Feeling electric with the flush of excitement

This past week has found us with crews working on Plumbing, Electric and Siding.
In the category of Ewwwwwwwww we find our old gable siding coming down.

And in its place our beautiful new HardiPlank Cement Siding now covers both the gables and the new addition. (more pictures coming soon.)

It is just amazing to see the progress as outlets are positioned and our NJ Tub find is now installed in the location that used to house my Yellow kitchen sink and dishwasher.

This week found us making many critical decisions that will affect us for the rest of our lives . . .the positioning of lights and switches. To give you some insight as to our dreading of this part of the project we take you to our last vacation rental in Maine. You see Scott and I have been vacationing in homes that are much bigger than ours for the past 10 years or so. We rent a house that has a gourmet kitchen and room for us, the dogs and the Mothers so that we can enjoy spacious living. The house we rented in Maine was beautiful. Check out the listing  For one week we delighted in having more room than we knew what to do with, however by the week's end we still had no idea of what all the complex arrays of switches did. Like some game one of us would flick a switch and then the other would search for a light that had been turned on or a garbage disposal that was gurgling at not being fed. While we loved cooking in this kitchen we grew tired of the odd configuration of sinks and switches and learned a great deal about what we did not want.

So that brings us to our meeting with our electrical contractor on "What we did want. . . "
3-way switches, outlets, Cat 5 jacks, COAX, Speaker cables etc . . . .
Oh the choices.

We were amazed at the ease of this dreaded task. Our contractor gave us ideas to eliminate the crazy switch dilemmas we encountered before. I was empowered by my quick decision to put the fan switch here or the breakfast nook light switch there. It was easy to read the look on the contractors face about whether my choice was good or whether I would be pissed off the rest of my life because I had to walk across the room to switch off the ceiling lights before going to bed every night. Suggestions like "Are you sure you really want that switch there . . .which way will you be entering and leaving the room?" helped us a great deal.

We were also amazed at the dedication of our electrician who finished up the rough in over the weekend!!!

We were also amazed at the Plumber who should win the Nobel Peace Prize for the ability to blend the old with the new. We were fearing the tie in to the stack which is as far away from the kitchen as you can get. This was our biggest preconstruction fear how would the drain from the kitchen sink get to the stack without us having to do some basement limbo to get to our washer and dryer.

As you can see from the pictures this Herculean feat is complete as the kitchen drain follows the walls around the basement to the stack which is happily secure at the new PVC addition to the family.

As Fall starts to chill the air we are excited for the next phase HVAC when we welcome our new heater and AC unit. Until next week