busybee fluffy rambles

The electrician came over and relocated the outlet for the stove, and now it fits flush against the backsplash. Well, almost flush – there’s a screw on the back which is trying to rest against it. But this tells me that the ideal height and position for the stove is with its surface flush to the countertop, and putting on the rear trim piece after all. Or maybe it could go a bit higher than the countertop and the trim piece rests against the backsplash, but I don’t think that would look as nice. Either way, the outlet position made the big difference here.

The original outlet mounting was really weird and kludgy, and it also seems that the outlet originally was in the spot where I wanted it to begin with, so it must have been moved at some time. I’d been suspecting that the stove I had wasn’t even original to the condo (based on its estimated year of manufacture) and now that’s verified. Anyway, now it’s in a better place, although this means there’ll be even more sheetrock to patch. Oh well, that was already planned on for the hopefully actually-final finishing day.

There’s still a slight gap on the left of the stove, unfortunately, but I think that could be handled with some window spline or some other sort of filler material. I have no idea how hot it gets in there though. I still haven’t run the oven, for starters.

Anyway, the main reason he came in was to finish wiring up the range hood. Our original plan was to use wire mold in the corner and run the cable straight down from right under the ceiling, but it turns out that there’s a beam that goes across the top of that wall – and the beam actually extends down further than the support beams in the front and back! So weird.

Anyway, because of that surprise we had to formulate a new plan, and the electrician’s idea was to use bent metal conduit to feed the wiring into the wall and down to the outlet. I was imagining something with tighter bends than what he was able to do, but the end result I think actually looks pretty neat, like an organic form made out of metal. It suits the décor well, and matches very well with the range hood’s mount.

It was really cool to watch him work with the conduit bending, too. He clearly had a shape formulated in his head and he was able to work pretty quickly to make it work, and he did it all in one try with three bends.

He also replaced the GFI outlet (which turned out to be defective), which was easy enough to do since the outlet had to come out anyway.

There will have to be some more patching to do, both from the test holes and from, well, the actual hole. Hopefully it can all be patched up reasonably well. I have no idea how the contractor is going to get the patching compound in behind the conduit, which is absolutely not going anywhere right now (at least not without a fight). Maybe we can use my pastry injector. I sure haven’t found any other uses for it.

(The pastry injector cost $1.50 at Daiso, so it’s not a big deal if it gets ruined.)

Oh, speaking of Daiso, yesterday I decided to go on a hunt for some more kitchen organization stuff, and in particular wanted a bin to keep my cleaning supplies under the sink. I looked high and low for nice plastic bins, and everything I found was really expensive and crappy, but I decided to check Daiso and they had a bunch of perfect bins for $1.50 each! So I bought two (one for under the sink and one for collecting some odds and ends), and it turns out they’re also the perfect size for my various utensil drawers, so I’m going to go back and buy as many of them as I can. Probably on Monday, after my upcoming job interview.

Also because of said interview, the finishing work won’t be until Tuesday. So, Tuesday should be the last day of the main project.

After that I can discuss the over-refrigerator shelving project with the contractor, and that should only take a day to actually do. Well, and then installing the door, which I’ll probably do on my own. Honestly I feel like I could do the whole project myself, but we’ll see what the contractor thinks.

Oh, and as promised in the previous update, I did in fact make an omelet for breakfast on Friday, and it was glorious:

I also made a video in celebration of my new stove, and the sheer power of induction cooking:

It was fun to do. I should remember to make videos more often.