Spring's Here!

Well, it's that time again... when flowers bloom, birds sing, and....




Oh yeah, allergies too. *Sniffle* Thank goodness for the wonders of modern allergy meds, or else I swear a good portion of humanity would be outright miserable this time of year. Guess that means it's also time for:

Spring Cleaning: the period in spring time set aside for cleaning a house, normally applied in colder climates, where the house is difficult to clean during winter. (Thanks to Wikipedia for the definition)

Today we gave the first floor a thorough cleansing, vacuuming, and dusting. It's a sure sign of an old house when dust just seems to collect in places where it has no business! We've also discovered one of the pitfalls of pet ownership: cats shed. No, really, they do! Thankfully Sphynx is a short-hair, so she doesn't leave as much as some. Still, it's great finding little balls of fur scattered around. Hmmm... think she would let us shave her?

A Cat Named Sphynx,,,

Around two weeks ago, we had a surprise visitor, in the form of a little black cat. It was unusually warm out, so we had the back door open. I was cooking, when I suddenly heared the distinct sound of a cat meowing. I looked out, and sure enough, there was a little cat sitting on our back porch, looking expectantly at me.

After some coaxing and a little bit of food, she came over and allowed us to pet her. She was very friendly, if a bit on the skittish side. Given her beautiful black coat, and her decidedly Egyptian look, we decided to name her Sphynx.

Over the last few weeks, she's become very comfortable around us. She now comes inside every so often, and is always sitting on our porch looking for her daily meal. We're guessing she's about a year old, and is very well behaved. It makes me wonder if she was someone's cat, who was left here. I really don't understand why anyone would do that though, since she's one of the sweetest cats I've ever encountered.

...And The Trouble She Caused

About a week ago, Sphynx was inside visiting, happily curled up on the living room floor. At some point, Amy's phone rang, which must have startled her. Before we could blink, she had bolted up the stairs and into the back bedroom. Yep, that's right; the one we've been working on for months. By the time I got upstairs, she had crawled into the hole in the closet, and disappeared under the floorboards. I could hear her crying, and tried desperately to coax her out with no luck. Then without warning, her meowing suddenly vanished.

Needless to say, we were both rather concerned, since there are plenty of places for a cat to get hurt crawling around in an old house. This feeling grew even stronger as we pulled up a few of the floorboards in the hall, and found lots of old knob and tube wiring. Not a safe place for a kitty! We tried calling and shining lights everywhere we could, but we never even caught a glimpse of her. Eventually, we gave up and went to bed, thinking we would find her when daylight came.

No sooner had we gotten into bed when the crying began anew. They were just muffled enough for it to be impossible to locate her, but loud enough to put us in a terrible state of mind. Then, to our frustration, her cries became softer and softer, until they vanished entirely.

Over the course of the next 6 hours, this process repeated itself three times over. We even tried putting out food in an attempt to lure her out. It worked perfectly, except that she always managed to run back into the wall before we could grab her. Finally, at around 5:45 in the morning, I managed to snatch her up as she poked her head out of the floorboards. I quickly handed her off to Amy, then proceeded to seal up every hole in sight with wood and screws. Our neighbors must have wondered about the sound of power tools at 6 in the morning!

Ever since then she's stayed outside for the most part, lest we suffer a repeat experience. She's now had all her shots and a clean bill of health from the vet, which I suppose makes her officially "our cat." Here's to hoping that's the last bit of mischief she gets herself into!

Electrical

Project History:

Now as many of you know, Josh and I (and our friend Shane) have been tackling the old electrical wiring in our house. That has been quite a task. NOTE: To anyone out there who is looking to buy a new house...just because they say the house has been updated to have 220 AMP service doesn't mean they rewired the whole place. In our case they converted a few corners into cubbies and ran wiring so that all floors have at least (2) new outlets. Bah Humbug. How naive of us!

We are taking it to the next level and updating ALL of the wiring in the house. When we first moved in, Shane took on the living room and ran all new wire and installed new outlets. That was easy becasue he full access from the basement. Then we took over the back bedroom which is being redone anyway.

Takin' on the tough stuff:

Now we've encroached on our living space and that has made things even more challenging. This is where the story from last weekend begins...

The first thing we had to do was hook up the fan. We purchased a timer for the fan so that it would shut off after a programmed amout of time. This is another electric saving addition to the house. However, to install it we needed to change the wire to work with the fan. This sounds easy...until you see the hole I needed to fit in to do the work...

I learned a lot about wiring and Josh talked me throught the whole thing.
Here is the finished project.

Now that we had the fan hooked up we moved on to the light over the bath tub. We removed it when we first moved in because it was ugly - and by doing that we also found out that the wiring wasn't safe. So the progress began to replace the light...it became more of a task than expected.







The first time the light was wired, a box wasn't put in the ceiling to hold the wiring. We found out that there was no beam near the center of the tub to put one. Below is a photo journey of how we fixed that problem.


Josh - in Darth Vador gear to protect him from who knows what that was living in the ceiling...

He used a long drill bit to reach through the whole and into the floor boards and carpet above to locate where we needed to cut the carpet.





Next, I cut away the carpet surrounding the hole so that we could gain access to the space below.










This is the section I cut out with the drilled hold in the middle.









This is when Josh got to have fun with the sawsall.
I'm glad the 'rents let us borrow this tool. It has been helpful in many situations like this one.











Once the hole was cut...

And what a beautiful view into the bathtub below.....











Here is Josh getting to install the box.


Here it is nailed into the two joists.











And of course you'd think this is the end of the story...NOPE! When we attempted to fit the light on the ceiling, we found out that the machine screws that came with the light were to short to go through the fixture, and 1/2" depth of plaster and lathe. So Josh and to go our and buy new ones. Of course by the time we figured this out it was 7:30 on Sunday night and no hardware stores are open. I finally got the light up on Tuesday morning before I went to work.

Here is the light fully installed.















Who knew that a simple project could turn so ugly so quickly....