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attic, part 10:
finishing up
the home stretch. not.
By the time we got to the
final details -- installing the lights, putting up the trim, attaching the
switchplates -- it seemed as if we were emerging out of a very dark
tunnel. After everything we'd been through -- the months of drywall
installation, the mudding and sanding that took seemingly forever, and all
that paneling to be custom cut and nailed up -- the final details seemed
like a snap. We figured it'd take us a weekend to wrap things up. Maybe a
day longer. Tops.
Not.
Finish work, for whatever
reason, takes For. Ever. There are so many little details in so many
different directions that it's hard to keep track of everything. It's
rather like herding chickens, really. With the other phases, everything to
be done was done in big chunks, either literally or figuratively, so it
was very concrete in our minds what needed to be done at any given time.
That didn't make it any less frustrating, just less difficult to quantify.
Not to mention that all those seemingly incidental details
we'd "figure out later" were now ready to be decided upon. Or
that dozens of adjustments and changes to our original plans we'd made months before
trickled down to these details, changing what we'd originally intended for
them when we first started the project.
Take, for instance, the
lighting. Our attic has a couple of lighting issues, not the least of
which is that the back third of the room has no natural daylight, the two
main windows being blocked either by the chimney column or the dormer
corner. Then there's the room height, which, at seven feet, seriously
limits what kind and style of lighting you can put in. When we first wired
the room way back in the beginning, we'd originally planned on a kind of
adjustable wire track-lighting system that you can bend to whatever shape
you like and that had three or four different kinds of light fixture
options you could mix-and-match. It also allowed you to adjust how low the
lights hung down into the room, thereby preventing taller people (like
Sal) from whacking themselves in the melon. Finally, the system had five
lights on each track, which would allow us to flood the room with light.
We planned two tracks in the main two thirds of the room with coordinating
light fixtures in the dormer and at the top and bottom of the stairs.
Cool, right?
Er, no. Thankfully, we didn't
purchase the lighting in the beginning even though we knew what we wanted.
When the time came, we realized that the kit we'd
planned on only came with three lights and you had to buy a package of two
separately to complete the track. By the time you did all of that (twice,
since we'd planned for two kits), the price we'd originally planned had
tripled, and that was without the three other single fixtures we needed
for the rest of the room. No amount of refiguring our budget could absorb
all that cost, especially since we'd blown a good deal of our cushion on
the unexpected doubling of the insulation cost.
Back to the drawing board.
We spent literally hours
online and off trying to find fixtures that would meet all of our
requirements: low-clearance, putting out lots of light, at an individual
cost that didn't require a kidney as collateral since we had to buy five
of them. They also needed to be enclosed, because I really hate all the
little bug carcasses that accumulate in open fixtures.
Oh, and one other requirement. See, the vast, vast majority of
lighting we looked at was some variation on this:
Different finishes of
glass or metal, maybe, different depths or circumference of the bowl,
perhaps, but generally, they were a variation on this theme. And that's
fine and all, except whenever I see a light like this, all I can think of
is what it looks like. (Oh, like I'm the first.)
I guess any bowl-shaped item is going to
have a vague resemblance, but the little finial thingie at the bottom?
You can't tell me that isn't an inside joke at the design departments of
lighting companies. They're breast-lights, people! Breast-lights! How can I take my lighting
seriously when I think it might need a little underwire support? I mean,
I'm a progressive sort of girl and have no objection to the human form or
any part of it. But if, whenever I flip the switch, I think
"breast-lights, breast-lights, breast-lights"? That's just not going to
work.
As I said, nearly all the lights we looked at had this problem.
Which isn't to say there don't exist lights that don't have that problem,
they just don't exist in our price range, were the wrong color/style, or
were flat-out fugly. Ultimately, though, it
turned out quite well. We happened upon some simple but pretty single
Italian fixtures with completely enclosed alabaster shades. Even better,
they were a discontinued item and were seriously marked down; we got all
five lights we needed for the price of just one of the tracks we'd
originally planned. We were a little afraid the two single fixtures in
place of five-light tracks would make the room very dim in the back
section, but that also turned out not to be a problem since each of the
single fixtures holds two bulbs. Best of all, the shades
were a more unusual, flattened shape that didn't look like a bowl, nor did
they have little finial thingies, therefore, no breast-lights.
