MichaelandChrissy.com

I spent the better part of Sunday putting up the outdoor Christmas decorations. I generally don’t like to sit outside in the cold, but it’s impractical to bring every strand of Christmas lights into the house to check them where it’s warm. So I sat out in the garage, laying each strand out and then plugging them in one at a time. I hate that. What I really hated was finding that half of my strands don’t work anymore. I was able to fix two of them by replacing the bad bulbs, but I still didn’t have enough strands to go all the way across the front of the house.

I decided to skip the strand lights. I like them (they look like icicles hanging from the gutters), but I don’t have enough to make it look right. So I started on the lawn decorations. Right about here, it started to snow. Sleet, actually, like frozen rain. It didn’t stop until I was done setting everything up. I have eight red-and-white striped candy canes (with lights), one white tree (with red and white lights), four box-shaped presents (with lights) to go on either side of the tree, one “Claire the Square” snowman (with lights), and a small sleigh with two flying reindeer (again, each with more lights). It’s a very bright display.

My favorite part of decorating the yard might be layout and power management. I got two more extension cables last year, the kind with an outlet every three feet or so. These work out nicely because I can plug in three candy canes into one outlet and then run the cable over to the next set of three candy canes, and so on. I also use fewer power cables this way (I used to have to run 10-foot extensions all over the yard). This year, I went from using six power cables to only two of the new kind, and only used one three-way outlet splitter. I ran everything into a timer that turns everything on at dusk and off three hours later.

When we first bought our house, the circuit box in the garage was a fire hazard waiting to happen. It had no lid and wires were dangling out of it. We asked my Uncle Marve to clean it up, being a master electrician, and he found that the entire garage was a mess. Conduit had been added piecemeal over the years, several electric garage door systems were still in place, and some wires just hung from the rafters for no reason. There were more pressing matters to attend to at the time, so we figured that we would come back to it when it became a necessity.

Three years passed. Before we could replace the garage roof, we had to shore up the rafters in there. To do that, Glenn had to disassemble much of the conduit running across the existing ceiling joists. Since the whole setup was a rat’s nest to begin with, we were lucky to be able to restore power to the garage door, let alone the rest of the garage. Marve said that he would come back and rewire the entire garage in a couple of weeks.

We finally got to it on Sunday. The process took all day, mostly because running conduit is a pain. I hung out with Marve, but I’m not much help with electrical wiring, so Marve did all of the work. We now have a single switch that operates all four lights inside the garage (before we had three switches, one for each of three lights), additional outlets near the work shelves and a rear switch that operates the flourescent lights above my workbench. Now that we have reliable lighting in the garage, I’m going to have to organize everything in there…

The roof is progressing well. Glenn started on Tuesday with a friend helping him, who was supposed to be responsible for stripping the old shingles off. That lasted about a day. By Thursday, I was up on the roof instead. I spent most of Friday helping Glenn and then from 8 AM to 7 PM on Saturday and Sunday. I found out that roofing is hard work.

Glenn and I stripped both layers of shingles off of the back side of the house on Friday. There are special shovel-like tools for prying up the nails. I got the hang of it quickly, but it was exhausting. I attempted to strip the shingles off of the garage by myself on Saturday, but it turned out to be a very hot day. The heat made the shingles stick together, and then I was sitting on a bed of hot tar once the first layer of shingles was up. I gave up by noon and helped Glenn with the house instead. Chrissy and Aiden were there to take pictures.

Glenn helped me strip the garage on Sunday. We started early before it could get too hot. We tore off both layers from one side by noon, and then spent another hour cleaning up. We could toss the old shingles directly into the dumpster from the top of the house, but the garage was too far away. We bribed the neighbor boys to carry our mess to the dumpster for the second half of the garage. Progress was made much more quickly this way.

I don’t think that I’ve ever been so dirty. I wore the same pair of pants until Sunday night; I didn’t want to ruin more than one pair. I had dirt and black tar smudged all over me from removing the shingles and tar paper. I’ve still got dirt engrained into my hands that just won’t wash off. There must have been ten thousand roofing nails up there, and I had at least five of them stuck in my shoe at some point. And I’m sunburned on top of that. I’m just dirty, burned and exhausted.

Glenn still has more work to do. The house is shingled completely, but the chimneys still need to be water-proofed and the garage needs new shingles. Glenn is also replacing the attic vents with a single crest vent that is supposed to ventilate the attic better. He should be done by the end of the week. In the meantime, I need to buy some shoes that aren’t covered in tar…

The shingles arrived yesterday. The supply company delivered them on a big truck and used a conveyor belt to send them to the top of the roof. The dumpster was also delivered early this morning, so we have the main pieces in place to start the roofing project.

Unfortunately, it was supposed to rain today, so we can’t start until tomorrow. The rest of the week should be nice though. Glenn is buying the rest of the supplies today, so we’ll be all set. Glenn and his assistant will be tearing off the old shingles by 8 AM tomorrow. With any luck, we’ll have a new roof by the end of the week.

The next phase of home remodeling has begun. This time, we’re going to replace the roof. Glenn noticed last spring that the shingles on our roof are curling, which means that it’s time to get a new roof. I’m not sure how we’re going to afford it, but it needs to be done. We’re going to replace both layers of shingles on the house and the garage.

