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.

Kitchen Cabinet Hardware, Part IV

Alright, I found the last handle I needed for the kitchen! Not sure how they wound up with just one in IKEA as-is, but one is all I needed.

This handle was the first (and last) one I installed while Brianna was in the house and awake. Not only that, but she was in the kitchen watching me. The tension was palpable as I drilled through the cabinet door. Brianna said her stress level went up 50 percentage points just watching me install one cabinet handle. I feel pretty justified about doing the others while she slept.

Speaking of the others: here's the complete set.

Kitchen Cabinet Hardware, Part III

I installed the last four cabinet handles this morning. After my last post, I asked Brianna what she thought about getting longer ones. She very politely told me I could do whatever I wanted.

I still think these are shorter than I would like. But they do have a significant advantage: if you cut that corner coming in to the kitchen, these shorter handles will not be able to hook onto a belt loop or pocket. And hopefully a hypothetical little boy will have a harder time poking his eye with these short handles.

I've spent roughly $40 at IKEA as-is to get all this hardware, and I still have five of the short handles left over. If I had paid full price for just the hardware I used, it would have cost $110.

I'm not quite finished, though. Brianna changed her mind now that she's seen the entire kitchen with new cabinet pulls, and wants one more handle installed on the lower corner cabinet by the sink.

Kitchen Cabinet Hardware, Part II

As expected, installing the handles on the horizontal drawers is a pain.

All the doors are done, and I only have four drawers left (top picture, on the right). I was itching to finish up tonight, but as I was making marks on the last four drawers to drill holes, I concluded I was about to use the wrong size of handle on these drawers.

We have kinda gone out of our way to make the handles proportional to the drawer (or door) they are on. And I really like the effect of the different sizes of hardware on the different sizes of cabinets.

I was going to install 9.5" handles (the shortest ones) on the last four drawers, just like most of the other drawers. But they look too short on these drawers - I think we need to step up one size to 13.5" handles, like the ones on the larger above-the-counter cabinet doors.

Eh, I dunno. It's 11:30pm now, I need to get to bed. I'll run it by Brianna in the morning.

One final thought: now that I've spent a lot of time up close and personal with these cabinets, it's clear they need a really thorough scrubbing down. We did an initial pass at cleaning them when we moved in, but I bet the cabinets will glow after a really good cleaning.

Installing Kitchen Cabinet Hardware

I'm finally getting around to installing the rest of those cabinet handles I got at IKEA as-is. I typically have to do tasks like this, which involve permanent destructive changes (especially making holes) after Brianna has gone to bed or left the house - if she's around to hear it, it drives her stress level through the roof. This is how far I got before the battery in my cordless drill died for the night:

I still have (1, 2, 3... 11) eleven handles left to install, after installing sixteen tonight. Unfortunately, those horizontal drawers (as opposed to the vertical doors - I just love the English language) are a real pain. I have to counterbore the interior side of the drawer to make the hardware work in the area we want the handles to be. And to make it extra tricky, the screws holding the front panel onto the drawer body are going to interfere with the handle hardware on nearly every drawer in the kitchen.

Fun fun fun.

SnapRays Night Lights

Remember this kickstarter for nightlight outlet covers?

I had almost forgotten, too. Our ten-pack arrived a week and a half ago. So far I have only installed two - one in each guest bathroom. They work exactly as advertised, and are a good amount of light at night.

Range Hood

Picked up a range hood from IKEA as-is section yesterday. It was $30 instead of $70 because it was "open-box". I'll take it.

Like this, but without the cabinet.

It fits well above our stove, and matches the current kitchen pretty well. For thirty bucks, we can just use this for a year or so until we're financially ready to update the rest of the kitchen. I actually like this solution better than buying a $200+ range hood that would match the future kitchen, but not the current one.

Finally Done with that Green Wall

Put up the last coat of green paint on the upstairs hallway, and installed a new air-intake grill and new lights (a full month after they were delivered).

I'll try to remember to get a photo in daylight - that upstairs lamp is dimmed to it's lowest setting, and it's still washing out my phone's camera. There. Looks much better in daylight.

Getting this wall done has been item 4 or 5 on my priority list for weeks now, but every time I finished items 1, 2 and 3 something would jump ahead of this wall to take priority. I'm glad I could finally finish it.

We also did a fair amount of general clean up, and re-hung all the doors, because Eva, our little rat terrier, has been making a renewed habit of "marking" any unoccupied rooms she can access. Despite having a pet door.

...Maybe she should just be an outdoor dog, going forward?

New Exterior Lights

The exterior lights on our house were originally a bright brass, which isn't exactly to our taste in the first place. After years of weather and apparently being hit with basketballs, they were broken, spotted with corrosion, missing glass, and one of them had a hard time staying vertical. They needed to be replaced.

