Monthly Archives February 2016

I know it may not seem like a very interesting thing, but putting up the interior doors is one more step to making the house seem complete.

While right now most of the doors are still stacked up, waiting to be installed, like this,

that will start Monday.

While trim carpenter Lonnie or his assistant is doing that, the shelving in the office storage room, all three bedroom closets, the guest closet, linen closet, and another closet will go in as well. (That’s the “stores” in the title of this post–for storage.)

Another kind of storage got sorted out recently too. The original plan was to have an 1,100 gallon rainwater storage tank outside of my office, harvesting the water from the office roof and part of the shed roof.

To be honest, I never liked this option...

One of the things I do outside of my writing life is to be a judge at a local science fair. The Youth Engineering and Science (YES) Fair is sponsored by the local electrical co-op and the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association, or AFCEA. Each spring, students in grades 5-12, from schools in the co-op’s service area, compete first in fairs at their schools, unless they’re home-schooled, and the top projects come to the YES Fair.

The judges are all volunteers from the area. Some are active scientists or engineers, some are retirees, and then there are the oddballs like me who have never been a practicing scientist or engineer, but we’re interested in the fields and can talk a good game. (Or as Kristine Kathryn Rusch says, “we play one on TV...

I know I’ve written about lighting before (like last time!) but this has been one of the biggest things to work on lately. The good news is that we’re now well on our way to having everything sorted out. Last week I approved one part of the order, for much of the decorative lighting, but then lighting expert Faith and I had to sort out some details regarding the under-cabinet lighting in the kitchen: would each bank have to be turned and off individually, how long could they be (these are LED light strips), what I might want besides outlets in the tracks between the light strips, etc. By using this kind of lighting system, we can mount the outlets, USB charging stations, and all sort of other gizmos (which I won’t be doing, but could) on the tracks...

Man, what a busy couple of weeks it’s been since my last post! One of the key things we’ve needed to finalize at this stage is all of the light fixtures and switches. You might think this would be a simple matter, but no, not in this house, anyway.

Take the lamp that’s going to hang over the table in the dining room. First of all it’s heavy: 35 pounds! Second of all, it’s going to hang from a high ceiling. Third of all, that ceiling is sloped. Can it hang from a sloped ceiling? One that’s that tall? How do we mount it to the joists? Are we going to have to redo the drywall? If so, we need to do that while the drywall guys are still on site.

Then there are the outdoor lights. Cochise County has a “dark skies” lighting code to keep the night-time skies, well, dark...