16 May 2016

Another manic Monday!  Sonny and Brandon did some little projects all day: got their juices flowing first thing by helping lift and carry the 500 pound woodstove from the middle of the living room floor over to its hearth, installed all of the closet shelves, installed a lazy susan (to be used as a spice rack) in the corner kitchen cabinet, painted and installed the sun room chair rail, and put door / drawer pulls on the rest of the kitchen cabinets and some of the bathroom vanities.  Carpet installing sub-contractors to Countryside Carpet and Paint, Jeff Gearwar, Tim Williams, and Pete Felkl from GWF Company spent the day doing the preparatory work for installing our carpets: nailing down tack strips, putting down ⅜″ Omafirm padding, and cutting each carpet roughly to size.  The carpet has to acclimate overnight, i.e., come up to about 70°F, so that it will stretch properly when installed tomorrow.  Tom spent much of the day redoing the master bath shower floor tile again (fourth time’s a charm????) and starting the vanity backsplash tiling.  For the last hour or so, he put in the sun room and foyer chandeliers and then the wall light in the half bath.  Steve returned to the fold today and did all of the plumbing connections for the kitchen sink and half bath (where he also installed the pedestal sink and toilet).  I did a little electrical work (attaching a plug to the dishwasher, which came set up for hard-wiring, a practice no longer allowed by the National Electrical Code), answered a constant stream of questions from all and sundry, thoroughly cleaned the floors ahead of the carpet installers, did a little sanding on the interior doors, and helped Tom hang the chandeliers.  While showing off our handiwork to Chree this afternoon, we discovered that the Green Creative A19-E26-8.5W-4000K LED light bulbs, a boatload of which we bought as illumination for the wall fixtures in the house, don’t seem to be compatible with the Legrand^® WSCL453PW dimmer switches that we installed, as evidenced by the lights constant flickering.  Not good!  Chree went over to Shoreham (15 miles of twisting back roads away) this morning to fetch the custom cushion she had made for the mud entry bench seat.  Arriving back at Fern Lake, we discovered that the fabricator had put the zipper on the wrong side of the cushion.  So back Chree drove to Shoreham.  While she was grocery shopping in Middlebury mid-afternoon, the fabricator called to say the cushion had been fixed.  So back Chree drove to Shoreham…