This was the *good* light

Brianna and I have been keeping our eye out for a while, and finally found one we like during a trip to Lowes today to get wall plates for light switches and a spark plug for a lawn mower.

We bought and installed two today. Eventually I would like to put one on the left side of the garage door as well, and put something that matches on the back porch, so I'm going to put this picture here so I can find it easily in the future:

***Update***

In the course of installing nice new exterior lights, the ugly, old yellowed plastic of the doorbell leaped to my attention. Sigh. Something else I want to replace now. Money money money.

Detail Work

Yesterday Brianna helped me re-install the ceiling fan in the living room:

I bought a combined light-and-fan-control switch, which includes a dimmer function. The CFLs we have don't work with dimmers, and we're out of Cree LED bulbs, so there are incandescents in there for the time being. Unfortunately, one of them exploded the second time it was turned on:

Fortunately, all the glass landed on painter's plastic, so I was able to just roll up the plastic and throw it all in the garbage.

We also put a lot of finishing touches on the hallway.

I re-installed the Nest Protect smoke alarm, installed a new light fixture (which matches the ones in the kitchen) and replaced the return-air grill in the lower right corner. I wound up cutting off the old security system control panel, putting up a low-profile conduit box, and wrapping the spare wire inside of it. I'm not sure what I'll use the wire for eventually, but I'm sure I'll think of something.

While I was doing all that, Brianna took pity on me, and did all the taping work yesterday, taping off the trim in the kitchen. Once the trim is painted, we can start moving things back into the room, and the house will look a little less like a construction zone.

I was planning to do some electrical work (replacing switches) in the afternoon, but it started to thunderstorm, so we went to see the latest X-men movie instead. Brianna and I both enjoyed it! Wish they could get the X-men back into the Marvel Movie universe so they could tie-in with the Avengers, but oh well, it was still fun.

My Beautiful Gorgeous Wonderful Wife is Home!

Brianna came home today!

I did not get quite finish everything I was hoping to get done before she arrived, but eh, close enough. She exclaimed over all the work I did while she was away, which certainly made me feel good about it.

I put up the second coat of green in the hallway before she got home, and after dinner Brianna helped me re-install the thermostat.

I have actually wanted to mount the Nest Thermostat directly to the wall ever since I bought it, but I did not have a wall in good enough condition to do so until now (previously I used a steel mounting bracket and a plastic cover). The Nest is just barely big enough to cover the hole that had been knocked out of the drywall for the thermostat cable (which you can kinda see here), and I actually had to add some scrap wood behind the drywall to give me something strong enough to screw in to. But after doing that, and patching numerous screw holes from previous thermostats, the Nest is mounted all by itself on the wall.

Here's the plastic cover plate I used before, to hide the damaged drywall:

The old way

I really like the way it looks now!

I still have to decide what to do with the old security system control panel (currently hanging loose, just to the left of the door). It is deactivated and ugly, but the wires for the security system run through out the house, and it would be a shame to lose access to that kind of infrastructure (also, I have no experience with patching drywall). Any ideas as to what I should do with it?

Photospheres

Well, my Moto X phone on Republic Wireless finally got its update to Google's latest version of Android, and now I can take Photospheres!

I've been playing around with it for a few days, but inside the house, where the walls are really close to the camera, the photo stitching wasn't working well - things were jagged and blurry. I looked around a bit, and came across this cheap phone mount:

And decided to build my own:

It's basically joist hanger, a cheap phone case and a bent wire hanger mounted on a tripod. It's arranged so the two axes of rotation pass through the camera lens, making the camera the exact center of the photosphere. And it works fairly well! Much better than doing it by hand, anyway.

I can't embed photospheres without uploading geo-tagged versions to Google's Maps app. And even if I wanted to do that (which I don't, not for interior photos), Google's terms of service don't allow interior photos. But! If you click this link, you should be able to open up my new public Photospheres album and rotate through the entire photosphere. I recommend it - it's a lot better than the flattened-out version above. Let me know in the comments if it doesn't work for you.

New Lights for Upstairs Hallway

Found these lights on woot.com a week ago, and thought they would work well in the upstairs hallway. It's not painted yet, so these will have to wait a bit.

Outdoor Temperature Display - Redux

I wasn't able to get the display and outdoor temperature sensor to pair with each other. But I noticed that they talk to each other on the 900 MHz frequency - which is the same frequency my Z-Wave home automation wireless network operates on. There's a pretty good chance they are interfering with each other. I'm going to take the display and temperature sensor with me to work tomorrow and see if they can pair with each other there.

