Homestead

Main work

A sea of wonderful pink stuff

0
4 weeks ago
by uncommonguy in ,

I've been work­ing really hard get­ting ready to insu­late our attic. The insu­la­tion was min­i­mal, barely up to the top of the joists in most cases, so 6–8 inches in most places. This was awful. Last year we had Home Depot come out and give an esti­mate for insu­la­tion work and they big $2000 which was a let-down as we didn't have the cash at that time.

We finally had the extra money to try again this year so got an esti­mate from a com­pany my father-in-law rec­om­mended, Williams Insu­la­tion. Esti­mate: $425. Yeah, 25% the amount of Home Depot's con­trac­tor. The esti­ma­tor also did a walk-through energy audit and sug­gested some really use­ful things.

The esti­ma­tor actu­ally found a whole sec­tion of attic we had never known about. He real­ized there was a gap along two whole sides of the house and sug­gested we cut a hatch to check it out. He turned out to be right — we found a space 40'x5' with even less insu­la­tion than the other main attic area. This was along the whole front and kitchen sides of the house.

I reported my find­ings and he came back for a free re-estimate. Amaz­ingly, this added only $100 to the esti­mate, bring­ing it to $525. Frankly, we would have paid twice that and been happy about it. Five hun­dred bucks is a no-brainer!

The main prep work was to imple­ment his main sug­ges­tion. He told us to tape up all gaps in the metal cas­ings of can lights and ven­ti­la­tion fans, and encase them in sty­ro­foam to fully air-seal them. He sug­gested the $2 sty­ro­foam cool­ers from Wal-mart, which turned out to be the per­fect shape and size for most of them. We had one larger fix­ture — the heat lamp in our shower — on which I used a larger, bet­ter cooler meant for ship­ping frozen goods.

I spent many hours up there the past few weeks, but par­tic­u­larly the past week­end. I spent half of Sat­ur­day and almost all of Sun­day skit­ter­ing around in the tini­est cor­ners seal­ing every­thing. It had to be done care­fully and cor­rectly to make it per­ma­nent, at least until the fix­ture itself fails. I wanted to never have to crawl through all the new insu­la­tion to reach and work on this stuff.

Over­all I sealed up 4 can lights above the kitchen, the rest being below the floor of the lit­tle play­room. In the main attic I replaced the non-working bath­room fan with a new one and sealed it up, and sealed up the other one that I replaced last year. I also ran duct­ing from the fans to exhaust out­lets in the roof. There was one reg­u­lar can light to enclose, then one huge heat lamp to enclose. All of those took a lot of work because of the cramped space. Much of it I had to work one-handed, hold­ing myself on a joist with the other hand. It was brutal.

Mon­day night I worked from 9pm to 3am fin­ish­ing up the var­i­ous bits, includ­ing seal­ing up the huge hall­way fan. It was quite a trial after a full day of work, boy scouts, and hang­ing out with Asa (my Lit­tle from BBBS). I was a mess of insu­la­tion, sweat, Great Stuff expand­ing foam, and grime.

The big pay­off was Tues­day morn­ing when the insu­la­tors came. In just an hour they crawled to all the dark cor­ners of the attic and blew in insu­la­tion to the 20" mark. This gives an insu­la­tion of R-60, which is higher than even the lat­est stan­dards for this part of the coun­try. The work was fast, effi­cient, and looks great — a uni­form sea of pink energy and money-saving fluff.

We've noticed our fur­nace run­ning much less and the house feels warmer, par­tic­u­larly the upstairs office. We are super happy about the project. In fact, it's kind of embar­rass­ing how excit­ing the insu­la­tion is to us. The insu­la­tion plus the work involved in prep­ping for it was really reward­ing and feels like the best improve­ment we've done to the house since we replaced the doors. And the energy-saving aspect makes us feel gen­er­ally good about our­selves and our house.

Call before digging, or curse after digging…made my choice.

0
7 months ago
by uncommonguy in

You know those ad spots from the power com­pany about "call before you dig"? And the mag­nets? And the warn­ings on the monthly bill? Well, I ignored all that and just cut a cable while dig­ging. Inter­net still works, so guess we didn't need it much. I nicked the other one last month but repaired it. Feel­ing pretty dumb right now.

