More electrical work

Today we actually slept in! We were at the house by 9:30am though since we only had a few hours. Mike had managed to get almost all the outlets in the master bedroom changed out. We turned off the whole floor and went to work on the other two upstairs rooms. I went through and removed all the outlet covers, pulled out the outlets and removed the wires. Then Mike went through and rewired the new outlets and I put them all back into the wall. We also got the light switches replaced in all the rooms with illuminated rocker switches, decora style. Mike is quite partial to them. The white outlets and covered look great with the white baseboards. He got tripped up on the three way switches at the top and bottom of the stairs last night but his dad helped him out this morning.

I also did some more demolition in Katherine's closet. There were some makeshift shelves in one corner of her closet that had to come down. There were two vertical tracks with adjustable supports and pieces of unpainted plywood on them. It was old, dirty and needed to leave. Of course half of the screws were completely stripped, as in all that was left was a crater. I got the other ones out and bent the vertical tracks until I snapped them above and below the stripped screws. I had to bend the metal back and forth until it broke; leverage is key in such situations. Then I had to twist the screws out with pliers. And the only time I hurt myself was using the pliers; they snapped off a screw and pinched my palm pretty good.

Bob was downstairs working on the short bar wall plumbing still. Anne came over and was attacking the junipers where the new fence will have to go. The bushes are incredibly dense and its been slow, hard work for Anne.

We got to take a break when Tim stopped by to check on the cable work. Last night they had stayed later to try and reroute the cable and wires. They found that the path of least resistance was taking all the cable (coax, speaker, Cat5e for internet) up from the top of the media closet in the family room on the lowest level, up into the second level then down through the green room closet and it will go under the carpet into the wall below it which is the wall we want to put the TV on downstairs in the family room. They have to go all the way up to get it over to that wall because that room is on slab and there is no crawlspace between the first and second floors. We have to get wire mould to protect it under the carpet in that green room.

Renee also stopped by to see the progress and take a tour. We didn't have too long today because of a birthday party. It was a little hard leaving with so much left to be done but it was nice to have forced relaxation. On the way home we didn't get far because our tire pressure light came on. When Mike checked it he found that our back passenger tire was completely flat because of a nail. It doesn't look like anything we've been using at the house but who knows at this point. We drove less than two miles to the nearest America's Tire store and got it fixed under the warranty in less than a half an hour. Which was also good since we hadn't eaten and took the opportunity to grab food.

Tomorrow we are excited to have the whole day together to work on the house. There are a few miscellaneous things to do, we've already made a trip to Home Depot to prepare. We couldn't find everything we needed before the baby started to melt down so we'll have to go back in the morning. Its a good thing Home Depot is only about 1.5 miles away from the new house.