Happy blogging!

The new one will be here today, so hopefully I can find the time to install it and finish a draft post by the weekend.

Quick update, sans pictures.  Plumbing, insulation, and drywall are all done at Pikesville.  Mudding is happening this weekend.

The back log of projects at home is growing daily, though.  The disposal stopped working, and now the sink smells awful.  Still no base or toilet or sink on the main floor.

In other news, I’m kinda in to these guys right now.

Sugar Glider.  Adorable.  Look at that face.  Come on.  Don’t pretend.  I have a beard, and I can still acknowledge these things are heart-melty.  Non-bearded ones have no resistance.

Oh, you had a beard, but now you don’t?

Image source thebeardly.com

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The first of the big projects this year was the corner storage bench. Dani asked for it as a birthday present, which is in late January. It wasn’t put into the room until July. So I came in a little late, there.

We’ve got a lot of use out of it this year. We’ve since moved the dining room table to sit in front of it, and we’ve sat around it for many dinners when we have guests. Read these posts for the whole story:

• Corner Storage Bench: Designing
• Corner Storage Bench: Building
• Corner Storage Bench: Still Building
• Corner Storage Bench: In Place

The second big project of 2011 was the installation of the new flooring in most of the first level of the house. This had been in the top 5 of our wish list since the day we moved in, but it has always been cost prohibitive.  After frequently checking flooring supply centers, I finally located exactly the right amount of flooring for our project in a wood that was high enough on the Janka hardness scale to withstand the traipsing of our Dane’s oft-neglected nails. 

There was a problem, though.  It was an “odd lot” from Lumber Liquidators.  I bought a bundle and brought it home, and easily 10% of it was damaged (cracked, warped, etc) and there were only 2 pieces at or longer than 48 inches.  The entire process was not without injury, anger, or disappointment, but the end result made it all worth while, and for an incredible value.  Check out that series of posts below.

• New Flooring Part I: Demo
• New Flooring Part II: More Demo
• New Flooring Part III: Fixing Subfloor
• New Flooring Part IV: Installation
• New Flooring Part V: Finishing
• New Flooring Part VI: The Reveal
• New Flooring Part VII: The Costs  (coming soon)

And there are, of course, a fair number of less spectacular things accomplished that are worth reviewing.. check out the archives for those.

We’d like to thank our readers for support over the last year.  The occasional prodding for content is a work light shining at unfinished projects, prompting me to get more things done, and sometimes we need that.  There’s also the desire to have something good to tell you guys, and having that looming overhead is another strong motivator to get up and get to work.  

Here’s to a fun, productive 2012!

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Then the fun started.  Demo.  More demo.  It goes on from there.

Part I: Demo

Part II: More Demo

Part III: Repairing Subfloor

Part IV: Installing

Part V: Finishing

I finally cleaned up all the flooring debris I dumped in the front yard, by the way.  Not the toilet, though.  I feel having a toilet in the yard is an accurate portrayal of life in this house for the time being, and should remain there until that is no longer the case. 

Speaking of things preposterous.  Here are some reasons this post took so long.

1. Thanks to the short days of winter, I leave for work when it’s dark, and get home when it’s dark again. This makes taking good pictures of flooring difficult. What about the weekends, you ask? That’s when I go do things like the electrical rough in at Pikesville.
2. The DSLR’s charger is missing. Things have a habit of vanishing when I bring them to Chicago with me. We went there for Thanksgiving, and I’m pretty sure I left the charger plugged into the wall, but now no one can find it. So the camera ran out of juice at about 11am on Christmas day.. so much for taking pictures in the sunlight on Christmas!
3. My keyboard is screwed up.  It keeps randomly launching programs in the middle of typing, as if the ‘window’ key was stuck down.  But it’s not.  This makes typing infuriating.  Windows Media Center launched as I was typing that.  I do not jest.
4. I got an XBOX-360 for Christmas (thank you Dani!!)
5. Then there’s this buying-another-car thing. I don’t know how much to say about this, yet, because I’m maintaining a certain level of pessimism about the whole thing. We can thank the United States Navy for instilling in me such a useful attribute. And for the sarcasm.

Enough excuses.. onto the reveal!

Let’s start with the Family Room / TV Room.   Yeah, the room naming issue is still around.

This is how the room looked (Media Center just launched) when we toured it before buying.

That’s a fake cat, by the way.  I know, right?! 

And a couple of shots from during the flooring project.

And how it looks now.

Can (Media Center just launched) you believe the change?!  We love it.  Aside from the wall damage and missing base, I mean.

We love it so much we immediately set about covering as much of it up as possible. I don’t know. That’s what you do, I guess. Dani said “I don’t want to put those couches back in this room.”

We had been looking for months for a sectional that met her criteria, and couldn’t find one. We found a great furniture sale where we could get a new one for $2300. So we were all set to go place our order when I did one last check on good ol’ CraigsList and found this one for $575!

It’s still the most we’ve ever spent on a single piece of furniture, but it’s really comfortable, the color is great, and it’s in wonderful condition. 

Onto the Living Room (aka Family Room). Here’s how it looked (Media Center just launched) when we toured it in the summer of 2009.

We removed the draperies and carpet, painted, and distressed the fireplace.  Under the carpet, we found this room actually had a decent-looking original wood floor. Earlier, I explained why we had to rip it up, but here’s how it looked before we did so.

