LEGOS in the Aquarium

The fish tank has been empty for a couple months now. A few weeks ago, we started the arduous process of cleaning out the aquarium. I quickly lost track of how many fish skeletons I found in the aquarium gravel.

This morning, I finally called it "good enough", and put in a number of my Star Wars Lego sets that I've collected over the years:

I probably need to do another pass with windex, but I was ready to take a break from the fish tank for a while.

Eventually, I'd like to have some of the space ships suspended with fishing line, but that will be a project for another day.

I did do one cool thing, though:

See the little cylinder hanging from the ceiling in the top right corner of that photo? That's a motion sensor, and it controls the light in the fish tank.

Specifically, I dug out my Wemo motion sensor and smart plug, and paired them for this task. I had packed them away because they don't really play nicely with the rest of my home automation stuff, but this is a fairly stand-alone application, and it feels good to have them do something beyond gathering dust.

Basement Window Well Scene

We put another big poster in another window well. Brianna's been wanting to do this since last summer, and with multiple family visits coming up, it seemed like a good time to do it.

Basement Smart Switches

This is kinda a place-holder post. There is a lot more work that went into these switches, but I only have time for a quick write up:

I put the basement lights on smart switches, which involve reworking the existing wiring a bit:

I also got a dumb motion-sensing switch in the laundry room.

It's really nice to walk into the laundry room with a full load of clothes and just have the light turn on automatically, without having to fumble for the switch. The light turns on almost as soon as something (including the door itself, which opens into the laundry room) breaks the plane of the doorway.

This switch is somewhat remarkable, as it does not require a neutral wire. Apparently Lutron holds a patent on the technology. It will be really nice for DIY home automation smart switches when that patent expires.

Skeeball in the Basement

Brianna got her Christmas present a little early:

Her very own Skeeball Table!

The Amazon reviews claimed it takes 4+ hours to put together, but I knocked it out in under 2.5 (which included an outfit and diaper change for Lincoln) - I guess putting together all that IKEA furniture had to pay off at some point.

Now I have to figure out some way to keep track of the top scores :-)



Edit - 12/20/2015

Here's the scoreboard, inspired by Top Gear:

Turns out it's really hard to get higher than 150. I've been trying every day...

Basement Bedroom Door

The blasted door to this room kept sticking. I wound up shaving it down with my circular saw. I may have accidentally taken off more material than I meant to. Power tools are powerful!

As usual, the door got a coat of paint, new hinges, and a new handle. This particular handle is keyed, mostly to keep toddlers out of a room they're not supposed to enter. I was able to change the lock so the same key that works on our front door also works on this room.

Wall-mounting the TV

I have been working on baby-proofing the house for a while now, being comfortable in the knowledge that Link will not be crawling for a number of months yet.

I came to an unpleasant realization this week: there is already a toddler spending a lot of time in our house. Our nanny brings her two-year-old son to our house while she watches Link. Our 10-month-old nephew Torsten has also begun crawling and pulling himself up on furniture. So I skipped right past "running out of time" to "over-due" on getting things baby-proofed.

Probably the most dangerous (to toddlers) item in the house was the un-anchored TV in the basement. While it is fairly stable and would be difficult to knock over, the consequences of a 65-pound flat panel TV falling on a little kid made it the biggest risk in the house (that I can think of).

I ordered a locking wall-mount kit compatible with our TV the same night I realized this oversight (the nanny was off this past week).

Here is what the old TV setup looked like:

Today, I installed the wall-mount kit and hung the TV!

Any kid that wants to move that TV is going to need a lot of persistence and a long screwdriver.

I moved the TV to the far end of the basement because Brianna and I are thinking of installing a screen and projector there sometime later this year. This allows us to get the TV safely mounted, and to try out a different arrangement of the basement.

Of course, since I was moving things around in the basement, I organized the rest of it as well:

It's a much more open rumpus room now!

Exercise Machine

Road construction projects have made it impossible to get from work to the gym and then home in a reasonable amount of time. And it's getting cold out when the sun goes down.

This weekend, I found a Gazelle Supra exercise machine at Goodwill for $13. Once I got it home, I found out why it was so cheap: it was missing the handles and all the electronic components.

I'm not going to bother replacing the electronic parts. I replaced the handles with two halves of a chin-up bar I've been dragging around since Texas and hardly ever used.

A little weird-looking, but it works. Drilling new bolt-holes to anchor the handles was a pain, though. My cordless drill (or at least it's out-of-production batteries) is at the end of it's life - I had to charge my last good battery twice to drill six holes through not-very-thick steel pipe. That drill has served me well, and followed me through four states, but I think a new cordless drill with new, modern batteries is at the top of my christmas list this year :-)

Anyway, I got the exercise machine working, and Brianna took a video:

That's totally my normal exercise intensity. Anyway, hopefully this thing gets more use than that old chin-up bar did.

