Pre-Thanksgiving House Updates

Alright folks, I am slowly catching up with blog posts. Stick with me here. I am still before Thanksgiving on these posts. My parents came down to see us for Thanksgiving. It was actually our second year hosting. We are getting to be pretty good at it, if I do say so myself. Anyway, before they showed up, I decided to do a few last minute updates. The first of which was to the guest bedroom. If you remember (and maybe you don't), our guest bedroom was looking something like this (goodness grief, that door needs to be painted - unfortunately that's unrelated).

Well, I was going through our basement and discovered a few things. One was the mirror from the half bath before we remodeled it. I thought it would go nicely here and give guests a place to do make-up, fix hair, etc. if someone was in the bathroom.

I then found the Z hook (ze hook!) that we had used in the half bath for towels and fashioned a little hanging frame thing from it. The frames aren't actually suspended by the Z. I nailed in the top one to the wall and just used the ribbon to hold the bottom picture. The ribbon around the Z hook is just decorative.

I think it fills out the room a little better. It's nice not having a huge expanse of wall without anything.

The second project I accomplished was painting the trim of the stairs. This is a before shot. I'll warn you now that the pictures don't show much change.

But looking up close, you could see how bad it was looking. The peach trim and the original trim were both showing. This is because we had our carpets replaced before we moved in. But, the peach needed to go. So, I used the trim I have been using everywhere else to paint the stairs a nice white (Snow Bound by Sherwin Williams).

After is a nice crisp white.

I took it all the way to the top of the stairs. The hallway trim needs it too, but there is only so much time in a day.

Much better, right?

And just because I love my readers so much, here's a sneak peak at one of the themes for our Christmas card. We actually didn't use this picture, but I thought it was a good one. :)

More soon!

Visit to hotlanta!

Hello! And Happy (late) Thanksgiving! Lots to catch up on from my end. Let's start with last weekend. J and I traveled down to Atlanta, GA to spend some time with our friends there. As many of you who know me in real life already know, I lived in the ATL for a year and a half while I went to Georgia Tech. It's hard to believe that it's been 4 years since I graduated from grad school! 5 years ago, I had gone to my first conference, and made my first trip overseas. Makes me feel old. We had a really great time visiting my old stomping grounds.

Tech had a football game on Saturday, which made walking around campus a lot of fun.

Tech students never stop working, even when tailgating.

I took about half my classes in the Klaus building. It was used for the filming of the movie, The Intern, where it was Google headquarters.

Beautiful fall foliage.

And we saw the new building that was put in for undergrad classrooms.

This piece of art was re-created with Legos.

I didn't bring my camera to the rest of our outings. We had a great time visiting our friends! I have more house updates. I hope to get to updating you all soon!

Wishing you the best Thanksgiving!

Does this turn you on?

The main point of today's post is light switches and outlets (hence the title...).

It's been a while since I have blogged so I feel like I may have some catch up to do... My last post was October 30th! Time really does fly. The first weekend of November, I got absolutely no house work done. We went to a bonfire / "camping" event (we didn't stay the night so we don't really get credit for camping) on Saturday in rural Virginia, and I spent Sunday celebrating one of my close friend's birthday in Baltimore. It was a super fun weekend, but not at all productive. :) Then, last week passed in somewhat of a blur, with all the election excitement, which brings us to this past weekend. Saturday, I spent the day with my coworkers playing paintball. That was a new experience. I managed to keep myself from getting hit too much or too hard until the very last game we played. I was trying to hide out in the back and not get hit (which had overall worked for me as a strategy). Unfortunately, everyone else on my team got out, which meant it was just me. And I got shot, in the ribs, at close range. Ouch. My body's first reaction was to start crying uncontrollably in front of my coworkers. It really made the situation a lot better (Can you hear the sarcasm?). After paintball, I had planned on doing some house stuff, but I was absolutely beat.

Sunday, I finally got around to... more light switch and outlet exchanges! You're excited right? I actually meant to do that and painting, but the electrical work took way longer than expected. How long? Well, last night J had a dream that he woke up and his alarm clock didn't have power, and my alarm clock didn't have power. So, he came downstairs and I was standing there with a bunch of wires pulled out from the wall. In the dream, he asked me what time it was, and I replied that I didn't know, but I had been at it for hours. When your husband has dreams about you doing electrical work, you may have a problem.

First of all, I did NOT wire the 3-way switch correctly. I knew I didn't when I first did it, so I set about to correct the problem by buying a 3 way switch. I'm going to make a really long story of trying to figure out the 3-way switch short, by telling you that the white wire in the back of the box (that I assumed was not connected) was connected to the original switch. And needed to be connected to the new 3-way. Once that was accomplished, the switch worked. I'm embarrassed about how long figuring that out took. Stupid 3-way switches and making white a hot. If you are ever interested in 3-way switches, I would recommend: 

http://diy.stackexchange.com/questions/4053/how-exactly-does-a-3-way-switch-work

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiway_switching

http://www.wikihow.com/Wire-a-3-Way-Light-Switch

The difference between those links and my circuit was that whoever wired ours disregarded any sort of color scheme, which made it more difficult to figure out.

Also, I am getting new switch plates soon. So sick of these grody ones.

The simpler, but much more labor intensive switch outs are as follows...

Garbage disposal switch.
Before:

After:

Guest bedroom switch
Before:

Sitting room switch.
Before:

After:

Outlets in the master bedroom (6 in total, did not take pictures of all outlets). The cool thing about the new outlets is they have built in child protection (a piece of plastic over the individual slots), which is always nice in thinking ahead.
Before:

 After:

Now, in addition to my ribs, my fingers are sore. Reminds me of those old wire stripping and breadboard days back in college (don't worry about it if you didn't understand that sentence).

Anyway, that's all for now. I would like to replace the switch plates and then move on to more exciting projects. :)