Vacation TODO: Day 1

Day 1 was productive but not overly so. I didn’t venture into the shop to work on cabinets because I feared that would take too much of my attention away from Atticus and Trissa. Most likely I’ll start on the doors and drawers on Monday when they’re at daycare and work.

Trissa and I worked together on two projects today. The first was identifying and labeling all of the electric circuits in the panel. You’d think that because we redid the panel two years ago that it would be all orderly and labeled, but it is not. It was at the time, but since then we’ve added and replaced many circuits, and these haven’t always been labeled appropriately. This process took a good hour, and it is the first half of the project. The major half yet to be done is to rearrange the circuits so they are a bit more orderly. For example, all of the kitchen circuits will be next to eachother rather than spread around the box as they are now. Once we identified all of the circuits we used Trissa’s label making machine to label each of the wires. This will help me keep things straight once I get around to pulling each of the breakers and re-ordering them. I also made a spreadsheet in Excel showing the existing and new layout of the breakers. I was able to derive a good layout that balances the number of amps to both sides of the panel.

One question I have for anyone out there who may know: our lights are dimming momentarily when the electric dryer kicks on. Of course they are on separate circuits. What can be done about this? Perhaps moving the dryer’s 30-amp breaker to the other side as the light circuit in the panel? Does having the dryer’s breaker above or below the light circuit make any difference?

The other project we worked on was the upstairs closet that I mentioned yesterday. We have 4 large closets in our house and this one is the upstairs hall-closet, approximately 6’ x 12’. Over the past four years it had accumulated so much junk that it was basically imposibble to venture into it, much lesss find anything. The impetus for cleaning it now is that the other night I was looking for my pilot’s log book (I’m thinking of finishing my pilot’s licence training which I began in 1991) and figured it must be in the closet. Well, we cleaned the entire closet today and it wasn’t in there. Perhaps it is in one of the other 3 closets which are nearly in as bad of shape as this one was.

Here is the progress thus far. 16 1/2 more items to go:

1. Kitchen cabinet doors. 11 total. 4 important ones for the base cabinets.
2. Kitchen cabinet drawers. 7 total.
3. Upper cabinet crown.
4. Kitchen nook seating and table.
5. Kitchen island trim and panels.
6. Kitchen under-cabinet lighting.
7. 3 interior doors: sand, varnish, install with hardware. (Important baby-proofing item…)
8. Paint kitchen ceiling and walls (already primed).
9. Paint foyer ceiling and walls.
10. Electrical panel - re-order the breakers and document them all.
11. Strip and sand baseboard for the living / dining room. Determine if it can be re-varnished.
12. Cable TV to the kitchen. Forgot this when we had the walls open (DOH!)
13. Window sill for kitchen nook. Started this but is incomplete.
14. Exterior lights by the back doors.
15. Dining room chandelier (choose, purchase, install).
16. Dining room speakers (purchase, install - I prewired for them before we drywalled…)
17. Cat door platform (ask Trissa…)
18. Clean the upstairs hall closet - it’s a MESS!