Life At Villa Boswell

It’s sort of hard to talk about rough electrical.  I mean, how exciting is that?  I suppose really exciting if you mess it up and then electrocute yourself later on.  So, the thing about electrical is that, even though you have mentally walked through the house and thought of all the places where you need a light, a switch and an outlet, there’s nothing like walking through the house again, pretending to turn lights on and off, looking at all the spots where you might want to have lighting.  That’s what Chris and I did, and good thing, too.  Anyhow, I figured I’d also throw in some photos about the work on the garage, since that’s where the main electrical panel for the house is located too.

This first shot shows the garage, no wiring and no finish work, on a rainy December day. In the center is the doorway through to the utility room, where we stored and locked up all the tools for the job.

Once the electrical finally converged in the garage and utility area, the tools had to be moved out of the utility room and stored in the garage, which also meant that the garage had to be locked up.  So Chris hung the interior doors and Lora did her tool organization magic.

And they assembed and hung the garage door. You can also see the sockets for exterior lights and electrical outlets on the exterior.

Here’s an earlier short of the "doorway" to the main living floor.

Now complete with door and storage.  Rather than building something temporary, we just decided to build the storage we wanted for that section of the garage anyhow.

There is something so satisfying about looking at organized tools.

The full view.

Here’s a shot where much of the wiring from the main area converges in the garage. I love those power tools.

And another one of all the recessed lighting cans that Chris and Brian installed.  I drove Chris nuts with adjustments to the recessed lighting.  We mostly used Halo housing because our electrician, Gus Ibarra, told us that though there are cheaper housings available, the cheaper ones often fail later on and have to be replaced.  Ok, made sense.  These Halos are fairly reasonable anyhow, but the ones that really cost are the dedicated fluorescent housings, which are required for the kitchen.  The trick to those is that you should get the correct voltage to match the intensity of light you want, and this can get confusing, because it seems like you could just put in any wattage of light you want, but not for dedicated CF recessed housing.  We had to take an entire set of lights back after I did a little research and realized that we’d be blasting our kitchen with too much light.  Also, we skipped getting the dimmable recessed lighting since it cost half again as much.

A shot of the lighting down the hallway. Bear in mind that if you want dimmable recessed lighting for dedicated CFs, you need a special ballast in the housing to support that, and that’s the extra cost.  In our kitchen, we’ll rely on under-cabinet lights for ambiance.  All the other recessed lighting in the house was pretty much standard 6", and we’ll just put dimmable CF screw-in bulbs in those, which are available online.  Was that more than you ever wanted to know about recessed lighting? Ha.  I spent so many hours on this topic, and I haven’t even picked out the trim yet.

Commercial break: Bucky wants to go play now.

Lora steps back to guide Chris and Brian as they install the main, huge, fat electrical wire through the conduit from the outside of the house to the main panel.  Have you ever bought this stuff at Home Depot?  Once, Chris and I made a trip for some of the larger conduit we needed.  We came away with three rolls of wire weighing about 120 lbs and costing about $800.  All I could think was "The shoes I could buy with this!"

Three generations of Boswells working very hard.

Chris and his mom, Lora.  What would we do without her?

Bucky and his new brother, Max, conked out in the construction shed after horsing around on the site.