Home Improvement Todo

1 year ago
by uncommonguy in ,

Here is the cur­rent todo list Rachel just sent me. Later I should post the list of what we got done over Thanks­giv­ing. We had an insane 3 days of home improve­ment work. Really, this is just fin­ish­ing com­pared to the bulk work.

Clean drain in mas­ter shower
Caulk front lights
Move swing from front lawn
Cut down clama­tis
Clear brush from flowerbed (I will do this)
Cut down pep­per plants that haven't died yet (me)
Put up bird feeder
Stain handrail
Install handrails
Install pantry door
Find new blinds for slid­ing door (me?)
Install doors
Paint around trim of doors (me)
Take exacto knife to door to garage (I can try this)
Repair light fix­ture in entry hall, both repaint and rewire
Swap out other light fix­tures
Lower light fix­ture above din­ing room table
I will touch up the paint in the liv­ing room and din­ing room
Hook up speaker wires in liv­ing room

Update list (March 22):
Clean drain in mas­ter shower
Caulk front lights
Move swing from front lawn
Cut down clama­tis
Clear brush from flowerbed (I will do this)
Cut down pep­per plants that haven't died yet (me)
Put up bird feeder
Stain handrail
Install handrails
Install pantry door
Find new blinds for slid­ing door (me?)
Install doors
Paint around trim of doors (me)
Take exacto knife to door to garage (I can try this)
Repair light fix­ture in entry hall, both repaint and rewire
Swap out other light fix­tures
Lower light fix­ture above din­ing room table
I will touch up the paint in the liv­ing room and din­ing room
Hook up speaker wires in liv­ing room

House updates

1 year ago
by uncommonguy in ,

excerpts from an email to my par­ents tonight:

We are wrap­ping up the insur­ance and mort­gage paper­work. We are annoyed with the bank that the day they processed the paper­work the inter­est rate went from 5.125 to 5.25%. The loan man­ager sug­gested it might go down again if we waited a few days, but then it went up to 5.38%. They think rates are start­ing to rise again. So we didn't get the low rate because of a paper­work delay. grr… It only mat­ters over the 30-year course of the loan, but we don't plan to take that long to pay if off.

We went to Home Depot tonight and picked out col­ors to repaint Rachel's office (the room next to mas­ter bed­room), the mas­ter bed­room, and hall­way. We are going to do some dec­o­ra­tive paint­ing tech­niques in that office and the mas­ter bed­room. Rachel picked 6 col­ors to do blocks of col­ors on her walls. We are doing an 'antique leather' tex­ture tech­nique for part of the mas­ter bed­room. We have some pretty cool col­ors picked out. We are pretty excited about it. We also have some ideas for the liv­ing room, but they are pretty ambi­tious and will come after we see how the upstairs goes.

Rachel is head­ing out of town tomor­row for an overnight trip to St. Louis, so she will be stop­ping by the new house. Hope­fully Ahmed will be ready for us to decide on the gloss of the fin­ish and she can decide that, and also drop off a few more things.

ps — We have labelled the houses Alpha and Beta, using ani­mal heirar­chy terms not soft­ware release terms. So Alpha house is the new, big­ger, bet­ter one. Beta is the cur­rent place in Lawrence.

Selling our home

1 year ago
by uncommonguy in ,

Just a quick note to say that we are sell­ing our home. Rachel and I have decided to buy my par­ents' house in Shawnee. We need a big­ger place and want to be closer to all the fun activ­i­ties in Kansas City. Per­son­ally, I am look­ing for­ward to hav­ing a garage work­shop and being close to JCCC so I can take that weld­ing class I have always wanted to!

We are still work­ing out the full details of buy­ing my par­ents' house and sell­ing ours. We haven't cho­sen a price yet. Sadly, there are 2 other nearly-identical units for sale in the sub­di­vi­sion already and priced lower than I expected. Oh well, we will just hope the advan­tages of our place will help sell ours first.

http://bit.ly/greathomeforsale

Home Improvement, compressed to 1 day

2 years ago
by uncommonguy in ,

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.

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