This cOld House 34

This post has been languishing for the past MONTH.... waiting for pictures. I finally decided to put it up without, as I have yet to shoot, organize, find the proper accompaniments. My apologies for words alone. - R -
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Well what can I say? The roofers have been diligently hand-soldering copper on my roof for three and a half weeks, it rained cats and dogs all last night and we have NO LEAKS!!!!!!!!!

We got seven windows back from Dayton Art Glass today and Bob's teed up to install on Tuesday. In a spectacularly bad turn of luck, it appears that most of the damage done to the lead on the attic bedroom windows was from a squirrel who must have been caught up there. Dick actually found a tooth embedded when he began cutting out the lead to replace it. I wonder if the squirrel ever got out, and if he did, whether he died a dismal death of lead poisoning. (I can only hope...)

I had curtains made for the girls' room and bathroom so those rooms are really starting to come together.

Now for the bad news...
The new garage has this troublesome leak. Rob et al have been caulking, sealing, and waterproofing to beat the band but they just can't get it to stop.

The electrical installations done a couple of weeks ago are sub-par and need to be re-done. (that's the second bunch of electricians I had to fire.) Rob's still looking for replacements.

Dan finally hit his head hard enough on the kitchen light to knock it off. Up until now, we've managed to avoid it coming down by placing a butcher block and the kids' small table underneath it so Dan wouldn't continually hit his head on it. Still he managed. This is along the same vein as the dent in our closet ceiling, (the sloped part under the stairs, where he inexplicably crushed the plaster with the sheer force of his thick skull,) and also the cracked plaster on the ceiling of the kitchen stairs. The guy has been close to six feet tall for the past twenty years or so, you'd think he'd have a pretty good idea what the evelation of his head is at any given moment. How can one not know where one's head is? But I digress. The kitchen light in question was a marvel of Johngineering so mediocre that it rivals the inane 14 gauge wiring of the entire room. (12 gauge being code and anything else just NOT.) This massive low-hanging fixture located in the middle of the room was attached to a mounting strap which was bolted to another mounting strap which was screwed into only one side of the electrical box, which was not flush to the ceiling. That's akin to tying two ropes to the front of the boat, looping them around a tree on shore and hoping it doesn't swing around and hit the dock or run aground. We went to Lowes this afternoon to purchase a flush mounted ceiling fixture to replace the pool table light that was there, rather than buying a hard hat.