Tuesday, September 16, 2008

We're Wired

Too much coffee....

No, not really, not every day, anyway.

It's the house - the rough-in electrical is in.
I knew it was happening soon but didn't realize that 'rough-in' includes actual fixtures for the pot lights so it was a bit of a scramble getting them in time.
I had met with a lighting designer a few months ago so I was prepared (or thought I was) when we did our first walk-through with the electrician. I had made a few adjustments of my own to the designer's plan & then the electrician had some great suggestions to make.
OK I'll confess, when I got home I compared our final plan to the original designer's plan and found they were almost exactly the same. Most of the changes that I had made the electrician had revised - to the way the lighting designer had originally planned, coincidentally.
So much for my delusions of being a lighting designer.
And, it's a good thing we had such a knowledgeable electrician.

When Kim & I checked the placement of all lights & outlets after the first day, before the wire was strung, we found just a few errors. Then sheepishly realized that most of the changes or additions on our list were because of our own mistakes.
In one case we both thought the other had told the electrician about a fairly crucial outlet requirement; in another I had carefully measured & put an X on the floor for placement of our dining room fixture. Then, just to be absolutely sure, I wrote the distances from each of the walls on my taped 'X'. When we did our check that evening I couldn't believe they had put the light 'over there' when the X was obviously 'right here'. Couldn't figure out how they could make such a stupid mistake when they had done such a great job everywhere else - until I looked at the figures I had written on the X - I had the numbers swapped, of course.
They must have noticed their, I mean my, mistake as soon as they walked in the house next morning because it was fixed before I even phoned to tell them about it.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi Jem,

Had some time to kill and thought I'd view your blog after watching Marth Stewart's show about blogging. What a great idea. Great to see the transformation, and funny comments too.
See ya next Tues. at work.
Cristina

Jem said...

Thanks Cristina, I'm so glad you had time to check out the blog and that you left a comment. I'd make a bigger effort to keep it up-to-date if I knew there were people actually reading it.
Jem