Greg In The Desert

My house was built in the late 1970’s or early 1980’s. I don’t know because it was a foreclosure and the bank didn’t really give a shit, they just wanted to sell it. It is easy to tell the era due to the rest of the houses in the neighborhood and the style of the house.

The fireplace is one of those dated artifacts that is not to my liking. It consists of a false brick veneer with a brick hearth that sticks out from the wall about a foot.

If the original designer of the house had put in some storage under the hearth or made it somewhat more useful, it might have been worth keeping. Otherwise the hearth just takes up too much space and I wanted to take it out before I re-did the floors in the living room.

I surrounded the area around the fireplace with sheet plastic that I attached to the ceiling with tape and push pins. I smashed the hearth brickwork with a sledge hammer and a pry bar. Under the brick veneer I found dirt and brick fill, no hidden treasure of gold and rubies.

There is still a layer of brick attached to the block fireplace that I was not able to remove. Like many of the projects at my house this is a mult-stage project. When I get ready to hire someone to do the drywall throughout the house, I will remove the remainder of the bricks and have drywall installed where the brick is now.

I was somewhat worried about completing this project as it was not undoable, but I am happy with the extra space I have in the living room and the fireplace is still functional.

Also see the Toolmonger post.

It’s hard to believe but as much effort as I have put into my home automation system I have not had an automated vacuum cleaner. I have always been skeptical of the Roomba’s ability to clean floors adequately. That mostly came from a few friends and reviews I read online.

I have been considering trying one out for myself for sometime and when woot.com had a refurbished Roomba 530 model for $129 I decided it was time give it a try.

My skepticism was unfounded. The Roomba 530 does an excellent job of cleaning my floors. I have been amazed at the amount of lint the Roomba has picked up (no more lint tumbleweeds floating across the floor). It also cleans up all the pieces of plastic and twist ties that the cat uses as toys. I am also impressed with how well it handles itself across uneven surfaces and untangles itself.

It probably helps is that my floors are all solid, no carpet or rugs and my house is pretty small. So far I have been able to have it clean the living room, kitchen, part of the hallway and bathroom in one cleaning session, or mission as the Roomba users call them. I think that the Roomba could also clean the guest bedroom across from the bathroom but so far it has some difficulty finding it’s way.

I have an automatic cat that kills all the bugs in the house and now I have an automatic vacuum that cleans up after the cat. Since the Roomba 530 model doesn’t have scheduling capabilities, I plan to purchase a serial port bluetooth module that will allow me to remotely control the Roomba from my home automation computer. The computer can keep track of how often the Roomba cleans and send it off on cleaning missions when the house is unoccupied.

Last fall, I threatened that I would have the master bathroom completed by the end of the winter. Here it is spring and I did almost nothing to the bathroom. I have a variety of excuses that I wont go into now, however I did finally make some actual progress on it this weekend.

Before I can do anything I need to install the pocket door. Before I install the pocket door I need to relocate the wiring that exists on the wall where the door goes.

The wiring consists of power in, a wire to the lights controlled by a switch and a power out to a outlet. The good news is the wiring was easy to move to the next wall, it was loose in the attic and there was plenty of room to move it. I thought I would leave the outlet unpowered for now, until I figured out how I was going to rewire everything, apparently the wire to the outlet is also hooked up to the living room.

Now I have a problem that I need to wire that outlet back up, so i have Romex running along the other side of the bathroom along up to the switch. It looks pretty messy and dangerous in the pictures, I know. Trust me it’s safe and temporary.

I need to decide how to wire up a exhaust fan, will it go near the light switch or near the toilet? I also need to figure out if I’m going to use a fancy digital shower control. If so It will use the power from the outlet then I can wire it up properly.

Finally I can install the pocket door. I have the studs marked to cut down, but I’m waiting for some friends to come by and verify my measurements before I screw it all up. I will save the pocket door install for another post.

Last year it started with spiders. Big scarry looking spiders. All harmless. Then I had Scorpions. 7 to be exact. I had big gaping holes between the door jamb and wall leading out to the garage. I filled those gaps with expanding foam. I also weather sealed the front door. I’ve had no further problems spiders or scorpions since then, but that was near the end of summer.

This summer I’ve only had a few spiders, nothing like last year and so far no scorpions. But I have had crickets and crickets and more crickets. My weapon of choice is the Dyson. For several nights in a row, I vacuumed up around 6 crickets at a time.

The thing about crickets, they seem to hang out where they came into the house. I was finding most of them coming from one area of the living room. After a few days, I started looking around and found a big crack between the fireplace and the wall. There were even crickets in it. I filled all the cracks around the fire place with expanding foam. This has blocked off the main cricket highway.

Now I’m finding a few in the hallway. I’m finding at least two a night under the refrigerator. The other thing about crickets is the male makes the chirping noise to attract the female. Whenever a male is chirping, there’s almost always a female nearby.

I installed a ceiling fan in the living room today. It’s the simplest, most basic ceiling fan I could find, an 60″ industrial ceiling fan from Home Depot.

