So... What are YOU doing? - Part 8

[tango]

Now that family is gone I'm busy cleaning the house again. I'm hoping today's storms aren't as bad as they're forecasting.

In my area they forecast severe storms often enough it feels like the boy that cried wolf.

It's as if they figure there's a vanishingly small chance of something nasty happening so they list it as "possible". It seems to be about as much use as the warnings that "bacon causes a 100% increased in the risk of death" when what it turns out to mean is that if you eat your own body weight in bacon every single day your chance of death rises from 0.00002% to 0.00004% or something.

 

[tango]

In related news my forecast is that asteroids may fall from the sky and eliminate life as we know it. It probably won't happen but it may happen. If by this time tomorrow you have seen falling asteroids you know that I called it. If you don't you'll know I was still right because it was possible that it might have happened, even if spectacularly unlikely.

 

[tango]

Today I'm going to be thinking about where best to tap a cable into my lighting circuit to fit this new fan I want. I think I've got a handle on the best place for it, just trying to make sure I've covered enough bases to not cause myself problems later.

I also need to figure out how to get at the ceiling cavity above my kitchen so I can replace the nasty wiring feeding the fan. I thought I had a way to get at it but I'm one, maybe two, joists too far out. I think that means I need to cut through the ceiling in a storage closet so I can get at the cavity and the switch. If I can get that done I lose a bit more of the nasty knob and tube wiring, which leaves just one more light fitting to see to. That one should be easy enough, and from there I'll rapidly hit a point where there is no more live knob and tube anywhere in my house.

 

[Lamb]

In my area they forecast severe storms often enough it feels like the boy that cried wolf.

It's as if they figure there's a vanishingly small chance of something nasty happening so they list it as "possible". It seems to be about as much use as the warnings that "bacon causes a 100% increased in the risk of death" when what it turns out to mean is that if you eat your own body weight in bacon every single day your chance of death rises from 0.00002% to 0.00004% or something.

They let the school kids out early for today's storm! I'm looking at the radar and the storm keeps getting smaller and smaller as it approaches.

 

[tango]

We were supposed to get "severe thunderstorms" after 3pm and mostly sunny until then. My wife and I went for a walk and it started to rain at the furthest point from home. That was near our church, which was locked but has a few doorways where you can take shelter. Because we thought the storm would last a while I left her under shelter and ran home to get the car. By the time I got home I was soaked to the skin, so took the time to put some dry clothes on before going out to get her. By the time I got there the rain had all but stopped and it has been sunny all afternoon.

Now they're saying we might get severe storms this evening. The radar shows nothing.

 

[Lamb]

We were supposed to get "severe thunderstorms" after 3pm and mostly sunny until then. My wife and I went for a walk and it started to rain at the furthest point from home. That was near our church, which was locked but has a few doorways where you can take shelter. Because we thought the storm would last a while I left her under shelter and ran home to get the car. By the time I got home I was soaked to the skin, so took the time to put some dry clothes on before going out to get her. By the time I got there the rain had all but stopped and it has been sunny all afternoon.

Now they're saying we might get severe storms this evening. The radar shows nothing.

Did you get the severe storms? We were supposed to and it hailed for 10 minutes and then it got sunny. The temps dropped so windows will be opened today!

 

[tango]

Did you get the severe storms? We were supposed to and it hailed for 10 minutes and then it got sunny. The temps dropped so windows will be opened today!

We got some rain. That was about it. No storms, severe or otherwise. Not even any hail.

 

[tango]

Today's fun is a trip to the hardware store to see if I can find a bracket to support a fan given the odd ceiling I'm trying to work with. I think I know what I can do, I just want to look at it in the flesh to make sure it will work. Then I'll need an extension so I can drill a 4" hole in the ceiling and then drill another hole in the next ceiling that's about 8" higher up, and run a cable.

I'm also trying to figure if I can bypass some electrics in the adjacent room so I can fit a fan without killing the next part of the circuit. It's the last section of knob and tube that's still live, simply because I haven't figured out how to replace it without pulling down ceilings in our living space. I really want the wiring replaced but have been dealing with it from the very end, so I don't disconnect anything downstream. I'm thinking I can tape off exposed ends and tuck everything out of the way pending fixing the final part of it, which will let me run a new cable and do things properly.

Last night I ran a fish tape from our guest bedroom under our bedroom into the space behind the closet in our room. That let me pull a string back under the floor, which in turn means I can pull a cable to power the guest bedroom. It will be good to get rid of some surplus sockets on a generic circuit and make a start on a dedicated circuit for that bedroom. I'll need to do it sooner or later anyway, might as well do it while I've got the baseboards off.

 

[Lamb]

My daughter brought over 2 zucchini plants as part of my Mother's Day gift so I planted those today in containers. I'm hoping they do well. I've never done zucchini in containers before and I hope that they give me at least 5 zucchini from each plant to make up for the cost of the Miracle Gro soil.

 

[tango]

I figured out a bracket that will work to support my fan. They cost $21 per bracket so I'm hoping the next room can work with something cheaper. I also picked up a ceiling fan to put on the bracket. Maybe I can get it fitted in the next couple of days.

I also need to figure out if I can cut or break my drywall offcuts to fit the space where I removed lath and plaster from my guest bedroom. I want something to fit behind the baseboard and would really rather not have to buy a sheet of 1/2" plywood. It doesn't need to be pretty, I just want something to provide a little more thermal and sound insulation and something to hold the baseboard so it's not recessed into the wall.

 

[tango]

The fan is fitted and wired, but the other end of the cable isn't connected as yet. It was dark by the time it was hung so I decided to leave connecting it to the circuit for when I can do the work without plunging the entire downstairs into darkness.

The fan looks kinda nice in place. I had thought to wait until my wife was out and fit it as a surprise for her, but we decided to drill the holes to double-check everything would work, and then figured we might as well just finish the job.

 

[Lamb]

Getting groceries this morning. I absolutely hate it because the stores keep getting worse, out of stock and over-priced.

 

[tango]

My wife has gone for her haircut. Originally the plan was for her to do the grocery shopping afterwards but we figured we can leave that until next week. So I'll get busy connecting the other end of the cable for the ceiling fan so we can use that. It won't make a huge difference just yet but when we fire up the air conditioning it will.

I had planned to go with my wife so I can check out the device to blow insulation. I want to be able to see it, so I can figure out if it will fit in my car. If it won't I need to talk nicely to a friend so I can borrow their truck to get the device and then borrow it again to return the device. Obviously that means I need to plan renting the device around when I can borrow a truck. But I've got enough else on for the rest of the week I don't want to deal with having to deal with the insulation this weekend, particularly since there's more work I need to do beforehand and a bit more work I want to do beforehand. Maybe I can get to that next weekend.

I also need to talk to my friendly local heating and cooling guy to see about getting central air conditioning installed. Heating oil isn't getting any cheaper and it would be really nice to have central cooling as well as another option for heating if we need it. Using a heat pump for heating will prevent me from getting an accurate calculation of just how much heating oil my improvement work is saving going forward but that might be a price worth paying. If nothing else it will mean I won't need to lug air conditioners into the windows every year. The upstairs ones are easy enough but the one we use downstairs is heavy and I'm not getting any younger.

 

[tango]

I decided to take down a light fitting that my wife and I have never liked. I was wary of just what I'd find behind it. It turned out that removing the fitting was easy enough but for some reason whoever put the back box in used both nails and screws to secure it. Pulling out two 3" nails from inside a 4" diameter metal box was interesting.

The back box was secured to a piece of 2x4 nailed between the ceiling joists. Except it was nailed from the far ends, which I couldn't get at without pulling a big chunk of ceiling down. So I had to cut it with my sabre saw and flex it until it came away from the nails. The short end was tricky, I had to use the long end and hit it with a hammer to get any leverage behind it, but eventually got there. It was interesting doing all that through a 4" diameter hole in a compressed cardboard ceiling tile without damaging it.

