Monday, October 13, 2008

Pulling Cable

We spent our long weekend hauling crap out of the room that was once a bathroom. It has been two weeks, and yet the power drill is still running in reverse. When will we be putting it in forward and actually building a bathroom, not demolishing one?

We spent Friday night at the holy trinity for home renovators: Home Hardware, Rona and Home Depot. I bought myself an electrician's fishing tape - hooray. I've always wanted one. And today, I needed it, as we fed the four different gauges of wire thru the bulkhead down to the basement and to the panel. (We didn't connect it. We'll get an electrician to do that part.)

Thinking ahead, I want our new bedroom/office to be wired with coaxial cable and phone, plus we are putting a laundry rough-in as well, in the event that we move the laundry upstairs for our golden years. So this required pulling two electrical cables: a 14/2 for the washing machine and 10/3 30A cable for the dryer. That flipping 10/3 cable (the orange stuff) is heavy and expensive! Plus, the future dryer location is as far from the electrical panel that you can get with our tiny house, so we needed a lot of it. This was what I had listed as our easy job for the weekend. Relatively clean and quiet work, yet it still took us a few hours. But, I got to use my new fishing tape, and it worked like a charm.

The harder job was tearing up the remainder of the 3/4" plywood subfloor. It was a loud and dirty job, which I'm sure was even less pleasant for our neighbours. Just pepper the roar of the power saw with some colourful cursing when the head of one of the several screws popped off. The quote of the weekend came from Dan when he said: "drywall comes down a lot faster than it goes up".

After two weeks of toiling in this zone, I'm sure that Dan is happy to be starting his new job tomorrow. He's off the hook for a few day. My super brother-in-law is swooping in tomorrow to save us from this hole that we are in. Super Mike to the rescue!

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