Here’s how it looks now.

I was surprised at the dramatic difference in the feel of the room from one type of wood floor to another.

That last picture is the only picture in which I was able to capture the mistake I made.  I sanded at an angle at the highest grit, because I read online that one should do that with new wood.  One should not. (Media Center just launched) It’s only visible in the right light, but it’s there, and it bugs me.

Lastly, the bathroom.

Not much to brag about there just yet.

I’ve got a draft working (Media Center just launched) for one last post in this series that will cover the costs.  We’ll see how long that takes.

So what do you think of our new floors?

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Before we get into the tangled web of wire, I’ll jump in with a disclaimer/warning.  I’m not a licensed electrician.  I spent a number of years of my time in the Navy doing a lot of very dangerous electrical work on large scale systems, and received training and certification to do those things.  So, while I’m not fully up to speed on all the in’s and out’s of the residential electric code, I do keep abreast of it as much as I can.   And I will have a licensed electrician take a look at my work before I put up the sheetrock.

One of the first things I did was go around and mark the points where power came into the kitchen from the panel.  To do this, I used a no contact voltage tester, like this one.

These things are pretty great.  I had to buy a new one, though, because my last one started turning off sporadically, and through a series of unfortunate coincidences, I ended up with a blown breaker and a nervous twitch.  Use rubber-handled tools.
Now that I knew where power came into the kitchen, I used a marker and some tape and labeled the hot end of the cable with the circuit number that it corresponded to.  During this process, I went to use the bathroom and found that it was without power.  This wasn’t too surprising, considering the age of the house.  I decided to pull the kitchen and utility room out of the existing circuits in the house.  To do that, I  needed to add some junction boxes on either end of the kitchen and run some new wire through the kitchen ceiling from box to box.  Here’s the one I put in on the far end.

When I ripped down the old sheetrock on this wall, I found that the contractor who had renovated the bathroom 5yrs ago had buried a box.  See that black metal strap crossing over a patch in the wall?  That’s where it was.  This is a big no-no.  Don’t bury boxes.  I decided to put the new junction box where I did so that I could remove that buried box at the same time.  So this new box contains the power feed for the bathroom, which used to power half the outlets in the kitchen AND the bathroom. 

Here’s the junction box on the entrance half of the kitchen.

Kind of a crappy picture.  It was a crappy job, too.  The box was already in place, so I had to keep using it.  This picture was taken from the kitchen looking up into the rafters.  In order to work on this box, I had to crawl along the eves of the house, accessed from upstairs.  It was cramped and uncomfortable.  If you’ve ever done something like this, the first question you are probably asking is “how many times did you have to get out and back in?”  Well, I forgot a tool I needed twice, and I dropped a tool once.  I also wanted to be really sure I had the right hot wire to feed the bathroom with, so I got out and triple-checked that.  So 4 times crawling in and out.  [sigh]. 

Now that I had isolated the kitchen from the rest of the house’s power, I pulled out all the old outlets and wire runs.  It’s a nice moment when you look into the room and have a clean slate to start on.  But slates aren’t meant to stay clean, so I went around and put in the new boxes for the receptacles and switches that will be going in.  This takes a lot of foresight.  You need boxes at certain heights for certain things (like a microwave/range hood, oven, etc), so you have to know where your cabinets and appliances are going to be.  This is one of those times where I stand there staring at things for a long time, thinking and rethinking to make sure I get all the details right.  I’m sure I’ll forget something, but at least it won’t be a serious thing. 

Once all the boxes were in, I ran the cable to each box and switch.  Nothing is hot at this point; I’m just setting up the cable runs.  This requires a paddle bit and a strong drill to put holes through the studs.  Next up is the can lights.  I used the same cans I used when I did my own kitchen lights almost two years ago(!!) with my dad. 

That’s me 30lbs heavier and with (sadly) noticeably darker hair.  Come on, now.  I’m too young to be saying that. 

Quick aside: if you ever EVER gut a room, take pictures of the walls!  There will come a day when you need to know where a wire comes from/goes to, and you will be thankful you have those pictures.

These can lights are crazy-easy to install and hook up.  They have nice and easy push-in connectors in them, and they come with nails and adjustable rails to fit nice and snug between the ceiling joists.  Once they were in, I was pretty much done with the basic rough-in.  The outlets above the countertop are all 20-amp, per code.  The microwave/range hood has it’s own 20-amp feed, and the lights, dishwasher, and garbage disposal have a 15-amp feed.  I ran these to the breaker panel and tried to put in my new breakers, but they didn’t fit.  

My thumb is covering most of it, but there is a notch in this breaker.  Old Cutler-Hammer panels have this dumb rejection bar to prevent you from using breakers that don’t have this notch.  They don’t make breakers like this anymore, though.  [sigh]. Cutler-Hammer recommends removing the rejection bar, which is held in with one-way screws and requires taking out the main breaker to get to.  I haven’t done that, yet.  In the mean time, I’ve..ahem.. borrowed some non-essential circuits (no more outside lighting or upstairs outlets) in order to get my lights working.

