Category: Houseblog

As I wrote in December 2003, there are times when company websites fail to provide the information you need. Oddly, that’s still true with the Whirlpool washing machine we bought then; as of now, 15 months later, I’m still the only hit on Google for that model number. (Thanks to reader John B. for pointing that out!) As I told John, the machine worked well for the six months we had it until we sold the house in Kirkland and moved here, so if you find one on clearance as John did, go for it.

One factor in the dearth of info on the model: that model number was apparently sold only at Best Buy. I’m all for segmenting your product line by retailer (well, not really), but companies who do so should make sure that they still provide all the information a customer might need about every model number on the corporate web site.

I found a great post on one of my favorite houseblogs, The Old Man and the Street, called Rewired about a total rewiring job that he did. As I read I felt a great sadness, because it was a project I would never be able to do in this house. Apparently Arlington requires that all wiring projects be done by a licensed electrician.

I can understand the rationale for doing that (fire safety, etc.), but other localities take care of those issues with a permit+inspection process. All I really wanted to do was to wire my workshop/storage room, which would require:

1. Installation of a subpanel in the shop.
2. Connecting the subpanel to a breaker on the main board (requiring me to fish cable across the ceiling—not a big deal as the access holes in the plaster have already been made at both ends).
3. Installing two 20-amp GFCI circuits to the subpanel, one dedicated one for the miter saw and one to feed the electrical outlets near the workbench. (I also need to have an emergency switch on one or both of those circuits.)
4. Install a separate circuit for an overhead light (badly needed)

Not trivial, but certainly manageable, and a project that I was looking forward to doing. Now I need to pay a contractor instead. Sigh.

Have you ever noticed that very few people make stereo cabinets any more? All you can find in most stores is the “entertainment center,” big walls of wood or particleboard designed to hide all your equipment away. Those of us blessed with a nice big fireplace as the focal point of our small family rooms don’t really have a lot of places to put an entertainment center, though. Our solution, until this weekend, was to use the rolling metal cart that we bought when we were living in our Worthington Place apartment in east Cambridge. The cart fit the aesthetics of that apartment—big, loft-like, exposed pipes & brick—but not our 1941 Cape Cod-style living room. (The steel cart didn’t go well with the dentil molding under the mantel.) So we decided to start looking for a cabinet that would both hold our electronics and fit our aesthetics.

The trick was dimensions. If you stack all our equipment in one pile, it’s about 25 inches—but that doesn’t include the height of supporting shelves or air clearance for ventilation. More pressingly, most home electronics components are about 17 inches wide and 14 inches deep, with some, like our DVD player reaching as much as 22 inches in depth. There are very few cabinets available that approach those dimensions.

But we finally found one—at Crate and Barrel. They call it the Springdale Cabinet, but it looked like a stereo cabinet to us! The issues: the DVD player wouldn’t fit (too deep) and there were no holes to run cables in the back. Fortunately both of those were simple problems to rectify.

After assembling the cabinet, we loaded it with the components, without cables, to identify where each component would sit. We took into account a few key things, such as heat production and headspace, as well as the location of the one fixed shelf in the unit. That dictated the final placement of the components. I would have preferred to put the amplifier higher in the stack, since it produces the most heat, but the number of ways I could load the shelves in was limited. I did, however, make room for our turntable for the first time in about eight months, which was pretty cool.

I then took a pencil and marked the location of access holes on the inside of the cabinet. Some components, like the CD or the turntable, could get a way with a single one-inch hole through which power and audio cables could pass. Others needed bigger holes: the DVR needed a wide slot, the amplifier a large open rectangle, and the DVD needed a hole as wide and tall as it was so that the excess depth could extend through the back of the cabinet. Fortunately the back panel doesn’t provide a lot of structural support for this cabinet since I was cutting so much out of it.

I then cut the holes. For the simple one inch holes and the slot for the DVR I used a one-inch spade bit and simply cut the holes. For the larger panels, I used a smaller spade bit and marked the four corners of the hole, then went to the back of the cabinet and used a straight edge and a jigsaw to connect the holes. It was a little loud, but only took a few minutes to complete all the cuts.

Loading everything back in and getting the cables connected took the longest, but fortunately I had made notes about which inputs were connected to which and everything was pretty straightforward. We hooked it up and turned it on and it worked the first time. Sweet.

We now have a much less obtrusive AV cabinet that fits the architectural details of our room much better. The only compromise we had to make was TV placement—unlike an entertainment center, the cabinet left no place for our conventional 27″ tube, so we ended up sitting it atop the cabinet. When we pick up some additional income streams and buy a flat panel, we’ll be able to place it on the mantel and slide the AV cabinet further back into the corner—making it disappear that much more.

