Chipping Away At Projects

We've been lazy about updating the blog, mostly from being pooped after real-work and house-work.

Jeremy and Elle at our weddin'

The Back Yard
The pool has come in quite handy to cool off after yard work.  Matt has taken to wearing his swim trunks for outdoor work so he can immediately dive in when we're done.  Close friends, Jeremy and Elle Alcorn, came by for dinner and brought fantastic gifts of a cantilever umbrella, fire pit and tons of bug repellent products.  Our back yard is shaping up nicely.  This is the year of "slash and burn" gardening, probably next year will be more about planting an proper landscaping.

Cool umbrella

Le fire pit

A quick wood holder I built out of
scrap 2 x 4's we had lying about

Creepy Crawlies

While rooting around for some wood to burn that night, Jeremy found some strange "things" all over the leaves of one of our trees.  We figured out they are spider mite eggs, which will hatch sometime soon (the thought of the amount of mites to be released gives me the heebie jeebies).  The eggs are quite dense on the leaves, and even on the branches of the tree.  There are three trees of the same type in our yard and they are all infected.  Spider mites can kill a tree, I wanted to take the zombie apocalypse approach and strike strong by cutting all of the trees down that day.  Matt's cooler head prevailed and we are going to try a tiered approach of pest management.  Step one is lady bugs, we released 3,000 last week and have seen three since then (insert Price is Right losing sound effect here).  They are probably hiding in the siding of our house to spite us.  Matt is sure they hunt at night, but with the degree of infestation I think we need to move up a level.  The next step is to buy "spider mite destroyers" (Stethorus punctillum).  Their only prey is spider mites, and once that population has been depleted...they cannibalize themselves.  The third level is spraying a bunch of chemicals all over the place, but we'd rather not get to that.

Horrendous, disgusting spider mites

Pit Progress

We're chipping away at the Pit slowly and I think we're in the home stretch.  To ease the 9" drop between the foyer/kitchen level and the floor of the Pit, I built two steps.  They each run the length of the opening between the foyer and the Pit, and the kitchen and the Pit.  The treads are nice pieces of oak that we've routed and stained.  With four coats of polyurethane, I hope not to have to refinish them for a long while.

Potpourri of photos:

New register cover...not sure why you would even put a
register directly in front of a door, but we're not going to
dig up the concrete slab it runs through to move it.

After two passes with a rented carpet cleaner, I still
tried  to spot treat the skid marks left by years of recliner
use.  It's been a while since this photo was taken,
amazing what it looks like today.

Pulley system I rigged to lower the bird feeder for
easy filling.  Before the pulley I was just running
the rope over the branch...then the rope broke.

Electricity E-lec-tricity

A very expensive lesson

I had always thought all surge protectors worked the same, and that having any cheap surge protector would provide more than enough protection. We learned that this is not the case.

Halley was at home for the electricians to install the new stove and couldn't get the tv to work. She thought nothing of this as our TV remote is somewhat complicated... It is a "smart" remote designed to work everything in our home theatre setup (TV, receiver, xbox, ps3, cable box, etc.) It can control anything with IR (I used to control our AC with it as well). She ignored it and just picked up a book to read until I got home.

When I got home, I immediately assumed Halley had broken it (jokingly) and tested every combination of all the devices. I jumped around from thinking the TV was broken, to just the receiver and called in the home theatre expertise of my 2 ex Best Buy home theatre nerds Alex Fiddler and Rich Hart. They both recommended testing on known good equipment to rule everything else out. Fortunately I work for a company that tests video equipment all day long, so I threw it all into my car and took it to work the next day.

I finally determined that every HDMI port on every device but the Xbox had died. Dustin Rand (an employee) showed me the internet that said HDMI is very prone to static electricity. (so anyone using HDMI learn from our lesson and take precautions...) This was a huge bummer... The PS3 we didnt use very often, but the reciever powered our speakers. We then contacted Comcast for a replacement box which showed up a few days later.

To add insult to injury the day after I installed the new comcast box and setup everything back up, we had another storm. Guess what happened? The HDMI went on not only the comcast box, but also our tv and Xbox. 

Whole house surge protector installed

So now we are gearing up to make our first home insurance claim as the total cost to replace all of this equipment is $1700, and our deductible is $500. We have finally learned this time though and installed a whole house surge protector and a nice tripp lite surge protector that comes with a $500,000 insurance policy attached to it.

The day Halley almost killed herself

While installing the whole house surge protector, I wanted Halley downstairs watching me (to call 911 in case I zap myself somehow) But also because I like having us both around working on more substantial projects as it gives us "another set of eyes" and hands to help out. After I installed the device and was ready to turn the power back on, I thought it'd be fun to let Halley flip the main breaker back on. I wanted to leave the front panel off, incase I had done something incorrectly (I have never installed a whole house surge protector before) so the mains terminals were exposed and pretty close to the main breaker.

New panel with faceplate removed

I should have given Halley a bit more warning/instruction, because when she reached to flip the breaker, her hand got sweat-inducingly close to the main terminals. She had no idea how close she got to getting zapped...or how high my heart had risen in my chest watching her.  Before I could shout or pull her away, she had flipped the switch safely and turned around with a big "what?" on her face in response to the guttoral noises I was making.  After doing a ton of research on electricity (and please correct me if I am wrong) there is no more danger in touching one of the house mains, then getting zapped from an outlet, assuming you are not  grounded well. Its still just 120volts and regardless of amperage, that amperage needs a nice path to ground (this is why getting zapped by an outlet doesnt immediate draw all the amps it has to offer and trip the breaker) So I feel a little better now, but at the time I immediately started sweating bullets.

Finally!

200Amps!

If you look closely, you will notice a 200A on our panel. We finally got our service upgraded!

I worked from home on Tuesday May 39th so the electricians could do their thing. They came early (around 8am) and shut off the electricity around 9am. The service line is supposed to be 18 inches deep, but of course our house had to give the electricians problems by having the line 48 inches deep.

New Panel

The two electricians were very nice, and even suggested putting Molly upstairs while they used their concrete nailer (imagine a nailgun powered by a .22 cartridge) so she didnt have a heart attack. The new panel they installed was much larger so they had to build out the wall a bit so that it would sit flush.

Just because I was working from home didn't mean my office was taking a day off, so I tethered from my phone to deal with the daily fires. The power didn't come back on until 2pm and by that time I had drained every phone/computer in the house. 

The electricians did a great job, I just wish I could say the same about their customer service (see Halley's post). 

Old meter

Panel removed

The new meter

Forgotten house stories
 While working on the house, there are a number of small entries we forget about from time to time, and I wanted to add a few here.

DAWWWWWWWW

After cutting down the trees, we left the debris on the front yard for a while before we hired a company to come and chip the wood. As they were doing this, one of the workers let Halley know they found a nest of baby bunnies.

The bunnies were so young they were practically hairless. Being the animal nuts that we are, we placed large planters around the nest to make sure that no one accidentally hurt the babies.

Halley still sees a mother and a young bunny almost every morning.

Baby bird looks pissed!

While cutting the lawn this week, I saw something flipping around in the tall grass and stopped the mower. I found another baby, this time a bird... too young to even fly away. I decided to stop for the day and hope the bird would make its way out of the grass so I could finish the next day.

Fortunately I did not run over anything the next day, so I am assuming he continued his journey elsewhere.

Really dumb

 The upstairs bathrooms had a very interesting piece of lighting we still cannot figure out. Take a look at the picture on the right and figure out how to replace a light bulb. The previous owners must have run into this problem as well, because almost every light bulb in the bathrooms upstairs were burnt out and left in place!

Switch and GFCI in one

Full light switch and GFCI

Another annoying aspect of this bathroom was its single outlet. They installed this hybrid switch + GFCI outlet that drove me nuts... Why not install a full GFCI, and a normal light switch? So I did :)


This was my first time installing a new outlet box, so I had no idea how to remove the old one. I decided exploratory drywall sawing was the best way to go. I found that the box was mounted to the stud, but in this case the stud was the door jam... So I decided against removing the entire door jam, and broke out our favorite tool... the sawzall. I am a bit overly cautious when it comes to electricity, and when I turn a circuit back on I always like to have Halley by the outlet just to make sure nothing explodes into flames... This project happened to happen on a day when I had off and Halley did not... So I used skype on my personal phone, and company phone to monitor the outlet in real time as I flipped the breaker back on. After a bit of drywall patching, everything looks good as new!

Our First Foray Into Tiling

I Am Terrible At Estimating Things
The day we were to go purchase the tile, I insisted that we take two cars to Home Depot in order to transport the tiles home.  I have a 1999 Honda Civic, and Matt has a 1991 Honda Civic so we really are able to transport big stuff easily.  We calculated the number of cases of tile we'd need to be 60 and the sales person started laughing when we told him how we were going to transport the cases.  At 80 lbs per case, I wanted to carry nearly two and a half tons of tile in two sedans.  Plus another 475 lbs of mortar and grout.  You too can now take this opportunity to laugh.  Delivery was $75, and a fantastic choice.  The cashier says we were wise to do this because she had seen more than one person break their car axle trying to carry too much stuff.  I'm not even sure the same volume of styrofoam would have fit in two Civic's because 60 cases turns out to be over two pallets of tile.  Cripes.

Tiling Like We Mean It

Uncle Don and I getting started

Our Uncle Don was so kind to set us up with tile saws, a power drill that can handle mortar, the mixing paddle and most importantly knowledge.  The tiles we bought were 16" x 16" monsters, with some variation between boxes which we figured out after a few courses of tile were laid.  We chose a diagonal pattern because I think it looks more interesting than a grid that is square to the room.  Speaking of "square", our house has only a passing familiarity with this concept.  The corner behind the door in the adjacent photos is probably 105 degrees instead of 90.  This would have been super obvious if we went with a pattern aligned with the walls rather than the diagonal.

At the peak of tiling we had six people working, including Matt's parents Jim and Pat.  To make our lives easier we decided to put off the tiling of the corners and closet for a day until the mortar set on the adjacent tiles.  Tiling the closet was tricky, but we did a complete dry fit to make sure the plan would work.  We didn't get too lathered up about things looking perfect in the closet...because it's a closet and we have plenty of other details to be concerned about.

A real treat to tile the closet

We all went for a dip in the pool afterwards,
getting warmer but it's still "brisk"

Tile spacers, times a million

Done!

Molly, happy to be allowed
back into the room

This week Matt and I have been grouting after work, photos to follow. When the home depot salesperson asked what color grout we wanted, I proudly stated "dirt". He politely informed us that this was called "earth". We chose a dark colored grout, because I don't want to spend the rest our lives trying to keep the grout white.

Greening the Neighborhood

Mature White Fringetree

Kim Fuller, a former lab member and current friend and neighbor, is a post-doc at UPenn.  They have a great program where they give away one free tree per year to faculty and staff.  Kim and her husband Brad's house has plenty of trees so they offered the tree to us.  Kim and I picked one up this last Saturday, after a quick trip to a Chestnut Hill bakery for breakfast and cupcakes.  After shoe-horning the tree into the mighty Honda Civic (their new tagline: When you think of large transporting capacity, you think Honda Civic), I was too excited/too busy chatting to pay attention to the speed limit.  I got let off with a warning, thankfully, and crept the rest of the way home at a snails pace.  We chose a White Fringe tree which will grow to ~30 feet high and have an equal spread.  It blooms in late summer with tiny fragrant white flowers.  Matt and I planted the tree yesterday in a spot where there used to be a tree.  The ground was nice and soft thanks to all the rain...but mostly because we had the stump ground a few weeks ago.

Our White Fringetree, landscaping to follow soon  (a keen eye will be able to see our neighborhood bunny, who Molly would love to get to know)

This weekend we will have our first weekend off from house projects thanks to the annual Harper's Ferry camping trip with my extended family (clocking in at ~30 people this year).  I am looking forward to not being covered in paint/mortar/grout for a few days. Its a well deserved break.

Mid-week range installation!

When we bought the house, we knew there would need to be some upgrades to the appliances.  We didn't realize how quickly we would need a new range.  There was a gas cook top with only two of the burners barely "functioning" and an electric wall oven that barely crept to 250 degrees when being preheated to 400+ for over an hour.

I really like baking and fell in love with this monster after a lot of research.  It has dual electric ovens, the bottom of which is convection, for super even baking.  The burners are gas, because that is top notch for stove type applications.  I couldn't find it at the local scratch and dent stores (there was no way this would cross the threshold of our house at the list price of $2,500).  I eventually found on for $1,300 off with free shipping at a Sears in Minneapolis.  Sold!  Once we got it in the door, we opened the installation manual and found that the ovenator draws a minimum of 40 amps.  Since our panel is only 100 amps and our inspector recommended that we upgrade the panel at some point, we decided now would be a great opportunity.

Today, after over a month of wrangling our electrician, we finally had the appropriate connections to set up the range.  Although this represents only half of what we hired them to do, PECO refused assist in the upgrade of the supply line to the house which requires some digging due to all the rain today.  Not a drop has fallen here since the wee hours of the morning and it is currently sunny so you can probably imagine my eye twitching with frustration.  PECO did do us the courtesy of stopping by in one of their huge trucks just to make sure we weren't doing the project today.  Not sure why that was necessary.  The upgrade of the supply line to support 200 amp service is scheduled for May 29th, barring any other foul weather.

Anyway the range is installed and I can bore you with the saga of our electrician another time.  Now is time to make a cake for dinner (yes that will be the only menu item) and dance with excitement of our success.

Structural component or not?

Before

This week we played a game called: "Structural component or not?" I had been pestering Halley for a while to agree to take out this decorative divider between the Pit and the kitchen. Halley finally agreed, and we broke out the sawzall to destroy this annoyingly unfunctional "decoration". Once we cut through it and pulled it apart, it came down about an inch with some decent force... "What have we done"... I immediately assume this is load bearing due to how much force it was bearing... We spend a good half hour pondering this, and decide to contact a structural engineer... While we were waiting for them to get back to us, Halley posted pictures online in hopes that friends and family could weigh in. Brian Ell, Ralph Ratcliffe, Pete Campagna, Jeff Ratcliffe, and Rich Hart all agreed that this was VERY unlikely to be load bearing. We had checked the joists on the Pit side, but I had forgotten to check on the house's side. I checked with a stud finder and found that the joists were parallel... So we removed it with a clear conscience.

After, also there is now paint

Once removed, we found a pleasant surprise we will have to deal with in the upcoming years. Our kitchen has multiple layers of linoleum. Hooray!

Layer linoleum cake and sloppy
joint compound

Sunday was our first actual party hosted. We had 13 people over and cooked on the grill (since our oven/electric is still being worked on...hopefully this Wednesday).  John and Dave came over early and the gents and I hopped in the pool. It was... a bit chilly :) but John would call it "refreshing."

John and Dave immediately broke Halley's rule of "no flips".  She struck a compromise and they agreed to only do acrobatics off of the diving board and straight out into the pool.  Photo credits to Dave.

Make sure to click the "gear icon" and select 720 to watch in HD

Almost immediately the aquatic acrobats determined the diving board was too "squishy" so John  and Dave took it apart and tweaked it a bit tighter.  Kids may not get as big a bounce, but now it's perfect for adults.

Last week we forgot to post some of the other projects we were working on. We planted some nice perenials, and hosta out front. The grass we put down is coming up great as well! Hooray for a week straight of rain!

 

We had also found some pretty cool blinds a while ago but forgot to post them here as well.

They have the "hex" design to insulate, but as you can see, they can go up from the bottom, but also down from the top for letting sunlight in while still having privacy!

The start of the finishing of the room

We got a lot done this week!  I am really proud of our work and meeting our deadline of having the house ready to host a mother's day dinner for 13 people.


Crown Moulding

Damn you, angles gamma and alpha!

There is math here that we had no idea how to deal with, goodness gracious.  The math gymnastics stem from from the fact that the angles between the wall and ceiling and the moulding are not 45 degrees.  Our angles were 58 and 32 degrees, which required strange saw adjustments in order to allow us to lay the moulding flat on the saw's table surface for the cuts.  We have a fantastic power mitre saw that is capable of also bevel cuts.  For a mitre cut, you adjust the blade relative to the vertical fence of the saw.  For a bevel cut the blade is adjusted relative to the horizontal table of the saw.  Based on math that wasn't obvious to us, we needed a bevel of 33.9 degrees and a mitre 31.6 degrees.  It took us a while to get the first board properly cut, and a few practice cuts.  Then begun the challenge of nailing through the moulding into the ceiling joists and the wall studs.  After putting up a few nails to hold it in place, we let go of the moulding and stepped back to admire our work.  The moulding promptly fell off and we promptly got into the car to go rent a finish nailer.

Matt went into Home Depot to get the supplies and I stayed in the car with Molly.  This is when he got the demo of how to avoid nailing our hands to the ceiling, and an idea of how loud this thing is.  He was clever in setting me up to fire the gun for the first time, and recording the result.  It's loud, and a little scary to fire.  Once the matter of securing the moulding was handled, we went back to figuring out the angles.  After messing up a few more cuts, we decided to use a cheater method of simply holding the moulding against the saw's table and fence the same way it would be oriented relative to the ceiling and wall respectively.  This allowed us to have just a 45 degree mitre and zero bevel, muuuuuch easier.  We finished the moulding up that late night and were pretty happy, until we opened the back door to bring Molly inside.

Matt called for her and we turned all of the lights on outside to find that our backyard was dog-less.  Further complicating the matter is the fact that our street has buried electrical lines, so no street lamps.  Being calm under pressure, I bolted out the front door honking a squeaker tennis ball, crying and yelling for Molly.  Matt, who smartly took a flashlight, found her in our neighbors yard who's property backs up to ours.  She was panting and happy and had no idea why we were so lathered up, after all she had a fun romp through the neighborhood.  We've since reinforced the area of the fence she got through.

The start of the end

What would a project be without
all of our tools to trip over?

Hello, Orange!

Because we're not professionals, some areas of the crown moulding needed some serious caulk.  There was only one seam that wasn't in a corner which made our lives a little easier.  We did two coats of ceiling paint on the ceiling and crown moulding, then it was time for color!


We are so happy with the color, its exactly what we wanted.  We're ordering the tile today or tomorrow and shrewdly using a competitors coupon to get 20% off our order which is a huge help.  We'll have a tiling party once we get all the supplies, let us know if you'd like to join us for a day of rolling around on the floor (we'll even feed you).  Amateurs welcome because it will be the blind leading the blind.

Exhibit A: a happy painter

Quick screen solution

Magnets to be sewn along bottom,
sides and middle seam.

This is how Molly relaxes after
a hard day's work.

I have run through a few screen doors, as has my brother, as have our dogs.  I didn't want to have screen doors on the french doors between the Pit and the pool deck.  Two of these weighted screens seemed like the best option.  They secure with velcro, but we plan on upgrading this by sewing some of those fantastic rare earth magnets (how do they work?) in key places.  Molly is fine going through them, but has been trained to wait for us at open doors.  So even when the french door is open, we still have to give her the go-ahead to exit.  This doesn't stop her from running back through them into the house immediately after a quick dip in the pool.

Mother's Day
We finished touching up the paint job at 11:00 on Sunday morning then started a flurry of cleaning to prepare for a Mother's day dinner.  We had 11 people over: parents, siblings and spouses and aunts.  Our guests graciously helped us by bringing sides and desserts which was huge because we are still oven-less (hopefully by the 16th, fingers crossed).  We made herbed pork tenderloin on the grill and a rhubarb currant chutney, cucumber salad and a regular salad.  Also on the menu was appetizers, mashed potatoes, citrus rice with carrots and candied walnuts, ravioli salad with pine nuts, tomatoes and olives, rice pilaf, and pound cake with strawberries and whipped cream.  If I forgot your contribution, I apologize.

My brother John and cousin Dave came over a little early to take a maiden dip (voyage?) into the still frigid pool.  David recorded the temperature on the digital  thermometer at 66.6, fitting to say the least.  Molly joined them in the water, as did our mother's dog Olive, or Violet as only my brother calls her.  Olive didn't really seem to enjoy the water too much, her coat is incredibly heavy when wet so she probably couldn't swim too easily.  Matt hopped in too, but I still think it needs another 5 or 15 degrees to be an appropriate temperature.

Matt and I had a great time, it makes us really happy to have a house full of people we love and feed them good food.  After all, isn't it great to eat with friends?