Street Address and Front Entry Lights

Here's another project that has "finally" been tackled: our street address plaque.

Here's the old version that came with the house:

You can see where there used to be a security light above the plaque. It was against HOA guidelines, kinda ugly, and made it impossible to read our street address when it was on, so it was an easy choice to remove it.

I have had the numerals for our new plaque sitting in my shop for over two years now. This project was delayed again and again because I wanted our street address to be back lit or illuminated somehow. Potential solutions ranged from back lighting with LEDs, to using one or more spotlights, to using an electroluminescent panel. I finally decided to just use a length of LED strip I picked up on sale a while ago, and just get it done.

It turned out the numerals we picked up so long ago where actually meant to be set in masonry. But it was nothing a drill, a hacksaw and some superglue couldn't fix:

Here's the plaque, mounted, with the LED strip:

I'll put some silicone in the hole, and touch up the paint another (warmer) day.

Since I had my tools out, I decided to mount the rest of the LED strip under the eave of the roof along the side of the garage. It was pretty dim along the walkway to our front door before this:

Now walking to the front door after dark is a completely different experience!

Outdoor Smart Lights

I picked up a couple of LIFX color 1000 smart bulbs last week when they went on sale. I've been wanting to put smart bulbs in the two light fixtures bracketing the garage for a while now.

LIFX bulbs are brighter, have better color reproduction (and better whites), and are more responsive than any other smart RGB bulb I'm aware of today. However, they are are also pretty large:

The light fixtures I wanted to put these bulbs in were designed for a standard A19 bulb, and the LIFX bulbs just did not fit well. So I made 1.75" strips from scrap sheet metal, spray-painted them flat black, and dropped the light fixture down to fit the new bulbs:

It's not professional grade, but I don't think anyone will notice the extra metal strip unless they are specifically looking for it.

I did change the wiring for these lights. They used to be on a dimmer switch with the front porch light. These smart bulbs are not supposed to be on a dimmer, but beyond that, I didn't want these smart bulbs to be on a switch that we use regularly. A smart bulb on a switched power supply becomes awfully dumb when the power is off.

I came up with the following solution:

The wire coming out of the light fixture now ends in a male electrical plug. The wire coming from the front porch dimmer switch now terminates in a standard electrical outlet, top left (I need to put a label on it). A standard, always-on outlet already existed (bottom right) from a previous project. Currently, the smart bulbs are plugged into the always-on outlet, but I can easily put dumb bulbs into the light fixtures and plug them back into the dimmer switch if I ever want to.

For Halloween, I have the new bulbs on a flickering orange:

In the future, we should also be able to indicate on which side of the driveway we would prefer guests to park, maybe with a blinking green light on the appropriate side.

Exterior Paint

The neighboring house that got foreclosed has had a parade of contractors coming through to fix it up.

We hired one of them to repaint all our exterior trim, and repaint the front porch and back deck.

He and a buddy did the trim today. They are planning on doing the decks on Monday.

Sick Day

Well, I caught something that completely sapped my energy yesterday. I stayed home from work and watched a lot of TV. I was able to replace that ugly yellow door bell with a $5 black version. I picked it to match our new exterior lights.

Ugly Old Doorbell

We had a tragedy a few days ago: the birds' nest fell down, and the baby birds didn't make it. This hit Brianna particularly hard. Now, in the top left corner of the above picture, you can see a metal basket, firmly anchored to the house. It's tilted for drainage and to provide a better viewing angle. Hopefully we'll have better luck with baby birds next year.

I dug out a section of wire fencing from the backyard junk pile (left to us by the sellers) and corralled a flowering shrub back from the walk way (it had already taken over fifty percent of the walkway).

Our "curb-appeal" is improving. It's a nice change from painting, actually. But I'm going to have to do something about all the stains and cracks in our driveway sometime in the near future.

Oh, one more thing: our bird feeder has an exterior wire mesh hung on springs. It is designed to allow birds access to the birdseed, but to close under the weight of a squirrel, and it seems to have done that job well. At least, we haven't seen any squirrels on it. However, some crows have been digging out the bigger seeds and scattering the smaller ones. I adjusted the springs to be a lot looser. The smaller birds haven't had a problem with it - I have not seen a crow attempt to eat from the feeder since I made the adjustment.