Project Buy All The Things continues apace; this one was practically an accident, as we weren’t in the market for a new refrigerator until Lowe’s decided to put them on an absolutely ludicrous sale– this particular fridge was $800 off. This is the second new fridge we bought this week as the first one was too Goddamned big to be brought into the kitchen; they have a “will this fit?” tool on their website to avoid specifically that problem that I didn’t notice until after a very nice and patient delivery man, clearly expecting to get his ass chewed out, apologetically informed me that there was no way that they were going to get the damned thing into my kitchen. Various fuckery ensued and long story short an only slightly inferior refrigerator is now in our kitchen, although there were some scary moments getting this one in as well– I actually had to pull some trim from a doorway last night to ensure we had enough room, and even then it was about literally as tight as it could possibly be; you can see where the missing trim is in the doorway behind the fridge. I’ll put it back tomorrow. We’ll have to repaint a bit but we needed to do that anyway.
Those of you who are either particularly eagle-eyed or have a good memory will note that there is a nook that appears to be for a refrigerator on the left side of the picture there, and yet the New Hotness is rather oddly perched against a wall in the middle of the damn kitchen. The problem is that any fridge that fits into that space has to be smaller than we want it to be and we’re going to reno the kitchen eventually anyway, as soon as we get done paying off the bathroom we did last year. We just decided to jump on the fridge early. Yeah, it’s awkward, fuck it.
Tomorrow, I review a pillow. For at least the second time.
Much was accomplished today. Like, no bullshit. We got a lot done today.
The before pictures, keeping in mind that we’d already put a new light in the library. These lights are so goddamn old, guys:
The one on the table was the light in the entryway, and I want you to pay particular attention to that one, because it has fucking snowflakes on it for some reason, a thing I only ever noticed when I had to change bulbs and managed to annoy me anew every single time I had to do that job.
After, and yes, that’s a different light in the library, as we took the one we put in the library earlier this week and moved it to the entryway. The others are in the kitchen, bedroom hallway, and hall bathroom, respectively. The hall bathroom is the Bathroom of Terrible Decisions, a renovation project that has been ongoing for something like eight years and may actually be finished for real this weekend.
The after pictures:
The lights in the kitchen and the library match, the hallway lighting is hugely improved, and there are no longer fucking snowflakes on the light in my entryway. I am particularly pleased with the lights in the bathroom, which look stellar. The rest of the house feels astonishingly bright now, and there may be another project coming to add some dimmer switches, as the only place in the house with one is in the library.
I have had my arms above my head all day, and my shoulders are killing me.
I thought about putting an exclamation point at the end of my age up there– 47! — but that implies a level of excitement about this birthday that I don’t really feel. Honestly, I could do without it, and I’m feeling a little bit of stress about this one that I really don’t remember being there the last few times July 5 rolled around. Maybe it’s got something to do with yesterday being the hottest day in the history of the human race, or maybe it’s just that I’m undeniably in my late forties now, with 50 staring me in the fucking face, and I feel like my sudden realization earlier today that my hobbies haven’t changed noticeably since I was nine years old is kinda hitting harder than it deserves to as well.
But fuck it. I’m 47. That’s what 47 looks like on me. There’s a video going around on TikTok right now of a woman who claims to be 28 who looks at least a decade older than me so things could definitely be worse. And it’s not like I don’t know plenty of people who didn’t make it to 47 to complain about it, too.
(EDIT: This post is auto-linking to my birthday post from last year, which I also started with a selfie. I am wearing the exact same shirt today that I was wearing a year ago. Apparently the idea of wearing red the day after the 4th entertained me both years.)
