Electrical Walkthrough

I didn’t post anything yesterday. They did a lot more HVAC work; putting in new ducts to route air to new places, and improve the hardware at other places. Although I took some pictures of yesterday’s work, most of it is showing the shiny new metal inside of a hole that I already showed you. Still, a few things might be worth showing you. The kitchen had its vents for air return relocated, so new duct work was needed.

I think this new gadget must be something to do with bringing things up to code. I think it’s the natural gas pipe for our oven/stove.

I think that’s the new flexible duct to vent the exhaust from the kitchen to the outside. I don’t think I’d ever really seen our attic before.

Last night, our cat Rosie managed to get past the plastic zip door. I made some more modifications which I’m hoping will keep her in the basement. I think taping the side flaps to the floor will make it more difficult for her to pull the plastic away from the door or wall.

Today we had our initial electrical walkthrough, and we discovered some things along the way, which really is a big part of the reason for doing it. We are going to have more new electrical outlets than I had thought, apparently as part of bringing it up to code. Apparently, having outlets no further apart than 12 feet makes it less tempting for people to use extension cords as permanent fixtures.

There was another important discovery. Apparently, things were on course to have controls for the ceiling fan lights be just like the controls on the one we are getting rid of, which I hate. Apparently it’s the current trend to make the dimmer control on these lights be a single button. The idea is that you hold the button down while it cycles up and down between bright and dim, and you release the button when you’re at the level you want. How this is supposed to be an improvement over a simple slider, or even a knob, is beyond my comprehension. It’s so frustrating to have to wait with my finger on the button to get to the right setting, which more often than not is to get it to the brightest it will go, only to find that I held it too long thinking it was going to get brighter, but it got dimmer, so now I have to wait for it to cycle through again. It adds guesswork to a process that should be simple and precise.

Sorry. I just felt the need to vent about that. Anyway, I thought we were getting away from that kind of control, and hopefully we still are because the electrician said he’d investigate how we can make this work properly.

There are some inspections this afternoon and I can hear work going on once again. It should be fun to go up and see what else has changed.