Outdoor Temperature Display

With the crazy weather in Colorado lately (70 and sunny one day, 40 and sunny the next), I have been wanting a display in the bedroom that reported the outdoor temperature so I know how warmly to dress in the mornings. I'm really lazy, so I wanted a hands-free way to check (meaning, not on my phone). I picked one of these up from Amazon for $17.

It's kinda itty-bitty (4 inches by 6 inches, so the screen is more like 2 inches by 4 inches), but it has a wireless outdoor temperature sensor and reports the indoor humidity. It arrived yesterday, but as of last night I couldn't get the outdoor temperature sensor to pair with the display. I'll try again tonight.

Once it's working I'll hang it above the mirror in the bathroom - perfect for checking while brushing my teeth.

Weekend Summary

Aside from starting work on painting another bedroom and painting a shelving unit, we did some other work around the house this weekend:

• Our "new" chest freezer got cleaned out and turned on. Now we need to stock it up!
• Changed out the furnace filter.
• Two more boxes were unpacked.
• The pet stuff in the laundry room got organized
• The backyard was cleansed of Eva's "presents" 
• And the main floor of the house was vacuumed.

We also had some deliveries, both from Woot.com:

Brianna has wanted folding step stools in the kitchen since we moved in, and these actually put her right at eye height with me! As for the Pyrex...well, apparently a kitchen can't have too much Pyrex.

After a full day of work (including the inaugural Easter Egg hunt!) we went to see the second Captain America movie (which was pretty great!) and now it is bedtime before spending Easter Sunday with Brianna's family in Colorado Springs.

Toilet Seats

These no-slam toilet seats are pretty great. They also have a neat pop-off feature that allows for really simple cleaning - twist the caps to unlock from the bolt-posts, and remove the entire seat!

***Update by Brianna***

Notice how the old toilet seat was made out of foam. GROSS.

This foam is also cracked, so every time you sat down, it puffs gross gross air at you. Also, impossible to clean.

I am very happy to have new toilet seats.

Automated Lighting - Kinda Working

Well, I'm still struggling to get the automation working on the lights in the Master Bedroom. Part of the hold up is that things are not clicking together quite as easily as I hoped, and part of it is that there is a limited window when I can mess with the lighting - I have to be home, not working on something else, and Brianna has to be willing to put up with the lights going on and off, on and off, on and off.

Anyway, over the weekend, I installed this control switch:

And as of last night, the top rocker switch controls two lights simultaneously! It feels like a minor miracle at this point that a switch finally works :-/

I tried to take a video of the lights fading on and off when the switch is pressed, but it turns out the camera on my phone can't handle the sudden change of light intensity - it just whites out the screen.

Cooling the House in the Summer

We are still occasionally getting snow on the ground, but on days when it doesn't snow, the house can reach 75 F without any help from the furnace. We have a great south-facing exposure, which will be handy in the winter, but makes me pretty nervous about the upcoming summer months. The house does not have a central air conditioning system installed. After three years in Texas, Venezuela and Abu Dhabi, I don't like living in warm climates with no air conditioning.

Unfortunately, air conditioning is expensive, both in up-front purchasing and installation costs and in year-after-year operating costs. I'm not a big fan of that, either.

So what are the options?

• Suffer quietly through the summer without any type of cooling (not going to happen).
• Refurbish or replace the gigantic, gross and rusty swamp cooler hanging off the house's west face.
• Get a window AC unit for the master bedroom - I kinda like this idea, and there is a cool "smart" window AC unit due out in May.
  
• Shell out $5000+ for a new central air system, and pay ~$200/month extra in electricity.
• Install a whole-house fan in the attic.

The more I think about it, the more I like the last idea. A whole house fan resides at the highest ceiling in the house, venting hot air into (and out through) the attic and drawing cool air up from the basement. The house I lived in the last two years of college had a whole-house fan, and I remember it working rather well during the muggy Michigan summers. Having someone else do the installation seems to run between $1500 and $2000 all-in, and I bet my brother-in-law and I could do it for significantly less. Add some automation to make it a little bit smart about what time of day it runs automatically, and I think this could be a winner.

(I have to admit, I still like the idea of a smart window AC unit. It has wi-fi. And a phone app. It's aimed right at my weak points!)

Bathroom Light Dimmer

I have a pretty decent head cold, and really only got one thing done around the house today. A small box of goodies arrived from Amazon today. It included a power supply to replace the original, buzzy power supply that came with the MusicLite, and a dimmer switch which I installed in the water closet. This way, late-night pee breaks won't have to be blinding. Unfortunately, it turns out this particular dimmer does cause a faint humming with the Cree LED bulbs we are using. (It's the switch on the left. The dimmer function is controlled by the little slider just to the right of the main on/off switch).