Finally put on the cabinet hardware and started the backsplash. Slowly but surely I’ll finish this room. 
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Looks professionally installed. Well done.
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Almost finished. Like three more finishing touches. Did lights and outlet covers today. All the lights in the hallways too.
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Looks nice. We put a fixture similar to the one in your hall in our kitchen.
(Which replaced a ‘triple spotlight’ we’d put in a year before that when we’d had a crappy old ‘box flourescent’ light go bad and it was too much of a pain to replace. The spots were nice, but we had a big rectangle not he ceiling that annoyed me from where the box had been, and I find I want ‘all over’ light for the kitchen, not spot lighting.)
On Monday or Tuesday, the ballast went out in one of the fluorescent fixtures in my kitchen. Of course, I tried replacing the bulbs (2) first, because they had been in there at least 10 years, but was disappointed when they didn’t come on. Thought about replacing the fluorescent fixtures with those flat rectangle LED arrays, but ended up getting a new electronic ballast and LED replacement bulbs. The result is great, and notably brighter than the old stuff, so I’m going to have to switch out the ballast and bulbs in the other fixture soon.
We’ve followed a similar path.
When we moved in the kitchen was (poorly) lit with one of those old circle fluorescent fixtures. We replaced that with a two-bulb, four-foot rectangle with a box frame around it and a plastic diffuser over it.
When THAT got wonky, we bought one of the LED light made to replace the old four-footers, and did some mods to the frame and diffuser so we could reuse them. The whole thing looks the same from the outside, but we jokingly call the effect “the surgical lights.” VERY bright.
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Oh, look, two assistants!
Looking good… obvious that care and attention went in.
All we need now is Gregory Peck or Clint Eastwood… This is just temporary to give us a bit more space.
House before :
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I like the Wild West vibe you have going on
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If we decide to make that permanent, I’m going to put a porch and railing all around.
Then get some Clint Eastwood type clothes and sit in a chair all day long swatting files 
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New fencing is up. We will put a speed bump under the gate, for now IBR sheets block the dogs and chickens from going out.
Fencing on the bottom part of the gate will not work as the gate drops to the ground when you open it. I mean the outer part goes progressively lower if you swing it open either side.
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3 blocks from my house. The same house design. They gutted it, moved the kitchen from the front to the back and the bathroom from the back to the side. Living room is where the kitchen was. Kitchen/dining room is where the 2 small bedrooms were. Now, there is one large bedroom and an office. Downstairs has been completely redone. It’s amazing, but I can’t see that they’re making more money than if they sold it as it was. For sale: 11 LYALL STREET, Ottawa, Ontario K2E5G5 - 1225891 | REALTOR.ca
It’s $800k. Mine will go for north of $400k with only small cosmetic repairs. All that work done makes for a really amazing house, but it had to have cost a small fortune.
I got a look at the floorplan through the MORE PHOTOS link and there is this weird hallway that goes nowhere. I can’t imagine what it is for.
The problem I see (going forward) is that this house will be used as an example when they re-assess my property taxes.
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I loathe it when they do that. Pick the nicest house in the estate and say every single pile of rubble beyond is valued the same and pays the same tax bracket.
Some jerk here won the lottery, only a couple dozen thousand, but that was enough to turn his house into a classy townhouse. My council tax went up £140pa because of him.
Yeah, if you want to assess my taxes at double the resale value of the house, there should be a mechanism for me to sell it for that value.
The last time they did this, they were comparing us to houses in Toronto, which would have put our valuation at about 60% higher than what we bought it for. We fought that and won. Well, we set up a court date and then settled at slightly higher than what we had wanted. This one will be interesting. I’m sure of it. I have no idea when that will happen, though.
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Indiana just went through a serious revamp of the Property Tax laws a few years ago. Capping increases and normalizing rates across areas was part of that. Turns out in small localities where one party was in charge for decades the taxes were warped, usually that party was Democrats, but the Republicans played the game too.
Now it’s more open, and school bonds are voted on by the locality instead of just shoved into property tax increases.
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Britain needs to do this. At the minute the school properties (that haven’t been privatised) are funded by State via income tax, and the local staff and equipment are funded via council tax. This means that a poor area will generally have a very average looking school with no teachers nor equipment, and a rich area will have an identical average looking school with too many staff and not enough rooms.
Same here, richer areas have slightly better options.
Though frankly the inner city schools in Indy are the best in the state. You can graduate with a CNA, Apprentice Metalworker, HVAC, or carpentry cert, or an A+ (Or whatever it is now) cert. Not to mention the better options of magnet schools and etc. I live in a decently well off school in a small town and we have a radio station. Most of the shop classes were shut down because the equipment cost too much and they can take some AP classes. But you can take 5 years of Textiles, and 4 of Cooking.
There used to be a cool program where the auto shop would take in crappy cars, strip them down and send the frame to the prison shop where they would fix body panels and frames then send them back to the school where they would do engine and electric repairs. It was too expensive to keep doing apparently, even though they sold the cars for profit.
It always takes me a bit by shock when I’m reminded your prisoners do hard labour.
It does sound a bit like one of those projects where the optics would look bad so it would suddenly find itself unprofitable. Kinda like how we used to allow the folks from the retirement cottages look after the town parks and they were immaculate; then the EU said that retirement home residents weren’t allowed to do that so private contractors took over, the parks look like crap, and the old folks have nothing to do but watch the idiots’ lantern all day!
Sorry. I get a bit touchy about that. It happened to my great grandmother.
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Putting the conversation back on topic however, I’m about two months away from moving to the new Casa De Noms on the West Coast near Carlisle. At the minute the new place has no power, water, stoves, floors, walls nor ceilings but hey, I have a tab at the builders’ merchants and one heck of a desire to get the hell out of the city!
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