It's been a busy few weeks around here; the husband has been swamped with work and my folks graced us with their presence for a lovely visit for a while as well. However, we do have some exciting developments to report on the home front.
You may recall that our living room (or the den, as Nick calls it), had no overhead lighting save for a pair of small skylights. We got around this with a table lamp and a floor lamp, but it was really not ideal at night. We also discovered that if one is...say...brewing beer in the adjacent kitchen and hosting guests during...oh, say, August, that room gets really, really hot. Bordering on uncomfortable. So clearly an overhead fan was needed. Nick and I found an inexpensive one that we liked at one of the big home stores a few months ago, and it's been sitting in the garage awaiting installation. Then when my folks booked their trip, we thought, "Pefect!" My dad is quite handy and always happy to help with projects...now we've got one!
So during the some of the few free hours that my husband had at the end of last month, he and my father installed the fan. I will spare you the details but suffice it to say that it did not go any more smoothly than the heater/fan installation in our bathroom last May, due (again) almost entirely to the ridiculous wiring job previous owners had done in this house. Electrical boxes sitting on the floor of the attic, face down, hiding under insulation...hot wires tied to the common...you name it, they had to fix it. Nick was feeling particularly inspired (read: frustrated) one evening and worked until after ten o'clock at night, at which point a screw ending up inside the fan he had just finished putting up caused a pretty impressive fit of exhaustion giggles. However, in the end, they figured it all out and we have a great fan that works!
It's alive!
The other project that they started was installing recessed lighting. Unfortunately, the 4" cans they bought did not fit in the 4 3/8" hole drilled by the hole saw - only once you opened up the packaging for the cans and read through the tiny fine print did it become apparent that we needed 4 1/2" holes in the ceiling. Oops. So after buying a new drill attachment, today Nick very carefully drilled a slightly wider hole centered on the smaller one. He only installed two lights today, but it's pretty impressive already!
The LED lights are a little cooler than I'm used to, but they're warmer than they look in this photograph. And even with only two lights, the room is so much brighter that I put the floor lamp back in the front room. This is great! The next time we have company the room will be well-lit and we will have more temperature control. My menfolk do work awfully well together!
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