All those little things

Just a few updates here. While I have other projects that have been started, they remain incomplete. Here are those that are now done and were either mentioned previously or were just too small to get an individual post. 

A new outlet

  There was nothing wrong with the old one, but for one of my future construction projects I want to have an area that acts as a phone docking station. This includes being able to plug in your phone using just the USB cord, without an adapter. So I tore the old one out of the wall. Turned into a real mess, as I misunderstood a piece of its anatomy and destroyed it, RIP old outlet. This is currently located where most outlets are, way down low near the floor. But when the new construction is done it will be at easy arms reach.

Indoor lighting finished

  Almost all of the lighting fixtures have been replaced. A couple were not, simply because they were fine as-is: modern and nice or simply out of the way enough to not offend. Bathroom lights were left in because I intend to remodel them both completely. But the rest have been updated.

  The lighting fixture here on the left was used in both the upstairs and downstairs halls as well as the master bedroom. It's one of those super cheap ones you'd expect to find in a creepy motel. Their replacements are below. Both halls got identical lights, the one downstairs is slightly smaller.

Master bedroom

Upstairs hall

Also had the wallpaper and light removed from the office. The new light fits a similar style to the rest. Of course, I now how to paint the place, so I'll have to choose a color. But I also want to complete a little project that will make the room office-able. That will have to be new post for another day.

Door improvements

  Added a couple door catches. While most of the doors have the little springs with the rubber tip, a few were just banging into walls. In a couple spots I added a little rubber pad to prevent a hole being added to a wall where I normally wouldn't want one. Some spots already had a start, so I just covered them up with these guys on the right.

Several doors also have these little clips that grab a hold of the door stopper and hold it open. But some of the doors only had the clips. So I grabbed extra stoppers, put the new one right into the old hole and got things working again.

Also added a more modern touch to this by putting in a magnetic catcher stopper to a door that spends just as much time open as closed. But this was quite a feat of acrobatics putting in as I installed it at the top of the door to keep it out of the way. Why would that be important? Because this door is at the top of the stair and I don't want it putting anyone's eye out, or really looking at it all that much as they come up. But since it is on stairs the top of an open door, I had to perch on a small ledge and the handrail (just for balance) to reach it. Now people can wonder about my magnet, "How does it work?" 

Window shade

  In the garage we have an additional front door. Problem is it has this giant window that looks straight up our pantry. So I got a simple draw shade and attached it. I put a screw down at the bottom to hold it in place, even when opening and closing the door. But the shade easily comes off of this for regular use.

Window frame pad

Remember how in the 80's all the dresses had these giant shoulder pads? Well, even this window framing device in the living room had them. Had to pull these suckers off by hand, which had been upholstery stapled on. A few minor cuts and now the frame looks much better. Also added the lights, intended to be permanent, not just for the holidays.

And just for scale, this window is about nine feet by five. It's gigantic.

Hang 'em high

Back at the old apartment, having cleaning tools about was a pain. The broom, dustpan, and mop were just wedged between the fridge and a wall. Now that I have the space to expand into, I'm putting these items out in the garage. But I don't want them hanging out just anywhere. Well, there is a pretty dead wall where little does or can happen. So I just installed one of those gravity grabbers that uses the weight of the item itself to hold it in place. There, out of the way, but still within easy reach.

For whom the bell tolls

I consider the Hundred Acre House open, that my friends are always welcome. But I also don't want to scare away strangers.

And that is exactly what the old door bell button might do. The thing looks like some sort of trap, asking if you want to play a game. "Push me and I'll hold on," as it pinches and keeps a bit of your finger. Or maybe it burns and shocks you with the exposed incandescent light.

No matter, I'll replace the thing.

As you may have come to expect, the interior component is straight out of the 60s, with it's golden starburst, claiming to be from a future that never manifested. The future we have instead, fifty years later, is one that glows like Tron instead of sparkling like Buck Rogers.

The new button is almost exactly like the old one, but matches the color and style of the house: black and white bars. But the installation wouldn't be as simple as it's design.

Like with most electronics, there are two (or three, if it is grounded) wires involved: one incoming and one out going, to complete an electrical circuit. Door bells are no different. You push the button, it connects the two wires, completes the circuit, sending electricity to the door bell itself.

The old one was pretty mechanical. When activated it would bounce two little spring loaded pistons. One hits a tuned metal bar at the top, the second hits another on the bottom. Ding and dong. Simple. If you got the polarity wrong, switching the incoming for the outgoing wire, it might reverse it: dong-ding.

The problem was the wiring wasn't to spec. You see, there should be a red and a white wire so you know which one is the incoming and outgoing. This is what was hidden behind the button. But inside the door bell itself were two red wires. Since I was standing on a chair to reach it, and all I had on hand was a sharpie, I marked the two wires with the Morse Code for their Terminal letter. There are three terminals in a door bell: T, F (Front), and R (Rear). I don't have a door bell button at the back door, so no corresponding wire. The T and F wires should travel directly to the button at the front door, but somewhere along the path the electrician probably ran short on the white and used extra red to complete the path. No problem, I simply used my marks to connect them to the correct terminals in the new bell.

But the new bell is modern technology. It's digital and plays a range of tones, notes, and even songs. For some reason, it requires a diode (not a light emitting one) in the button at the front door. So I had to disassemble and reassemble the button to put this in. Tested the button: no dice. The bell would go off, but only for as long as you were holding the button. Your standard button press would barely register. The diode needed to be installed "facing" the right direction. I had a 50/50 chance of getting it right accidentally, but as luck would have it, I did not. So disassemble and reassemble the button for the third time...

But now its installed and working. The new bell includes a number of seasonal songs. Currently it plays Auld Lang Syne but includes things like Happy Birthday and other obnoxious noise.

