Projects

Today was my first day that I had to rake my enormous oak tree laden hell yard.

Here’s the before:

And here’s the after:

Pretty good job, eh?? Rake courtesy of John Deere.
After I finish doing all this, I look up into the heavens…

And realize that mother nature hasn’t even started raining her leafy terror on my yard.? There are just too many leaves up there.? I have a feeling I’m getting pwned.

Over the weekend we went from 100 to 200 amps. This was partly for safety reasons, and so that in the future when we want to add new stuff (like a microwave range and a hot tub or whatever) we have enough circuits. The old circuit breaker:

A bit of a mess. It wasn’t properly grounded, and it was WAY to close to the oil tank.

The new circuit breaker had to be moved about 5 feet to the right.

The old breaker is gone, replaced with some boxes to extend the existing ancient cables. I’m not concerned about the age of the old cables, 50’s era armored BX cable is good stuff, should last forever.

The new circuit breaker. We have TONS of unused breakers we can use now.

New jump installed across the water meter.

Outside, the place where the old meter was is now exposed. I didn’t know this, but it looks like the old house was painted cedar siding. Now it’s all vinyl (thank god). Not sure how I’m going to clean this up.

The new enormous meter outside. Note the lack of an actual meter counter doohickey. CL+P installs that this week sometime. For now, I guess I get free power. Also note that the master shutoff for the circuit breaker is actually underneath the meter, outside. I guess they did this because the master shutoff can only be a few feet from the outside meter, and we’re now over that limit. The national electric code is so weird…

This is what I got for christmas this year.

It’s a cona coffee maker, and it’s the coolest thing ever. You put medium ground coffee in the top, water in the vessel below that, and denatured alcohol in the very bottom (methylated spirits, for you brits). You light the thing up, and when the water gets warm enough the pressure inside the lower vessel increases to the point where the hot water is forced through a glass tube into the upper vessel. After most of the water is out of the lower chamber, you let the thing brew for about 3 minutes, and then kill the flame. The resulting coffee falls back down the same tube, and into the pot. It makes some damn good coffee, and by some miracle of science you don’t get any grounds in the pot, and there’s no filter. Amazing.

The first time I tried it was on christmas eve, in front of my entire family. I must have goofed on the directions because I put the top piece on too late (water was already at a boil) and the thing exploded everywhere, shooting coffee all over the house and throwing scalding water all over my hands. I’m fine now, and no one got hurt, and now everyone wants to come back next year to see me and my christmas bomb.

I got the hang of it now. No more explosions. Honest.

(note: in order to get the flame into the picture and not get reflection off the glass, I had to take the picture in extremely low light with no flash. I ended up with a nice sepia tone for free.)

Thru magic, I was able to turn this:

into this:

My house is now a super modern energy saving machine.

Being a programmer COMPLETELY sucks when you try to attempt to do anything in the real world. I’m spoiled. If I’m working on a coding project, and I realize that what I’m doing just isn’t working out, or I decided to follow the wrong path, no problem. I can always just undo checkout from my source code library, revert to my original version, and start over. Two quick steps. So simple, so nice. Real world, not so simple.

This weekend I installed a new dining room overhead light. The problem is, when I would screw up, which was every possible second, I would have to undo like 20 minutes of work to get back to a point where I could start over again. I did this 3 times, where I get to the end of the project only to discover that after I threaded all these stupid fucking wires through all these widgets and grommets that I forgot like one secret piece of metal that I somehow needed to be in the middle of all the mess. But I don’t get undo checkout. I just get bloody fingers full of shredded bits of copper and tons of hate. Took me ~90 minutes to wire in one stupid light.

In happier news, my new voltage detector works like a champ, as evidenced by the fact that I’m not dead.

This was from a few weeks ago, but I randomly decided to replace my upstairs bathroom sink.

Removing the old sink destroyed the laminate on the countertop, so it was unusable..

Not only that, there was some significant water damage to the countertop, because the original caulking wore away.

The empty sink base.

I made a new frame around the sink base for the new sink/countertop to sit on. We decided to get a single piece sink/countertop, because it’s a really good idea and we’re smart.

The new sink, before I put in the new faucet.

Installed! This job was pretty easy, after Michael showed me how to do it.

The cabinets and countertop are in! The next phase of the project starts this weekend: compounding, retiling, and painting. I’m unskilled, pretty slow, and I lose interest in things quickly, so this will probably take me a couple of weeks to complete.

Although we’re not finished with the project yet, we couldn’t be more pleased. The changes completely met our expectations, and the guys who did the installation did a great job (and they were really nice). Send me an email if you want his name, I don’t want to post his email so he doesn’t get spammed by viagra and poker ads.

The new sink drawers. There’s less room underneath the sink now, but much more cabinet room. We also added one of those lean-out drawers in the sink base for sponges and stuff. When I came home, karen had turned on the dishwasher and it was making the worst sound imaginable. They simply forgot to turn on the water under the sink to the dishwasher. A quick turn of a knob, and we were in business. There’s also a fine layer of grit over everything, which was totally expected.

The new peninsula cabinets. Glass doors on both sides.

The crazy squiggly line underneath the cabinets is scored-up sheetrock that needs to be compounded. This entire strip will be tiled.

