way to go maybe I'll try the pre-stain wood conditioner on the pine and try to finish it that way. So samples one and two are regular Minwax stains Red Oak and Red Mahogany. Although the pre-stain wood conditoner helped I still thought it came out blotchy. Samples 3 and 4 are different mixes of the bombay mahogany and antique walnut. Neither of them was really what I was looking for it just ends up being a bit too red to complement the floor.

So then I did what I should have done before I started this little project I googled "finishing pine" so now I'm working on attempt #3 where I use thinned shellac as a sealer and a gel stain instead of a liquid stain. Here's hoping third time is the charm.