I am in the office this morning. Dominica is at home awaiting the power delivery provider to come out and deal with our missing neutral situation. The team last night indicated that they would be bringing in a trencher this morning to dig up our yard and likely replace the line coming in from the street.
The team from the electric company arrived quite early this morning and ended up finding that the issue was not in our yard at all and so they did not have to dig up our yard in any way. They were able to fix the issue of the missing neutral in short order and had Dominica test everything in the house to see how it was working. So far so good. She turned on all of the lights and kicked off some laundry. Rock solid power. This is awesome. We can now safely turn on our computers and appliances without continuous fear that something disastrous is going to happen.
I came home for lunch today and got a chance to check out the newly working electric. I am very excited now. Having the electric be unreliable made being in the house not so much fun and was a constant worry. Now we can, with much more confidence, move forward with other projects. And with the repairs being free, we have more funds with which to pursue other work as well.
Most likely our first project is going to be the conversion of the garage. Getting more working space in the house would be great. But more importantly having that space as an additional guest bedroom is really a big deal. That will, in theory, give us the “nursery”, the garage office and the “den” as potential places for guests to use when staying at the house. Quite different from places that we have owned previously. We’ve never really owned a place that could house so many people. With the garage being able to act as a guest bedroom, in theory, that makes the house function much like a four bedroom house.
Possibly the biggest advantage of getting the garage conversion completed, however, is the addition of the one wall being shelving which we will use to house all of the sprawl of books that currently fill the house. That is the top source of “stuff” around the house. There are easily twenty boxes of books, plus loose books, books that haven’t made it to the house yet and more than need someplace to go and until we have those shelves will not have anyplace to call home. Many of those boxes remain in the living spaces of the house making the place a bit of a mess while the rest remain in huge piles in the garage. In fact, now that I contemplate it more, there might be closer to thirty boxes. It is truly that bad.
Additionally, if all goes to plan, those shelves will also be used to hold my collection of rare and antique computers interspersed among the books. I plan to have my Commodore 64, 128 and 16, Vic=20, TRS-80s, XO-1 and others on display there. I have several interesting items that I would like to display. I want to put them on stands behind plexiglass or something similar and have little LED lights shine on them and have little museum-style labels that say what each item is. I think that it would be a really neat use of the space and really fit with the office.