This past week Mike has been hanging fans and connecting all the electrical receptacles (light switches/outlets). I put in the trim pieces for the can lights, hung a few sconces and a cute chandelier over our front door.
Mike strongly dislikes the chandelier, he hasn’t flat out said he doesn’t like it, but I can tell. 
It’s the same face he made when he found out our new sofas don’t have built in recliners. He passive aggressively refers to me as “design eye” and we move on.
I don’t care what he says, I like these couches and they are super comfy. This fan used to be in the top of our ceiling vault, right smack dab in the middle between our kitchen and livingroom. My “design eye” said it needed to move into the livingroom. It looks much better in it’s new home.
That’s not a shadow on the ceiling you’re seeing, it’s paint. Mike sprayed the walls before we rolled the second coat and he didn’t mask the ceiling. On purpose. Because we are doing this to the kitchen and livingroom ceilings:
(not my kitchen – source unknown – but the stone floors look just like the stone we picked out for the upstairs bathrooms)
Speaking of ceilings I made a a little wooden frame to go between our whole house fan and the ceiling, for some reason it wasn’t made to sit flush and had a 1/2″ reveal (nice language for big gaping whole) around the entire edge of the fan.
I looks much better trimmed out. I almost got fired though because it’s been awhile since I’ve done any woodworking and I couldn’t find one of my tools. I looked like this:
I pulled it together, Mike threatened to do the project himself and his finish work makes me look like this:
Building that frame got me in the mood to start the rest of my trim work and now I’m working on the window sills and casings.
Mike’s working on getting our showers ready for tile. Here is a pic of the girls shower/tub:
Do you see that soap/shampoo niche? I got it on ebay. It’s foam covered in cement (or foam coat if you want to get technical). It’s totally waterproof and ready for tile – sloped and everything. It fits right into your framing. We could have framed one ourselves, but this was $40 of awesomeness – so I bought two. The other one is in our shower.
I got these sconces on ebay too. They were the first things I’ve ever bought from another country and I was scared. I love them!
I really wanted these lights from Restoration Hardware but they are $299 EACH. And that would be fine if we didn’t like to eat on a regular basis. But we do, so $600 for two lights was the type of price tag that put it in the “dream on” category. Until my friend mentioned finding something similar on ebay. I must have done something right in this world because sure enough for less than half the price of one light I got two including the $20 shipping to the USA from Hong Kong. Thank you Hong Kong.
The one caveat? When we put the box in the wall for a sconce we used the oversized ones. Light fixture boxes come in roughly three sizes: pancake, normal and oversized. You’ve seen them, they look like this:
We put in oversized because we just happened to have two lying around and at the time it didn’t make a difference to us. Fast forward to finishing time and wouldn’t you guess it, Hong Kong sent sconces that aren’t made for standard USA electrical boxes. That’s cool because Mike still hung them and I patched the little bit of plastic that was showing. See, you can’t even tell.
At some point between polka dots and lights I noticed this wall looked a little blank:
A little closer perhaps?
I swear I put an electrical box here…I sure did, here’s the light switch for it. Funny that when Mike put the switch in, it never dawned on him that the actual light box was nowhere to be found. Details are just not his thing.
Mike has a plan to find it though (I told him it is exactly 79″ high centered on the wall – cuz I’m OCD like that) he is going to turn the switch on then use his current finder or some little electrical tool he has to pin point its exact location behind the wall – hey! wait, didn’t I tell you it’s 79″ high centered on the wall? Who cares…he’s got his “tool”. It’s a digital multimeter (DMM). It’s red because Mike says, “All great tools are red.” Whatever, you buy Makita.
PS. I love Mike. With all my big, red heart.
