…and I’m feeling like I was run over by a Mack truck!
Yesterday, our two dads helped us take the knotty pine off the walls, along with the furring strips and most of the insulation. Oh, the wood in this room was seemingly never-ending. We still need to take down some of the cardboard-box covered insulation in the rafters and finish bringing the wood down to the garage.
Now that it’s cleared out, we can see the electric. We know we’ll want to replace the outlets and light switch. It’s run on BX, but it’s 50-year-old BX. Not sure if it’s worth upgrading to Romex yet — going to ask my uncle his opinion about it. Of course, to do anything, we need to find the “hot box” where the lead line is, but that appears to be in the attic crawl space. That means I’m going to have to go up there today with gloves and a flashlight, because it appears insulation was laid on top of the main BX line. This will entail a lot of crawling on planks again (I did some of that yesterday and my knees are killing me).You can see some of the cardboard on the picture to the right. It’s brittle and definitely a fire hazard. But brittle also means taking it down creates a mess, as the insulation just falls apart, too. To get to the topmost pieces, I have to move planks over the ceiling rafters and crawl across them. Not looking forward to this part!
We’re also going to raise the ceiling from 7-foot to 8-foot, if possible. The original ceiling was less than 7-foot — only 6’11” to the bottom of the rafter, then deduct a few inches for the furring strips and the ceiling tiles. No wonder I was feeling claustrophobic!
