I’ve finally forced myself to work on my apartment! I have a new bathroom and (almost) kitchen. This is very exciting since I did the original planning for the kitchen back in March 2007.
Kitchen:
I still have electrical to do… The entire apartment still needs to be rewired. Then I’ll refinish the floors. If I have time before I leave to work for a small fruit company in Cupertino.
For the past several weeks I’ve been too busy with work-work to actually do any home-work. However, this weekend changed that! I knocked out a huge section of the wiring on Thursday and Friday. Then, with Liz’s help, we leapt forward in progress this weekend. I completely finished the wiring, Liz chiseled off the stick’em vinyl tiles in the 2nd bedroom, and I sawed down the wall on the staircase to make the landing area.
We are both extremely excited about how the upstairs is looking. It is much more welcoming with the new lighting, and roomier with the wall half gone. This week, every free minute will be use to start cleaning up so we can start the finishing work. There is one large area that needs drywall, but there are also several smaller holes and places that need patching. Then paint, clean and RENT!
So we hit a couple snags while continuing our current quest of rewiring the upstairs. You see, where we thought we could run the wire straight up from the basement, turns out to not be a viable option. So we ventured down to the spider-infested basement (more about that later) and searched for a new path to run power up to the second floor. Now, instead of coming up through the kitchen, we’re coming up through the where the kitchenette in apartment 3 used to be. I say used to be, because we spent most of today (which we didn’t expect) pulling it out. This involved a lot of unscrewing of unnecessary parts trying to figure out how the damn thing went together/came apart. Several screws, the oven door, the burners, random pieces of sheet metal and a whole lot of what I like to call plumber-language (just think of every 4-letter word you can and string them all together) later, we got it out and away from the wall. And we also inherited a few treasures; a moldy lemon, a dried bottle of dish detergent and a recipe for “Creamed Dried Beef”. We also discovered that not only did the thing look like it was from the 50’s it weighed like it was made in the 50’s. So Travis called in reinforcements and thanks to EJ’s extra set of muscles, we got the kitchen out to it’s temporary home on the sidewalk. Not exactly what we expected to do today, but it needed to be done anyway. We can always work on the rest of the wiring tomorrow…
So… while poking around, I discovered the wiring in Apt 3 and 4 is mostly cloth-covered, knob insulated wire. For those that don’t know, this stuff is fine unless you don’t like fire. Okay… it’s not that bad, but in reality, I don’t want this stuff in my attic where a tenant will throw there stuff to stored, wear through the insulation (which almost comes off in your hands) and start a fire. So… Liz and I have started to rewire the entire thing. This is going to be tough, but shouldn’t be too hard. Plus, this should bring these apartments into code compliance (or at least close enough).
Some of the outlets and switches have been more stubborn than others. This means we have a few large-ish holes that we’ll need to patch. Hopefully this is the worst of it…. (damn… did I just jinx that?!?)
