Lights and a Cape Cod Sink

New-old sink in the first floor bath

Another view

Building a lamp fixture

A light hanging over the dining room table from track. We have a vision of a series of small lights hanging here at different heights

Disassembled exterior fixture about to be painted black. This was mounted on the the old garage and will now serve as the fixture that lights the walk route into the house

I've been working on installing track where we'll have track lighting in the kitchen and dining area. This required a little sheetrock work again; cutting strategic points to wire or re-wire to make what we need to have happen. In the case of the kitchen track lighting we decided to make the track tw0-circuit so that we could have some or all of the lights on depending on which circuit they are fixed in. This allows, say, the light over the sink to be on it's own circuit and switch from the rest of the lights that light the counters. I'm always a little hesitant to cut into the sheetrock, but usually it goes pretty smoothly and I'm mudding it back up in short order.

I've built up a couple of lamps and they look just fine. One is hanging over the kitchen table, the other is over the kitchen sink. More to come.

Remember that big old sink we had in the downstairs bathroom? Well, it has moved down closer to it's final home in the basement. In it's place we've finally installed the sink that Nancy's parents Lee and Lou brought to us last fall. It's a great old marble sink that used to be in the bathroom at their house on the Cape. Its kinda battered and stained, but it's got a good measure of beausage (pronounced like "sausage", as in beauty-through-useage) and looks quite handsome in out bathroom. We're planning on replacing the faucet controls because they are kinda beat up and sorta unattractive. Eventually we'll build a cabinet that the will replace the brackets that the marble sits on right now.

One more piece of the puzzle in place.

Weekend Clapboard Clatch

This morning witnessed Nancy's parents Lee and Lou, my mom Maime, as well as Nancy and myself all painting clapboards. Out goal was to finish off the remaining bundles from the first of the two pallet loads we have to paint before we're done.

Everybody chipped in and we had four painting stations going with Lou going around keeping us all supplied with unpainted clapboards and full paint trays, as well as touching up any drips or unpainted spots among our completed boards in the racks. It was a fun way to make a lot of headway on a seemingly endless job. If out count is right, we are over the halfway mark and will continue to chip away at the project as we can.

A slightly reduced sheetrock crew also was here today to put in a little weekend time. At this point they are done sheathing the downstairs and will head upstairs tomorrow. Yes, tomorrow -- a Sunday.

We're not going to stop 'em.

Sheetrockers Rock

The sheetrocking work continued yesterday and the first floor is nearly sheathed. The once skeletal framing is taking shape and starting to define the spaces, such as they are, of the living space on the first floor. This is most apparent in the mudroom entry and the office/guestroom in the back corner.

The sheetrock crew is planning to come back today for some more work and expect to finish off the first floor.

Meanwhile, Lee and Lou continued to crank out the painted clapboards all day yesterday. At this point we are nearly half way through all the boards we need to paint. I spent some time yesterday building more saw horses to facilitate additional painting stations.

Big Day

The blower-door testing apparatus in place in the west door

Bill running the test

The readings

Sheetrock being lifted by the boom truck into the second floor

The first afternoon's work by the sheetrock crew

Lee and Lou hard at work painting clapboards

The wooden drip-edge detail

Today was exciting on a number of fronts.

The sheetrock crew arrived and got to work, making quick work of getting the first sheets up after spending a few hours loading. Its clear they are good at what they do and its feeling like the right decision to have hired this job out. They'll be back tomorrow and Saturday and expect to have all the 'rock up in about three days.

Even more notable was the results of our blower-door test performed by Bill Hulstrunk. Everything was buttoned up that I could think of and Bill gave the house a go.

The results were excellent. In fact Bill said that this was the tightest house he has ever seen and says he's tested thousands of houses. Its hard to rate the performance other than the numbers: from what I understand, an average house about the size of our house would come in at approximately 2000 cfm at 50 pascals. Ours hit 240 cfm at 50 pascals. For the record, his machine couldn't actually measure as low as the number that the machine was trying to register, alternating between "lo" and various numbers in the neighborhood of 230-240. This is as good as could have ever hoped and I feel deeply satisfied to have reached this milestone.

Toiling away out of the limelight, and trying to stay in the shade of the house were Lee and Lou, Nancy's parents, who are up visiting us and doing some great work painting clapboards. Way to go Lee and Lou!

In other news, Joe and I installed the wooden drip edge yesterday. This is a piece of molding that sits on top of the water table. Its a detail that matches the molding at the top of the window frames and ties the whole look of the exterior neatly.