Update on the kitchen lighting: everything under the cabinets is installed, and the old garbage has been cut away and tossed. I’m using heat shrink butt-weld connectors to join the wiring up with the speaker wire they ran behind the cabinets in 2004, which doesn’t thrill me, but given the low voltage these LED lights demand I’m not as worried as I might be. Something that is shocking, though, is how BRIGHT these lights are. They outdo the old halogen bulbs by a factor of about five. I wasn’t able to find lights by that manufacturer in black, so some plastic spray paint had to suffice. Four of these go at the top of each of the glass cabinets, and I still have to put those in.

The next project is to replace the wall heater in the half-bath downstairs. The thermostat on this thing barely registers, so you can crank it all the way to 10 and it’ll have a long hard think about things before it decides it might kick on. This should not be the case, because the porch areas are generally 10˚ cooler than the rest of the house in the wintertime. And nobody enjoys a frozen toilet at any time of year. The trick with this installation is that the heater went in before I put the headboard on the wall, so it’s going to involve some careful deconstruction of the heater unit to avoid ruining the woodwork. I did inquire into what a replacement thermostat would cost but found that the part itself cost as much as a new heater, and that there were so many different versions of this heater produced I wasn’t sure if I was going to find a compatible part.