Gen­eral home improve­ment is a major hobby of mine. It lets me express my love of trou­bleshoot­ing, design, and opti­miza­tion. On my short trip to the States I had only 1 day for home improve­ment tasks. I got a lot done, but noth­ing major in itself. It was the first home change involv­ing Rachel.

We pulled up all the ply­wood and car­pet rugs in the mas­ter bed­room. These were left over from the brief 3 months I actu­ally lived in my house where I used it as a gym. There were 6 large sheets of ply­wood cov­ered by green rugs from Home Depot. We had to play a ver­sion of that game of shift­ing empty blocks around using a sin­gle hole space to get things out of the way. One by one we pulled up and moved out­side the ply­wood and rugs. We left a sin­gle piece under the tread­mill. That piece is larger than it needs to be but I didn't have time to trim it yet.

We sold my mat­tress to a friend and pulled Rachel's out of stor­age for our use. Then we rearranged some dressers.

The big coup was putting some shelves up in front of the tread­mill. One is 2.5 feet off the ground, the other about 5.5 feet up, just higher than the tread­mill which buts up nearly against them. The lower shelf now holds the cable modem and wire­less router. The upper shelf is meant to hold a lap­top to watch movies or Hulu from it.

I had a great idea though and remem­bered my old View­Sonic cable-to-VGA adapter. It is a box that takes in VGA and audio inputs from a com­puter and a coax cable. It is a video KVM that out­puts to VGA. So effec­tively it is a cable box with usual fea­tures of menu guides that out­puts to a nor­mal com­puter mon­i­tor). This thing sat unused in my closet since my sec­ond year of col­lege so I was happy to pull it out and use it. Now the coax cable from the wall goes through a split­ter then to the cable modem and also this con­verter box. The con­ver­tor goes up to one of the LCD mon­i­tors I had lying around and some pow­ered com­puter speakers.

Voila! Now the pesky cables and boxes sit nicely on one shelf hid­ing in the otherwise-useless wall space in front of the tread­mill. And the tread­mill now has cable TV at eye level. There is room on the shelf to slide the LCD mon­i­tor out of the way to put a lap­top there instead to use Hulu. Of course, a lap­top or per­ma­nent box could sit on the floor and send out­put through the cable KVM box also. We paid $40 for shelves and reused some unused elec­tron­ics from my closet. In return we have an effi­cient media cen­ter for the mas­ter bed­room and the tread­mill. Bril­liant? Yes.

Down­stairs I did some minor work: replace the air fil­ter; hung a paint­ing we bought from a street artist in Rome; and replaced some dead incan­des­cent bulbs with floures­cents. Until recently I couldn't find candelabra-base floures­cents in the stores, but they carry them now at Home Depot and Wal­mart. For some rea­son the incan­des­cents in the drop-down fix­tures in the kitchen burned out very quickly and never gave much light. The new bulbs are much brighter for much less energy and should last much longer. Almost every bulb in the house is floures­cent now except up in the ceil­ing fans. Those will be swapped when they burn out.

Also did some basic main­te­nance on the bicy­cles. Mine sat out­side most of last sum­mer and fall so it was quite nasty and rusted. I cleaned and oiled the chain and other parts. The shift­ing is very badly mal­ad­justed and I have no idea how to fix it. I will inves­ti­gate when I come home again, or sim­ply take it to Cycle­Works for a full tune-up. I think the chain needs replaced or adjusted to remove a link or two (chain stretch­ing is a big­ger prob­lem on recum­bents because they are enor­mously long). Rachel's just needed some oil­ing and chain clean­ing and it is good as new. She has a real Euro­pean city bike with light gen­er­a­tor, upright seat and bars, 3-speed inter­nal hub, and a lot of charm. It is prac­ti­cally good-as-new now.

My chore list when I move home includes:

  1. fin­ish patch­ing and paint­ing the large holes I put in the dry­wall search­ing out a water leak last fall
  2. add an elec­tric out­let to the hall­way and maybe one in the stair­well wall
  3. fix the two wonky elec­tric out­lets in the liv­ing room and laun­dry room
  4. get new win­dows installed in place of the cheap old ones: at least 2-pane with all the good energy-efficiency fea­tures (nitro­gen fill­ing and low-e coating)
  5. get or build a small out­door chest to store bar­be­cue supplies
  6. build the read­ing lamp/automatic night­light shelves Rachel and I designed

Can't wait to get home! That might be sooner than expected. My def­i­nite last date is Novem­ber 21 but my res­i­dency per­mit and visa expire Octo­ber 31. We are hav­ing prob­lems renew­ing it, so I might get kicked out of the coun­try in a few weeks. Hot damn, that would be good to come home early.