Hooray!  I love this part.  New lights are so crisp and change the whole feel of a project when it’s been so dark and depressing for so long.  It’s the first new thing.  In that picture, you can see some of the other new stuff.. the two white(14/2) leads under the window are the dishwasher and disposal.. the white line going into the box to the right of the window is for the switch for the disposal.  That circle thing is an old vent!  It will be coming out soon.

Now that I had most of the rough-in done for the kitchen, it was on to the utility room.

There’s going to be base cabinets and counter top along this back wall of the utility room, so I’ve got some countertop-depth outlets in for that.  The lighting in here is also can lights, but the ceiling isn’t deep enough for normal cans.  Instead I got these new LED lights.

These things are pretty sweet.  They can be used for retrofitting; they’ll fit right inside an existing can light.  You can also put them in a standard J-box (a round 4” ceiling box), either new-work or old-work.  I put 4 new-work boxes in the ceiling and put one of these lights on each one.  Super bright and crisp!

What a mess!  That new framing, there, is because we are vaulting the ceiling.  The utility room was an addition, so you can see the old roof right there.  Neat, huh.

That’s it for now.  This week I’m meeting with the electrician to review my work, and also to get him to help me remove the restriction bar in this box (link is where I learned about what to do) so that I can add the new circuits I need.

So.. anything I might be missing?  Any electrical stories of your own?  Let me know below!  I’ve got a new comment system and I’m anxious to see how it goes over.

PS.. If you’re waiting for the reveal of the flooring project, I’m still working on that.  I’ve been trying to get some particular pictures to show my mistakes, but it’s always dark when I try to get them.  Stupid short days of winter!

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Ok.  Wow.  Time to sand.

First… happy belated Thanksgiving!  This post was half-written when I left for some quality family time in Chicago over the holiday. 

I found this article online about how to sand the floor.  It recommended that I start at a higher grit like 80, and sand diagonally across the floor.  This is to ensure that the floor is evenly sanded across the lateral seams.  That seemed odd to me, as I’d never sand like that on furniture.  But ok, I’ll take the pro’s advice.

You can see in that picture that I’ve completed my diagonal sanding and have started the with-the-grain sanding.  I’ve moved to 100 grit sand paper, now.  It looks to me, as I’m sanding, that my diagonal lines are being sanded away as I go deeper into the wood.

In that picture, you can’t even see any lines any more.    “Victory!”, I say to myself.   As we’ll learn later… this didn’t end up as the victory I thought it would.

Dani takes a moment to both take a picture of the sanded floor and show off her new boots.  I don’t know what it is with women and boots these last few winters.  They’re not even boots!  They’re shoes with more space for frilly things. 

So after a lot of vacuuming, sweeping, and gentle mopping, I was ready for the finishing process.  We opted not to stain the floors.  We really liked the color of the wood in it’s natural state.  We also opted to go the environmentally friendly route and used a water-based system.  Minwax seemed to have a good system, and so I went with that.  It was not inexpensive.  Compared to the cost of the normal oil-based stuff, the water-based system is easily double.  But, I could put another coat on 2 hrs after the first coat, it cleans up with water, and my house didn’t smell for 3 weeks afterwards.  With the oil-based stuff, you’re supposed to sleep somewhere else for 3 days.  That’s crazy!  Who would want those chemicals seeping into their home? 

First step, then, was to put a coat of Minwax Water Based Polyurethane for Floors Base Coat on. 

The base coat, according to Minwax’s website, “seals the wood grain, preventing discoloration (tannin reaction) between the wood and Minwax^® Water Based Polyurethane for Floors. Many water based finishes have a high pH level that can react with bare wood causing it to discolor.”

Mmmmmmk.  Sounds good.  The stuff went on easy enough, too.  I used a lambs wool applicator on a stick.  Pretty standard.

Two hours later, it was time for the first coat of poly. 

The Water Based Minwax Polyurethane for Floors poured nice and easy, and once I had a system worked out, it went pretty quick.  I found the best way to do it was to keep a bead of poly on the floor and to work with the grain, gradually moving the bead 6 inches at a time up the grain. 

Once I had 2 coats on, I put some finishing sandpaper onto a drywall sanding pole and went around sanding for an hour.  This was the hardest part of the application process.. arms.  so.  tired.

The sanding is to smooth out everything prior to the final coat.  I chose to do 2 more coats; I’m hoping it gives me a little more longevity. 

After the vigorous sanding, Dani worked her butt off to sweep and mop up the mess while I rested my sanding-weary arms.

I also took the chance to snap this picture of the state of the kitchen during all this.  Ughh.

Well this post got a little longer than I anticipated.  I think I’ll keep you all in suspense and do The Reveal in a separate post.  So check back soon for the last post in the New Flooring series!

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Installed flooring?  Yeah.  That’s what’s up. 

After some intense cleanup, I used my new laser line draw thing to put a line all the way across the house.  The thing is, it’s really important to get this line straight.  So buy the laser.  It doesn’t hurt that it’s a laser and fun to play with.  It freaks the crap out of animals.

The first night, I only got one row of flooring in.  I really really really didn’t want to mess up that first row.  Day two got us a bit further along.

We are watching New Girl right here.  Dani needs to ensure that Zooey and I don’t run off together.

Always more to clean when you are doing this.  Chunks of debris under flooring leads to creaks and lumps that will drive you insane the rest of your life.  My dad will vouch for this one.