I took some pictures as I was loading everything in that show the holes we cut and the hidden extra airspace for the DVD player. You can see a little of the “before” in the first picture of this album.

My parents came in last weekend for a fun-filled weekend of sightseeing and home improvement—we didn’t plan it but it kind of turned out that way. This was the first visit to our new place by my mom & dad, and it turned out to be a perfect introduction to New England winter.

I already mentioned the Boston Camerata concert on Friday night. On Saturday morning we piled into the car, drove out through Lexington and on toward Carlisle. We were curious to see if we could find the current This Old House project. (My dad, Lisa, and I are addicted to the show, and my mom is very tolerant.) As there are only three or four major roads in Carlisle, it was pretty easy to find the house, though we did have to stop and get directions from some cookie-selling Girl Scouts. We did a brief drive-by and took a few photos to prove we were there.

Afterwards we went downtown. Lisa introduced Mom to the wonders of Filene’s Basement, and my dad and I wandered the North End, taking in Modern Pastry and the Old North Church.

On Sunday Lisa and I went and picked up a long-awaited tool purchase, our first major power tool: a 12″ compound miter saw. My dad and I assembled it—and promptly learned that the extension cord powering my workshop didn’t provide sufficient juice to power the saw and the lights. Guess I’ll be running in a new outlet—and learning about fishing cable above plaster ceilings. (I’ll probably take the opportunity to try to run some conduit up there to make it easier to run future cables.)

Monday, though, was the real home improvement day, thanks to a surprise six-inch snowfall. My dad and I started by hanging a coathook board in the entryway/mudroom to mitigate some of the winter coat clutter. Then we took the closet door off its hinges and took a half inch off the bottom with a reciprocating saw. Not only was this fun and therapeutic, it also meant that we could now open the closet door all the way, even with our snow-absorbing all-weather carpet in the mudroom. (Incidentally, there are probably a few more precise ways to cut a door than with a reciprocating saw, but most of them involve tools I don’t have—and, even with a 12″ blade, the new miter saw couldn’t cut all the way across the bottom.) I finished the job by sanding the new bottom, and priming both the top and bottom of the door. The previous owners hadn’t bothered to finish the tops and bottoms of several of the doors, and we had noticed that some of them got swollen and impossible to open and shut properly in the summer humidity. In between, we also took down a swinging door between the kitchen and the dining room that was obstructing traffic flow between the rooms, and Lisa painted the hall connecting the kitchen to the living room.

Somehow with all this going on, we had time to make homemade pasta, roast lamb, and polpettone (Italian meatloaf, basically a very large meatball). On subsequent nights, not all at once.

It was a great visit—I only hope that the snow and hard work didn’t scare my folks off!

We’re well and truly thawing out this morning. Not only is there a river running down the middle of the street, but the face to the right glared down at me from a tree in our back yard when I was outside with the dogs this morning. I briefly glimpsed eyes inside the tree as well before they scampered further into the darkness. Seems like Rocky is a family raccoon.

It’s a good thing we had the chimney caps installed. Otherwise we might be getting to know Rocky Raccoon more closely than we want to some dark night…

Growing up, I used to start every day by looking at the outdoor thermometer that hung on my parents’ bedroom window. In retrospect, it was an odd thing to do, because frankly the temperature in Newport News never varied that much, but it was comforting to have objective evidence of how hot or cold it was.

That’s the only thing that explains our latest household gadget: an Oregon Scientific Cable-Free Thermometer. It comes in two pieces, a base station with a large digital display containing two temperature readouts, and a remote unit that’s meant to be mounted outdoors or placed in some other remote location. In between is nothing but a 433 MHz radio signal.

The base station can support up to three of these remotes, so when we build on to the house and add that wine cellar (heh), we can track the temperature there as well as outside. And the frequency doesn’t interfere with cordless phones or WiFi.

So far everything has been working just fine with the unit. I haven’t tested the claimed 100′ range yet, since the best mounting place for the remote (which apparently shouldn’t be too exposed to the elements) turns out to be the outside of the kitchen wall near where the base station is sitting. We also haven’t had any extreme temperature days; since Friday, when the unit arrived, we haven’t even had a day in the 20s. But it’s nice to know what’s going on outside.

Esta and a friend of hers from seminary are coming up this afternoon to stay for a few days, so I’ll be offline much of the day getting ready. There are floors to vacuum, beds to make (this will be the first time we’ll use both guest bedrooms at once!), groceries to get… and, provided the weather stays above freezing, ice to remove from the driveway.

