Surge Protection, Furring Strips

A couple developments today:

1. A whole house surge protector was installed on the electric panel by Tim, Curt Swanson's cousin-in-law. I read about this type of surge protection on AVScience.com, and then it came up again while talking to Curt one day. He mentioned he was having one of these installed on his house, and I said, "Hey, ask Tim if he would be willing to install one at my house when he comes over to do yours." Being a great guy, Curt followed up with Tim--and ba-da-bing, ba-da-boom, Tim was at my house installing surge protection for my whole house! Thanks to both Curt and Tim! In the picture below you can see a handsome first chair saxophone player and behind him the surge protector is in the upper right hand corner of the electrical panel. Look for two green lights although I think they are pretty dim.
2. Furring strips . . . were installed on the wall at the bottom of the stairs. Later drywall will go over the furring strips. You might remember that I earlier wrote about a potential design for the "nook" area. That design included a fake brick that cost about $2600 to have installed. Although the price was not attractive, the idea of maximizing the opening between the bottom of the stairs and the wall was attractive. More space gives the option of bringing bulkier furniture into Men's Land while reducing the space by even 3 or 4 inches severely limits the options. So . . . after way too much thinking, discussing, and debating, we finally settled on putting up furring strips, wedging them out to varying degrees at five points to create a planar surface. This option will be both economical and stylistically consistent with the rest of the basement (i.e. drywall looks good with drywall). Here is what the work looked like at the end of the day (along with another shot of our guitar/saxophone virtuoso):