Installing the floor pieces isn’t what takes the most time.  It’s the “little” stuff that does that.  Like finding just the right piece of flooring for the spot you are in, or trimming the base around door frames and entry ways.

The vibrating dremel tool was a huge time saver, here. 

At the end of day two, Dani and I did a lot of strolling back and forth on our 45 sq ft of installed floor.  It felt very regal.  We should have spoke with our very practiced high class English accents.  We may have waltzed.  Ok, that’s a lie.  I have no idea how to waltz; it’s been a long time since I was forced to learn during High School PE class. 

When day 3 came along, I had some reinforcements.  Eric came down from PA to help for a day and we made a lot of progress.   I think the last time Eric showed up here at My Dad’s Shoes is when he fried a turkey and didn’t burn down the house.

What Eric is doing, here, is using a wrench and a hammer to convince a stray nail that it wants to go the rest of the way into the floor.  We had to do a lot of this.  Being vigilant in finding the nails that stick up just a bit too much will save a lot of frustration when you find bumps in the floor.  So, yes.. progress was made with Eric’s extra set of hands.  But progress does not come without blood in this house.

Eric stepped on a nail, and I had a Dremel tool nearly take off my finger tip.  But hey, ‘close’ only counts in golf and nuclear warfare, right?

See that stack of short pieces against the wall?  Now is a good of time as any to say that an odd lot of flooring sucks.  But, given the amount of savings, it’s worth it.  My waste factor was higher, my frustration level was way higher, and I have a lot more seams than I’d like.  I also have a fair number of pieces of flooring installed that taper in width, but I didn’t catch it until it was too late.  But, at 1/3rd the cost, it’s still well worth it.  Buy an extra 5 to 10% waste. 

Let me just point out to the lady readers that it’s hot when women use a tape measure.   Hot.  Dani still has a number of tricks to keep me from Zooey.  Tool-use is a strong one.

Speaking of things worth their cost; this is one epic beer.  I wish I had an opportunity to get more of them before they vanished for the season.

A couple more hours of work after this last shot and we had our new floor completely installed.  This is still no where near the end of this project.  More to come!

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The linoleum is still in the room in that picture, but the rot is already evident.  The tears.  You can’t see my face because I’m hiding the tears.

Time for some repair. Another opportunity to use my sweet new circular saw.  Wood runs in fear.  So do the dogs.

Up first; cut a huge hole in the floor into the basement.  When you cut a whole into your house that opens up one floor to another, it’s a bit… disconcerting.  There is suppose to be a floor there.  Not a hole.  It really messes with your perception of how a house works.

Now that I have the floor open, I need to put in a new sister joist against that back wall so that I have something solid to anchor the new subfloor to.

I picked up a 2×6 and some 3/4” plywood from Home Depot and cut them to fit.

Lets.. umm.. let’s not talk about those random screws, there.  Look, the angles of approach were pretty limited and the smell isn’t pleasant.  Moving on.
With the new sister joist in place, I ripped the plywood that I had cut to size in half, and then used my dremel tool to cut a half-circle in each one of the halves.  After that, I simply put the halves in place and screwed them home.

There are some things I didn’t do correctly, here.  It would have been smarter to raise the toilet flange at this point.  However, that sucker is solid and it isn’t budging.  I would’ve had to replace the whole drain line to do it correctly, and I didn’t have the time, patience, or desire to do so.  Instead, I’ll use a spacer when I go to install the toilet. 

But I’m happy with the end result, and now I can carry on to the next step… hardwood installation!

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When last I spoke of it, I had really just started on ripping out the old floor.  Well, I did a lot more of that, and true to form, there was a fair amount of bleeding and yelling and wall damage.

I used a digging bar to get these sheets of laminate and backer board up.  It worked wonders.  The bar is very heavy.  I had some sore man-boobs.

This is another great example of when to wear gloves.  The nails on the bottom of these sheets put a few holes in my fingers.  I was wearing gloves until I ripped a few glove-tips off on nails, and then discarded them.  I ended up duck-taping over the ripped fingers and putting them back on, because I can only be stupid for so long.  Speaking of stupid.. I’m wearing flip-flops.  This is actually a step up from where I started; which was barefoot.  I’m a no-shoes-on-in-house guy, and it took a little time for my mind to transition from “you’re in the house” to “you’re in a construction zone”.

Here you can see where the dividing wall was when the house was built.  The wooden floor used to be the dining room, and where there is no wooden floor, there was an extra layer of old-school linoleum, because it was the original kitchen.  We’re talking like three kitchen-additions ago, here. 

Apparently I neglected to take (or can’t find) pictures of the stripped-bare floor.  This one is off of my phone.  You get the idea.  I had to take all the radiator covers off to get at the flooring underneath them.  Now the whole subfloor is exposed, though.  It’s tongue-and-groove 3/4” planks.  I went around and pounded in some nails that had wiggled their way loose over the last 75 yrs.  Overall, the floor was in good shape.  Except for the bathroom.

Yeah, that’s floor rot.  All around the toilet.  It was an unwelcome discovery after removing the toilet, sink, and all the contractor-grade tile.  I could push my hammer right through the wood.  I’ll probably do a brief post later on how I fixed that.

