In preparation for the new baby, we've been busy getting things ready around the house. Connie's been taking care of researching and acquiring the amazing number of baby things we'll need. Thankfully we've had family and friends who've been able to provide us with a LOT of stuff. I've been focusing on the house since I haven't really done much with it since I moved here about 5 years ago. My time was consumed with getting the outside under control since it had been neglected for a long time by the previous inhabitants (i.e. renters).
The first thing I did to make things more kid-safe was replace all of the electrical receptacles with tamper-resistant outlets. I didn't realize these were available until I went looking for them. We were going to just do the plug-in plate things, but the house is really dated (70's style) so it was asking for an upgrade. So every receptacle in the house now looks like this.
In the kitchen, bathrooms, and laundry room, I also installed GFCI outlets since that had never been done.
To keep things looking uniform, I also replaced all of the old style light switches with these new ones. Some incorporated dimmers (the little slide switches adjacent to the main switch) to help with lighting control.
And to make it a little easier to find the light switches in the dark, I used illuminated switches in certain spots. An interesting thing I found is that some illuminated 3-way switches won't light up in certain circuits. I think it has something to do with a voltage differential they require to operate, and there are varying residual voltages in the 3-way circuits here. Another project for the future.
An outgrowth of replacing all of these outlets and switches is that I traced just about every electrical circuit in the house. So we now only have one unknown light switch (seems to be an abandoned 4-way) and a couple of circuit breakers that don't seem to connect to anything (they're both switched off, and I haven't noticed anything not working). I also found an interesting DIY job on a 3-way circuit. Whoever did it thought they didn't have enough wires in a cable to wire up a 3-way circuit. So they used the bare ground wire as a hot lead. Yikes! Needless to say, that's been remedied.
The house has always been rather dim (ok, almost like a cave) so I upgraded the lighting in a lot of locations. In the living room, I added some recessed lighting.
The master bedroom, Connie's office, and baby room got new surface mount ceiling lights.
And the bathrooms all got new lighting fixtures.
I also finally replaced the stairway chandelier that had been missing since I removed the giant fish hook chandelier when I first moved in.
The kitchen needs a complete remodel. But that's something for the distant future. So for now, I just cleaned up the existing lighting, re-wired it to balance out the circuits better, and replaced a bad ballast and all of the fluorescent tubes. So it doesn't look much different (except maybe cleaner as you don't see the silhouette of dead bugs any more), but the lighting is way better.
The lights on the outside of the house are really dated looking and some have been falling apart.
I've got all of them replaced except the two at the entry in the above photo. Due to the rock wall, these are going to require some carving to get them to fit. But eventually they'll look like this one that is installed in another area.
There's more that's been done and will be done, but I think that's enough for now.
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