The little things...

I've been going through the boxes from the move, slowly putting books up on the bookshelves and starting to think of the 'bigger things' such as painting, electronics placement, etc.

While I do that I have also been trying to get some of the little things cleared up:

a) The hall light is a pendant style that hangs low enough that when you open the hallway closet, the door hits it as it swings open.  Not something I liked, and the look of the light isn't my style:

So I removed it and replaced it with Commercial Electric Rustic Iron 2-Light Semi-Flushmount from Home Depot.  Higher, has two bulbs vice one and is definitely more my style.

b) The hall closet door was rotated incorrectly:

 The 'stop' for the mechanism is facing the doorframe when it should be facing the hallway.  (so that when you push the door closed, it rides the curve of the deadlatch and eventually engages the fitting in the frame.)  I started to take the whole device apart, when I saw that I could rotate the latch mechanism 360 degrees.  Something is fishy with it, but for now I just rotated it so that it works and I'll dig into the door at a later date.

c) The wood stove.  My dad came over this weekend and took a closer look at the wood stove.  There was some build-up of creosote at the back of the stove.  The chimney had been checked clean by the home inspector, but as we chipped away at the creosote, we discovered that it was caked into the back and bottom of my Resolute stove.  We ended up having to pull the whole stove away from the flue pipe and chip/vacuum all the way to the bottom of the 'plenum' at the back.  The previous owners had obviously not been using the stove correctly for quite some time and when they could no longer use it correctly, were just using it with the flue fully open as a small wood fireplace.   Here is a picture of the creosote we removed!

Also a fair amount was vacuumed up.  We dug down until we found clean metal and had a fire to check the stove out.   Dad spent some good time showing me how to correctly operate the stove and we dug around the Internet until I found an owners manual for further reading later. 

I also troubleshot the refrigerator's dispenser panel, bought a new circuit board..but it wasn't the issue.  So, still working on that.  (the fridge's lock button will not unlock so I can't use the dispenser for water or ice.)

I did get the long window of the dining room covered with some new drapes.  That, plus new shower head for the upstairs bathroom and some raking of the front yard and clearing of twigs/fallen branches made for a busy couple of hours today.   I did also start to look at the outside light for the kitchen, but it appears there are other issues.  The switch only shows .2V AC when I turn the switch, I took a look inside the switch box and I don't think the switch is wired correctly.  I'll leave that for next week most likely (also take a look at a new light?)