More Fun With Electricity and the HPOs (Hated Previous Owners) and The Garden Marches On

 

This Sunday found Kiki and I locked in battle with replacing a third ceiling fan with a light fixture. 

The HPOs had something of a fixation with ceiling fans, which I have little doubt they booby-trapped just to torture us. 

The reason I suspect this foul treachery is that, of the six fans they felt it necessary to install, three of them have failed in the last year. Of course, the fans worked great when we did the home inspection a year ago and the final walk-through. Admittedly, two of them can be operated only by stupid dirty-white remote controls (because, for some reason, this couple was apparently incapable of standing up and pulling a cord.) By late summer, half of the fans were inoperable. 

It turns out that replacement light fixtures are not routinely easy to install - at least not for us, with our admittedly limited home improvement skills. 

The puzzling mass of little metal bits and screws and wires that arrived with our new fixture took much of the morning to piece together. 

When we were finally able to get it into more or less one piece and remove the useless fan, we faced another challenge: Our new fixture required a round junction box. The one in the master-bedroom ceiling was square. 

Fortunately, the internet is full of much information, and we quickly became aware of a piece of hardware called an "adjustable crossbar kit" which allows one to put a round fixture into a square hole. 

Because of the plague, Kiki ordered this obscure thingy as a curbside pickup at Home Despot, where a surly fellow came out and demanded to see her driver's license before handing it over. 

Because it is January and there are about two hours of daylight, we'll be installing the new fixture next weekend, and temporarily spending a lot of time fixing the blinking 12:00 that is displayed on every electronic device.

There are not inconsiderable drawbacks to homeownership. 

The Garden Marches On

The lettuce seedlings planted last week have thrived in the greenhouse, even under the old and inadequate light fixture. 

A new, promising and not inexpensive 2' T5 full spectrum bulb arrived in the mail. I've placed it into the greenhouse, and will be planting a new row of lettuce this very afternoon. We'll be able to evaluate the new bulb's performance to see whether it is worth investing in a couple more before the spring planting proper gets started.

Garden planning moves on apace. Daunted by the enormity of it at first, I've broken it down into parts. Right now I've planned an everbearing strawberry bed and a broccoli/oregano bed that incorporates succession planting. 

Because starting strawberries from seed is a months long process involving the freezer and so on, we've resigned ourselves to purchasing plugs. Seed catalogues that have been arriving at Steepmeadow are full of them, so they should not be difficult to acquire. 

As for the broccoli, it seems to take about 100 days from seed to table, which would be all summer. So the plan there is to start a batch at the end of March, and another at the end of May when the first batch goes out to be planted in the raised bed with a planned harvest date at the end of June. The second batch will follow into the garden in July, with a harvest date at the end of August. 

There's a lot more to plot out, but one thing at a time is the way to do it.