I had great plans for the weekend…mostly revolving around my laying out in the hammock under a shade tree, sipping an ice cold lemonade…WAKE UP WARREN!  You live in a 70 year old money pit!  Plus it’s winter and snowy…you’d freeze your…toes off in a hammock!  So, back to reality – I don’t think I have a free weekend between now and 2017.  

Like all projects on this house, they never are as easy as they should be.  Let me tell you about my latest project.

First, remember back a few weeks.  I had just finished insulating my crawlspace under one half of the house.  We’ve had a pretty cold winter and our house has virtually no insulation.  Under the house, there was no question about the insulation…there just wasn’t any.  But our attic was another story.  When we first moved in, the flooring covered all but the edges of the attic floor.  I spotted old rockwool insulation so assumed that it ran in the space between the edges as well.  We noticed, however, that the master bath and the extra bedroom were always cold.  You guessed it, someone, sometime had cheated.  They insulated the edges where folks could check on the insulation…but nothing in the middle, you know, the other 85% of the attic under the flooring.  

So, first off, we started by pulling out all of the junk that we hauled from our attic in Nashville where it was stored and never used.  Most of that, we finally pitched this time around.  I pulled up the tongue and groove flooring in the 10’x20′ attic and started installing r-38 insulation.  Why is all insulation pink, by the way?  Does anyone really know?  Anyhow, while I had everything torn up, we decided to move a light in the extra bedroom into the center of the room rather than it’s previous location, 2 feet off center.  Do youknow how distracting that was?

Anyhow, I had to go buy a junction box…and then back to the store to buy another since the project got slightly more complicated than I had planned.  I had all the power in place and we had planned to just put the old light back up.  With the economy as it is though, we decided to do our part and help stimulate the retail sector.  We went back out to buy a ceiling fan as a replacement.  If I am counting correctly, that is trip #3…today.  I got home and prepared to hang the new fan and discovered that I had to buy different  screws (trip #4) as the ones I had were not long enough to do the trick.  I got everything installed and flip…nothing good.  The fan made a heck of a noise.  I know it was wired and installed right, but I wasn’t going to wait for flames to prove any point…back to the store..still counting?  Trip 5.  The bad fan came with bulbs by the way – more on that later.  So, I got everything re-wired and insulated.  I patched the hole from the old light and got everything cleaned up.  I was so excited to turn on the new lights.  Remember the first fan…the one that came with light bulbs.  Well, the second one, the better looking, higher end, more expensive one, didn’t come with bulbs.  It requires the small base bulbs which, of course, we don’t keep around.  One more trip out to the store – yup, #6.  It’s not easy going pink…