Of course, once they were
installed, I happened to look up at them while sitting on the floor
(painting trim) and was suddenly struck by their remarkable resemblance to
a whole different part of the anatomy. At my sudden burst into
uncontrollable laughter, a friend (who was helping with the trim), looked
upon me quizzically and when I could finally speak, I explained to her the
whole quest for the Non-Breast-Resembling-Light-Fixtures, then pointed up
to the fixtures we'd chosen. At which point she noticed the same thing I
did: penis-lights!
Sigh.
Other details didn't end
quite so easily. We'd purchased all the switchplates and outlet covers
when we bought all the electrical items way back at the beginning, but
somewhere during the year and moving things between the attic and the
basement, misplaced the bag with most of the covers. (Actually, I'm the
only one who swears that we bought all of those plates and that they've
subsequently been lost; Sal, Dad, and Malinda -- who were there when we
bought the stuff -- swear that we didn't.) In the grand scheme
of things, not a big deal since we bought the most basic type of plates
(because we were painting them to match the walls), but it still irks me that when we clean the basement this winter,
I know we're going to
stumble across a bag full of 20+ covers which we'll have no use for.
The covers themselves
became their own little lesson in frustration, since they all had to be
roughed up to take the paint, then painted with multiple coats, and the
fronts of the screws had to be painted, too, without gumming them up. I
sprayed them all with a couple of coats of lacquer, as well, to help
them stand up to daily use. And all of that also had to be done (very
carefully!) to the switches and outlets themselves. (If you're going to do
this, be sure to mask off
everything but the front of the switch/outlet to prevent the paint from
getting on the electrical parts. Also, spray the lacquer at an angle so
you don't spray directly into the holes in the switch/outlet.)
When it came time to
install them, we found that several of the outlet boxes weren't far enough
forward in the wall once the drywall was installed (even though we used
the little plastic tabs that are supposed to prevent this), which meant
some crazy-making finagling of the boxes and electrical components inside
the boxes. And, as if that weren't quite enough to put a few gray hairs on
our headss, we discovered almost all of the switch/outlet holes were
juuuust slightly off-center and/or too big so there was a gap in the
wall once the plates were on. Grrr. Off came the plates, then rounds with
the painter's caulk, patiently layering it up and smoothing it out so it
wouldn't be noticeable, waiting between every application for it to set,
then painting it up with whichever of three colors was needed to
camouflage it with the rest of the wall.
And then there was the
trim. We'd laid out all of the baseboard trim and painted it when we were
painting the window trim and the rest of the room, so at least we didn't
have a lot of that to deal with.
Unfortunately, our plan for the closet
doors (all five of them), had changed fifty bazillion times during the
course of the year, along with how the doorways were to be trimmed out. We
finally settled on traditional-style hinged doors (that have to be
custom-made and thus, have yet to be finished), which meant traditional
trim for the doorways. Which also meant the baseboards couldn't be put up
until the door trim was up and since we hadn't originally planned for
visible door trim (our first idea was modified rolling barn doors with the
big wheel hardware -- it would've totally rocked, except it would've cost
about $200 for each of five doors because the hardware was so expensive,
and was therefore scrapped). Again, grrr. So it was another trip to
the Depot for what was decided to be very clean, simple trim of 1"x4" in a
lintel configuration, followed by custom cuts for all five doors
(every damn one of them is a different dimension. of course they are.), and then painting it
all (primer and two coats), and then installing (which took some finagling
of its own -- did I mention the doorways are, uh, unique?). Finally --
finally! -- the baseboards could go up. I thought that would take longer
but Sal did it in an afternoon; it was all cut and installed by the time I
got home from work. That was thanks mainly to the pneumatic
finish-nailer we'd picked up at an estate auction a few years ago (along
with the little air compressor).
I then went back over all the little nail holes, filled them in with
putty, smoothed the putty with a swipe or two of sandpaper, and then
touched up the holes and joints to make it all look seamless.
Finish it we did, though
-- well, as long as you don't count the banisters. Or the closet lights.
Or the
closet doors. And we don't, because hellooo, ready to move in -- less than 48 hours later, we spent our first night up
there in our very own bed. Technically.
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