cushtie.com

Long start to the week

I had my weekly Pilates session today, when I was feeling exhausted and stressed after I’d missed a work meeting, but lying on the ground and lifting my legs in the air cures some ills. My electrician friend took the day off to sort some wiring at our house, which was jolly decent of him; the ground floor is pretty much complete and ready for dry walling now, except for the work we need to do on wiring the smoke alarms, but it feels like we’re making progress.
This evening, when I’d reached the point of diminishing marginal returns, I turned off my laptop and went shopping for electrical gear. We need one more dimmer switch and around eight more regular switches, and a panoply of related parts – mostly various different plastic boxes to mount switches on.

(Houses in the US are made from timber framing with plasterboard stuck over them, rather than something more solid like brick, but that means it’s easy to arrange light switches – you just punch a hole in a wall, insert a plastic box to hold the ends of the wire, and attach a switch on the front. Obviously, it’s much easier when there’s no plasterboard in place, like in the basement, although there’s the added complexity of figuring out where light switches should be: I realised today we need another switch at the back door, to turn on the lights inside the house. But we have time to rectify a few of these oversights…)

I couldn’t get enough switches at Home Depot, and the alternative, Lowe’s, had no switches at all, and was somehow much harder to find anything in, but I returned home with a dimmer, two regular switches and some plastic plates. More is coming via the internet as we speak…

Then all that was left was to read to the girls, do some virtual boxing, and walk back down to the house to deposit all the things I’d bought (and label them) and then walk back and prepare to sleep. This has been a very long day, but somethings got done, so that’s ok.

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