Stove-side cabinets. Tile will go back here too. They also raised the oven a few inches, which was nice. It was really low before, which allowed dirt to fall to the floor easily. We also raised the microwave about 4 inches from the stovetop, bringing it to code. This will make working on the back burners a little easier.

An empty dining room. On the right is the new bar, which is almost 4″ wider than the old one. We’re going to throw some stools in the dining room so we can eat on it.

New shelves in the pantry. I will need to throw a couple of coats of paint in here, and putty over the holes in the wall made by the old wireframe shelves.

You-know-who, nosing around while I take pictures.

Everything started today around 9am. Here are the pictures:

My worst fear came true! 2 of the pipes that supply water to the sink were directly in the way of our new drawer cabinet, and the guy doing the install wasn’t a plumber. I called my plumber (Aiello Plumbing) and they were on the scene in about 2 hours. The day was saved. If they didn’t come when they did, he couldn’t complete the install and the entire project would be in limbo.

The modified pipes. It took the plumber about 1/2 hour to do the work. A big sigh of relief. Problems that are time dependent and relatively complicated are a big reason why I hate doing home improvement. I have a great deal of respect for people that can do this sorta stuff. Because I certainly can’t.

The sink side cabinets, completely gone, down to the sheetrock. They took out a lot of old sheetrock out of the kitchen (which I didn’t expect), including any sheetrock that had tile on it.

Stove side. The crowbar and sledgehammer spared nothing.

Peninsula cabinets and bar completely gone, with only giant holes in the ceiling remaining.

Obligatory picture of Sangi, wondering why her room has been completely demolished.

The guy who did the work is amazing. By the end of the day, he had gutted the entire kitchen, put up the new sheetrock, installed most of the cabinets, and installed the sink base. Tommorow they are putting the new shelves in the pantry, and doing finish work.

The stove side, with the new cabinets installed. Although this side looks like it is pretty close to being finished, there is still quite a bit to do.

Tommorow they are coming to tear everything down, so I had to completely empty the kitchen tonite. Including dismantling the pantry. It took me hours to do, and it sucked, but I’m finally done.

Cabinets are totally empty, and ready to be dismantled.

Completely cleaned out the sink (which is going to be reused). There may be a problem with 2 of the pipes behind the wall. They may be in the way of the new cabinet. We’ll see what happens there. Could get ugly.

This is probably the cleanest this stupid pantry has ever been. It was really nice taking it apart, because I hate it.

I can’t even believe all the junk we now have laying in the living room. Sangi made sure there were no open containers of food lying around.

Living room at full messiness, and Sangi at full nosiness.

This weekend Mark came over and took the doors and hinges to many of our cabinets. He is going to use them in his basement, for some crazy project he is working on.
We also started to get all the stuff out of the kitchen. I can’t even believe all of the crap we have.

About half of all of our kitchen “stuff” is now laying on the living room floor, with food in plastic bags.

Sangi is in heaven. All sorts of new wonderful smells and things to get into.

More crazy mess..

Lots of light getting into the kitchen now..

I opened up all the boxes to make sure everything is correct. The box pile is growing..

Around the beginning of the year, Karen and I decided that it would be a good idea to upgrade our kitchen.
The reasons for this project were many:
- reclaim wasted space (mostly vertical space)
- open up the room to outside light
- make the kitchen more functional
- spend lots of money

We’re also learning a lot about the overall home improvement process. We’ve learned it sucks. You need to micromanage everything, and costs can explode very easily. But the end result will be worth it.

The installation is scheduled for next thursday and friday. Thursday night I will have pictures of the kitchen completely dismantled. That should be wicked cool!

Here are the “before” pictures:

The new cabinets have arrived, and are filled up our dining room. We had to take apart the kitchen table to make space for all this stuff, and put it in the living room.

The current sink and bar. The new bar is going to be 4″ wider than the old bar, and the sink is moving 6 inches to the right. With the new bar, we’ll be able to put some barstools on the dining room side and actually use it to eat on. Ignore the mess.

Unfortunately, the backsplash has to go because the existing countertop sits on top of it. Mark and I tried to yank some of the tiles, breaking some of the underlying sheetrock. We’ll have to fix that. Conventional wisdom says that removing tiles is never pretty, and this is no exception. I’m putting in the new backsplash myself, once everything is done. Gulp.

The cabinets above the bar are being replaced with cabinets with glass doors on both sides, so more light can come into the kitchen. The new cabinets are also 6 inches shorter than the existing cabinets.

The new countertop, laying in the living room. Unfortunately the manufacturer screwed up one of the countertop pieces and they are coming over tommorow to pick it up and fix it.

We’re replacing the existing wire shelves in the pantry with 4 solid wood shelves (with a laminate coating, for easy cleaning). This should also give us lots more useable space.

The new sink base is substantially smaller than our existing sink base, which gives us room to put a really big 3-door cabinet on the left.

The stove side. If you look on the left, you’ll see a big gaping hole where the silverware drawer used to be. The sliders on the existing drawer failed, which was one of the reasons we wanted to upgrade the kitchen in the first place. All of our silverware is sitting on the countertop right now, to the right. It’s really annoying.