A week ago Friday my wife and I headed to Louisville mid-morning for the first day of the Bourbon & Beyond festival. We arrived in time to catch Joan Jett, +Live+, The Flaming Lips, Nathaniel Radcliff, John Fogerty, and the Foo Fighters. We spent the night Saturday night and we were pretty wiped out when we got back. About 10 hours of being in the sun and heat with cigarette smoke and gravel dust everywhere.
Sunday I got back into the attic to run the last wires and tie everything together. Also got the wire run up the wall from the basement.
Sunday evening I ran to HD for some new ceiling paint and touched up around the holes and covered all the prior marks from the layout process...
Then I started popping the lights in place:
We're really happy with how they looked and with the new ceiling paint, the lights practically match the color of the ceiling:
That was as far as I got. Monday morning I had to drive up to Jasper, IN to pick up some parts from that lab and bring them up to our Holland lab, unload them Monday evening, then drove over to Grand Rapids. Monday during my drive up I started to feel either a URI or sinus infection coming on. Yeah!
We had a customer summit on Tuesday and trade meetings Wed. and Thurs. I didn't go to the trade meetings, I went and made sales calls. We also had clients visit the Holland lab on Thursday afternoon. Ended up with a nasty URI from the smoke and dust at the festival. Friday morning I had my last client meeting/lab tour and got on the road home around Noon EDT.
Saturday I tackled the wiring in the basement, moving wired receptacles that were on the switches to the always-on circuit. So now all my receptacles are on the same circuit and only the can lights are on the lighting circuit. I had to go and buy a new switch box for the wall. The old box was too narrow and shallow for the new dimmer switch. Got that cut in and installed and then:
We had light! Man do those lights get bright! Definitely going to be an adjustment to the additional light. And I had to pull the lights twice to change their color. Started at 4000K which was way to blue for the room. 3500K was still too intense so we settled on 3000K. Normally 3000K looks a little yellow to me, but in our LR it's perfect and looks bright white.
Sunday night I put the plugs I kept from the wall when I cut the access holes back in the wall:
The URI is still kicking my **** and my wife has one too, so we're quit the pair right now.
Now I just need to mix up the drywall mud I have that matches the texture of the plaster walls and patch everything. After it's sanded and primed, we can paint the walls.
But before that we decided to hang our TV on the wall by our sunroom doors to get it up higher and allow us to get rid of the TV stand. It's a 40" TV and it will fit the width of the wall perfectly, however, I have to buy a full motion mount that will allow me to slide the TV on the mount because the studs aren't evenly spaced on the wall. The cost difference is about $100, but it will be worth it to have the TV properly centered on that wall. We don't have cable TV or even a sound bar on that LR TV, only the TV and a FireStick, so I found a recessed receptacle that I can install just under the TV mount on the wall so no cords will be visible.
I'm not mixing up the mud for patching until the TV mount is up and the new receptacle is installed just in case I have to cut any bigger access holes for the install. I shouldn't have too, but waiting a few days at this point isn't a big deal.
Mid October will be painting. Lots of painting. Ceilings, walls, and trim in the sunroom, LR, and DR. Plus the kitchen ceiling needs to be painted and I still have a little bit of trim to put up in the kitchen above the cabinets.
And I suspect this winter a few more rooms will be getting some can lights since they were pretty easy to install and we have the hole saw that works great on our plaster walls/ceiling.
I missed the Menards 11% rebate last week so I have to wait for the next one to buy the insulation for the garage and I'm getting some insulation for above the sunroom too. While I was on that side of the attic I realized it had almost no insulation in the ceiling and none in the attic wall above it.
I'm hoping it cools off to seasonal temps in mid-October. It's still been in the low 90s for the last two weeks here. I don't want to mess with insulation when it's that hot since I wear a Tyvek suit in the attic along with gloves and a mask. I'll do the same in the garage when installing that insulation just to keep from itching like mad afterwards.
Have a couple of camping trips planned for October too, so hopefully the lack of rain continues for a few more weeks.
The purge of stuff hasn't stopped yet either. Gave away several things the past week and binned a lot of other stuff over the weekends. Still need to purge more stuff from the garage to make room for a future tool chest and just get as much clutter off the floor as possible. The goal is to have half the garage available to my wife to park in once the driveway is poured and the other half will be for the motorcycles and work area. The Pilot will have to be out in the driveway when I'm working, but I'm hoping there will be enough room.
My wife has already said that our next house will have to have an attached garage and room for me to build a detached garage. The detached garage will be for my son and I. She said the attached garage will only be for our cars, two running motorcycles, the bicycles, and a chest freezer. Everything else goes in the detached garage. She has already found a few houses with both an attached garage and a detached garage in NW Indiana and Western MI.
I'm so glad she's on the same page with me. I didn't push for a yard barn for all the lawn equipment and lawn tools yet, but they won't be going in my detached garage...
Not only did they have it, it was NIB and the price I saw online was correct! 