Oh yeah: I actually couldn’t get my car out yesterday afternoon. I had snow-blown the driveway clear Thursday at lunchtime to go to a job interview, and by the time I came back the weather had changed to “wintry mix.” Which I parked atop. Which subsequently froze to ice. Lisa’s car, which hadn’t been moved, had sufficient contact with the bare pavement to get out and about. Hopefully we can get my car moving today. Lesson: snowblower ≠ panacea.

Oh, and our neato upstairs guest bedroom is finally in shape and mostly decorated. It’s been christened the Virginia room, as it seemed a convenient place to hang all the framed Rotunda pictures. Maybe I’ll post a few snaps after we get the house ready.

The heat is fixed, and only one slowly dripping sink drain (plus the disconnected kitchen radiator) remain as proof that there was ever a problem. The sink drain would already be fixed if Jefferson hadn’t spend all day voiding copious quantities of liquid mess from both ends. Sigh and double sigh.

On the positive side, our mail for the last ten days arrived today, and in addition to the twenty Christmas cards, my copies of the new Cheese Lords CD had arrived. Review, as they say, TK.

We got back from New Jersey today, to a house that was 29° warm. Apparently our boiler had stopped working sometime while we were gone, as the water level dropped too low and initiated the auto cutoff. As the temperature dropped a radiator cracked in the kitchen. We’re currently working on getting the house back up to temperature—47° as I write this—and not having any pipes burst as things thaw out.

At least we’ve proof that our snowblower works.

Sigh. I wish I had known how complicated and troublesome steam heat was before we got into this mess.

It was such a simple problem: our dining room radiator had scraps of reflective paper, the remnants of a lining on the inside of the radiator cavity, sitting on top of the radiator, clearly visible behind the radiator cover. The plan: unscrew the radiator cover from the wall, remove the loose backing paper, install some reflective insulation, and replace the cover. What could go wrong?

Pretty much everything, as it turned out. The first thing: when I removed the radiator cover, it brought part of the wall along with it—five one inch by several inch by 1/4 inch irregular chunks of plaster, adhered to a wall by a previously unseen caulk line, even after scoring along the edge with a putty knife. Oy. And this a wall we had already painted. I sighed, resigning myself to plaster repair, and started removing the matter inside the cover.

I quickly realized I was going to have problems. The radiator sat hard against the back wall, making removing the flaking reflective material difficult if not impossible. And the radiator was, as all radiators are, heavy. With a little help from staring at it, I realized that it was only attached on a threaded connection to the steam pipe, with other supports just holding the radiator off the floor but not attached to anything. I was eventually able to lift the unattached end of the radiator and pivot the whole thing out. But it was still impossible to get the insulation behind the attached end.

Our final solution: Lisa ran a double thickness of heavy duty aluminum foil behind the trouble spot, and I cut the insulation, installing one strip on the left wall the cavity and the rest overlapping the aluminum foil and wrapping around the back, top and other side. It took the rest of the morning to finish the job, not counting the plaster repair (done, shamefully, with quick-setting spackle. Sigh.) The final result looks nice and is probably a lot more energy efficient than the previous set-up, but I don’t know how well it will stand up to steam coming out of the relief valve (which I think was responsible for the state of the previous material).

The moral: don’t start home improvement repairs in public parts of the house the same day as a dinner party, no matter how easy you think the job is.

Over the weekend the house held up well to the snow, as did the dogs. I wasn’t able to get pictures of Joy hopping out the door in her sweater and booties (which lasted about two minutes before she left them one by one in the snow). Our own psychic survival is probably more endangered. Saturday night we probably inhaled a ton of carcinogens from our first proper (successful) fire in our fireplace, and Sunday afternoon we were pleasantly giddy from scores of VOCs from various painting projects. After I finish the second (or fourth) coats on everything tonight I should be good and addled… just in time to figure out how to add the DVR functions to the universal remote.

We’re getting our first snow as I write this. It’s pretty, big white flakes, and fortunately everything is so warm that it’s not sticking to anything.

Serendipitously, we bought our snowblower last weekend and had it delivered on Tuesday. In reading over the owner’s manual, I’m reading the safety section very carefully, having never operated a machine like this, and came across the following warning (relevant parts bolded by me):

Keep area of operation clear of all toys, pets, and debris. Thrown objects can cause injury.

Somehow I think that if your pet gets caught by the snowblower, the injuries caused when he is thrown at you will be the least of your concerns.

