Electrical Cheesecake Dumpsters

I am pretty busy as of late. With this construction work going on at my house all of my free time is taken up with the "homework" I have to do between the days that I am paying the "professional", Kent, to help me. I figure it is the wise move to have someone around that does this for a living to help with the renovation work falling into the skilled category. His rate is a pretty fair price, since he is a friend of Pearl's from the church, but I do have to make sure he doesn't talk his way into a lot of free money... because the dude can talk!

Last weekend Shawn and I ripped out the sheet rock, and some of the cardboard sheets that were holding the old insulation in place (wish we had known better, and left them in place)... once we saw how ancient the insulation was, and considering we were not sure if it was asbestos or not, we decided to wear respirators for the rest of the weekend (see Sherry during cleanup). After I was finally able to find a piece of insulation that was intact enough to read, Sherry did some research and found that Kimsul Insulation is not asbestos based, but was in fact popularized by the 1948 movie "Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House" in which Cary Grant says, "Wrap your home in blanket of Kimsul."

On Monday night I ripped out the den's walls and built-in book shelves, and on Tuesday finished the prep work for the upstairs and went with Kent and Sherry to Lowes to purchase the sheet rock, replacement windows, and other materials.

Sherry had also volunteered to bring a cheesecake to a work party on Friday, but after her first attempt at cheesecake on my Birthday (story not posted to protect good intentioned, but you can use your imagination) she had to swallow her pride and ask me to make it. So in between loading all of our deconstruction mess (from the street to the container), I whipped up a cheesecake. We decided after hauling all the old drywall to the road that it would be worth the $300 to get a trash container, which was delivered yesterday (only two days late). The good news about them being two days late was that after some angry phone calls asking "where the hell is my container" they gave me the free upgrade from the 12-yard to the 20-yard, which I think we will need anyway.


After the cheesecake was baked... and cracked (pretty upset about that one)... I decided that I had better run out to Home Depot (have to spread the love... can't just spend ALL our money at one home improvement store) to pick up some wiring. I like older homes, but wiring from the 1940's just gives me the willies. So since we have the walls out I figured I would take this opportunity to update the wiring and decrease the fire hazard of older wiring.

So when I got home at 9:30, eat some homemade wings (THANKS REGINA!!) and then made Sherry get out of bed and help me. I know I am sounding mean, but one person could not (quickly):

• make sure the circuit breaker was off


• see if the conduit I was wiggling was the correct one


• and push from one end while pulling from the other end of some tighly run wires which was still running through the insulation and behind the cardboard

So I would like to say thank you to my lovely wife for getting up after you had already gone to bed and helping me last night, even if you were still in your pajamas.