The wiring isn't as grim as I feared it might be. I've got a skanky piece of ungrounded cable that's connected to knob and tube that lurks above the upper ceiling. What I'll need to do is much like I did in the room where I just fitted the fan - drill through the upper ceiling, feed a fish tape to a known spot and then pull a new cable and connect it all up. I'll just tape over the ends of the knob and tube because there's one more fixture I need to replace before I can disconnect it completely.

At present I am feeling optimistic that I can get another ceiling fan fitted without too much ugly work. Having only gone to the hardware store yesterday to get a support brace and a ceiling fan I can see myself going back tomorrow to buy the exact same thing again.

 

[tango]

The dining room looks odd with a hole in the ceiling where the light fitting used to be. I think I've figured out a way to secure a suitable back box into place if a brace between two joists doesn't fit. Because there are two nails that once held the support strut in place, and I can't remove them without making a big hole in the ceiling, I may need to figure something else. I think I can do it with a piece of 2x4 and a few pocket screws, and then screw a back box to a strut screwed to a single joist. If I can figure a way to prop it at an appropriate height while I drive the pocket screws I think that will be strong enough. It will also save me the $21 for a bracket that's heavier duty than I need for the weight of the fan I plan to use.

 

[Lamb]

I had a cat scan today...hoping it's my very last one! It's been 5 years since my tongue cancer and all the previous scans have been clean. I found out that I was one of the last appointments for a while to have a scan with the contrast dye because there is a shortage now! Yikes.

 

[tango]

I managed to get my new cable run from the switch to the light fitting. I got a brace screwed into place but I'm not thrilled with it, I couldn't quite get the screwdriver bits I needed into place so it doesn't feel as solid as I'd like. That said I can pull down on it and it doesn't move relative to anything else. Not surprisingly when I pull hard on a frame that was intended to support ceiling tiles I can distort it slightly, as I could in the adjacent room. Maybe it will hold the weight of a fan.

Along the way I got the switch removed and the cable to the switch taped off so that's safe. Now I need to buy and install a new fan, run a new cable to the switch and connect it to the lighting circuit. I'll probably need a new hole in the floor so I can run some 14/3 so I can install three-way switching later on. For now I'll just replace like with like, maybe with a dual switch so I can turn the fan off without having to keep pulling the chains.

At the hardware store I'll probably go ahead and buy another heavy brace so that if the thing I've screwed into place doesn't support the weight of the fan adequately I've got something on hand I can work with. I'm just not sure how easy it will be to undo the strut I've screwed into place, because of the same space concerns I had putting it in.

 

[Lamb]

I have to wait around all day for my doctor to call to go over my cat scan results with me. If the results aren't in yet then I have to wait next Friday all over again. Ugh.

 

[Lamb]

I spent the last 2 days cutting out fabric to make 21 reusable fabric shopping bags. 6 of them I'm keeping for myself and the others will all be gifts for family for birthdays, Christmas and because my daughter comes over and needs a bag to take home all the goodies I buy for her pets

 

[tango]

I decided to do a piece of extra work that will hopefully make future work a little easier. So that meant moving a dresser so I could pull another piece of baseboard off the wall, pull down some of the lath and plaster wall behind it, and get at the electrical back box for the nasty old socket that was in that space. Then I ran my fish tape under the adjacent room so I could pull a string back. Then I could use the string to pull a cable under the floor into the wall cavity at the end of the room, down the wall cavity below to get it into the basement, then across and into the breaker panel.

So now I have everything put back so it looks much like it did before but I've got a nice new socket in place, that's properly grounded. I've got a piece of cable running across to where the next socket is - that was a new socket on new wiring but the new wiring simply has one big circuit that feeds a load of upstairs stuff, so I'm going to disconnect the guest bedroom from that circuit and run new cabling all the way around it.

This will also mean I can pull out a bunch more nasty old cable. The socket I replaced had some nasty cable connected to it. Some of that still feeds into the attic but will be easy to disconnect. Some of it is coiled up in my scrap copper bucket. Along the way I found that the trim screws I bought a while back really work very well. I could use the holes where the baseboard had been nailed into place to drive trim screws and hold it to the wall, pending renovation of the entire room.

Every day a little closer to spraying foam into the wall cavities. Then I can put that room back the way it was before.