Our 2006 Family Portrait
Yesterday a transport company called us and told us that they had a 50-lb piece of "electrical equipment" to deliver from Calabasas (California). Of course, we are not expecting anything of the sort, but were expecting a family portrait from nearby Westlake Village. After some phone calls, I discovered that our 65"x54"x6" package had been mislabeled as containing electrical equipment. Instead of waiting until next week to take delivery, I arranged to pick it up today (thanks to my home teacher Scott for letting me borrow his Suburban).

Berkeley, Eliana, and I drove down to Kent to get it this morning. We brought it back and opened it. Wow, it's big. We hung it up on the wall in the family room, and then I went to work finishing the install of the spot light required to properly illuminate the new portrait. Here is a before and after shot:

		Before the spotlight was installed.
		After the spotlight was installed. What a difference!

Some small notes about the portrait setting. It was taken on the side of a public road in Westlake Village. Our chairs are literally only about 3 feet away from the sidewalk. The portrait is a composite of two pictures that were taken. Eliana is actually stitched in from a different picture because we liked her pose so much. There is, of course, a lot of other retouching done. For example, they removed Kristy's hand that was holding Olivia's right arm.

Come by and see it in person.

Small Home Renovation Project: Family Room Spot Light (continued)
Last week, I started to install a family room spot light that will be used to illuminate our new family portrait. Today I finished the job.

First I had to move our master bed away from our way about 6 feet and roll back the carpet (and carpet pad) to expose the second floor sub-floor. Moving our bed is no small task. There must be about 12 supports underneath the king mattress, not including the 4 corner posts. Fortunately, Kristy is pretty tough and was able to help.

After I had the sub-floor exposed, I set to the task of opening up a small hole over the top of the portrait wall. After taking my measurements and confirming them about six times (because I am borderline obsessive compulsive I guess), I made the cut... see below:

Unfortunately, I discovered that a heating run to the register in our master bedroom ran over the exact spot where I needed to drill a hole! There is always something to add a little challenge to home projects it seems... and this was it! After more careful measurements, I selected a site for my hole down through the ceiling of the first floor and (hopefully?) into the void space in the wall where I would need to drop my 14/2 cable. I got the drill out and made the hole... perfectly placed... w00t! With the hole in place, I pulled up some wire from the single gang hole that I made last week.

Next I made the 5" circular hole in the ceiling where I wanted the light placed. Now I needed to get the 14/2 wire from the hole cut out in the sub-floor across two floor joists to the circular hole. After some tricky cable work and with the help of Kristy, we were able to thread the wire through to the circular hole in the ceiling. You can see the finished cable run in the picture below (I took this picture, and the one above, for the benefit of my brother-in-law Scott, whose saw I borrowed... thanks Scott!).

Once I made the final electrical connections (the easy part), we had a working dimmable spot light to illuminate our new portrait. Here I am (below) posing in front of my work:

Job well done!

(Update Sat Apr 14 23:51:15 PDT 2007 // fixed thumbnail height)