At this point, I’ve got all 800-some-odd sq ft of old flooring ripped out and piled in front of the front door, including carpeting, padding, the original hardwood, and two layers of laminate.   Most of it is still there.  Along with a toilet.  [sigh].  I’m that guy, now.

Next up; prepping for and doing the install!

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Remember back when Dani did her (still unfinished!) house tour?  She mentioned this ugly 1980’s gold chandelier on her list of still-to-change in the kitchen.

It’s really the last remnant of the old kitchen.

Ugh.  I cannot believe that is the same room. 

So.  Anyway.  I went to Home Depot and they had a clearance table for lighting.  Clearance tables at Homies are both beautiful and deadly at the same time.  It’s like one of those mosquito zapper things. 

There on the table was a light that we had both really liked when we saw it on display a month or two earlier.  At the time, it was retailing for over $200.00.  When I saw it’s new price, I snapped a picture of it and sent it to Dani.  Her reaction was.. well.. she told me to geri t, and I believe she wanted me to expedite that process.

Do you see that price sticker?!  That’s like a billion percent off.  Once I geri t’d it home, we hung it up, and with that, we have now purged the last of the old kitchen from the house. 

I left some extra chain because the box for the light isn’t centered in the room, and I may put a little dangle in the chain and attach it to the ceiling so that the light will be centered.

We both think that this new light complements the pendant lights I made. 

What do you think?

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Let’s just let that sink in for minute.

We’re renovating a house in Pikesville, MD, in order to rent it out.  Because, hey.. one house full of projects isn’t enough!  It hasn’t had many updates since being built in 1956ish, and we’re on an abbreviated time scale trying to get things done over there.  The process of acquiring it and beginning demo has taken most of my free time of late, hence the lack of any new content, here.

I’ve got some early demo photos to share, though!  Everybody loves demo.

Here we have the kitchen; early-demo.  The cabinets are old-school metal ones.  The floor has 3 layers, and I was incredibly nervous of floor-rot underneath it.  It turned out to be in great shape, though.

And here is the pre and post-demo of the utility room.  Our plans, here, are to update the electrical and plumbing, new walls, cabinets against the back wall, and something neat for the ceiling….

We’re removing these ceiling joists and building a new bump-out wall against the exterior of the original house.  This will go all the way up, and tie the utility room addition to the exterior of the house to recoup the strength we’re losing by removing these ceiling joists.  Then we’ll have a nice tall ceiling that will give this space some breathing room and make it feel bigger.

This is where the new bumped out wall will go. 

And lastly, the partly-demo’d kitchen.  A long way to go in these two rooms, but it is where the bulk of the work is happening for right now.  Over the next couple of months I’ll be redoing the electrical and plumbing, walls, ceilings, cabinets, lights, sinks, appliances… this all feels so familiar!

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I do believe this little guy had as much crab as I did.

And we spent a nice long day on the beach. 

I did a little swimming.  I did a little reading.  But mostly, I DIY’d.   Apparently, even when on vacation, I must be building something.

A friend and I built a 420 sq ft town of sand.  With pyramids of both Egyptian and Sumerian style.  And buttresses.  And a Hoover Dam looking thing.

This was a lot of fun.  Although the sunburn on my back isn’t so much fun.

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So as many of you know the Mid-Atlantic region has recently been affected by some unusual natural events.  Last week was The Earthquake of 2011 as I am now referring to it.  Last Tuesday Virginia experienced a 5.8 earthquake that was felt as far north as New York.  I’ve lived in Maryland my whole life and have never felt an earthquake, so when it happened, I was confused for a solid 5 minutes.  I couldn’t understand how we could have bought a house that was so structurally unsound that it was now falling down around me.  After I finished processing what had happened I realized, “I know what this is! I’ve read about it!”  Also, I checked Facebook.  Naturally there were 20 posts from my friends and family all reporting that what we felt was indeed an earthquake and not my house crumbling at the foundation.  The devastation was horrific.

That’s not really my joke; I stole it from the intertubes.

So anyway, after that big event came and went the talk turned from The Earthquake of 2011 to the approach of Hurricane Irene.  What do Baltimorons do when a big storm is heading our way?  Buy all the milk, bread and TP we can fit in our cars.  Being that Kevin and I are on the Medifast diet right now, we had no need for additional food and instead we actually did something useful.  I should say Kevin did something useful. He brought our cars and trash cans into the garages, secured our lawn furniture, and emptied the trailer of debris that could become airborne.  Twenty minutes later he was out of things to do, so we turned our attentions to inside the house, and this is what we got done!

We moved our furniture in the Kitchen to protect it from the windows being blown out. 

Sike!  We moved it so we could do this!  We ripped out the carpet and padding in the living room in preparation for the new hardwood flooring.   Kevin’s been gradually removing the many layers of flooring across the main floor of the house.   We still have to take up at least 2 more layers in some sections.

After a trip to the dump, I started cleaning up the sunroom while Kevin took down the hideous non-functioning fan/light.  When you turn it on, it just buzzes.

I wasn’t lying, that thing is ugly right?

Then, he replaced it with this simple, beautiful, functional new one that I bought for us.

He also replaced the missing latches on the storage doors in the office, as well as replacing 2 outlets that have been unusable and without covers for months.

What did I do other then take pictures while all this was going on you might ask…

I made delicious pumpkin spiced chocolate chip pancakes for lunch.  We are allowed to eat them on our diet, believe it or not. 

