On carpet and fire. Not carpet on fire, thank heavens!.

The carpet layers came!  Yippeee!

Last Monday!  I have carpet!
It's hard to get a good picture of it.
It's more green than it shows here, but here's kind of what it looks like.

 Totally generic, neutral, just fine.


THis is probably the best picture I have of it because we immediately started moving in stuff and boxes and more stuff, so if I were to take a picture now, you would mostly see other stuff on top of the carpet.


One of the trials of building out the basement was how not everything went as planned.  And some of it did go as planned, on the 2nd try, and at greater expense than anticipated.
The fireplace, for example.
When the fireplace installer was done he told my contractor there are two lines, one starts the fireplace, and one starts the blower.  The fireplace is just a little igniter thing, doesn't need electricity.  In fact it CANNOT have electricity.  Electricity will BLOW UP THE IGNITER motor and FRY THE WHOLE GUTS of the fireplace.  The blower has to have electricity.  DO NOT let these two lines get crossed.  I myself heard this repeated a couple of times.


My contractor decided that he'd put the fireplace on a double switch, where the igniter and the blower were up and down from each other.  Like this.

My contractor, who saved me money by doing the electrical himself, put the fireplace on the top switch, the blower on the bottom.  HOWEVER he forgot to break the connection between the top and bottom switches, which runs electricity from one to the other.

So everything was fine when I turned on just the top switch.  But when I flipped the bottom switch, the electricity ran right up the switch to the top, down the wires and FLASH!!  POP!!  Flames burst out from the bottom of the fireplace, the whole thing filled with smoke, and the smell of burnt wiring filled the basement.  The whole guts of the fireplace was toasted.

The fireplace guy (who I called first as this is the third fireplace insert thing he's installed for me and obviously he knows more about it than my contractor), was floored that the contractor would 1) put the igniter and blower on a double switch like that and 2) forget to break the connection between the two switches.  Totally dumb mistake, according to him.  The contractor came over when the fireplace guy was here assessing the damage, and they were talking and getting to be good old friends, and the fireplace guy said "Yeah, it's a silly mistake anyone could have made," and the contractor shrugged and said to me, "See, s**t happens!"  

Not the right thing to say to me.  He's going to eat that when he gets the bill for replacing his little s**t.

Of course, the guts are the most expensive parts to be replaced.  And they have to be shipped from Canada.  Which takes forever in the fireplace world.  I don't get it, I can get stuff from Amazon in two days...  why does it take a month to ship from Canada?

Fast forward a month or more to this Monday, when everything's here and the fireplace guy comes back and installs the new parts.  Both of us were pretty nervous about flipping that switch... did the contractor REALLY fix it?  But we finally did, and it works great.

I am soooo pleased with the fireplace!  It is lovely!

The hearth thing goes to the wall on the left, just out of the picture.  The TV is just visible on the right.

Apparently I lost the little charcoal rocks that it came with, so I put some other rocks around the bottom.  A couple of larger white coral rocks that I brought back from Hawaii, with some smaller river rocks that were left over from the shower floor.

The fireplace puts out a lot of heat... really warms up the place!  I think I'll run it a lot just because it's so pretty, though.  

I'm terribly pleased!

This concludes the basement remodel.  All that's left is minor stuff... some doors on the bedroom closet, some lights...  a couple other things.  The rest is moving in and the simultaneous purge of unnecessary stuff.  I'm hoping that a lot of toys that get pulled out of boxes are deemed unworthy since they went into the boxes almost a year ago.

We shall see...