I just lost my hacker cred: I opted for Comcast’s DVR over TiVo. Ah well, at least we’ll have the capability to record and pause TV. Or at least we will once I:

1. Figure out how to run the cable box into the amplifier. I used to run our cable box in Kirkland through the VCR, and then into the amplifier, using composite cables. When the VCR moved out of the main setup, things got screwy. For some reason, I was unable to get video flowing through the same jack I had used in Kirkland, and had to switch to a different video terminal, but I haven’t tried to reprogram the universal remote and now things are kludgy. I think the solution will be S-Video; I just need to pick up an additional cable to run from the DVR box to the amplifier.
2. Re-program the universal remote to add in the DVR functions—fortunately basic things like power and channels seem unaffected.
3. Investigate the Ethernet port to see if it works. (Very important.)

Not too bad. Plus the cable guy moved our prior box downstairs to the hookup in the media library. So now in the basement I have our 21″ with digital cable and a VCR. Before you say “But the VCR is redundant!,” I note that we still have quite a few VHS releases, including the original Star Wars trilogy. I don’t think we’ll be doing any recording on the VCR, though.

Still unresolved: whether I take a step back and re-run the cable into the structured wiring box. Right now we have two coax lines coming into the house from the street, through an outside splitter. The one in the basement comes in through a hole drilled in the basement window frame and down directly into the cable box. I’d ultimately like either to drop it into the wall and out through a jack, or to fish it across the ceiling and into the structured wiring box for distribution. However, I know that’s going to be a real pain: I’d have to fish it all the way across and then back, as well as running it up into the living room. But at least doing that would remove the outside splitter. I don’t know. Option B is probably not worth the hassle until we add more rooms with televisions.

Yesterday was Leaf Hog Day. As I believe I’ve mentioned, our leaves are the last to fall on our street, and I’m learning that what I thought was a lot of leaves was just the by-product of our neighbors’ trees. (Here are the trees in question.) Yesterday I experienced the main event: yellow leaves blanketing our parking spaces to a depth of six inches, covering the new grass that Lisa is trying to establish on a ten by ten foot patch along the back fence, totally covering everything that I had cleared just a week previously. So, it being a dry day, I got the Leaf Hog out and got to work. Several hours and aching back and forearms later, I was done. I was spitting black (and we won’t even mention my nostrils) from all the dust that came up from the driveway and the grass along with the leaves, but I was done. Of course, this morning the modest rain we’ve had has completely covered the driveway again.

And today? I finally hung the structured media enclosure I bought back in August, which was in itself a bit of a project. I only have bare concrete block walls in the basement, so I inaugurated a masonry bit: drilled quarter-inch holes with a standard drill bit through a 1/2″ thick piece of plywood, then held the board against the wall, switched to the masonry bit, and drilled through the holes into the concrete. A set of hammer-in concrete anchors finished the mounting job for the plywood. Then the box. First taking a flat-bladed screwdriver and popping out the knock-outs to bring the wires in, I then screwed the box into the plywood, using a thick brass spacing washer to ensure the wood screws wouldn’t punch through the back of the plywood and push the panel away from the wall.

Great. So the panel is mounted. Now how do I get the phone board mounted? Wait a minute, there’s nothing on the inside of the enclosure that’s even remotely like the spacing for the screws on the panel. How do I make this fit?

Ah. Enlightenment strikes. The Leviton blocks are designed to snap into plastic mounting brackets that then screw into the back of the enclosure. So I guess I have to make a Home Despot trip today. Oh well. It’ll give me an excuse to pick up some more shelves for the garage so I can finally move enough things around to get a car inside.

The trip to New Hampshire on Saturday became a trip to Maine. We walked around the small coastal town of Ogunquit, Joy and Jefferson charmed all onlookers, we walked on the beach in 45-degree high winds, and turned around and went home. Charlie and Carie are well and are finding the same things we did with Behr paint from Home Depot: good coverage requires so many coats that the price disparity with higher-grade paints is effectively erased.

Yesterday was a bit of a work day. I replaced a few downspout sections, including one by our three-season porch that proved to have about two feet of compost matter in it. The worst part is that it was feeding into a hole in the driveway next to the house that might have been a dry well, only it was completely full. Which of course means it’s going to be a pain to excavate—especially since the entire thing is surrounded by the asphalt of the driveway. Incidentally, there’s nothing better than a reciprocating saw for cutting aluminum gutters, though the noise in an enclosed space like my workshop is akin to a motorcycle engine going inside one’s skull.

I also continued the Sisyphean task of leaf pickup. Our oak trees won’t drop their leaves for quite a while longer, so I’m just removing everyone else’s debris right now and it’s still taking hours each time.

Last night we tried having a fire in our fireplace for the first time. Alas, it burned itself out before our logs really got going. I’ll have to bring in some more kindling and try again tonight.

Now for the week, and trying to type keeping my fingers crossed for the Sox.