Fire Alarm

The Fire Alarm System in the house was installed in the 1960's. it worked off heat sensors strategically placed throughout the house. The system has been out of service for some time and has just been sitting dormant with the power feeds removed. The sensors are still in every room of the house, I left them there pretty much for nostalgia. the box needs to be removed now because the cutoff switch panel for the generator needs to go there.

So I chopped the sensor feed wires and took the panel down, Four screws, no big deal.

The emergency power source looks like it has seen better days, a little corrosion.

Are those batteries suppose to be still in use after 38 years?
September 27, 1978... That was my high School Graduation year.

Anyway, the box is down and the space is open.

I still haven't decided what to do with the choo choos, the progress on the layout came to an abrupt halt after the $1000.00 Digi-trax control system and a few $400.00 and $500.00 digital engines were stolen a few years ago.
I thought many times about getting back into it, but....I don't know.

The pleasure of working on it was pretty well murdered by the theft, not to mention having to buy all that stuff again is prohibitive.

So, for now it will continue to sit and collect dust, and florescent light bulbs, tools, jars, nuts and bolts, and anything else that gets dropped on the layout.

Side Bar, a woman and her pants

On Sunday I heard a woman say one of those sayings that just make you smile.
"Hey Mark, Where are my pants?"

I love to hear that coming from an attractive woman, unfortunately, she was looking for her painting pants that she leaves at the house.

Lite (Light) Electrical (shudder) work

I have to replace a few room lights in the house, now I don't have a problem doing this since 99% of the house lights have wall switches to kill the power. So I bought a few LED room lamps to swap out the older fixtures. The fixtures that require replacement at this time are both upstairs rooms, the top of the stairway, and the bathroom. Sooner of later I will be switching all the lights to LED.

Now, the one light in the entire house which is not on an external switch is directly over the kitchen sink. guess which light had it's chain pull out of the switch socket, yup, that sink light.

I dropped the unit and found that the wires went up into the ceiling, I pulled on it a bit and still saw no splice joints. So, not wanting to simply cut hot wires, I sat and stared at it for a half hour while drinking a coffee. The house was wired by an electrician in 1958/9
and his idea was to link anything and anything that didn't make sense together. So I called Old Young and asked him to bring a meter so we could determine when that circuit was dead. Old Young came last night after work.

He came in with his bag of electrical tools and went right to work, he pulled the wires down further and two wire nuts appeared, he gave me that look that Pancake makes when he wonders if you're daft. He then changed the fixture. 

Since he was there he installed the LED light in the upstairs room which as just painted, this actually became a chore. What should have been a simple loosen the screws, lower the unit, disconnect the wires and reverse the process to install the new unit was not that easy. The original electrical mount box was black, round and looked like it came out of a 1929 Hudson. With 2x4s in the way above the box had been installed only half recessed and was held in place by a big nut in the center and a couple nails in the side.  The new unit is held in place with a threaded rod, so pancake installed the depressed bracket upside down then we cut the threaded tube and cut the plastic collar back on the new fixture, this gave us enough room to thread it in and tighten the unit to secure it flush with the ceiling.

The LED unit for the staircase threw me for a loop, Pancake took it out of the box and handed it to me.

It had, as you can see from the photo above, a regular screw in light bulb section on it, so how do you replace that?

Well it turns out it is easier than I thought, Since we were using an existing fixture we would not need the mount plate.

All you need to do is disconnect the wires from the original lamp and install the new socket.

Once that is done you tuck the wires up inside and screw the new fixture into that socket. 

Insert the mount screws through the slotted sections and tighten. The cover then just rotates on and locks.

Which reminds me, we still need to paint the doors, jams and ceiling at the top of the stairs

Work commences

Nat is back, and pushing to get me moving. Yesterday she came over while I was at work and decided my two tone gray had to go, she decided to keep both colors but used them in different locations. I had planned a dark gray upper half of the room and a lighter gray lower, she decided it would look better boxed, sectional and with the red paint I was debating on using.

You know something, she was 100% correct.

As you can see from the photos the angled ceiling and the wall do not actually form a straight line, but then, neither does the angled  ceiling and the flat ceiling.

Time to replace that overhead light and then attack the floor.

Back to work, well not me, I'm at work, but...someone

As I drove to work this morning I was involved in a rather long lasting text message. Luckily the texts read out (through the cars speaker system) and send texting is voice controlled. 

While I am hard at work, (believe me, if it were hard, I wouldn't have this job), any way, while I am at work, Nat is headed for the house to finish painting the upstairs room. I was originally going to go with two different shades of gray, then changed my mind to gray up high and red down below, no I am going back to two tone gray.

So, when I get home tonight the walls upstairs should be done. That means we can get to work on the floor, and finish moving a bunch of boxes from the attic to the basement.

In the meantime I found another project...Nat's cabin

They drained the lake her cabin is on to fix the dam, in doing so it allowed access under the dock and we found there is no under the dock there. We have decided to rebuild the dock framing. legs and braces out of wood, working around the existing metal work. So in March or April we will attack that. It has to be done before June when the lake refills.

The wood sections of the dock will receive new cross bracing and footings

Haven't done much but have a lot to do

I haven't really been doing much on the house, the game room is still half painted, but I have mixed emotions about finishing that. I did put up three storm windows, not as easy as it used to be. The storm windows used to just hook on, pivot in and hook closed, but after they installed the vinyl siding years ago, the windows have to be screwed in place. I have decided that since the AC runs in the summer and heat in the winter to make the storm windows permanent. Most of the windows in the house were replaced with double pane when they did the siding and when I get some extra money again I will replace the rest, in the meantime they are getting hard mounted. Three are up, but the siding trim they put on does not allow the windows to seat all the way in. So I screwed in the kitchen window, placed a moulding along the bottom window gap and sealed it with caulking. I will do the others this afternoon. 

I did install blinds in the kitchen on the window and door. 

As for cleaning out the spare room on the second floor I stopped working on it because there are five rather large items to be brought down and tossed in the dumpster, being alone I have not been able to attack that issue, but Reuben is coming over tomorrow and we will get those three bookcases, a head board, an old dresser and an old TV tossed out. After that is done I can get at the rest of the room which has a lot of stored smaller crap to be cleared out. Then that room will be ready for painting.