This is what our girls though of all the activity and the impending storm.

So there you have it.  A rainy day of impending doom well-spent. 

Storm update: its been gently raining for about an hour with no gusty wind.  If it keeps up like this, maybe you wont be seeing a post about the tree that fell on our house.

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When we redid the kitchen a couple of winters back, we replaced all the appliances except for the dishwasher.  It was only 4 or so years old, the quality was on the upper side of medium, and it worked well.  It didn’t match the rest of the appliances, but it didn’t look bad, either.  The other day, we opened it after a load was done, and the dishes were pretty grimy, still, and there was dirty, standing water at the bottom of it.  I tried to force it to enter the drain mode, but it wouldn’t power on.

When I was installing the baseboard, I had foreseen that a difficulty with the dishwasher might arise, and had create a removable panel of baseboard for in front of it.  I popped this out, and using my awesome non-contact voltage tester tool (yellow pencil-shaped thing in the picture below), I verified that the dishwasher was, in fact, getting power.  About 30 mins later, I’d narrowed the problem down to having something to do with the control panel.  After opening it up and looking for any obvious shorts or loose wires, I did a price-check on a replacement control panel.  It’s a bit shy of $200.  We decided that it wasn’t worth repairing, and off I went to the nearest Sears Scratch-and-Dent center.

There, I picked up an Electrolux model that was a customer return.  It matches our other stainless steel appliances and has all of the options we wanted.  It retails at $1100, but I walked out with it for $515.  The only negative is that I failed in something I usually excel at.  Dani would say I excel at this to the point of ad nauseam.  Research.  I should have done more.  This model has a lot of bad reviews on Amazon.  I’m just crossing my fingers that we don’t have to join their ranks.  I was in a rush, though, and the price was good.  We had 5 house guests this weekend… the dishes were piling up fast, and hand-washing was becoming untenable. 

Before I removed the old one, I turned off the dedicated breaker for it and disconnected the power feed in the electric box on the dishwasher.  After turning off the water feed to it, I then had the joy of sucking out all the nasty water still inside with my ever-venerable shop-vac.  In my last entry here at the ol’ blog, I mentioned that I had inadvertently caused ashes from the fireplace to spew skyward and cover most of the surfaces in the family room, causing cleanup to take far too long.  Knowing I had a shop-vac full of ash, I emptied it outside and removed the filter before sucking up water.  Apparently I wasn’t thorough enough, though, because as soon as I turned it on, ash blew out of the thing all over the kitchen floor. 

Pain. In. The. Ash.

You may have noticed in the image above of the old dishwasher that it is sitting up on some 2x4s.  This is because all of the cabinets in our new kitchen sit 3” off the ground.  I talked about why we did this when I installed them.  Because a dishwasher has feet at the front and the back, it’s kind of hard to get one pushed in correctly when the surface isn’t flat.  I was having trouble getting the new one in, so I quickly whipped up some 2-by-4 base-extensions to sit perpendicular to the existing cabinet base.  It made the whole process much easier.  The white pex visible in the picture is the water feed for the as-of-yet-unpurchased-or-installed pot filler above the stove.

With the new bases in place, I wired in the new dishwasher and connected the water feed and the drain line, then pushed it in.

It’s a much more pleasant experience loading and unloading a dishwasher that sits higher off of the ground.  I cannot over-recommend this to fellow tall people.

So the new dishwasher is in place.  It’s Dani’s job to get the sticker residue off the front and get it all nice and shiny, and I have still have to reinstall the baseboard panel.  The first test load worked well, so here’s hoping our luck holds.

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The first time Dad visited us in our new house, we were walking around together talking about the various things we had plans for.  One of the these was a desire to remove the carpet and the vinyl flooring underneath it in the living room/TV room and replace it with matching hardwood to what we found under the carpet in the family room/fireplace room.  At this point, Dad did a very smart thing.  He pulled out one of the AC vents and inspected the edge of the existing hardwood flooring we hoped to match. 

“Well that’s not going to work.  Your floor is too thin”.  Indeed it is.  I had just assumed that a house build in the mid-30’s would have a 3/4” thick floor, but for some reason, this is not.  From one perspective, this is a relief.  I don’t have to feel bad about tearing it out, since it is too thin to refinish.  And I don’t have to try to match it, now, either.  On the other hand, though.. it just feels awful to tear out an old floor. 

I found an odd lot of some 3/4” thick Brazilian Koa (it’s not really.. they just call it that) at Lumber Liquidators.  It’s full of some damaged pieces and lots and lots of short pieces.  I’m a tad nervous about it.  That is an understatement.  The truth is, though, that we can’t really afford to do what we really want to do.

I really like the look of wide plank mixed-width flooring.  This is white pine.  It’s grown, harvested, and milled right here on the East Coast.  But at $6-9  sq ft, it’s not in our near (or not-so-near) future.   At $2.45 a sq ft, though, we could swing the cost for the nearly 1200 sq ft of the stuff we bought from Lumber Liquidators. 

I decided to rip up a chunk of the flooring in an out-of-the-way corner so that I could transfer all the new flooring into the house. 

Ugh.  This process is not fun.  I did find this on the bottom of a few of the flooring remnants. 