Anyway, I’m an electrician now. This has been hanging in my former dining room/ current library since we moved in in March of 2011:
It had a bunch of dangly glass things with it that we removed almost immediately, and I’ve mostly been hitting my head on it since we moved the dining table into the other room. I finally took it down and replaced it today, with this significantly simpler model:
That’s an LED ceiling light, and you can adjust the temperature of the light. Right now my wife thinks it’s perfect and I think it’s too fucking white, so we can look forward to fighting over that for forever, but I don’t need to buy those stupid fire-shaped lightbulbs ever again. I also swapped out the existing dimmer switch with a newer one that was supposed to be specifically for LEDs. This is, as it turns out, a pretty simple job all around, mostly requiring convincing yourself that you’re not going to electrocute yourself while you’re doing it. It was made slightly more complicated by the fact that my house has aluminum wiring, having been built during the five-year or so period where copper was hugely expensive for some reason. There are special little boxes you’re supposed to use to connect copper and aluminum wires, but again, they aren’t complicated either; they just make the job a little scarier.
I also discovered while swapping out the dimmer that it was installed wrong, and was in fact installed without the little boxes, which is basically exactly what you’re constantly told not to do when you’re working with that type of wiring– you don’t want to pigtail them together like you would with two copper wires, because something something science science and they can spark and cause a fire. I hope to hell that that dimmer switch was installed a lot later than the rest of the house (it would make sense that it was a late addition, since, after all, it used copper wire) and I’m really hoping that I’m not about to find out that every power switch in the house is installed incorrectly. Since this went off more or less without a hitch we’re going to swap out a few other fixtures that we’ve decided we don’t like, and while we’re doing it I’ll look at the switches and make sure they’re installed right.
The punch line to all of this is that now that it’s in I’m not sure I like the new light. It’s higher in the room than the chandelier was, as you might expect, and so it throws shadows on the books and statues and various and sundry other things in the room in a way that was very different from the chandelier; you can get some hints of what I mean from that picture above, although I wasn’t smart enough for a “before” image. We’ll see; I’m sure I’ll get used to it. I also haven’t seen it at night yet, so we’ll see how I feel about it in a couple of hours.
Okay, not really, there are still four days of school left— but the first Big Projekt of the summer has been accomplished. My wife decided that she hated how the porch looked (sadly, I lack a before picture at the moment, but I’ll see what I can find) so she spent the week stripping, etching, washing and repainting the floor out here, and I spent yesterday putting furniture together, and I’m pretty damn pleased with the results.
It will not surprise you to learn that I have been putting off a number of things that needed doing, and as a result it is the Sunday before I have to go back to work and I have a number of Things that need accomplishing. That said … the reading room is done? Or close enough, at least? I need to do something with that shelf in the middle, there, the one that is leaning to the side; hopefully I can come up with a way to push the shelf next to it a couple inches over to shore it up a bit without removing every single Goddamned book off of the shelves again. We had one bookshelf fall apart moving it from the living room to here, and several of these are not going to survive another transition, but if I can pin it between two shelves that are more or less properly vertical we ought to be okay.
I’ll put up some pictures of the living room and the bathroom soon too; the living room’s conversion is complete, barring only some cable management behind the TV that — wait for it — I’ve been putting off, and, well, the bathroom is exciting. But for now I’m going to cross “blog post” off of my to-do list and move on to something else. I gotta make it through five days this week and then I get a three-day weekend for MLK Day; I should be able to manage that, I think.
Former dining room now has comfy chairs in it, although it’s not quite ready for prime time yet:
You can see the shape of what we’re getting at here, I think, although there’s still work to do and not everything is in its final place. The chandelier is getting replaced with more appropriate lighting, the table in the corner is going away, we need to a rug and some side tables into the room, and many of the books will end up being moved to the as-yet-unordered new shelving going in the living room.
And what will eventually be the dining room:
This room needs a lot of work before it looks like a dining room, obviously, and a number of the things in here are going to end up in the former dining room, but again, you can get the idea we’re going for, more or less. This room needs the most work but I think we’re going to be really happy with it once we’ve moved beyond the “table in the middle of what is obviously not a dining room” stage.
Happy Thanksgiving, y’all. Prrrobably no post tomorrow,(*) although who knows, and there will definitely be no videos up at YouTube, because I’d have to have them recorded by now and it’s already 9:00. So see you on Black Friday.
(*)I’m sure I’m lying. Every time I say anything close to “I probably won’t post tomorrow,” I end up posting anyway.
