The Oaklanders are coming!

As part of their Renovation Road Trip extravaganza, I got a visit from Chris and Meryl of Picardy Project. Meryl and I have known each other for about a year online but had never met in person. That always makes me nervous, so I obsessed over the state of the house in the days leading up to their visit. You'd think that would mean I would attempt to fix or hide my shoddier work but my brain went into stupid mode and said "YOU SHOULD BUY AN ENORMOUS PLANT."

So instead of buying renovation supplies to make their work go faster, I bought a new plant. Because you know Chris and Meryl would walk into the house and immediately judge that my air isn't pure enough. I found a bamboo palm (Chamaedorea seifrizii) at Ikea, which is one of the top plants for removing toxins from your home.

Oh my god, what am I talking about? Sorry, I'm so sleepy today. Anyway, Meryl and Chris showed up and it was immediately like we'd known each other forever. I highly recommend letting them in, should they ever arrive on your doorstep.

I didn't have any major projects for them to help with; instead I had a long "homeowner fatigue" list of things I could probably do myself but I'm tired and a little worried I'll do it wrong, and also there's a new episode of Revenge on the Tivo and those cookies won't eat themselves in bed.

First up: that hideous light fixture over the kitchen sink. This is what it looked like right after I moved in.

I took it down halfway when I painted the kitchen and the wiring looked strange to me. Chris took down the fixture and confirmed that, nope, everything in there was pretty normal. I felt really silly. I'd spent all this time with an ugly light when my wiring was totally normal! He got the fixture, an old piece I bought on craigslist three and a half years ago, rewired and hung up in less than an hour.

I've been wanting to repaint the kitchen, so this should be just the motivation I need.

Next we moved to the living room, where I was pretty sure there was an electrical box in the center of the ceiling, hiding beneath a spot where the plaster looked a little different. Chris climbed up into the attic, confirmed that there was indeed a box there, then carefully excavated the box and revealed the wires.

You know how normally when you hire an electrician or a plumber they'll use a sledgehammer to open a tiny hole in the wall? And then they'll leave dirty fingerprints everywhere, necessitating touch-up painting and a ton of patchwork? Chris and Meryl don't do that. There are tarps and careful placement of hands and no additional patching or painting required.

You remember how my wiring in the kitchen was supposed to be weird but it was just fine? Well, ha ha Chris, I TOLD YOU MY WIRING WAS JACKED. This is where everything got a little frustrating. For Chris, that is. Electrical is his gig, so Meryl handed him tools and assisted with testing while I braided Meryl's hair and tried to convince her to move to Portland. I was useless. The rest of the day was mostly Chris wandering from ladder to outlet to attic to ladder muttering, "This just isn't right."

Greetings from the attic.

It turns out there is an extra wire in the ceiling box. A whole bunch of weird stuff runs to here and we can't tell if the light that used to be here ever had a switch hooked to it. Despite digging around in the insulation in the attic and chasing wires, we just couldn't figure it out.

We decided to leave it for a professional electrician, one who we can pay to swim around in the attic insulation. Chris recommended installing a new switch and running brand new wire to the box. I asked him if he'd cut the switch box hole for me, because I didn't want an electrician to do it. I don't want to patch and paint this room again.

So he made me a perfect one. Then he and Meryl spent the rest of the afternoon in a shame spiral, convinced that they had failed because they hadn't magically fixed the fact that my entire house is wired imperfectly. There was a rush to fix anything else I could throw at them.

Shaky bathroom vanity? It's properly anchored to the wall now.

Strike plate that would fall out of the door jamb because the screws were stripped and the holes were way too big?

The holes were filled with toothpicks (a This Old House trick), then four-inch screws were driven in. The strike plate doesn't fall out anymore and it will make it much more difficult for someone to kick in the door.

All the sticky parts were lubricated and weatherstripping was put up. It was like Christmas but without your drunk aunt saying something shitty to you.

Please come back, Meryl and Chris, because I've thought of 600 more things I need help with. I promise none of them are electrical.

New bedroom light fixture

The weather has been awful here.  I'm starting to feel like those children in the Ray Bradbury story where they live on Venus and only see the sun for two hours every seven years.  I obsessively check the weather widget on my iPod and expend more emotional energy than is necessary fretting about rain.  A friend has taken to calling it Junuary.

You know who doesn't care about the rain?  Lupine.  Lupine is the big dumb hippie at the festival, high on mescaline, STOKED that it's raining again.  We're having a party!

My penstemon is also doing well.  I'd read that they don't usually bloom the first year after being transplanted but, lo and behold, the start I put in two months ago is blooming!  I think it's because I bought this plant from the Master Gardener sale.  

 

Heather, this has nothing to do with light fixtures, you're thinking.  I know!

Rain was forecast so I had written off yard work for the weekend.  I decided I should clean the house, which meant I ran around doing anything I could to avoid vacuuming.  I recently ran across a fixture I bought at Ikea last summer in the basement.  I have no idea where I was planning on putting it.  Why not put it in the bedroom?  Not that the existing fixture wasn't awesome:

The glass part that should hide the bulb was missing, so I had a bare bulb hanging from a very dirty ceiling fan that wasn't properly anchored so it heaved and chugged if you tried to use it.

That's just a little bit better, right?  WHY DIDN'T I DO THIS A MILLION YEARS AGO?

A snapshot of my mind lately

I wandered into the kitchen to strain the chicken stock I'd made the night before.  Then I remembered that I needed to put laundry in the machine so I went and grabbed the basket.  But then I got hungry so I started to make a snack. Then as I was sitting there, eating my snack (laundry basket by my feet), I decided I should finally hang the light fixture I bought.  So I pulled out the ladder and did that.

Is this what dementia is like?  Will there are least be good drugs to look forward to?

On light fixtures

This took me almost four months to replace.

 

It looks extra classy with all but one bulb burned out.

It lets people know that this house is a work in progress.

I was shooting for a light fixture that people wouldn't much notice (did I succeed?) because there's an awful lot going on up there.  Smoke detector, carbon monoxide detector . . . or maybe I should go whole-hog and hang a mobile?

As an aside, I chose a flush-mount fixture mostly because it was cheap.  The underside part, the part that meets the ceiling, is backed with insulation. Insulation is not only itchy, but it also makes it unbelievably difficult to thread a screw blindly into a hole in the ceiling.  I will not buy one of these again.