31. Fire and Wires

When I headed over this morning, I had no idea what to expect after the fire next door.  This is the street scene - the burned building is boarded up (and missing it's roof), but you can see my house to the left and some other cute renovated places to the right.   I was pleasantly surprised to find that my house was just as I left it.  There was a little broken glass in the driveway, which I swept up, and a few pieces of soffit and chunks of charcoal in the side yard but nothing much at all.  I actually think the paint on the north-facing windows is peeling off because of the heat, which will save me a lot of time when I start the exterior renovations!  That and the lawn got a good watering - what do I have to complain about?

This is the building viewed from my driveway.  All the neighbors said that the flames were going straight up and there was almost no wind.  The mulberry tree barely looks singed and those palms are a fire hazard on a good day!  It really is amazing.  The whole interior of the building is demolished though.

My friend Ricko realized last night that he had an appointment today so he rescinded his offer to volunteer.  I'm not upset at all - seeing how today went it was really better that there wasn't anyone else there with me.  I am not the greatest manager, and don't particularly like working with anyone else - a lone wolf, if you will.  I appreciate the help when it is offered, and I enjoy the camaraderie - but if I'm involved with something that takes a lot of thought and concentration, I'd rather be alone, and that's the way today turned out.

I think if I had a helper, I would have begun the day with demolition.  Instead I began with the electrical wiring.  A whole lot of thinking, and taking it one thing at a time with pauses in between to think it through and make sure I wasn't missing anything.  This is one of the four can lights I installed - two over the stove counter, and two over the sink counter.  I wired them all on the same circuit, the switch in the wall will be added later on.  See those little white box thingies hanging there?  Those are called "quick connect" wires... I LOVE THEM!  No twisting and wire nuts necessary, just pop the ends of the wires in.  Also in this picture you can see the old (disconnected) "wire and tube" wiring that used to run through the house.  Believe it or not the wires are bare copper, run through ceramic tubes to separate them from the wood.  Talk about a safety hazard - glad I don't have to replace all that!

Gotta show you this - the most difficult section that I had to stand on top of the ladder and squeeze my shoulders through a little hole to feed this wire through a hole I drilled.  Thank goodness nobody was with me to take a picture of the other side. 

This is the bundle of wires that will eventually be connected to a hot wire from the breaker box coming up through the floor, and their appropriate switches.  You can see the outline on the ceiling where I'm going to have Rob and Ken build a little wall where the switches will be.  One wire goes to the four can lights, one to the box where I'll probably put a ceiling fan in the kitchen, and one goes to two ceiling lights as you enter the kitchen from the back porch.  Maybe you can see the writing on one - it's very important to label these with a sharpie because once the ceiling gets closed up there's no way to know which one is which.

Here is the whole kitchen ceiling - two can lights in the foreground and two in the back, and one wire to the very center where the fan will be.  You can also see all the plumbing from the upstairs bathroom and laundry room.  I noticed that the pipe that I think comes from the washing machine drain is not attached to anything at all so I'm going to have John check that out before the ceiling gets closed in.

Lastly I'll say a word about a favorite tool:  my Klein wire strippers.  They are worth every penny of the $10 you'd pay if you didn't find them at a yard sale for a buck like I did! So so so much better than those goofy red  'made in China' wire strippers - once you go Klein you'll never go back.

After a lunch break at 2pm I began to knock out a little demo (yes, that's a pun).  If my walls could talk they'd say "hook strip" in curly 1920's style writing.  This is right where a shelf was attached in the little under-stair pantry - I guess that's what it means.

The plaster banged off the wall pretty easily, but the lath was tougher - so I just went to town on the plaster and left the lath for the boys when they come back.  The plaster is just like concrete, maybe it is concrete.  Anyhoo I ended up with a big pile of it.  My idea was to put five scoops or so in each plastic bag and put them out with the trash, to avoid another dump fee - it's heavy!  But as I was scooping, I thought about how I had paid actual money for a load of crushed concrete for my driveway at home.  Ba-bing!  I'm either crazy or really smart - when the neighbors weren't looking I started dumping bucketloads right off the porch into a low spot that had developed in the driveway and voila!

You get the idea.  Crazy like a fox, I tell ya.  There's no nails or anything in there because I left the lath up on the wall.

When I was all done it was already 4:30pm - my longest day working on Grandview to date.  I decided to christen the shower, since I had brought a change of clothes, and Roscoe had been complaining about me stinking up the truck on the way home.