This fan is controlled through my home automation computer like the other fan. Unfortunately the only PLC compatible fan controller that exists is the Lightolier Controls Digital Fan Control (CCWHISPLC) which costs over $100, I have one for the kitchen ceiling fan and it works great. Besides the high cost of the CCWHISPLC it is also X10 only. I’ve decided to use a SwitchLinc V2 Dimmer for the living room fan. Dimmers don’t make good fan controllers. They usually cause a humming noise and can damage the fan.

To eliminate the hum from the fan controller I could implement a work around by Ed Cheung. It’s a passthrough device that properly switches the speed without humming or damaging the fan. The cost of this device is about $50. A Switchlinc is about $45. Together I’m getting close to the price of the CCWHISPLC, but at least it would still not be X10. I’m still pondering this option.

The last problem with this fan is it hangs a bit low. My ceilings are 8 foot high and this one hangs about a foot down. I think I can cut down the 6″ rod about 4 inches which should help.

The biggest Lego set ever, the 5195 Piece Millennium Falcon. It’s over 33″ long, 22″ wide and 8″ tall. It’s $499.99 and will ship by Oct 1st. Limit 5 per customer.

This is an appropate item to post as I just signed up for the Lego affiliate program. People who know me shouldn’t be surprised, as I have been a lego geek since I was very small. I currently have the Slave I (Boba Fett’s ship) in my living room.

As a kid, to have Lego and Star Wars together is something I could have only dreamed about. The next best thing would be to have Legos, Star Wars and Video Games that run on a Mac together.

My Advertising Policy

Here’s a picture of my equipment closet. Since I don’t have a utility room and don’t want to put this stuff, mostly Home Automation gear, in garage due to dirt and dust issues. There was enough room in the heater closet to fit all this stuff.

I’ve already been asked, is there a heat problem? Doesn’t seem to be. The heater doesn’t emit that much heat around itself, and since it doesn’t constantly run there’s not any build up from what little bit of heat that is generated. Also, the all the metal here is not interfering with the wireless stuff.

Keep in mind, all this stuff was strung around the house. Mostly in the living room. Since I access the Home Automation computer via VNC I don’t really need direct access to it. It’s nice not having wires all over the place anymore.

It’s been a few months since I moved in and started working on the kitchen remodel so I’m glad to report that Stage 1 is complete. Stage 1 is what you see here, with half of the upper cabinets installed including the appliances. Every bit of it built by me. Stage 2 will complete the kitchen with the rest of the cabinets, paint and tiling.

When I first made the offer on the house I wasn’t initially planning to remodel the kitchen. But after spending a few hours in it, it was clear that I was not going to be happy with the wear and tear that had been put on it for 20+ years. I used Home Depot’s design service to do the design, which turned out to be a good deal. It’s costs $100 for them to come out and do the measurements and plug everything into the computer. They give $100 off materials if you buy from them.

When choosing the materials for the cabinets I looked at both the lowest cost and highest cost cabinets. I’m pretty disappointed at the amount of particle board used in the construction of both version. The lowest cost is totally made of particle board except for the doors and are complete do-it-yourself. Where as the more expensive ones are about 50% particle board and are installed by someone else. I went with Mills Pride cabinets that Home Depot keeps on stock because of their much lower costs, significant in some cases. Despite the fact that they are made of particle board they are of pretty good quality and very easy to assemble. Well worth it for the money I saved. I would say it cost around $1000 for this section of cabinets (the maple doors were as much as the cost of the cabinet boxes, that’s the real expense).

Stage 2 will involve taking down the wall on the right and putting in a cabinets along the bottom (this is where the refrigerator originally was). This will open it up to the living room more. I’ve never pulled down a wall before (just as I never did any of this kitchen work before). I will also probably pull out the original tile back spash and put different tile up. I will finish it up with paint, trim and what ever else will be needed. I figure it will cost about $2000 to finish it up (doing it all myself of course) but don’t know when I will start it. In the mean time check out my Flickr photo set showing the stages of the remodel.

The trend continues, I either like the house and not the land or I like the land and not the house.

This house kind of had a weird lay out.

• I’m not so much in love with the sunken living room, especially since it was sunken about 6 inches or less it seemed.
• The kitchen was small and it didn’t seem to have much room to expand
• No back yard access with a vehicle

This was a Amrep house built in the early 1970s. I’m not a huge fan of Amrep homes (more on that some other time) but this one had a very nice layout. THe kitchen was very well done. The owners had already done most of the renovation work I would have with wood floors and painting and so-forth.

Unfortunately the yard was really that big (.25 acres or maybe smaller). And I wouldn’t be able to talk them down much considering the work that was done.

This house has a nice large back yard with block walls. It’s also a Amrep house and lives up the the “werid” design that some Amrep houses have. I don’t mind a 2 story house but this one was just not right.

Finally the last house of the week. Another Amrep house that has a interesting design. I liked it actually. They had put tile on the kitchen counters, it looked nice but was the kind of adobe tile that wasn’t uniform. Thus the counters are uneven. And of course the plot of land was too small/had no vehicle access.