Low Hanging Fruit

I’m exhausted, and I think Trissa is too. Work on the house appears to have slowed to a crawl, even though we don’t have time for much else. This weekend we spent a lot of time just looking around at all the various stages of completion, unable to get any traction. Finally we made a list and tried to knock off some of the low hanging fruit:

• Manifold connections. For the two manifolds that are complete, we hooked the radiant tubing to the supply and return ports on the manifolds. This was fun for a couple of reasons: Mostly because it adds a “fully completed” feeling to a job that’s been underway now for several weeks. Secondarily, because we had to buy a tool to do it – my previously largest crescent wrench was too small.

• 3-way wire to 2nd floor. Last weekend we had to pull out a 14/3 wire coming through the first floor on its way upstairs. I’d fed this wire a year ago so we could have a three-way hallway light. But with the floor going down, it had to be moved slightly from its former location. So we moved it and it sat in a pile, live with juice, in front of our main bathroom in the basement all last week. This weekend we threaded it back up through the floor and up the wall -hopefully it’s permanent path. Bonus is we our hallway light working again and we don’t risk electrocution each time we head to the can.

• My friend Jon came over on Saturday with a load of reclaimed fir flooring that he wants to use as trim for a cabinet he’s installing. The flooring had a layer of old deteriorating varnish and I’d told Jon we could run it through my planer to clean up the wood. After sharpening the blades, the planer did an awesome job. So awesome in fact that we decided to run a couple of the fir planks from OUR floor through the planer. I set the planer to take less than 1/32” off. Whoa! That floor is gonna look GREAT!

• Trissa tidied up the shop, in preparation for varnishing more doors this week and next.

• I ran gas to the stove. We felt that it was about time to re-enter civilization with indoor fire for cooking. The stove has been sitting in its new home on the floor plan for a couple of weeks now and we decided it was time to hook it up. Two trips to the hardware store later for fittings, and we are again Cooking With Gas. Sorta. Sunday morning Trissa woke up bright and early to bake us a quiche for breakfast, but soon discovered that the oven wouldn’t heat above 200 degrees. AAARRRRGH! We literally spent 3 hours on our stomachs on the floor by the stove turning the oven on and off trying to figure out why one of the two oven burners wouldn’t ignite. No luck, so today I’m calling the repairman. In another time or dimension I’d have taken the stove apart and fixed it myself, but yesterday I just didn’t have the energy.

• And finally, we began working on our super-secret-hush-hush project, the “Pigeon Point Paint Peeler”, which we’ll tell everyone about when it’s done and tested. If it doesn’t work, you might not ever read about it.

That list doesn’t LOOK half bad, but compared with the mountain of items on our TO DO, we’re feeling a bit overwhelmed. With any luck we can do one last push and get past the radiant floor this week, perhaps such that we can begin installing some real flooring in the near future. That sure would be nice.