1.1.2018 - Happy new year!

It's really hard to fathom that it's 2018!  Last year, I did a recap of the fact that Jim worked 349 out of the 366 days in 2016, taking only 17 days off for kidney stone surgery, Kyle & Julia's wedding, and a couple trips back to Ohio.  It's easy to recap 2017 - Jim worked every single day of the year at the property - he starts 2018 with a record 454 days straight.  He keeps track of his hours too - so last year he spent 2,670 hours working at the carriage house - that doesn't include all the prep work he has to do at home!  I think his New Year's Resolution needs to be to take some days off!

That being said, we start this new year full of gratitude and anticipation.  We are so grateful for good health and fortitude that has allowed us to make such incredible progress over the past year.  We look forward to hopefully moving out of the apartment and into the carriage house in 2018!

We wish our family and friends and all you faithful blog readers a new year filled with much good health and happiness!

Onto the day's progress...

Probably the best news of the day was that the car started!  After having a totally drained battery last night and with temps overnight that hit -14, Jim was pretty convinced that it wouldn't start this morning and was coming up with Plan B.  However, he went out and it turned over! 

At lunchtime, I went out and unearthed my car from quite a few layers of snow and ice so that I could spend the afternoon at the property.

Jim did put together the next assembly for the water heater but I failed to take a picture.  I hadn't been out in what felt like forever, so I was busy taking in all the sights - especially the stairwell which looks incredible!

He put the last little piece of drywall on the back wall of the woodshop...

He spent a good chunk of time working on the tv boxes on the living room wall - this took quite a bit of configuring to decide how he wanted it to work.  He mounted three boxes...

 

 And did the wiring...

After he did all the heavy duty mounting work for the plywood blocking for the tv mount, he just needed to staple a couple pieces of plywood on top to bring the blocking even with the studs for drywall application.

All done...

 

Jim brought power up to a receptacle where the tv will plug in.  Then he brought the media wiring into another box that will be behind the media cabinet.  From that box, he just needs to put some kind of conduit/tube to go to the box on top.  That way he will be able to push whatever wires he needs to connect the tv to the internet through that box.  All the wiring will be in the walls, hidden by the tv.  Perfect!  But isn't setting up a tv these days so very complicated?  Sure glad I have an electrical engineer to do it!

 



 

 

While Jim was working on the wiring, I did some cleaning up in the shop, including cutting up all the scrap drywall that Jim and Kyle used when working in the stairwell.

 

 

We decided to continue living room work - Jim had the soundproofing insulation in this last cavity but it wasn't glued down, so that was the first task.

Next was cutting, marking and bringing over the drywall...

Up in place and fastening down...

High 9/Low -8