We're enjoying a lovely spring up here in the Souther Tier. There are allegations that we will break freezing today (first time in 4 days), so that will be nice. However, we did wake up to a dusting of snow on the the crocus! The daffodils and tulips are both very confused by the weather, and I fear we may have decreased production from some of the tulips that sprung up in the warm weather we had a couple of weeks ago.
The electrics done! This past week the electric company showed up and dropped a new line out to the house. The new meter got hooked up and all of the old stuff got taken away! Yes! I realize the pictures are not all that exciting, but like to go down to the basement and lovingly stroke our new panel with it's 15 empty circuits, and spare capacity. I had hoped to upgrade the power to the garage at the same time, but that will have to happen another time.
Currently, there is a piece of buried romex that runs under the concrete slab to the garage to provide 30 amps of power. I really want to keep the electric buried, but with the slab in the way trenching is going to stink. I also haven't decided how to heat the garage. We have gas to the house (furnace and hot water heater), so the ideal solution would be to run a gas line out to the garage and install a direct vent gas heater. But now we're up to two trenches that have to go out there (can't co-mingle gas and electric in the same trench), so I have to:
1) Decide whether electric heat is sufficient
2) Decide if I can swallow my pride and run the electric as an aerial to the garage.
Decisions, decisions, decisions.I also finished the low voltage wiring to the sewing and living room. Previously the coax was run through drilled holes in the floor and was a single run from a big 5 way splitter off of the main. I wanted to run cat5 everywhere (wireless sucks) so I'm just running a low voltage package around the house. Skawood helped me figure out what to run and what tools I needed etc, and so with a spool of cat5e and rg6 in hand, I've started that project. Leviton makes really nice modular wall plates that you can put coax, ethernet, phone, and speaker plugs into.
There is a similar plug on the other side of the wall in the sewing room. The plugs were surprisingly easy to punch down as all of my runs worked on the first try! The only difficulty was figuring out that when crimping a modular plug onto cat5e, you're not supposed to strip the individual wires. Sigh. Reading the instructions is bad. The crimping pushes insulation piercing contacts into the wires. Learning that I didn't have to strip 8 24 gauge wires was a relief.Thinking is not always my forte.