So now I at least know a little bit more of the history of my current flooring.  After a few hours of work, I had a section cleared, de-nailed, and cleaned up.  The next morning, a friend helped me unload the trailer and get it in the house.

A few days later, I attacked another section of the floor.  These nails suck.  I have spent enough time crouching and shuffling about the room to qualify as an Old Bay Crab. 

When I was done, I cleaned it up with my venerable shop vac.  Which may have been pointed into the fireplace when I turned it on.  And may have then sprayed fireplace ash all over the whole room.  And consequently the cleanup may have taken about an hour.  sigh.

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Here I’ve got the blades off.  They come off very easily.. just a couple of rubber-lined large-headed screws per blade. 

With the blades removed, I took off the face plate and then the glass cover.  Still no sign of anything broken.  At this point I’m starting to scratch my head a bit.

So I took every last part of this thing apart.  And guess what I found.

Stinkbug.  A stupid faced stupid Stink Bug.  Ugh.  These things get everywhere!!  Apparently it had died, got all hard and dried-up, and stuck it’s dead-self in just the right spot to go click-click-click-click as the fan spun.  Awesome.

I don’t know how they’re getting in, either, man.  I feel your pain.  We need a support group.

After that ridiculous unplanned and unwanted project, I needed this.

I’ve been on this quest since our trip to Ireland in May to find a place that can serve and correctly pour the perfect pint of Guinness.  So far.. meh.  I’ll keep you posted.

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The exposed ends of the cabinets and of the island were always intended to be stone veneer.  I’ve priced out the cost for the amount of stone I would need and it’s about $500.00.  There always seems to be something better I can spend 500 bones on. 

Last Fall, Dani’s employer decided that she no longer wanted a large display unit in the salon.  She said if I would get it out of there, I could have it.  The unit was made entirely of reclaimed barn wood, so I jumped at the chance to snag it.  I disassembled it and brought it home, and stacked it under the car port to keep the weather off of it.  I figured since it’s super-old barn wood, it would do just fine.  That did not turn out to be the case.  When I moved it earlier this month, this is what I found:

My awesome barn wood had been eaten.  Pretty thoroughly.  About 30% of the surface area of all the wood had been badly marred by some kind of beetle, I think.  I found oblong-shaped empty eggs in these holes.  I had intended to use this wood to make some really nice furniture for the living room, but that option was taken away.  Dani had a bright, idea, though.  Maybe this would work for the ends of the cabinets in the kitchen.  So here is my usable barnwood.

Although I couldn’t find a single bug anywhere on or in the wood, I bug-bombed it anyway.  Then I used my compressor to blow out any remnants of anything that might be in those holes. 

After a quick photoshop to see how it would look in the kitchen, I decided to give it a go.  I cut some pieces and dry-fit them, and I was liking it so far.

So I cut the rest of the pieces, spray a few coats of polyurethane over them, and used my nail gun to put them in.  Here’s the results.

I can’t say that I’m head-over-heels in love with it, but I do really like it.  It fits the rustic motif and, here’s the best part, it was free.  It cost me zero dollars and about 3 hours time to cut, clear-coat, and install.

One more thing off the list for the not-yet-done-kitchen.

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A co-worker of mine clued me in to this house bill that just came out of a committee recently.  Here is a blurb from the news story about it:

A last-minute rewrite of the bill expands the information that commercial Internet providers are required to store to include customers’ names, addresses, phone numbers, credit card numbers, bank account numbers, and temporarily-assigned IP addresses, some committee members suggested. By a 7-16 vote, the panel rejected an amendment that would have clarified that only IP addresses must be stored…. To make it politically difficult to oppose, proponents of the data retention requirements dubbed the bill the Protecting Children From Internet Pornographers Act of 2011, even though the mandatory logs would be accessible to police investigating any crime and perhaps attorneys litigating civil disputes in divorce, insurance fraud, and other cases as well.

You can help fight the bill by letting your congressman know you oppose it.  An easy way to do so would be to use the form on the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s website.

Now, the mere insinuation of that level of data being kept about me got me into a bit of a sour mood.  Sure, it will probably (if it passes) be put to some good use.  But even if I totally trusted the government not to misuse this data, I certainly don’t trust that some random hacker won’t come along and pilfer it from my ISP and put it to some nefarious use.  So I decided to do something about it.

What’s Happening and Why You Probably Don’t Like It

In layman’s terms (that means my geek friends can’t critique me for over-simplifying this), your ISP provides you with your all of your internet services, like web-surfing.  When you go to a website, your computer asks your ISP “Please take me to this website” and your ISP goes and finds that website and delivers it to you.  Your ISP could potentially keep a history of everything you ask it for…  every site you visit, and everything you type or click while on that site.  What it can’t keep a history of is encrypted traffic.  So once you go to your bank’s website, for example, you’re computer and the bank create a secure, encrypted link, and the ISP can no longer “see” what you’re sending and receiving.  It does still know how much you are sending where, and that’s still a lot of information.  What this bill would do is force the ISP to store all the data; the easily-readable unencrypted data (the majority of your browsing) and whatever information they have on your encrypted communications, as well. 

What I Did About It

I’m cheating.  The bill only applies to ISPs (Internet Service Providers).  So if there is a way to have someone else fetch and return your traffic for you, and deliver it in a secure, encrypted channel, then all your ISP will see is the link between you and this mysterious 3rd party.  So I created a 3rd party.   Amazon has this group of services called Amazon Web Services (AWS).

