Last Bits of Remodeling

Dealing with contractors can be a headache, but it beats banging my head against the wall trying to do home construction ourselves.

We spent almost the entire weekend at the Pinehurst house, trying to finish it off before the renters move in May 1. The only tasks left were to install insulation and plywood in the storage room under the porch and install lights, switches, and an outlet down there, too. We went to Home Depot and Lowe's about five times over the course of the weekend, plus another trip to the King County Transfer Station to get rid of the old plywood that we decided not to use.

Reminder: 48 + 18 ≠ 86. 48 + 18 = 66.

We hired a friend of a friend to help us with the electrical work. I thought we would hire an electrician, who would know what things to buy and all that, but we ended up doing the shopping and the physical installations of everything, and all the electrically minded guy did was connect the wires.

Apparently there's a tool to find out if a wire is hot, even when the copper is not exposed. He didn't have one, though. His cutters (or rather, our cutters) discovered the wire was hot with a zap. He wasn't hurt, but the breaker tripped. The wire we thought went to a closet light and a couple outlets actually went to an electric heater.

We left at 10 p.m. yesterday, but we still need to go back and clean up all the tools and such. The storage room looks nice, now that it has clean plywood and light. I hope our renters appreciate it. I want my weekend back.