When I say “we“, I mean Glenn and I. Somebody needs to explain to Chrissy that it is a terrible idea to put me on top of the house for any length of time. I’ll be wearing a harness that is attached to the crest of the roof by a rope, though. I’ll look rediculous, but I’ll be less likely to die. At least we waited until the fall to do this. It would have really sucked to be roofing in the heat of late August.

We put in the order for the supplies last week, and they should be calling for a delivery date soon. Glenn also ordered lumber to reinforce the joists in the garage. It turns out that the joists are sagging as much as six inches and are cracked in some places. That will come first, since we don’t want the new garage roof to cave in on my cars.

The kitchen counters arrived this week. The installation crew showed up at around 8 AM and was out by 9:30. I stuck around to supervise but left for work shortly after they left. The counters look great though. We got the Corian brand of manufactured stone in the “Terra” color, which is brown with white and black flecks. The kitchen is really coming together now, so we should be done with it soon.

Chrissy bought another ceiling fixture today, the same kind that we got before. It would have been great if the last one hadn’t crashed to the floor into a million sharp, tiny pieces. This time, however, I would be installing the new light with toggle bolts, which would insure that it would stay put for the indefinite future.

The problem here is that the type of toggle bolts that I got were not guaranteed to work. I had originally put six screws with plastic anchors into the ceiling, one for each pre-drilled hole in the fixture. Since the plastic anchors had pulled free, they left holes in the ceiling large enough to push the unopened toggle bolts through.

I now had six toggle bolts in the ceiling (three on each side), perfectly lined up with the fixture’s pre-drilled holes. I hoisted the fixture up to the ceiling and started driving screws into the toggle bolts. The first one took, the second and third didn’t. On the opposite side, the first and third took, the second pushed up though the ceiling. I was pretty aggravated by this point. So I did something drastic.

I was using the toggle bolts because I didn’t have a ceiling joist above any of the pre-drilled holes. I knew where one of the ceiling joists was, so I measured 16 inches over (to where the next one should be) and drilled right through the fixture into the joist above. Four times: twice in one joist and twice in the next one over. This ceiling fixture isn’t going anywhere.

Before the cabinets arrived for the new kitchen, Chrissy and I had decided on a new ceiling fixture. We wanted to replace the one that was already there with the same type, only with an oak casing in the Arts and Crafts style. Chrissy picked it up from Lowes and I would install it over the weekend. I decided to do it the weekend before Easter, since I wanted to get it done before we had the family over.

The old fixture was installed with only two screws (one into a ceiling joist and one supported with a plastic spreader). I wanted to put the new fixture exactly where the old one was (to cover up the dingy ceiling over it), but I couldn’t get into the ceiling joist from there. So I used six screws with plastic spreaders, easily enough to hold it up.

I was pretty proud of myself when I finally got the fixture wired and it turned on. And that’s why I was completely crushed when it fell from the ceiling at midnight on Easter Eve. There was a huge crash when it hit the floor — Chrissy and I thought that someone was breaking in! There was glass and wood bits everywhere in the kitchen. If it had fallen just six hours earlier, any number of my family could have been hurt.

Luckily, nothing was hurt except for my pride. I should have used toggle bolts to hang the stupid fixture. Chrissy and Aiden bought another one today and picked up some toggle bolts while they were out. I’ll try not to lose another ceiling fixture in the future…

Chrissy got a call from DirectBuy today to let her know that the kitchen cabinets had arrived and were taking up space in their warehouse. She then called me at work to tell me to come home. She then called Glenn to tell him to drop everything and come install the cabinets. She then continued to call us both every ten minutes until we complied. You see, she was very excited about the new cabinets.

I managed to leave work a few hours early at 2 PM, so Glenn agreed to meet me at my house at 3 PM. Chrissy had already arranged for us to pick up a 17-foot U-Haul truck on the way to the DirectBuy warehouse in Merrillville. That’s my biggest gripe about DirectBuy — they don’t do home deliveries. You can save a lot of money on furniture and cabinets and such, but you have to somehow get the merchandise to your house from the warehouse, which sometimes requires a rental truck.

Glenn and I managed to get the truck loaded quickly and returned home without incident. The rough part was unloading the cabinets from the truck and carrying them upstairs. Oak cabinets are heavy. We managed to get most of them into the spare bedroom though, with the bigger ones staying downstairs. We were done by 7 PM, when we returned the rental truck.

Chrissy and I finally got around to painting the kitchen and dining room. We had already decided on a “less bright” shade of yellow for the dining room, so Chrissy bought two gallons of wall paint, two gallons of primer, and a gallon of ceiling paint. We were up and ready for the day at 8 AM on Saturday morning. Our prep work done the previous day (covering the furniture with plastic, disassembling the ceiling fan, etc.), we went right to work.

I started with a coat of primer on the ceiling. Chrissy then started in on priming the walls with a yellow-tinted primer. Felice came over and helped. We got both rooms primed by lunchtime, when we stopped to feed Aiden and ourselves. After a little break to let the paint dry, we started coating the walls with the actual paint. We didn’t bother to paint where the new cabinets would be, but we still had a lot of wall to cover. And I got the ceiling again.

We were pretty dead to the world by the time the painting was done. I still had to put the ceiling fan back together though, and Chrissy wanted to put the first coat of trim paint on the back door. It was hard to believe that we had done so much by the end of the day. The only downside was that we would have to wait until the next day to see the whole room in daylight, since that’s the final test of a newly painted wall. If it looks good in the daylight, then you’ve done a good job.