It's Been a Week

Priming the cabinets and other things. New Nail Gun. Down lights arrived on time.

These are nice cabinets. Note the breadboard on the right.

I'm taking a break from priming the lower cabinet. It's a lot to do. I decided to prime the 14 metal handles, too. I want to tape them off and hit them with an accent color. Maybe a gray. (Some didn't want to come off, most have earlier paint on them, so I decided not to kill myself.)

I gave the 4x6 post a first coat of primer when I did the upper cabinets. Since the photo, the post has been given another coat.

As you can see in the second photo, the end of the lower cabinet is a dark brown, like the inside of the garage doors. I'm on a mission to wipe that out, but its a challenge for even the best primer. The idea is to get some sort of drywall to cover the insulation on the west wall (and to insulate and cover it with drywall at the east wall). That will all have to be primed, too.

Meanwhile, this is looking better. I bought a 12" blade and a mud trough so that I can do a proper finish coat.

The down lights arrived. They are exactly as they were described. All I have to do is run power to the first light, then a wire from the first to the second light, and so on. You install the drywall, covering up all the wires, then carefully cut out 12 4" holes (they have a paper template), reach into each hole and pull down the two wires (one wire on the 12th light), attach each wire to the connection inside each j-box, then place the j-box in the ceiling (pushing the wires and the j-box back up in the hole. Do this 12 times.

Then, we take each light--they look like a puck, 4" diameter and only about 1/2" thick--and connect it to the wire dangling from the j-box. Each puck has two spring-loaded ears. Fold them back, push the puck into place. C'est voila, the ears snap like a mousetrap and hold the puck tight on the ceiling. Do this 12 times, turn on the power and boom--6500 lumens for just 108W.

New toy: It's an 18-gauge brad nailer. It can shoot 5/8" to 2" nails into wood. (The diameter is 18-gauge, which is slimmer than a typical finishing nail. I tested it, though, and it holds.)

The Ryobi Nail Driver (in my next novel, my new character, Nail Driver, teams up with my long-time hero, Bolt Upright, to solve crimes) was on sale for $129 and it uses the same battery as the kit that Tanya and Kevin bought me for Christmas (18V Ryobi One).

Going forward, I need to cut five 4x8 sheets of drywall into 4x4'-9" sheets--that's the width of the loft. I need to drill for the wires for the downlights. I have 2x6s to close the ends of the loft so that the drywall has something to screw to. The east wall needs some 2x4 blocking and insulation. The left-over pieces of drywall go on the east and west walls. Hopefully, I won't need anymore drywall (Johnathan Jones' truck is my only way to get them home). Finish priming the lower cabinet, finish the drywall on the bedroom side. Maybe there's only one more week on this.