Cleaning up the Basement

Pretty much since we moved into the house, we've been using the basement as a dumping ground for stuff we weren't ready to deal with. Honestly, I'm not sure it's been vacuumed since the first time we deep cleaned the house.

My goal for this weekend was to clean up and organize the basement. Here's what I started with:

And this is where I called it "good enough":

I also worked on the storage shelves in the unfinished area of the basement. I didn't take a very good "before" picture, but rest assured, the floor area of these shelves was also crammed with stuff:

By the end of the weekend, I had it looking much better, with the shelves on the left reserved for food, camping stuff all in one area, and everything just generally more organized.

I feel fairly accomplished.

Installing the New Nest Protect in the Basement

I actually started this project yesterday afternoon, but it continued through tonight.

After stealing the Nest Protect from the basement for use in the master bedroom, I ordered an AC-powered Nest Protect to replace it.

When we first moved in here, I already knew the existing carbon monoxide detectors and smoke alarms badly needed to be replaced. I did not yet know what the wiring looked like. So I ordered 3 battery-powered Nest Protects (one for each floor of the house) as a starting point.

Now that I have a better idea of how the house is wired, future Nest Protects will be AC-powered, and the battery-powered ones we already have will be cycled into rooms that do not have convenient AC power, like the master bedroom.

Anyway, I spent all of yesterday afternoon trying to figure out which circuit the basement was on. I was unsuccessful. I did manage to map out most of the rest of the electrical system, however.

This afternoon, I realized that the circuit that controls the junction box where I wanted to put the Nest Protect also controls both the basement lighting and and kitchen and dining room lighting. I had labeled that circuit as just kitchen and dining room lighting months ago, and figured that was all it did. Whoops.

Anyway, once I finally had the circuit safely turned off, I installed the wiring for the Nest Protect, and then turned the circuit back on.

Nada.

I rechecked everything I had worked on, and flipped the circuit multiple times. Power still wasn't flowing to the lights or the Nest Protect.

ARGH.

The only thing I could think of was that the circuit breaker itself had broken. I ran to Home Depot to pick up a couple of new ones. On the way home I called up my Dad, to talk through the job of replacing a circuit breaker and try to minimize the chances of shocking myself.

Dad had me get out a voltmeter and check that the circuit breaker actually was bad (this would have been a smart thing to do BEFORE driving to the store). Turns out it was. Unfortunately, the spares I had just purchased WERE THE WRONG SIZE. Bah.

I might have driven back to the store then (it was 8pm here, it was getting dark, and for some stupid reason our circuit breaker panel is on the exterior of the house, so any stupid teenager walking by can "prank" us by turning off the power) but Dad asked me what the other breakers around the bad one were for. One of them, immediately above the bad breaker, only controls the electrical connection for our not-yet-installed range hood (as far as I can tell). Dad suggested I steal that one to replace the broken one, leaving the not-yet-installed range hood without power until I can buy a new, correctly sized circuit breaker on the way home from work tomorrow.

So that's what I did. And it worked!

I installed this Nest Protect more centrally in the basement. The smoke alarm that came with the house was right up against the wall (code says it must be at least 6 inches from a wall) - you can see the junction box on the ceiling, to the right of the air vent.

Here's another view:

I promised Brianna it would take less than 10 minutes to get this Nest Protect installed tonight. I bet Murphy heard me say that, reached out his intangible hand of probability, and destroyed that old circuit breaker just because I said something so stupid.

I had other, additional, plans for tonight, but I think I'm going to have to be satisfied with this.

Elevating a Couch

Brianna has been having trouble with standing up after sitting down on low chairs and couches. The couch in front of the TV was pretty low, so I elevated it several weeks ago on 4x4's left over from building the chicken coop.

Today, I found these at IKEA:

I'm not sure what they were originally intended for, but now they're my new couch legs.

Basement Stairwell Ceiling Light

After discovering the horrible condition of the ceiling light in the basement stairwell yesterday, I didn't want to waste much time getting things fixed. I went to IKEA today, but unfortunately a suitable ceiling light was not available in the as-is section at a ridiculous discount - I had to pay full price this time.

Here's the stairwell before I started working on the light fixture this evening. Brianna has often mentioned that she wanted some way to light up the whole stairwell, not just the bottom.

Here's what I found when I took the light fixture down:

One of the black (hot) wires was completely broken and loose. I guess that explains the sparks yesterday.

Here's my solution:

I had been toying with the idea of lights along the walls of the stairwell for several months now. I was initially thinking of LED light strips where the walls met the ceiling. I was hoping to hide the wiring behind the drywall - somehow fishing the wires through a few discreet holes without having to do any significant drywall repair. But since I had to replace the old fixture immediately, and since this area hasn't been repaired and repainted yet (and probably isn't going to be until well after the baby is born), I took a cruder, simpler path.

