Garage Phase 2 Complete

This is a late posting.  I’ve actually been done with the garage for a little while now, but it still took much much longer than planned.

Originally, the last thing to do was paint the walls.  That was going to be done during the downtime from hurricane Irma.  The paint was purchased and everything was cleared out and ready to go.  And it never happened.  And the weeks went by and it still never happened.

Finally, I got up the energy to strip the old paint off the electrical conduit to the electric box.  Immediately after that, I got the flu, so I had another setback.  After recovering, I made a few more half-hearted attempts at stripping the paint until I figured it was good enough.

The next half-hearted attempts involved priming, which was done over the span of weeks, with a final push in early December.  Then it was on to painting.

But before all of that, there was a bit of planning for the electrical outlets.  The outlets dropped from the ceiling had cheap, flimsy plastic outlet covers.  I wanted to replace them with metal.  Also, the light switches and wall outlets also needed upgraded to more ornate metal plates.  Finally, the doorbell transformer was mounted on a plate that needed swapped out to a metal plate.

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This transformer plate.  Never before have I had such trouble finding a product.  This is simply a plate with a 7/8” round hole in the middle.  The transformer has a mount that fits into the hole and is secured with a set screw.  You would not believe how difficult it was to find a metal plate with a 7/8” hole in it.  I found one at exactly one place on the Internet – Kyle Switch Plates.  When I finally received the new plate, I had to drill an extra hole in it to route the doorbell wire.  After drilling the hole, I wondered why I just didn’t drill a 7/8” hole in a blank metal plate.  I’m not exactly the smartest handyman.

One other task I wanted to accomplish was rerouting the electrical supply for my FIOS box.  The way the box was originally set up, I had to run an extension cord from the outlet over to the breaker panel, where the power transformer for the inside portion of the ONT was mounted to the wall.  I took the FIOS boxes apart and saw that the power line was just simple cat5 cable between the wall unit and transformer.

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I got a longer length of networking cable and routed it around the wall, just under the chair rail molding and relocated the power transformer just underneath the power outlet.

So, with all the plates installed and a future plan to change out the switches and outlets with fresh, clean ones, I’m considering this phase of the project complete.

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The next step, Phase 3, is installing the garage door.