Future Projects

Now that I'm (personally) done painting the house and all major purchases from IKEA have been completed, I've gotten a couple questions about what is up next for me.

The immediate answer is that my evenings have now cleared up enough to go back to the gym on a regular basis, and to help Brianna study for the PE exam (for her Professional Engineer certificate).

Beyond that, plenty remains to be done for the house.

I'm still maintaining my public to-do list. Paying professional painters to paint the two-story areas of the house is probably going to eat up all of September's house budget. After that, I want to re-insulate the garage, and potentially blow in some more insulation in the attic - hopefully in October, before it gets really cold.

I have a lot of ideas for home automation, and I'm excited to have some free time to work on them. I don't want to list them in this post, or I'll jinx myself and never get around to them.

Other projects I already have planned:

• Install a range hood.
• Continue to baby-proof the electrical outlets throughout the house.
• Install a third exterior light, on the other side of the garage door.
• Replace the house address numbers with a back-lit plaque.
• Install a second pendant lamp in the Great Room.
• Build a self-drawing chalkboard between the kitchen and family room.
• Wire and automate the chicken coop.
• Do something to improve the tortoise's standard of living - a larger terrarium or something.
• Brianna wants to fill that new vase on the dresser with glass beads. I want to mix in some wirelessly-powered LEDs with the glass beads.
• I want to make a picture-frame jewelry box for Brianna based on that Litograph I mentioned earlier.
• Connect the whole-house humidifier (not the evaporative cooler) to the Nest Thermostat.
• Look into Solar power for our south-facing roof.

And who knows what else is going to crop up as we head into our first winter in our new house.

Oh, I've also built up a bit of a reading list over the past seven months. I'm looking forward to knocking that down a bit, too.

I do expect this website to transition from house-blog to baby-blog as I experiment on and program raise my son after he arrives in December. I'm looking into setting up the website so a visitor can see A) everything, B) just baby posts, or C) just house posts. But so far it doesn't look like Blogger supports that kind of functionality.