Finn has a friend over today while her mother (not Jen) is delivering a baby. As of 9:45 this morning, the living room is filled with ballerina outfits, cat ears, pop-poms, and toddler tunes.

Over the weekend, I was able to get some time in on the side porch, where I pulled the baffles down over the front porch and redid them to fit stringers reaching all the way up to the roofline. My neighbor the electrician stopped over for a few hours on Saturday to hang light cans, but we weren’t able to get much more than that done. We still need to hook it all up and replace the small panel with the larger one I bought a few weeks ago, which will carry more circuits upstairs to the bathroom. Up there, we need to level the ceiling joists so that the cans can go in and switches can be run. I had our drywall guy come out and give us a price for both floors, which came in somewhere around “how soon can you get out here”, so the electrical has bumped up in priority.

The Harbor Freight multitool came in so handy, I don’t know what I was doing without it. I trimmed a section of roofline in a back corner, put in two old-work boxes in the shared wall (through 3/4″ sheathing), cut notches in the stringers for cables to pass behind, and cut the first of many sections of flooring out to be replaced. It went through hard pine like butter and made what would have been a time-intensive, frustrating task into a minor two-minute nuisance.

Before packing up for the evening, I cleaned up the space and took a minute to imagine it with drywall. We’re getting close!