Best Laid Plans

Amy and I watch a fair number of home improvement shows on tv. More often than you would expect there are problems caused by poor planning on the part of the homeowner, designer or carpenter. In most cases this is not the point of the show. The exception is one which uses the tagline "why learn from your mistakes when you can learn from theirs". When we approach a project we normally do a lot of planning up front to avoid those sorts of oops moments. This is especially true if Amy is part of the planning. (This is a major component in the delay our renovation.)

My workshop contains a lumber rack I built years ago. I've never been satisfied with the sturdiness, and have been expecting it to disintegrate for years. A couple of months ago one of my woodworking magazines arrived with a supplement full of projects for the shop, one of which was a very sturdy looking lumber rack. I thought it would work well in my shop and so set about acquiring the materials to build it. Because of the clutter in my shop (it desperately needs to be emptied and reorganized) and the size of some of the components (8 ft 2x4s) I took advantage of a couple of warmish, sunny days to do assembly in the driveway (the garage is also suffering from over-clutter).

Much of the early assembly was done with the unit laying on it's side since the shelves are too heavy for me to lift by myself. When it was time to wrap up my work after one of my days in the driveway Amy came down to help me set it upright and move it into the garage. And that was when we discovered problem number 1.

As some of you may remember from the garage door replacement, or from visits to our house, the ceilings in our basement are low. I can touch the ceiling while standing flat footed, and I'm not tall. When I decided to build the shelves I didn't take the height of the ceiling into account. And when we set the unit upright Amy pointed out that it didn't look like it would fit into the garage. So, with the sun setting in the west I pulled out the tape measure and circular saw and shortened the uprights by 6 inches.

I've yet to finish the shelves - mostly because we've been busy and I can't lift the shelves by myself. Meanwhile, we've been entertaining plumbers - each of whom has a slightly different idea of where the tankless water heater we want installed should go. (Stay with me, this is actually related.) The most logical location, given the venting requirements for the water heater, is at one end of my workshop. That end of the workshop is currently home to the about to collapse lumber rack. This has made finishing the lumber rack of higher importance.

Which brings us to problem number 2. The root from the garage to the workshop includes a rather tight squeeze at the corner of the furnace. The new lumber rack is eight feet long and, as my very observant wife pointed out, it will not make it around that turn. We could take the rack via the back yard to the exterior door to the shop, but that is a soggy, weed ridden route. In the post-renovation version of my shop the lumber storage will be in the garage. So we've decided that the new lumber rack will take up residence in the garage a little early.

Now I just need to finish the rack, clean out the garage, and move a whole lot of lumber. Oh, and stop thinking all those people making mistakes on tv are careless.

Kitchen Renovation

We're planning a major renovation of our house, so haven't done much about many of the things we dislike in the house. Our anniversary was two weekends ago. Many years we've spent the weekend away somewhere, but for a variety of reasons we didn't plan anything for this year. Instead we decided to do whatever we felt like.

So Saturday morning we were sitting on the couch watching tv. The view from the couch frames the pendant in the kitchen. I've never really liked the pendant. It's not that I don't like stained glass, it's just that this particular rendition doesn't appeal to me. While ignoring a commercial I looked over at the light and turning to Amy innocently asked "If we were going to replace the light in the kitchen, what would you want?"

Amy thought for a minute or two and replied "I don't know, should we go look at lights?"

So began our minor kitchen renovation. I don't remember why we decided to remove the pendant before going shopping, but remove it we did. As it turned out the wiring for this light went through the fake beam into the ceiling's drywall. So down came the beam, which turned out to be a whole lot easier than we expected. The beams are another item on the list of things we don't like in the kitchen. Since that beam was so easy to remove we decided to remove the other 6. About an hour later all that remained of the beams was a pile of wood in the living room, stripes in the paint on the ceiling, holes in the framing above the cabinets and patches of bright orange paint and orange striped wallpaper on the other side of the room.

Off we went to look for new light fixtures. After two circuits through a nearby lighting store we identified a ceiling fixture (to replace the square fixture pictured here) and a sconce (to replace the pendant). The sconce was going to require a 4-6 week wait, but the ceiling fixture was in stock, so we left the store with just the ceiling fixture and headed for the large orange big box store to look for something to replace the pendant. We located a pendant we liked at the big orange store, picked up some additional supplies and headed home with our purchases.

It was getting late, but excited about the new fixtures we decided to replace the ceiling fixture. With a worklight from my shop providing ample light we removed the ceiling fixture and installed the new light. Once I got the right combination of wire nut and electrical tape on the connections we had a beautiful new light. Tired, hungry and getting grouchy we decided to finish up the work on Sunday.

On Sunday we turned our attention to replacing the pendant. The wiring from the old light disappeared through a 1 inch diameter hole in the ceiling so out came the keyhole saw to enlarge the hole. Once the hole was big enough I discovered that the junction box for this light was about 2 inches above the drywall and the wiring wasn't actually in the box. This didn't really surprise me but did make me shake my head. We'd acquired a new junction box so I fed the wiring into it, and secured it to the studs (acquiring a lovely blood blister on my thumb in the process. I whacked it with the hammer I was using to persuade the box into the hole.) With the new box in the correct location even with the drywall, we assembled the light, secured it, wired it up and turned the power back on.

After a little cleanup - nails out of the old beams, lumber to the garage for later disposal, fixture remains into the trash, floor swept and mopped our spur of the moment renovation was complete. We are very happy with the changes and I'm still wondering what took us so long.