Today was a busy day – not only for me, but also for the two tradesmen who came in to do jobs.
The first one was a guy who restores stone surfaces. Our bathroom has marble floor tiles and they had become rough and pitted in places with age and various bathroom chemicals. one of the worst bits was this dirty looking stain, which I’ve tried cleaning but never managed to get out.
As part of the grand spring cleaning and mini-renovation, I’d booked a guy to come and polish the bathroom floor. He arrived at 8:00 and spent most of the day polishing and working on the floor, including inside the shower stall. It must have been back-breaking work. He ground the stained area to “open up the pores” as he said, and then used a chemical treatment to extract the stain. He also worked on the rough areas, mostly inside the shower stall, probably caused by various body wash and shower cleaning products.
The result at the end of the day is really good. The floor is silky smooth everywhere again, including the previously sandpaper-rough areas inside the shower. And the stained area is completely gone.
Very happy with this job!
The second person was an electrician, the same one we had install new ceiling lights for us a while back. We had been thinking about other jobs that we could get done, and my wife suggested getting some downlights installed in the kitchen, over the bench that sits in the cutaway section opposite the cooktop.
In this view you can see the sink against the window wall. The cooktop is on the left side, just left of the knife rack. Opposite that is another bench, extending perpendicular to the wall, to the pillar you can see at far left of the photo. We often prepare things on this bench, and early on we recognised the need for more light here. So I installed a cheap fluorescent tube on the wall, which you can see above the microwave, with an ugly cord dangling down at an angle to the power strip on top of the microwave. It’s an ugly solution, but we’ve lived with it for years.
But my wife suggested we could get rid of it and install some downlights above the bench, maybe three running in a line inside the edge of the false ceiling that you can see above the kitchen. I informed the electrician what we wanted, and he said he could wire them to the same switch circuit as the main kitchen light. But we wanted them independently switched, so we could have them on or off separately from the existing kitchen light. He said he wasn’t sure if that would be possible until he arrived and had a look at the wiring.
When he got here this morning, he was skeptical at first. I wanted a new light switch in the place where our old copper telephone cable comes out of the wall, which is on that pillar at the far left – a convenient place for the downlight switch. I thought he might be able to run a new power cable up from there to the false ceiling cavity and do all the necessary wiring that way. But he said that he needed to tie it in to an existing light power circuit, and the only one suitable was the main kitchen light, which is switched from another switch on the opposite side of the kitchen entrance. Okay… but when he opened up that switch and looked at the wiring, he lamented that it appeared to have been run through the brickwork and concrete directly, without a conduit, which meant it might not be possible to pull a new wire through.
He aid he could try pulling the existing kitchen light wire through, tied to a leader cable, and then pull the cable back with two wires, and add the downlights to an extra switch on a new wall plate. But he said that if the cable was tightly restricted by the bricks and concrete, he might not be able to pull the new wires through, so there was a risk that we’d lose the cabling for the original kitchen light! I asked him to estimate the chances of that, and he said he could give the first step a try and if things felt like getting stuck he could try backing it out, and he felt that was low risk. So I said go ahead. Thankfully he managed to get the whole process done, although there was a tense moment when he was trying to pull the two new cables back through.
Here’s the installation of the new lights in progress:
You can see two installed, and the third with a wire dangling out, and also wires dangling out the hole where the original main light was installed. And here is the finished job, with the original light and three new downlights all on.
This view also gives you a much better view of the kitchen layout than the first photo above. After taking this photo I removed the old fluoro tube from the wall, which now looks much cleaner.
While the tradies were working on the bathroom floor and kitchen lights, I worked on writing my class for the next week of critical/ethical thinking. This week’s topic is The Generation Gap. It should be very interesting, asking kids to imagine thinking like adults and to discuss why people of different ages sometimes don’t understand one another.
Even though I didn’t do most of the hard work, it felt like a very accomplished day!