I found two clip-on reading lights at IKEA as-is for $2 apiece when I bought the main light fixture. I mounted them to the wall, cut off the plugs, drilled holes in the main light fixture, and wired everything together. It doesn't look super-great, but it is effective. I think painting the black electrical cords white and putting longer shades on the reading lights could go a long way to improving the looks. And Brianna is never one to say "no" to more light.

Towel Rack in Basement Bathroom

This is pretty minor, but it was such a pain in the butt I'm going to post about it as a way of taking revenge.

The furnace is on the other side of that wall, so the studs are all over the place to make room for ductwork. I only had to put six holes in the drywall in order to find two studs to anchor to. I think my stud-finder is lying to me more often than telling me the truth, at this point. It's been unreliable for the last few jobs.

Speaking of Ceiling Lights...

This morning, Brianna noticed that one of the lights in the stairwell to the basement had burnt out. I took off the cover, and just about recoiled in disgust.

It's hard to tell in the photo, but either those wires were never insulated, or the insulation has completely fallen apart. I tried to unscrew the burnt-out lightbulb, and only twisted the whole assembly.

Later, out of morbid curiosity, I flipped the switch and got a shower of sparks.

So, yeah. The switch is duct-taped into the "off" position, and I'll swing by IKEA tomorrow and buy a new light fixture - at full price if necessary - to get this hunk of junk replaced.

Incidentally, aside from ceiling fans and can lights, I think this is the last light fixture still in use that came with the house.

Moving Furniture Part II

I had intended to start prepping the upstairs hallway for painting this evening, maybe going so far as to actually paint the trim. However, I wound up staying at work past 6 PM in order to help get a project out the door before tomorrow morning. Traffic was really good on the way home, though!

The temperature got up to 90F today, and when I arrived at home, Brianna informed me it was time to set up a living space in the cool, pleasant basement. So while Brianna made dinner I moved the TV and its computer downstairs to the basement, and then set everything up again.

We sit much farther away from the TV with this set up - makes it a more difficult to use the TV for things other than watching TV.

After dinner, Brianna and I hashed out a written budget for the first time since we bought the house. Assuming we can maintain our discipline, there will be a lot fewer new items appearing around the house during the month of June...

Moving Furniture

Now that the kitchen and family room are just about ready to contain furniture again, it's time to start thinking about getting the great room prepped for painting. We have been keeping most of our things in the great room while the other areas get painted, so it is quite a mess. I have slowly started organizing things over the last several days.

Now that the days are fairly warm on a routine basis (often above 80F) the house is pretty warm when we come home, and the cool basement makes for a comfortable retreat. We're planning to move the television down there, and probably some other furniture as well. I cleared out some space for that to happen:

Prepping for Painting the Main Floor

Brianna is going on two business trips over the next two weeks, making it a good time for me to tackle painting the main floor areas without fumigating Brianna out of the house with paint fumes. I'm hoping to get the ceiling and walls in this picture primed this week, and painted the following week. We'll see if I can keep my motivation up.

We prepped by moving most of the furniture out of the room. But the china cabinet we inherited from the sellers is really heavy. I'm going to just move that a couple feet off the wall and drape it in plastic.

As part of moving furniture around, we finally moved the white couch down to the basement.

It was a tight fit:

Just a couple inches too long in this orientation.

but we (eventually) made it:

Fish tank work

We have been in the house about 7 weeks and up until today I have only fed the fish maybe 4 times a week (Brian wants nothing to do with them).  I have been thinking about getting a sucker fish or a snail to help with removing the algae as I don't really want to fully clean this thing.  

Walked into Essential Pet, a specialty pet store on my way home and talked to a very talkative guy who grows his own coral in salt water tanks.  He was super nice, helpful and convinced me that I should bring some water in to get it tested/fixed before introducing any fish and killing them with shock.  The sucker fish that I was interested in was really cool looking and would cost $12.  He said the fish can handle a nitrates level of 150... went home and brought back a sample of the fish water... I would have killed any new fish.  Apparently, I need to do a 20% water change out every three days until I get the nitrates down to 100.  The scale ended at 400, so it may be higher than that and he said that I have some super hardy fish!

Before: boring background, only one working bulb

pH:8.7

Nitrates~ 400

I am really glad the previous owners installed a fitting to make the siphon into the drain easy and installed a fresh water hook-up only inches away.  It made the water change out process go super smooth.  They only installed a cold water hook-up so the 20% change out dropped the temperature from 78F to 68F.  The fish were huddled by the heater.  I added a pH buffer to help create a neutral environment.  I will bring a sample into Essential Pet after I do three 20% changes (400-> 320-> 256-> 205).  Maybe I should wait until the 4th 20% change out 205->164...

The water is murky after adding water stirred up the bottom stuff.

After: pretty background, replaced burned out right bulb

pH: buffered to 7.8

Nitrates ~320

Looks much cooler in the dark

Hey!  I got 4 of the 5 fish in one picture!  They are pretty little guys.