Sometimes Bella likes to lie half hanging off shelves. No problem with heights, I guess!
I did some more wiring. The garage was on the same circuit as much of the downstairs unit. And with all my fancy power tools… the breaker would trip. I added four circuits. Two for the garage, and two for our upstairs kitchen (which was also on the same circuit!) But it meant taking off more ceiling, and lots of conduit bending and pulling wire.
Stringing the wire through the conduit took much longer than I thought it would. As usual, what I thought was a one day project was really a four day project.
And now that the girls are three — they can go into the garage. Here’s Bella inspecting the conduit bender.
Here’s Bella doing her best impression of an otter. Her hairy belly makes here look really big. heh. And Arwen taking a nap on her favorite blanket.
Mole, Arwen, and knitting. Cozy! Arwen is on my lap as I write this. She has a unique squeaky rattling loud purrr…
The wood that was the laundry room siding was thickly covered in flaking paint. Before I put the wood on the soffit, we stripped it with a heat gun, and it took many hours. I decided to try another (faster) method for the rest of the wood: a planer. For the first pass, I hooked the dust collection up to a HEPA vacuum to try to catch the (probably leaded) paint dust I created.
The process generated two full garbage bags of paint chips, and wore through a set of planer blades (paint is quite abrasive and I hit a few nails.) But I stripped about 300 linear feet of wood (both sides) in one day. Of course, this method only works on flat boards, but the heat gun takes about 10-20 min per foot per side.
Here’s a picture of the pile of wood part way through planing. Some of the old wood is really beautiful tight grained wood. There are some rotten bits, but I’ll trim them off.
Here’s another photo of some of the boards after planing. Next step is to rout a decorative edge, and edge the boards so they fit together neatly for the wainscot in the laundry room.
And now for a photo of Bella relaxing in the sun:
