Category → Home Improvement
Sunday Stuff
Last Sunday I cleaned up the garage, and put everything in it’s place. Trish pulled a 4×8 piece of pegboard out of one of the sheds, and I mounted it in the garage and hung all my tools on it. We set up our new drill press and compound miter saw.
Today I finished putting everything away. I also installed 4 shop lights. Now I’m running 8 40-watt T12 bulbs. It’s really nice.
Sunday Stuff
I started with the usual sorts of things – cleaning up the basement, mowing the lawn, putting the cardboard out for recycling, as so on. I asked Trish to help me move some bags of leaves that didn’t quite make it out to the curb before winter. Since the bottoms were rotted out and the leaves mostly composted, Trish suggested we just throw them onto the compost pile. Out came the snowshovels. When I started to move the fourth bag, a cloud of yellow jackets came pouring out of the bag. I grabbed Mechel and ran. The yellow jackets didn’t pursue us. So, I sprayed two cans of hornet/wasp killer into the two bags I saw the yellow jackets coming out of. Hopefully by tomorrow we’ll be able to safely move the bags.
This afternoon, we went to Iona Island. A former Navy installation, it’s now part of Harriman Park. We went there looking for birds, as the Audubon Society lists it as a “hot spot” in Rockland county. We saw lots of swallows, and one Heron fly by, but that’s about it.
 Trish and Mechel look out onto the marshlands |
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 Barge on the Hudson |
 A commuter train on the other side of the Hudson |
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Quite the day!
Sunday Stuff
Cleaned the garage. Helped Trish clean the basement. Made a website for Tricia’s daycare.
All in a days work.
Actually, making the website was pretty interesting. I used NetObjects Fusion 7 to create the site. I had received a complementary copy of NOF7 a while ago, so I thought I would give it a whirl. Making a website using a tool like NOF was very different than doing everything in HTML by hand like I’ve done so far. Some aspects were much faster, but occasionally I would get to a point where I couldn’t get NOF to produce an effect that I could implement in HTML manually with 30 seconds of effort. After a steep-ish learning curve, though, I was able to get it to do my bidding (once I accepted the fact that I was not in control).
It’s like that whole “I’ll collect your garbage for you but you can’t use pointers directly” thing that Java does. In that case, I say good riddance. In the case of NOF I’m not so sure.
Catch the (micro)wave
Got the two microwaves mounted on a temporary shelf until we get the cabinets:
The shelf isn’t bent – it’s the barrel distortion of the camera. Too bad PhotoImpact doesn’t have a filter to correct it.
The microwaves are great – they provide truly variable cooking intensity (not the pulsed 100% intensity that cheap microwaves use to approximate a lower setting). Trish put some corn in and pushed “vegetables”. “Fresh? Frozen? Canned?” asked the microwave. We told it canned and pushed start. The microwave has temperature and humidity sensors, so it runs until the food is hot ‘n’ steamin’!
Eventually it will look like this.
Sunday Fun
A couple weeks ago, we lost power on one of the two 110 volt legs coming into our house. I did a quick hack in the power box to bridge the working leg to the broken one. The failure was due to all the construction that’s going on between our house and the road (a new house is being built there).
Since our house is so old, the power company would not allow a simple repair. The folks building the new house had to dig a trench from the road to our house. In the process, they had to dig through our ornamental garden.
Tricia asked the Digger operator to move the plants first, so he dug up each plant with the 2’x2’x2′ chunk of dirt it was planted in.
Trish and I moved the plants to the side of the house where the oil tank used to be. I found some paving stones in the yard and we made a little path:
We had a couple left over, so we planted the Clematis and a Hasta next to the parking area:
Thankfully, it rained quite a bit on Monday, which should be great for the newly transplanted plants. Some of our Hasta looks as if it has been nibbled on. We found some deer tracks around the yard yesterday, so I suspect they’re the culprits.
A few weeks ago I had diverted the gutter that used to run across the path to the front door. It fell down, so yesterday I reinforced the joints with screws. Not as elegant as the St. Louis arch (who was no saint, by the way), but at least no one will be tripping over the gutter any more:
Designing our kitchen
Here’s the North wall of our kitchen:
We got our two new ranges and microwaves today, so I went to millspride.com and used their Online Kitchen Designer. Here’s what we came up with:
Neat, huh?
Planning the basement
Trish is considering opening a daycare in our basement, so we’ve been trying to plan out where everything will go (in this picture, south is up):
All the rooms already have sheetrock, outlets, etc. except for the southern bathroom and the kitchen.
If you install the Cortona 3D viewer for Internet Explorer, you can view our plan in 3D!
If you want to be able to move stuff around in the floorplan, download Room Arranger and edit our Room Arranger data file.
The new living room
Two weeks ago on Thursday (12/4) we started using the house’s main entrance instead of the entrance off the living room. This meant we could put more furniture against that wall, so Trish redecorated the living room:
Sunday Stuff
This past week, in advance of Hurricane Isabel, I installed downspouts on the garage’s existing gutters:
Today, I covered the sump pump pit with plastic sheeting. That way, the dehumidifiers don’t work so hard to dry out the basement only to have the water in the sump pit evaporate and increase the humidity.
I also fixed my recumbent’s rear shifter cable – hopefully biking will resume this week.
In the afternoon we went to Van Saun Park (link, link) in Paramus, NJ. Mechel fell asleep on the way there, and refused to wake up, and it was late in the day anyway, so we decided to let him sleep. Trish and I briefly checked out the train, the zoo, the carousel, and the pony rides. We’ll have to come back when Mechel is awake!
1/2 sec, f10
1/4 sec, f10
1/8 sec, f10
Wake up Mechel, you’re missing all the fun!
…When we got home, he was still sleeping. You snooze, you lose!
Last Sunday….
Last Sunday (Aug. 31st) Mechel and I pulled out the dishwasher to fix the X10. It turned out that the dishwasher supply line connector was leaking a bit, so we tried tightening it up:
