jump to navigation

Painting in the rain? October 7, 2008

Posted by rob in : Paint , 3 comments

I arrived home from a very wet bike ride last night to find that they started painting the trim yesterday.  I was perplexed that they chose to start painting the trim on the north side of the house on a rainy day.  Amanda said they think it is going to take several coats to fully cover up the old brown and navy primer.

I haven’t had a chance to inspect the details yet, but I snapped this pic on my way to work this morning.  It sure is looking a lot better than feces brown and band aid!

Smurf House October 3, 2008

Posted by rob in : Paint , 1 comment so far

This is out of order, mostly because we haven’t posted a blog update in four months…I will try and find time to write the back story and post later.

A few weeks back we finally got around to selecting a painter to paint the house.  We went with Aarow Painting–mostly because they weren’t the people that painted the inside, they painted the house last time, they had a reasonable bid, and they could fit us in this year.

Then came a long period of indecision while we selected the color.  After starting with a greenish tan, we ended up with a Benjamin Moore color called “Hail Navy.” They got the primer up earlier this week and put the one and I guess only finish coat up on Wednesday of this week.  Trim painting will begin once the weather clears.

Here are a few shots of the all blue house I took this morning.

Getting paid to dispose of your fridge June 16, 2008

Posted by rob in : Appliances , 5 comments

Normally you have to pay big bucks to dispose of appliances.  Especially fridges.  Our house came with two chest freezers.  One was pretty ancient looking and the other was relatively modern.  We plan to keep the modern one and someday fill with a side of beef and pig in case Amanda ever decides to start eating meat.

The older model freezer has been sitting in the yard since we moved in–adding to the white trash look and feel that we are going for.

Several weeks back we saw an ad in the paper for a Seattle City Light recycling program through Jaco Environmental where they are trying to rid households of multiple fridges and freezers because they are such a drain on power.  Especially older models.  They want you to buy a new fridge and get rid of your old one, not to put it in the garge.  Makes perfect sense as your fridge probably consumes the most power of anything in your house.

So you call up 877-577-0510 and they will schedule a time to come out and pick up your fridge or freezer. It needs to be in working order–they even require that you leave them an extension cord so that they can verify.  If it passes the test, they pick it up and send you a check for $30.  We just got our check this weekend, so it is not too good to be true.

I am hoping this program is still going on when we can finally afford our new fridge for the kitchen.  In the meantime, all y’all should take advantage of this program.

Bathroom For The Win June 11, 2008

Posted by rob in : Bathroom , add a comment

We finally finished one room a few weekends ago.  The bathroom known as the “kid’s bath” was the first to be 100% functional and unfortunately weeks later is still the only 100% complete* bathroom.

Here is a shot from the tub of the Ikea cabinet and sink combination with the mirrored doors so that the little ones can look into the mirror.  We went with the Grohe Eurosmart faucet, which I must say has some of the silkiest smooth action I have ever felt.

Here is looking in from Thomas’ bedroom at the Toto Drank round front toilet with his little kids seat mounted on top of the soft close seat along with some Ikea “design original” step stool.

What this picture fails to show is my fatal miscalculation/miscommunication fail. Somewhere along the way we decided to get an outswing door for this bathroom because it was too cramped with the inswing door.  I guess I spaced on telling the wood floor guys and they brought the wood up to an inswing position.  The tile guys installed the threshold at the inswing postion.  Now that I have the door installed in an outswing position, the alignment looks great from Thomas’ room, but not so hot from inside the bathroom.Fortunately it is a low traffic area and nobody but me will probably notice it.

Lights, Camera, Action

Posted by rob in : Lighting , 1 comment so far

I finally got around to ordering and installing most of the lights in the house.  After adding them all up, I found that I needed 65 lamps.  43 Par30 and 22 Par20.  Based on local big box pricing, we were looking at almost $8/lamp or over $500 in lamps.   Even the Peninsula Electric wholesale price was almost $7/lamp. I searched online and found a place called 1000bulbs.com where I could get most of them for around $4.   So I whipped out SOHCAHTOA to do my light beam spread calculation and figured out what degree bulbs should go where.  Here is an example of how I did my calculations.  I took the distance from the ceiling to the lighted surface (8′ for ceiling to floor and 4′ for ceiling to counter) and then figured out the light spread and matched that to my specific location.

Degree 8 4
9 15.2 7.6
10 16.9 8.5
12 20.4 10.2
25 44.8 22.4
36 69.7 34.9
40 80.6 40.3

I decided to go with the 130 volt bulbs because they provide double the bulb life when you run them at 120 volts and you save electricity because you use less current.  Given that Watts = Voltage Squared divided by Ohms, my 50watt 130V lamps have 338 ohms of resistance netting out 42.6 watts of power in the form of light.  Which means that they are not as bright as planned, but that might be a good thing because I went a little bonkers with light installation.  For example there are 18 recessed cans in the kitchen.

It  took about a week for them to show up, but they all showed up with no damage.  Even the cases they sent with no protective layer.

Partway through the installation I discovered that I was short 34 5″ can trims.  I checked online and the Lowe’s near Joel’s house supposedly had them in stock, but I soon discovered why he calls it Blowe’s.  I got enough to do most of the lights, but not all of them.

So far so good.  The place isn’t nearly as bright as I had planned, but that is a good thing because we planned and still plan on installing dimmers that we usually set at a lower setting.  However I don’t have that operating room feel I was going for with the kitchen.  I may have to swap those 18 lamps out with 120 volt lamps.

I am also running into an issue with some of the cans where the temperature sensor is killing the light.  My hunch is the electricians didn’t move the insulation far enough away from the non-IC housing.  I have two for sure that I am going to have to pull down to inspect.

It sure it sure is nice not having lame incandescent bulbs dangling from the recessed cans any more.

Extreme Home Makeover May 29, 2008

Posted by rob in : Uncategorized , 4 comments

I just got back into town from a week long trip to Florida where my mom, my sister and I descended for what should have been filmed for an episode of extreme home makeover or one of those other reality shows.  We cleaned out my grandmother’s house of all excessive junk, redid several rooms and staged the house to go on the market.

The place turned out great.   We employed all the tactics we used when preparing our house for sale as well as a few new ones.  In case anyone is tracking, the best bang for the buck things you can do to make your house show the best are

Craigslist Fridge Buying Fun May 15, 2008

Posted by rob in : Appliances , 6 comments

I gave craigslist a quick shot to see if I could find a fridge on the cheap. There are plenty of people out there with “Extra” fridges or “remodel canceled” fridges. So I contacted a few people to see about buying their fridge, but I was not prepared for his salesmanship. He is offering up a fridge that lists for $2300 that is brand new in the box. He paid $2350 four months ago and will sell it for $1600 obo. It is a black 36″ wide full depth fridge. The market for this size and color is small. Maybe even limited to just us. Everyone wants counter depth stainless. I offer him $1000 cash money and it goes sideways from there:

Jeff Jensen <hawkfannw@yahoo.com> wrote: If you could find one for $1800 (which I know you can’t, $2099 plus tax) Go ahead and pay $1800 plus tax, for a one year warranty you won’t need. It will still be $400 more than what I am asking! Also, before you say it…Online is $1889 plus $169 for shipping and you will get it in about 6 weeks. You’re a MORON AND I’M NOT INTERESTED!

Rob McGarty wrote: 10% off home depot or lowes card that shows up in the mail every few months knocks the $200 off and then you are at $1800.

Jeff Jensen <hawkfannw@yahoo.com> wrote:

Here is the link to Home Depot that says they are $2249 (-10% = $2024 + tax = $2202). http://www.homedepot.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/ProductDisplay?jspStoreDir=hdus&catalogId=10053&productId=100614873&navFlow=3&keyword=pfsf6pkwbb&langId=-1&searchRedirect=pfsf6pkwbb&storeId=10051&endecaDataBean=com.homedepot.sa.el.wc.catalog.beans.EndecaDataBean%40229bd562&ddkey=Search Still a moron!

Rob McGarty wrote:

Moron? Why do you have to resort to calling names? You are the one that bought a fridge to sit in your garage for months and have been posting it on craigslist multiple times. Good luck with that fridge.

Jeff Jensen <hawkfannw@yahoo.com> wrote to rob
I’ve posted it for a week dip shit! Last time I checked CL is FREE and I paid wholesale for my fridge, so I will make a few bucks when I do sell! Have fun paying FULL PRICE for your Home Depot refrigecrapper…MORON!-

Fridge Foul Play

Posted by rob in : Appliances , add a comment

As I mentioned, the fridge no longer works.  It blows the circuit once you switch on the fridge part via the temperature control.  The light will come on, but once you turn the dial it blow the circuit breaker.  I tried three different circuits and they all met the same demise.  The odd thing is the fridge was working fine the whole time–on the same circuits until it sat outside for a few weeks.  I wonder if something got corroded and created a short.

I hit my favorite appliance repair website up for all the parts available for my Roper model RB22CKXYL00 fridge.  And found that there are only a couple of parts that could possibly go bad–the compressor, condenser fan, run capacitor, and the start device.  If it is the compressor, I am out.  The part is almost $300 and then I will have to deal with the refrigerant.  If it is one of the other parts we should be good to go.

I searched high and low for a service manual, but the best I could come up with is the owners manual.

I will try and hot wire the compressor and see if I can get it to run, otherwise we will have to toss it out the kitchen door to nowhere and live out of the ARB fridge until we get a new one.

Move in Success!

Posted by rob in : Moving , 1 comment so far

Amanda and Mark spent all day yesterday schlepping our junk from Fini to the new house.  The die was cast and we slept camped in the new house.  I say that because we still don’t have running water in the living space–the only working sink is in the basement.  Amanda tried to pick up our faucet at Keller Supply yesterday, but got there as they were closing and they couldn’t find it.  We also don’t have any functional appliances.  I cleaned and moved the old fridge (that I had been using to keep the beer and red bull cold while we worked on the house) back inside only to find out that it croaked and blows the breaker when you turn it on.

We couldn’t find our sheets, so we pulled the duvet cover off our comforter and used that as a sheet on top of the poop mattress and called it good.  I ran to the quicky mart and grabbed a six pack of beer and we watched the end of the sunset from our bedroom and unpacked a little and called it a night.

It was really cool to finally spend a night in our new house after making mortgage payments on it for seven months.  Speaking of which I need to pay that today…yikes.

Mattress Wicking Power May 12, 2008

Posted by rob in : Plumbing, Moving , add a comment

Remember back to the sewer shower? Well, we finally moved all that furniture into the house this weekend. Turns out most items really weren’t impacted by the disaster, but our mattress showed signs of some kind of water damage, but it doesn’t make any sense because the part of the mattress that was resting on the ground (wrapped in plastic) is clean, but there is a line about 10-12″ up from the bottom that looks like it was probably part of the fecal water tidal wave, but I am not convinced. I am going to take the bleach spritzing, mattress pad one-two punch for the win.

Speaking of the mattress, it sure was a blast getting a king size mattress upstairs.  I knew it was going to be a tight fit because the stair height is a little low at the bottom because of they maximized space upstairs.  I had an idea to taco the mattress with ratchet straps, but I was busy working on the island with Joel while the moving crew got it to the stairs.  After getting stuck in the stairs, I got called in and Mark and I were able to manually taco the mattress and jam it through.  After that tight spot, it fit like a glove.