A tease

This was delivered:

But what is it?

Could it be something to brighten my day?

All the little bits.

And all the big parts.

 Looks like a frame of some sort...

 Instructions and bits to cut

Structural materials

Put this all together, and what do we get?

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Oh the things you'll find when you shop at a lamp store.

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Betcha weren't guessing it was a chair. 

Or that I'd have three of them.

  This post is just a tease because these items belong to a home addition that will not be done for quite some time (most likely this summer). They belong to my first BIG project. I'm sure it will take so much work that I'll have to make multiple posts to cover it all. 

  Can you guess my plan? HINT: These chairs are the full set and this location (the living room wall that separates it from the kitchen) is their future home. 

Small Space Solution

Sometimes I have ideas that range from smart to genius. Let's file this one under "clever."

Just as you enter the front door of the Hundred Acre House, you encounter a small coat closet. It is
not only narrow (more slender than normal door) and shallow (as one would expect from a closet), but it is also short. The door, while thinner than most, is still a normal height. But when you open it, you find a shelf just above knee level. This is because the closet is using up some of the space above the stairs that lead to the lower level, so in order to leave a bit of head room, a chunk of the interior had to be taken away. This is fine as mostly coats are stored here and they only hang so low.

The shelf is entirely inside the closet, meaning there is a gap between it and the door. What to do with this odd space? My first thought was to put an extinguisher here. The fireplace is just around the corner, so it would be out of the way but close at hand... But unfortunately the space is too small for even our little red helper.

One thing I had been doing while moving in and getting organized was simply throwing umbrellas onto the shelf. Then the lightbulb went off. The umbrellas would fit in there perfectly! And yet, while they would stand there when I open and close the door, they may become a nuisance as coats accidentally hit them as we hang them up or pull them out. What could I do to hold them upright which wouldn't look out of place, would continue to allow the door to close, and would last a long time?

Well, I'd just torn out a false doorway downstairs that was complete with moulding. This, I decided, would be perfect. I squared off a corner, measured it to length, wedged it in place, and added a couple nails to make sure it stayed. I made sure to keep the rounded edge up and facing inward so that the umbrellas could be inserted easily. I'm not sure how much abuse this thing will get, but it can take a bit without worry.



After all of this was completed, I installed a motion detecting light into the ceiling so that when you open the door and reach for a coat, a light comes on and turns off shortly after closing the door.

A matter of life or death

One of the most important responsibilities as a home owner is deciding what lives and dies on your property. For the most part, I've been giving Caesar's thumbs-down to spiders. The house was full of cobwebs when we moved in and too many spiders are just a nuisance to clean up after. Dead bugs filled the windowsills. Over all, I'm fine with the little buggers, but I want them outside my space.

The three bushes at my front door

When we first looked at the house, we got a bit of a surprise at the front door. A large spider web was waiting nearby and obviously looking for its next victim. The agent admitted that it could get particularly hairy in the summer and a bush near the foot of the stairs was largely to blame. I'm not really a fan of that variety of plant anyway, with its prickly evergreen nonsense. So I vowed that the first thing I'd do if I bought the house was to cut that sucker down.

So I did.

Christmas morning, the first day living at the Hundred Acre House, I pulled out my new axe (the first housewarming gift I'd received, thanks Jeff!) and started wacking away at the branches. I found the trunk and it was a quite a bit more substantial than expected. It took a great deal more time, effort, and blisters than I had planned on.

Once felled, I stripped away the branches to leave the trunk bare, for this truly was just a short tree. A few days later on I spent some time digging up the trunk and the filling in the hole. Alas, this left a gap in front of the stairs leading up to the front door. I didn't know until then that the area under my porch was actually hollow.





So I picked up some lattice and cut it to fit the area and close off the space a bit.

Subtle little touches

While I spent most of New Years Day recovering from the night before (thanks Josh and Lillie!), I did manage to get some house stuff done. Just as the front porch light was a disaster, many of the other light fixtures in and around The Hundred Acre House are a bit dated and obnoxious. So we headed down to our local lighting store, which is currently going out of business and offering everything with a huge discount. Picked up a number of needed items before heading back home to take a nap.

Living room lighting

The theme that the lights have been following is a lantern style of bold horizontal and vertical black lines with plain white shading. This was true to the front porch light I just replaced, but also for the lighting we’ve set up in the living room.

The first thing to go was the chandelier in the dining room. This thing looked like the atomic future promises made in the sixties. I replaced it with something that doesn’t hang from the ceiling like a mace trying to smack you in the head (which the old monstrosity had already done to more than one victim). The bad news for the new one is that it is designed to hang flush but I have cathedral ceilings. Luckily, the slope of my roof is very shallow, so the tilt is barely noticeable.

New lanterns:
Garage and Front Doors

I was able to get a set of matching outdoor lanterns at the lamp store. But I have three outdoor lights, two out front and one in back. So I moved the light I had just installed the previous day to the back porch since it wouldn’t exactly match the new set. After changing a grand total of four of these outdoor lights I no longer need the instructions. This helps a lot because I now have to do a number of indoor wall sconces.

80's office
Wallpaper must go too

In the master bedroom, the switch turns on a light that looks like it should be in the hall of a cheap hotel. The same fixture also happens to be in both halls here as well. They’ll all be replaced, but I wasn’t sure whether the one I was looking at in the store would fit in the hall downstairs as there are a number of space restrictions. But for the master bedroom, I went with something with more of a branch motif. It looks nice, but the LED bulb was too low an equivalent wattage to brighten the room. Going to have to upgrade that.

In the room that will be my office, the sconce is straight out of eighties (which I think was the last time anything in this house was upgraded). Got something a little more modern, modest, and matching.

And after all of that, I managed to get a little yard work done.

The leaves from just the side of the yard that is currently visible.