If you have heard the phrase “in the cloud” from someone in reference to the internet, then this is sort of what they were talking about.  Simply put, Amazon has a crap-ton of computational power and storage capacity, and they’ve made it available to the masses to do things with.  The user doesn’t really know where these things are being done.  It doesn’t really matter.  All that matters is they are being done somewhere and that the user gets the results.  Hence; cloud.   I made this…umm… helpful picture to demonstrate.

Amazon charges per-hour to use their cloud resources to do these things.  But their entry-level stuff is free for a year; and even after that, it’s pretty inexpensive. 

I created a Ubuntu EC2 instance and set it up as a proxy using a public-key encryption to authenticate me and my VPN sessions. 

The simplest way to explain that is to say that I now have my very own computer running at Amazon somewhere, and I have an encrypted tunnel to it from my computer.  Now, when I ask to go to a website, my computer tunnels that encrypted request through my ISP and asks my computer in the cloud to go find it for me.  It uses Amazon’s resources to find the website and deliver it back through my encrypted tunnel.  Here’s the catch… Amazon is not an ISP.  So they don’t have to keep logs. 

For the down and dirty on how I did this, I cannot overstate how awesome this guide is.  It’s written for mac-users, and I use windows, so I had to download OpenVPN to use instead of Tunnelblick.  I added it to my startup folder so that it starts when I log in.

I hope this explanation-sans-guide is helpful.  Protect your privacy!

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My “solution” at the time was to use this.

It held the chain remnant to the flapper and allowed everything to keep working.  But it rusted away, and then fell off the chain.  Time to fix this properly.

Dani and I try to be environmentally conscious whenever we can be.  I’ll admit it’s not as often as we should be.  I picked this up at Home Depot for about 20 bucks.

The instructions did a pretty good job of explaining how to install this, so I’ll skip re-doing that here. 

Here’s the tank before removing the old flushing mechanism.  Note the dangling chain. 

After removing all the old pieces and dropping them in the sink, I started installing the new stuff.

The new one has this j-tube that is supposed to keep gunk (like the gunk that is visible in the picture) from forming at the bottom of the tank.  We’ll see.

After installing the new hardware, I put the new button on.

My tank wall was too thick for the included plastic washer-nut.. if I used it, there wasn’t enough space to attach the internal button mechanism.  I ended up using one of the thick rubber gaskets from the old innards to act as a spacer and I’m depending on the internal flush-button mechanism to hold the button in place.  So far, so good.

Everything is hooked up and the tank is filling.  After putting the top back on, we look good-as-new, with a fancy new button sure to confuse friends and family.

For those not in-the-know, this has two buttons on it.  The smaller button is for flushing liquids, and the larger for flushing solids.  Using the smaller button conserves water, and is a better option than the old “If it’s yellow let it mellow” adage.  That leaves rings, people.

Oh, and I don’t want to hear anything about the empty TP holder, there.  It’s stupid.  Who can reach back there?  Nobody, that’s who.  We have it on a shelf instead.  Don’t like it?  Don’t poop here.

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This.  Took.  For. Ever.

I designed this in February, and started construction a few weeks later.  I’ve probably got about 40 hours into it.  It really shouldn’t have taken that many, but hey, it’s my first piece of furniture.

I learned a lot.  I also learned that I need to learn a lot.  There are known unknowns and unknown unknowns to take away from this project.  Here, this pretty much sums it up.

I learned the critical importance of both following your plans too much and not following them enough.  I’ll explain.  In the beginning, I followed them without thinking each thing through, and I ended up building the shorter bench the same length as the longer bench.  Why?  Because I had copy/pasted the longer bench in SketchUp and then neglected to correct the length of the copy.  And so I ended up with a bench too long.  There was something a bit surreal about that, by the way…  having a copy/paste mistake on my computer end up as 3ft of extra bench on the floor of my shop.

I also didn’t follow my plans enough towards the end of construction, because I figured it was like putting together a puzzle and at this point, the last pieces would just fall into place.  This is how I ended up having trim pieces that were too long or too short because I forgot about the lid height or the the overlap… you get the idea.  If I had gone back to my plan instead of re-measuring from the build itself, I would’ve seen the issues right away.  But overall, the plan worked.. it’s pretty dang close.

I think I would like to spray next time instead of roll. I bought some ProClassic from Sherwin Williams and used some microfiber rollers, and the results are really very good. I did the finishing prior to assembly, which helped with preventing globs in corners. However, if I could prime, then assemble, then spray, that would be better, because I could fill in little gaps and cover seams in the trim.

As for the “known unknowns”.. well, I need to learn how to cut things perfectly square and straight.  There’s likely a good tool for that.  Using the guide on my table saw did a pretty good job, but where the lids meet, I had to plane some to get them to sit nice. 

Oh, the cushions.  Dani might write about that; we’ll see.  She picked the fabric and made them, I just cut the supporting wood and helped staple. 

Oh, I submitted the design to Google’s 3D Warehouse, so if you like it, you can download it and play around with the design till your heart’s content.

So, I can’t officially cross it off the list, but it’s in and useable, and I’m quite happy with that.

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