22nd of September

Whew. What a day! The concrete guys filled in the holes they made last week with concrete and aggregate. It looks good!

The electrician came today. We talked about outdoor lighting, locations of switches, the sockets and lights in the bathroom; we're moving two sockets in the bedroom to be either side of the bed, rather than the middle and edge of the room as they are now. Because we're having a mini-driveway, we decided we should have some lights near the entry way.. maybe a pole light (i.e. light on a stick). This will add nice ambiance to the outdoor lighting.

Tim-the-designer specified expensive low-voltage halogen lights in the Kitchen @ $150/can. The standard line-halogen lights are $100/can. We need about 19 cans.. Which is an extra $1000 for lighting we don't need. Apparently the low voltage halogens are used in specialist locations to highlight pictures on a wall etc.. So we'll go with the standard halogens. Thanks Tim-the-electrician!

Tim-the-designer also had lights on the toe-kick for the bathroom.. lights we wouldn't really ever use. So we nixed that. Probably saved us another $300.

I think we need better lighting in the living room, as the only light which currently goes on is the one on the fan, which is nigh-on useless.. It would make sense to have 2 tracks of track lighting - one near the fireplace, one near the opposite wall.. The fan will move to the center of the room.. We can use the extra $1000 from using the cheaper cans to put good lighting in! Also, as we are already patching the living room floor, we can take out those stupid in-floor power outlets which we never use, and which stick out and annoy me, and that are not currently grounded. Yay! We'll need to add another socket near the wall closest to the fireplace, but that shouldn't be too hard right now.

The carpenters have some of the siding up!

The HVAC guy told us the heating outlet in the bathroom is trouble. The plumbing is all along one wall, and the floor supports along another. There isn't a lot of room anywhere for the outlet, unless it goes in the floor, or in the pony wall. Not sure what to do at this point.

The guy who is building our mantlepiece was here today measuring stuff. We had a bit of a hard time working out how to do the 'return' on the RHS of the fireplace, as it is a different depth (i.e. deeper) than the LHS of the fireplace. We worked it out. The colour will match the stained cherry cabinets, so I asked the kitchen cabinet supplier to get us stain to match for the mantlepiece.