The electrical has been completed for the entire home except for the kitchen. That has been because we had not yet designed the kitchen layout until last week. The above design is our current plan, but like everything else, that is subject to change as we get better ideas from others. The kitchen is pretty big and the amount of cabinet space is a bit excessive. We may remove some of the lower cabinets to make room for a kitchen table or something else.
I use Home Designer Suite 8.0 which renders the above into the photo below (minus the misplaced bar stool):
Recently I purchased a new stack of Lowe’s coupons off of Ebay. They run about $1 each, which is not the best deal for a coupon, but one coupon used yesterday saved me over $60, so they pay for themselves pretty quick and up saving me a lot of money.
Yesterday I bought three bathroom exhaust fans. Two of them are under 1 sones (a measurement of how loud they are where 1 is the lowest) and one of them moves over 210 cfm (cubic feet/minute). The cheap fans move about 50 cfm and are around 4 sones, so these will be a nice upgrade to those.
I spent another $100 in electrical wire yesterday in order to complete the kitchen and also for some light switches where more than one switch will turn off the same light. In total, I will have spent about $700 in electrical wire which was more than the plan.
I also bought 60 more feet of cpvc which are the pipes that will complete all of the plumbing on the house. Cpvc is quite inexpensive and does the job just fine. It’s a pretty easy job when you have no walls and no ceiling.
The last item I bought yesterday was a steel door for the laundry room. It looks pretty nice and is pretty secure. I suspect it’s a door we’ll rarely use, but I needed to have that installed in order to have the stucco completed. I hope to have the stucco done next week.
I have bought a number of books over the last few weeks to help familiarize myself with each step and to get ideas for how we want things. These are the books on my shelf which I have found most helpful:
- Black and Decker’s The Complete Guide to Plumbing
- Black and Decker’s The Complete Guide to Dream Bathrooms
- Black and Decker’s The Complete Photo Guide to Home Improvement
- Complete Home Decorating: Design, Inspiration, and How-To from Lowes
- How Your House Works by Charlie Wing
- The Visual Handbook of Building and Remodeling by Charlie Wing
- Process Lighting: Product Catalog
The best of the books above are the two by Charlie Wing. They are extremely insightful to someone like myself who is unfamiliar with pretty much everything. They both have great illustrations.
Last night we watched the movie It’s Kind of a Funny Story . This was a really funny movie and is highly recommended. We are both fans of Zach Galifianakis since we first saw him in the movie The Hangover. He is also in the movie Due Date which looks hilarious, but we have not yet seen.
Yun and I have started a new Saturday morning tradition of going to Bruegger’s Bagels for breakfast and coffee. We have a Bruegger’s just up the street from us at Swan and Sunrise. I like having traditions.